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Claudia Breger argues that contemporary European cinema provides ways of thinking about and feeling collectivity that can challenge the twenty-first century's political trends. Through a new model of cinematic worldmaking,
Making Worldsexamines how films produce unexpected and destabilizing affects that invite viewers to imagine new connections.
List of contents
Introduction
1. Affects in Configuration: Controversy and Conviviality in Fatih Akın’s The Edge of Heaven and Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation
2. Critical Intensity: Jean-Luc Godard’s and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Defamiliarized Worldmaking Practices
3. Genre Assemblages: Affective Incisions in Fatih Akın’s The Cut and Aki Kaurismäki’s Refugee Trilogy
4. Tenderly Cruel Realisms: Objectfull Assembly and the Horizon of a Shared World
Epilogue: Reconfiguring Resistance
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Claudia Breger is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her books include An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Theater, Literature, and Film in Contemporary Germany (2012).
Summary
Claudia Breger argues that contemporary European cinema provides ways of thinking about and feeling collectivity that can challenge the twenty-first century's political trends. Through a new model of cinematic worldmaking, Making Worldsexamines how films produce unexpected and destabilizing affects that invite viewers to imagine new connections.
Additional text
Framing storytelling as a form of worlding or world assembly, Breger undertakes uncommon pairings of film not previously thought together, hereby unsettling inherited ways of compartmentalizing their aesthetic, social, and political significance. Making Worlds intervenes in a conjunctural moment when we sorely need compassionate and reasoned voices, calmly and carefully navigating the thicket of our global political morass with attention to the complexities of human identifications and multiple categories of belonging across shared layers of bounded earth.
