GRK 2279:  Konfigurationen des Films

• Subject Area: Art History, Music, Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2017
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 310565625

Critics like to describe contemporary film culture as “post-cinematic“: In a process of “relocation“ (Casetti 2011), the moving image has moved beyond the dispositif of cinema and circulates in a variety of social and cultural arenas. New forms of filmmaking beyond the feature film are emerging, while the cinema continues theater, the visual arts and literature. The term “post-cinema” designates the stakes for film theory: The term reiterates– and at the same time mourns the loss of – a notion of the medium’s specificity that is tied to the dispositif of cinema, the indexical nature of the photographic image, and a canon of works that together form the object of cinema “cinema”. Moving beyond this diagnosis, the graduate program “Configurations of Cinema” asks what comes after the “post-cinema condition”. How can we move beyond the aesthetic and ontological primacy of the trias of dispositif, index and canon in our thinking about film? What are the alternatives to the established dichotomies of film study, from “theatrical vs. nontheatrical” and “artistic vs. non-artistic” to “canonincal vs. non-canonical” or “centre vs. periphery”? To answer these questions, the program studies configurations of film beyond the classical dispositif and assumes that cinema is a medium in permanent transformation. The program defines three research areas, “Formations”, “Usages” and “Localizations”, to analyze the genealogy and transformation of wide variety of configurations of film. In terms of methodology, the program combines historical and media archaeological with comparative perspectives and integrates new digital methods of inquiry. From within this framework, the program explores new modes of writing the history and defining the salient features of film as a medium in permanent transformation. The aim of the program is to train excellent Ph.D.’s and contribute towards the development of new research paradigms for the next generation of film and media scholars. The program combines film and media studies with philosophy, theater studies, musicology, literature and film and media studies at Goethe-Universität and brings the neighboring Universities of Mainz, Marburg and Mannheim as well as the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach into the network. The program builds on three master programs at Goethe-Universität as well as on longstanding collaborations between the project investigators. The program benefits from worldclass library holdings in film at the Goethe-Universität library and the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, as well as from established collaborations with the Deutsches Filminstitut, the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung Wiesbaden and the Max-Planck-Institut für empirische Ästhetik. In addition, the program collaborates with the film studies programs at Yale andConcordia Universities.

• DFG Programme: Research Training Groups
• Applicant Institution: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
• Participating Institution: Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach; Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz; Philipps-Universität Marburg
• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Vinzenz Hediger
• Participating Researchers: Professorin Dr. Sonia Campanini; Dr. Daniel Fairfax; Professor Dr. Malte Hagener; Professor Dr. Rembert Hüser; Dr. Pavan Kumar Malreddy, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Nikolaus Müller-Schöll; Professorin Dr. Juliane Rebentisch; Professorin Dr. Alexandra Schneider; Professor Dr. Marc Siegel; Privatdozentin Dr. Wanda Strauven; Professorin Dr. Yvonne Zimmermann