Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema

Claudia Breger

Published by Columbia University Press 2020

Making Worlds

Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema

Claudia Breger

https://doi.org/10.7312/breg19148

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

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).

Reviews

Angelica Fenner, author of Race Under Reconstruction in German Cinema: Robert Stemmle’s “Toxi”:
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.

Deniz Göktürk, University of California, Berkeley:
Claudia Breger’s ambitious book draws its energy from our current moment of social dissolution. She sets out to counter collective closures with a focus on affective worldmaking in cinema. Her perceptive readings range from countercultural cinema of the 1960s to contemporary films set in Turkey or Iran. Making Worlds recharges European art cinema, known for its aesthetics of critical defamiliarization, with visual pleasure and possibilities of transnational empathy.

James Leo Cahill, University of Toronto:
Claudia Breger’s Making Worlds is a vital contribution to the political dimensions of contemporary film and media theory. Breger’s meticulous readings of contemporary cinema create generative openings in impasses that have petrified debate over the past three decades, developing models of cinematic worldmaking for critically feeling out the possibilities of creative assemblage and collective assembly in the face of authoritarian enclosure and humanitarian crisis.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
CHAPTER ONE. Affects in Configuration Controversy and Conviviality in Fatih Akın’s The Edge of Heaven and Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
CHAPTER TWO. Critical Intensity Jean-Luc Godard’s and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Defamiliarized Worldmaking Practices Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	74
CHAPTER THREE. Genre Assemblages Affective Incisions in Fatih Akın’s The Cut and Aki Kaurismäki’s Refugee Trilogy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	113
CHAPTER FOUR. Tenderly Cruel Realisms Objectfull Assembly and the Horizon of a Shared World Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
Epilogue:Reconfiguring Resistance Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	213
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	293
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	325

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Illustrations
- Other: 23 b&w frame stills

eBook

Published: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 9780231550697