Film and Media Studies

Abstract

Film and Media Studies Gerd Gemünden (bio) Since its beginning in the mid-1970s, the German Studies Association has actively promoted embracing cultural studies in order to take leave of a more traditionally minded notion of Germanistik, particularly its branding as “Auslandsgermanistik,” a term still widely used when I first entered the University of Tübingen in 1980 as an aspiring student of German and Philosophy. As Sara Friedrichsmeyer states, together with Women in German (WiG), the German Studies Association has “infused immense energy into the study of German literature and culture.”1 As a result, areas of research and teaching such as critical theory, particularly of the Frankfurt School variety, feminism, Jewish studies, studies of the Holocaust, and studies of the history and culture of the German Democratic Republic have become prominent disciplines that both benefitted from and contributed to a dramatically changing field of German studies in North America. Among these disciplines, perhaps no other has experienced a more dynamic development than the study of film and media. As Sabine Hake, the editor of the German Studies Review (GSR), noted in this journal in 2013, German film studies has seen a remarkable growth over the past three decades, a growth that can be measured by the number of scholarly publications and presentations at conferences, and that is most obvious in the full integration of film in the teaching and research agenda of German departments in North America and Great Britain.2 It must be stated that the purpose for Hake’s assessment was not self-congratulatory but rather to take issue with a series of problems that have come with success, a point I will return to later. For now, however, I want to briefly chart the trajectory of this growth since the mid-1970s, as well as my own position within it, which is very much shaped by the developments of the field and probably representative for many scholars of my generation. I can date my own entry into the world of German film and media studies rather precisely—it was the fall of 1983, and I had just arrived as an exchange student from [End Page 541] Tübingen at the University of Oregon as a graduate teaching fellow in the German Department. Scouring the course offerings of the various humanities departments, I came across the Department of Rhetoric, which for someone from the University of Tübingen meant the Department of Walter Jens, but here it was an umbrella term for housing the programs in speech, theater, and film studies. This was a real discovery—the academic study of film as a medium with its own history, theory, and methodology hardly existed anywhere in Germany at the time. The Film Program’s small core faculty included its charismatic founder, Bill Cadbury, and Ellen Seiter, an expert in television studies and in children and visual media who would later become part of my dissertation committee. While the dual demands of being both a student and a language teacher in the German Department were considerable, I managed to audit a number of courses in the Film Program—an experience that ultimately had a formative influence for my post-PhD areas of interest and research. It was in Cadbury’s classes that I discovered Italian neorealism, Godard, Bertolucci, and the films of the New German Cinema, a term I had never heard in Germany. Particularly memorable were Bill’s lectures on Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s History Lessons and Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road, both films whose titles I was familiar with but had never seen. (One of my first published scholarly essays would deal with Kings of the Road.) As the year of my exchange visit drew to a close, I decided to apply to the PhD Program in Comparative Literature, at the time Oregon’s most vibrant department in the humanities, and the rest, as they say, is history. Indeed, the mid-1980s were a time when the study of film within German studies began to develop some traction. By then, a number of English-language monographs on German film had already been published, predominantly devoted to Weimar cinema and...