Keller's "Kleider machen Leute" as Novelle and Film

Abstract

Despite the rapidly growing popularity of film courses in American universities in general and German departments in particular,1 as yet no widely used methodology for the study of the German film has been developed. Germanists, traditionally best trained in literature with relatively little formal film study, often use an essentially literary approach to cinema, despite a number of serious problems. A literary approach is even more likely to be employed when is dealing with the movie version of an established literary as is the case in this study. Students are not yet widely familiar with the language of although such familiarity is an integral part of almost any film course. It is not enough to take as a point of departure the fact that most motion pictures tell a story, and then proceed to treat movies as nothing more than visual literature, or literature where the reader's imagination has been supplanted by the imagination of the filmmaker. Students of literature learn about many techniques and devices which seem to be used similarly in both literature and film, such as the flashback, interior monologue (voice-over), contraction and extension of time, different levels and intensities of focus, and different narrative points of view. It is tempting and easy to transfer these techniques from the printed text to the visual text, but runs the risk of misunderstanding aspects of film art which have no exact literary counterparts. A number of substantial differences exist between literature and film, and of these is the difference in production and reception of each medium. Prose fiction is a on one medium with a single author and a single reader; the circumstances of production and reception are normally those of solitude. Film, on the other hand, is a collectively produced medium with a large number of specialized skills involved in making the finished product. The audience in a darkened auditorium has both collective and individual aspects which may be brought out by a specific film (e.g., a horror film). A full understanding of how a film does or does not achieve the intentions of the production team can be had only through an appreciation of how films are made, with special attention paid to the effects which the various constituent elements can have upon each other, such as lighting, editing, sound track, special effects, different lenses, and so forth. These are largely elements which fit into categories of inquiry