Pub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033X-8732131
Lydia D. Goehr
This essay presents Theodor W. Adorno’s case pro and contra the regulation of the work-concept in a tradition that long sustained a great 1800 divide. The case is made through the provocation offered in Lydia Goehr’s Imaginary Museum of Musical Works that “Bach did not intend to compose musical works.” The essay investigates the many references to Johann Sebastian Bach in Adorno’s aesthetic, social, and philosophical writings to show that his Bach case was not merely illustrative but paradigmatic of every case he made for a critical theory of possibility. Adorno’s case was an urgent matter of rescue and justice, made by linking Bach’s compositions to Arnold Schoenberg’s paradigmata of a possible music through the mediation of the work-concept for which Ludwig van Beethoven was made in the tradition paradigmatically to stand.
本文介绍了西奥多·阿多诺(Theodor W. Adorno)的案例，该案例支持和反对工作概念的监管，这一传统长期维持了1800年的巨大分歧。这个案例是通过莉迪亚·戈尔的“想象的音乐作品博物馆”提出的“巴赫并没有打算创作音乐作品”的挑衅来提出的。这篇文章调查了阿多诺在美学、社会和哲学著作中对约翰·塞巴斯蒂安·巴赫的许多引用，以表明他的巴赫案例不仅仅是说明，而且是他为可能性的批判理论所做的每一个案例的范例。阿多诺的案例是一个紧急的救援和正义的问题，通过将巴赫的作品与阿诺德勋伯格的一种可能的音乐的范式联系起来，通过路德维希范贝多芬在传统范式中所做的工作概念的调解，使阿多诺成为可能。
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Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-8607647
Jacob Haubenreich
This article examines the persistence of the notion of the immaterial text in literary studies, now decades into the so-called material turn. Digitization of manuscripts increasingly confronts us with the facts of textual materiality and material authorship, yet many scholars remain ill-equipped to engage these traces in order to expand the possibilities of textual interpretation. The journeys of Peter Handke’s notebooks serve as a case study on how to interrogate various definitions of text and methodological approaches that reinforce an understanding of texts as immaterial. This article thus elucidates the conceptual and methodological impediments to more comprehensively integrating materiality into interpretation; an uneasiness, for example, about approaching authorship—the process and agency of textual production—lingers despite resurrections since the Author’s “death” and more recent transdisciplinary retheorizations of agency. The article finally looks to reflections on materiality in another field, art history, to clarify the reasons that integrating materiality into interpretative criticism remains so difficult, so that the field might begin to move beyond these obstacles.
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Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-8713164
{"title":"In Memoriam David Bathrick","authors":"","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-8713164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-8713164","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41857076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-8607619
Barton Byg
Presented here for the first time in English translation is one of Harun Farocki’s earliest publications in the journal Filmkritik, of which he later became editor. Composed largely of quotations, Farocki’s text reports on film courses at the Wannseeheim Youth Center, a form of adult and alternative education in Berlin West. The introduction to Farocki’s text connects with the New German Cinema and themes that remained central throughout his own work: collaboration and quotation, Bertolt Brecht’s concept of “learning plays,” using nonfiction to explore both social relations and the cinematic apparatus, and seeing film as a form of “productive thinking.” It represents a kernel of Farocki’s wish to put the tools of filmmaking into the hands of ordinary people, thus revealing both theoretical aspects of the cinematic apparatus itself and the interweaving of visual images with social relations. With a deadpan, whimsical tone, Farocki argues that all this is, or should be, film criticism—in German, Filmkritik.
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Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-8607535
Erica Carter
Focusing on the interwar writings of the film journalist and theorist Béla Balázs, this article argues for an understanding of Balázs’s film aesthetics as grounded in a popular politics of the body. Balázs understood film as a medium in which experiences of image, sound, and expressive movement and gesture shape human subjectivities within a newly mediatized social realm. The article explores Balázs’s consequent plea for a film politics of popular embodiment and asks what a survey of Balázs’s writings as both critic and theorist tell us about the political valences of his film theory now.
{"title":"The Social Body of Béla Balázs","authors":"Erica Carter","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-8607535","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-8607535","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Focusing on the interwar writings of the film journalist and theorist Béla Balázs, this article argues for an understanding of Balázs’s film aesthetics as grounded in a popular politics of the body. Balázs understood film as a medium in which experiences of image, sound, and expressive movement and gesture shape human subjectivities within a newly mediatized social realm. The article explores Balázs’s consequent plea for a film politics of popular embodiment and asks what a survey of Balázs’s writings as both critic and theorist tell us about the political valences of his film theory now.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"47 1","pages":"7-20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47822735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-8607563
E. Rentschler
The often bemoaned crisis of West German cinema in the 1980s coincided with a dramatic changing of the nation’s film critical guard. The symptomatic impetus that had figured so strongly during the postwar era gave way to the so-called new subjectivism of young critics like Michael Althen, Claudius Seidl, and Andreas Kilb. They looked askance at the formal complexity and political activism of most art house fare and above all found themselves smitten by mainstream American features. Taking their cue from Susan Sontag and her essay “Against Interpretation,” these postmodern existentialists cultivated a highly personalized, indeed rarefied form of poetic empiricism. This study analyzes their sensibility and rhetoric, their emphases and oversights. It focuses on Dominik Graf’s essay film, Was heißt hier Ende? (Then Is It the End?, 2015), a tribute to Althen and the cohort of young critics with whom he worked and interacted.
{"title":"A Certain Tendency in German Film Criticism of the Postwall Era","authors":"E. Rentschler","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-8607563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-8607563","url":null,"abstract":"The often bemoaned crisis of West German cinema in the 1980s coincided with a dramatic changing of the nation’s film critical guard. The symptomatic impetus that had figured so strongly during the postwar era gave way to the so-called new subjectivism of young critics like Michael Althen, Claudius Seidl, and Andreas Kilb. They looked askance at the formal complexity and political activism of most art house fare and above all found themselves smitten by mainstream American features. Taking their cue from Susan Sontag and her essay “Against Interpretation,” these postmodern existentialists cultivated a highly personalized, indeed rarefied form of poetic empiricism. This study analyzes their sensibility and rhetoric, their emphases and oversights. It focuses on Dominik Graf’s essay film, Was heißt hier Ende? (Then Is It the End?, 2015), a tribute to Althen and the cohort of young critics with whom he worked and interacted.","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":"47 1","pages":"33-44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48914923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-8607577
M. Frey
A prominent strain of discourse sees digital-age German film criticism in a terminal trajectory of commercialization and dumbing down. This article demonstrates that this rhetoric is not unique: neither to German-speaking countries nor to the digital age. Complaints about slipping benchmarks and declining quality, the fragmentation of the filmgoing public into niche markets, and above all the anxiety about the authority of the critic to definitively speak for and interpret culture to a receptive audience have animated international film criticism since its origins. The article proceeds to examine the supposed new threat to critics: algorithmic recommender systems for video-on-demand platforms such as Netflix. Based on the author’s mixed-method empirical audience study, it concludes that the need and desire for human cultural mediators has not decreased despite the digital-age explosion of content and computational tools.
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Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-8607521
G. Gemunden, N. Isenberg
For more than a century—dating as far back as 1907, when the first Germanlanguage film publications were initially established—Filmkritik (criticism, historiography, all manner of cultural discourse on cinema) has been a prized form of expression, a thriving intellectual, journalistic, and professional enterprise. More limited in scope at the start, it quickly blossomed during the Wilhelmine and Habsburg Empires, through the interwar and postwar periods, and into the twenty-first century. Over the years it has faced numerous challenges: the political rifts of the twentieth century (including the Third Reich and the East-West divide), the technological shifts of the medium and the modes of writing about it (from silent to sound pictures, print to digital), the exigencies of archival initiatives and film preservation. At the same time, from its beginnings Filmkritik has been a relentlessly international affair, traversing national borders and transcending the limits of language and origin. Moreover, Filmkritik has persistently crossed the Atlantic due not only to the migration of prominent critics and filmmakers themselves but to the receptive audiences and readerships on both sides. Even today, a good century since the first pieces of film criticism appeared inGerman andAustrian newspapers and journals, the diversewriters and texts discussed in this dossier retain their timeliness. Having once held a
{"title":"Introduction: German-Language Film Criticism—History and Practice","authors":"G. Gemunden, N. Isenberg","doi":"10.1215/0094033x-8607521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-8607521","url":null,"abstract":"For more than a century—dating as far back as 1907, when the first Germanlanguage film publications were initially established—Filmkritik (criticism, historiography, all manner of cultural discourse on cinema) has been a prized form of expression, a thriving intellectual, journalistic, and professional enterprise. More limited in scope at the start, it quickly blossomed during the Wilhelmine and Habsburg Empires, through the interwar and postwar periods, and into the twenty-first century. Over the years it has faced numerous challenges: the political rifts of the twentieth century (including the Third Reich and the East-West divide), the technological shifts of the medium and the modes of writing about it (from silent to sound pictures, print to digital), the exigencies of archival initiatives and film preservation. At the same time, from its beginnings Filmkritik has been a relentlessly international affair, traversing national borders and transcending the limits of language and origin. Moreover, Filmkritik has persistently crossed the Atlantic due not only to the migration of prominent critics and filmmakers themselves but to the receptive audiences and readerships on both sides. Even today, a good century since the first pieces of film criticism appeared inGerman andAustrian newspapers and journals, the diversewriters and texts discussed in this dossier retain their timeliness. Having once held a","PeriodicalId":46595,"journal":{"name":"NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42281562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-8607591
Claudia Lenssen
As traditional media in Germany have lost their relevance in the digital age, so has the perpetually embattled authority of film criticism diminished. The article addresses current debates about the state of criticism while critics are confronting the collapse of the media having traditionally defined their work. What does it mean that writing on film is supposed to function as the “taste tester for cultural gastronomy” (Wolfram Schütte)? Do social media marginalize critical expertise? How does film criticism work under the omen of changing concepts of the public sphere? The article discusses the prospects of film criticism “at a time when the architectonic, mythic, and social unity of film is no longer self-evident and has ceased to function hegemonically” (Georg Seeßlen). What does it mean that “writing about the audiovisual must change” and young film critics open up spaces to win back film criticism as a counterbalance to market-driven film policies?
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Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/0094033x-8607605
J. V. Moltke
Ten film reviews by Siegfried Kracauer from the 1920s and early 1930s are translated here for the first time, with a brief introduction by the translator. Leaving aside reviews that have already been translated elsewhere, and focusing almost exclusively on the silent period, the present selection was guided by two considerations. First, it includes reviews of several films that have entered the canon of world cinema (The Last Laugh, The Blue Angel, The Man with the Movie Camera, Girls in Uniform). Second, it reflects Kracauer’s attraction, particularly during the early 1920s, to American slapstick.
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