Prof. Alice Kuzniar will be teaching a new course on German transnational film in Winter Term 2015. GER 359: Transnational Film, Intercultural Encounters will explore recent German cinema's involvement with other cultures.
Cinema functions as an important sphere in which history, identity, and nation are debated and forged. It creates imaginary geographic topographies, where the national intersects with global, political, and sexual avenues of self-definition. Recent German cinema offers an excellent avenue in which to address these intersections.
Topics to be discussed include: the avoidance of the homeland in the search for the foreign; the star system in defining a national cinema; ventriloquist fantasies of fusion with the Other; current issues in migration; cinematic tourism; and the fascination with the Holocaust in the international promotion of German cinema today.
Classes will be held in Winter Term 2015 on Mondays 3-5pm with screenings on Wednesdays 3-5:20pm. Both take place in ECH 1219. Class discussion and assignments are in English; the films are in German with English subtitles.
