Keynote Speaker and Workshop Leader:
Randall Halle, University of Pittsburgh
Randall Halle is the Klaus W. Jonas Professor of German Film and Cultural Studies at the Uni
versity of Pittsburgh. His books include The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities
BUGSC 2014 Keynote: The Larry Wells Memorial Lecture
German Studies and the Challenges of Visual Culture:
From the National to the European Style
German Studies is once again at a crossroads. Transformations in cultural production, especially in visual culture, pose fundamental challenges to the way we undertake our research and teaching. In the 1960s German Studies emerged as a discipline in the United States. It was understood as a way to break open a restrictive attention to literature and language of traditional Germanistik and German Philology. It sought new ways to make the distant place Germany, more proximate. While language and literature maintained key positions in the new German Studies curriculum, the new programs drew in considerations of German history, politics, philosophy, art, film, media, and so on. On the expanded field of German Studies all aspects of German culture became available for investigation - and this expanded field indeed invigorated critical academic study of Germany.
To be sure, it was not the case that every aspect of German culture received equal attention. These disciplinary reforms took place alongside the revolution in film aesthetics known as New German Cinema (NGC). The success of the German New Wave meant that in the course of the 1970s and 1980s film became one of the central objects of investigation. The sounds and images of the Federal Republic that NGC offered new possibilities of engagement with German culture. These developments gained momentum in such a way that today no German program exists that does not incorporate film; rarely does a German major graduate without some training in film.
While classical film may continue to draw our attention, we confront a number of transformations that will be under scrutiny in this lecture. 1) The digital revolution has ruptured the frame of the silver screen and freed the moving image to stream through new formats and in new places. 2) The moving image, which is everywhere and easily accessible from anywhere, has become a means of cultural expression and communication. 3) Further the changes wrought by digital reproducibility have resulted in what we can identify as a culture industry 2.0. And 4) the ‘German images’ of the 1970s gave way in the 1990s to ‘images of Germany’ or even a more general ‘images made in Germany.’ The national styleof the NGC has given way to a transnational style. Language and locale no longer offer stable signifiers of German culture.
To explore these four points, this lecture will take the moving image as a specific but significant example of general transformations in German visual culture. It will consider their consequences for German Studies and it will review how this relationship of visual communication to the spoken and written word presents us with challenges and opportunities in our own teaching and research.
The Larry Wells Memorial Lecture
Named in honor of Larry Wells, esteemed colleague and Professor of German at Binghamton University, State University of New York, from 1970 to 1998, this lecture series is made possible by the generous support of the Wells Family. The annual Larry Wells Memorial Lecture brings nationally and internationally recognized scholars in German Studies to the Binghamton University campus. The Wells Lecture highlights the work of the Binghamton German Studies program and, inspired by Professor Wells’ outstanding achievements in student-centered teaching, research, outreach and service in German Studies, builds upon the legacy of his work and his distinguished record in the profession.
The Department of German and Russian Studies is deeply grateful to the Wells Family for their continued support of the Larry Wells Memorial Lecture Series.
Workshop: “What the Study of Visual Culture Does for German Studies”
Historically the instruction of German has developed through a primary relationship to the spoken and written word. Our concept of fluency is often defined by linguistic fluency. It is, however, our goal that our students not just be able to speak German but that they also have something to say. Going beyond the spoken and written word, how do we extend our approaches to fluency through a focus on the image and the study of Bildsprache? Certainly the German culture we teach, research, even live in, is a visual culture rapidly transforming in the technological developments of the twenty-first century. What is our relationship to the image and what goals do we have in our classrooms that are supported by the study of visual language? How do we teach images?
Most often film is the primary form of engagement with the image. For over a century we have elaborated our visual expressivity primarily through the moving image. How does the study of film enrich the classroom? How do we present it as something other than entertainment and distraction? While film remains an important form of image, now through digitalization, streaming video, and new display technologies, the moving image has leapt off celluloid, broken the walls of the cinema, and become ubiquitous. On personal devices, Handys, public transportation, projected onto sidewalks, the moving image has become a part of quotidian experience. Consider that 80% of the global traffic on YouTube is from outside the US and within that traffic German and Germany is in the top 10 of the 61 localized YouTube languages and countries. How do we incorporate this Bilderflut of moving image and streaming video? Given these technology driven transformations, how do we contend with any technology gap between our students and us?
Along with these transformations the language of the moving image has become increasingly distant from explicit connections to national culture. 55% of film production in Germany is done as co-production. Unlike in the heyday of the New German Cinema, the German audio-visual industry has turned to genre strategies that differ little from Hollywood production strategies. How do we make selections and present material that represents well the conditions of trans-national Germany? Should we distinguish popular entertainment from cultural work with lasting values?
German visual culture of course does not begin and end with film. The moving image is only one particular aspect of visual culture. Gail Finney introduced her excellent collection on Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany by noting that “the visual is a consciously invented code that changed according to technological developments of the twentieth century, and it is correspondingly eclectic. And ‘visual culture’ is variously understood as the culture we live in, as the visible phenomena within this culture, and as the interdisciplinary field that studies these phenomena” (Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle 2).
To incorporate Bildwissenschaft we can explore the image (Bild) in all its medial forms. From that traditional object of art historical analysis the painting through advertising to contemporary medical imaging technology, visual culture studies invites us to investigate the phenomenon image in its historical and contemporary forms. In this understanding of visual culture the objects of investigations come to include further possibilities such as the built environments of architecture and urban planning, but also questions of subjectivity like the subjective ways of seeing or the ways that visual regimes see their subjects. We may ask: how is the image perceived, how does it convey meaning, how is it culturally situated, technologically transformed, ethically deployed and so on? In what way can such an expanded and expansive understanding of visual culture broaden the terrain of our classrooms? In what way does it threaten to distract our attention from our pedagogical goals?
The workshop will be an opportunity to pursue these questions collectively. It will review existing support material, websites, and resources. Workshop participants will be asked to discuss these issues in smaller groups. Participants will be asked to focus on practical experiences with images and image technologies in teaching. From out of the smaller group experiences, we will consider together guidelines and best practices for curriculum development.