Staging images of war as a mediated experience of community. The example of the Hollywood war film and its interdependencies with other audiovisual media

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Hermann Kappelhoff
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: from 2010 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 160552945

In the project we will examine the aesthetic strategies of emotionalizing through the example of the Hollywood war film and its mutual relationship to the rhetorics of war reporting and propaganda in other audio-visual media or other media formats. The central question is: What role do the directorial strategies and aesthetic modes of representation in genre cinema play for the information media, or what function is granted to the mutual relationship between war films and war reporting in audio-visual media? We started from the hypothesis that the aesthetic representational strategies of the war film genre can be found in all forms of the audio-visual representation of war and are aimed at mobilizing a sense of community (Rorty). Our first goal consists in developing a poetics of affect for the Hollywood war film, which will allow us to describe it as a genre within the dynamics of its historical changes. This is based on the assumption that this dynamic is essentially marked by the interaction of the genre and the information media. We understand the genre as an attempt to take the large, unmanageable amount of audio-visual images of war and transfer it into ,,manageable,, films that can actually be watched. Our second goal is to verify the degree to which this interaction of war film genre and audio-visual war reporting can be taken as a pan-medial staging of an ,,image of war,,. The third goal of the project is to clarify theoretically how, in the modes of aesthetic experience that are associated with the image of war, the spectators are related in their own sense of self to a sense of community. The sub-projects look at a special historical constellation, each of which can be demonstrated by means of a media-technological break: in UP 1 it is the classical genre film, film reportage, and the newsreels of the Second World War, examined as different cinematic formats; UP 2 focuses on the effects of the then new media of television on the staging of the Vietnam war in news coverage and in post-classical Hollywood war film; UP 3 examines how the video images of the internet altered the representations of the 2003 Iraq war in television and genre cinema.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants