Films and filming for a "better world" - Film criticism and social criticism in post-war Western Europe from the perspective of comparison, cultural transfer and entanglement

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Dietmar Hüser
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2012 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 213740974

In an article written as early as 1932, Siegfried Kracauer had demanded the connection of film criticism with social criticism. This project examines precisely that connection against the historical background of the massively accelerated socio-economic and socio-cultural changes during the 1950s and 1960s in Western Europe. The analysis of leftist film magazines, which is the centrepiece of this study, methodologically combines the concepts of comparative, transfer and entangled history. It deals predominantly with the Italian "Cinema Nuovo", founded in 1952, whose editors had had to leave their former jobs for political reasons, with the Western German "Filmkritik" of 1957, which had been founded by student cineastes, and similar French film magazines. These groups of critics are discussed in relation to other publications focussing on the seventh art from their own countries, to British and American magazines, and to film criticism in nationwide daily press. The scope of this project encompasses their first decades and compares them to each other: concerning the paradigms of film criticism, the idea of film and film policy, the attitude towards filmic "mainstream", social analysis, and film critics' links to rising protest movements and alternative cultures of that era. Moreover, referring to the premises of transfer history and entangled history, the project aims at reciprocal influence and transnational contacts among film critics, at shaping filmic networks in Europe and at film festivals as a communicative arena for this process, and finally at the reception of international trends in national contexts. Transatlantic cultural exchanges such as the reception of Hollywood pictures by the "Old World's" film criticism are considered in detail and brought into relationship with inner-European cultural transfers.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants