Public Film Screening and Lecture in English by Film Scholar Inga Pollmann on November 22, 2022, at the Arsenal Cinema in Cooperation with Cinepoetics - Center for Advanced Film Studies
On November 22, 2022, the American film scholar Inga Pollmann will hold a public lecture at the Arsenal cinema in Berlin, entitled "The Image as Affective Milieu: Mood, Medium, and Environmental Aesthetics." She will explore the question of what it would mean to conceive of the film image as affective milieu. She suggests that media disclose "being in the world" and themselves shape life and form environments. The lecture is open to the public, and admission is free. The Arsenal cinema is charging its usual prices for admission. The lecture is part of the Cinepoetics Lectures series hosted by the Cinepoetics Center for Advanced Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF in cooperation with the Kino Arsenal.
The Cinepoetics Lectures are a special format in the work of the Cinepoetics Center. They are held by internationally acclaimed scholars, who engage with the center’s work on the poetologies of audiovisual images. Speakers are invited to present a selected film and place it in a thematic context. The Cinepoetics Center for Advanced Film Studies (in German: Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe ,,Cinepoetics - Poetologien audiovisueller Bilder") is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Based at Freie Universität Berlin and in cooperation with Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, it took up its work in October 2015. The researchers at the center focus on the assumption that cinematic images shape the spatio-temporal parameters and schemata of perception, thus creating new frames for cognitive and semiotic processes.
In her lecture, Pollmann will examine the French film Sans lendemain (1939/1940) by the German-French director Max Ophüls. With the paradigm of the hunt as her point of departure, she will focus on the cinematic means of mise en scène and point of view to inform an environmental reading of images. The melodrama, shot by Max Ophüls in exile on the brink of World War II, will be shown following the lecture.
Inga Pollmann is an associate professor of English, comparative literature, and German at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her main areas of research are film and media theory, aesthetic theory, visual arts, and environmental humanities. Selected publications by Professor Pollmann include the monograph Cinematic Vitalism: Film Theory and the Question of Life (2018) as well as articles such as "Environmental Aesthetics: Tracing a Latent Image from Early Safari Films to Contemporary Art Cinema" (2020) and "The Forces of the Milieu: Angela Schanelec’s Marseille and the Heritage of Michelangelo Antonioni" (2018).
