GERMAN FILM FESTIVAL – (Re)imagining Post-Industrial Urbanity: Films of the Ruhr Area, Germany

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The German film festival will be held in Downey House 113 on April 13 and April 14, 2012. We will be showing three films from this large post-industrial area in western Germany. The first film, Bang Boom Bang by Peter Thorwart, will be shown on Friday at 7:00 p.m. The other two-Losers and Winners, a documentary by Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken, and Solino by Fatih Akin-will be screened on Saturday at 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m., followed by a discussion. The introductory session by Sina Nitzsche, Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Oglethorpe University, and Kate Thorpe, Teagle Writing Fellow at Wesleyan will place these films in the context of the transformation through art and image-making that the region is experiencing.

The event is sponsored by the German Studies Department, Writing at Wesleyan, and the Goethe Institute Boston.

 

Wesleyan Students in Germany

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All five students have been studying with our Regensburg Program at Regensburg University, Germany since January 2012. Here you see them during a visit to Berlin in front of the German Reichstag in Berlin.

From left to right: Oscar Takabvirwa’14, Taylor Steele’14, Shu Zhang’13, Julius Bjornson’14, Afi Tettey-Fio’13

Newer and Newest German Cinema

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Film Studies & German Studies will continue their annual film series with Maren Ade’s comedy drama, Everyone Else (2009).

 “…watching the film is to watch the emergence of a very particular and potentially galvanic cinematic talent.”   – Glenn Kenney, The Los Angeles Times

Powell Family Cinema, CFS, Tuesday, March 27, 2012, 7 p.m.,

with an introduction by Katja Straub

Leo Lensing on Karl Kraus

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Leo Lensing contributed the article on Karl Kraus (1874-1936) to the Handbuch der Kunstzitate, a lexicon documenting allusions to painting, sculpture and photography in the work of more than two hundred German-language writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The “handbook,” edited by Konstanze Fliedl et al., is published in two volumes by De Gruyter.

Newer and Newest German Cinema

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Film Studies & German Studies will kick off their annual film series with Christian Petzold’s enigmatic thriller, Yella (2007). It  “offers a surreal X-ray vision of cutthroat capitalism in 21st-century Germany.”  – Stephen Holden, The New York Times

Powell Family Cinema, CFS, Wednesday, February 22, 2012, 7 p.m., with an introduction by Leo Lensing

We will continue our series in March with Maren Ade’s comedy drama, Everyone Else (2009).   “…watching the film is to watch the emergence of a very particular and potentially galvanic cinematic talent.” – Glenn Kenney, The Los Angeles Times

Powell Family Cinema, CFS, Tuesday, March 27, 2012, 7 p.m., with an introduction by Katja Straub

 

The Baader Meinhof Complex – German movie night

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The German department will show Uli Edel’s film The Baader Meinhof Complex (with English subtitles) on Monday, November 28, at 7:00 p.m., in Fisk 210. The film is based on Stefan Aust’s book of the same title. Prof. Leo Lensing will give an introduction to this thought-provoking film.

Germany in the 1970s: Murderous bomb attacks, the threat of terrorism and the fear of the enemy inside are rocking the very foundations of the yet fragile German democracy. The radicalised children of the Nazi generation lead by Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin are fighting a violent war against what they perceive as the new face of fascism: American imperialism supported by the German establishment, many of whom have a Nazi past. Their aim is to create a more human society but by employing inhuman means they not only spread terror and bloodshed, they also lose their own humanity. The man who understands them is also their hunter: the head of the German police force Horst Herold. And while he succeeds in his relentless pursuit of the young terrorists, he knows he’s only dealing with the tip of the iceberg. Written by Constantin Film

Movies are Fun – Bork-Goldfield presents at ACTFL

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On November 19, 2011 Iris Bork-Goldfield talked at the ACTFL conference in Denver, CO on how one can effectively integrate short movies into the foreign language classroom. Movies, she argues, motivate students, support listening comprehension, and convey much cultural and historical information. As a good example she used Ingo Rasper’s humorous film Dufte that tells the story about German coffee smugglers in 1952.