21ST-CENTURY TRANSNATIONAL CINEMA

The so-called refugee crisis has drawn worldwide attention to Europe’s heated debates about immigration and identity, but questions of national and transnational belonging have shaped the continent throughout the last few decades, against the backdrops of sociopolitical Europeanization and socioeconomic globalization. While political discourse has become increasingly polarized with the ascent of anti-immigrant populist forces, contemporary European cinema has developed a range of rich imaginations. In different genres along with more experimental formats, fiction films (as well as documentaries) probe diverging perspectives, unexpected complications, fresh angles or bold responses in tracing experiences of migration and the possibilities of living together in in the twenty-first century. The course explores these rich scenarios by facilitating close looks at individual films in institutional and socio-political context. The guiding notion of transnationalism is developed descriptively as acknowledging contemporary production and distribution conditions, and probed conceptually in dialogue with part competing, part overlapping paradigms such as postcolonialism and cosmopolitanism, intercultural or diasporic and world cinema. We also read some film theory to sharpen our (multisensorial) reading skills. The selection of films reflects the course’s institutional location in the German department while crossing borders in different directions (that is, roughly half of the films are German-language or otherwise significantly associated with Germany). This course is taught in English. All readings will be available on Courseworks in pdf-Format. I will aim to make the films available for streaming on the course website also.