Köhler
Fakultäten » Philosophische Fakultät » Filmwissenschaft, Seminar für » Prof. Dr. Jörg Schweinitz » Köhler
Current research project
| Title / Titel | Dancing bodies, dancing images. For a Poetics of Dance in Film and Film Theory (1895 - 1960) | ||
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| Abstract (PDF, 14 KB) | |||
| Original title / Originaltitel | Film inszeniert Tanz inszeniert Film. Theoriegeschichtliche und filmästhetische Entwürfe eines «tänzerischen» Films bis 1960 | ||
| Summary / Zusammenfassung | From the first «scènes de danses et de ballets» in early cinema to recent experiments with digital media by choreographers like Merce Cunningham, dance and dancers seem to be «cinematic subjects par excellence», as the film theorist Siegfried Kracauer states. The idea of a specific affinity between dance and film not only characterizes Kracauer’s theories, but draws a continuous, subtextual line through filmtheoretical thinking from its very beginning up to recent approaches. By enigmatic neologisms such as «choreo-cinema», «cinedance», «camera-choreography», «cine-choreography», «film dance» or more recently «video dance», film theorists and critics continuously articulate the idea that cinema and dance as closely related arts should engage in a „most intimate friendship“ (Karkosch). The present research project retraces those filmtheoretical and -aesthetical concepts that formulate an understanding of the film medium by drawing on dance motifs and metaphors. Taking into account and bringing together (interdisciplinary) approaches from the fields of film, dance and media studies, the purpose of this Ph.D. -project is to sketch a historiography of cinema under the paradigm of dance. By means of close readings and metatheoretical analyses, this project follows up discourses in early and classical film theories referring to dance concepts. Which historical and cultural understandings of dance underlie those conceptual references? Which aspects of the film medium are highlighted and negotiated as dance-like qualities? Furthermore, this dissertation examines a rather heterogenic corpus of dance films from early cinema to experimental films of the 1960s to analyse the aesthetical elements shaping such a poetics of dance in cinema. Filmic representations of dance as well as dance-like film aesthetics – thus the thesis which is to be tested – function as an unfathomable and powerful visual figure by which films expose and negotiate their own mediality. With reference to dancers and dancing, films and film theories especially seem to reflect those aspects of filmic communication processes which are less related to the classical paradigms of narration or representation, but which rather point to an understanding of film shaped in recent filmtheoretical debates by concepts such as excess, performativity or intensity. |
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| Project leadership and contacts / Projektleitung und Kontakte |
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| Funding source(s) / Unterstützt durch |
Universität Zürich (position pursuing an academic career) |
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| Duration of Project / Projektdauer | Feb 2008 to Dec 2012 |