Prof. Dr. Brigitte Weingart
Screen Test #3: Migration & Moving Images
Seminar, English, 3 SWS, 2 ECTS
Tuesdays, 17-20 h, weekly, starts 15.4.2024, Grunewaldstr. 2-5, room 10

Registration on Moodle starts on 14.4.2025: https://moodle.udk-berlin.de/moodle/course/view.php?id=2650
Enrollment Key: film

This course is the third in a series that aims to create a common platform for viewing and discussing films. Following Screen Tests #1: Celebrity Cultures and #2: Documentaries, this semester is dedicated to films and moving images that deal with migration.

Migration is omnipresent in daily news coverage and election campaigns around the world via images that circulate on all channels. These images are a constitutive part of how we perceive migration processes, and how they are socially and politically organized. The seminar is dedicated to audiovisual productions that have historically shaped this image politics, are currently intervening in it, or are designing future scenarios – in fictional, documentary or hybrid modes. We will discuss audiovisual representations of forced mobility, precarious travel and border regimes, and representations of diasporic and hybrid cultures, paying special attention to tipping points in the cinematic aesthetics of displacement (e.g. in the oscillation between hyper-existentialist modes of survival and administrative submission under border regimes, or in the tensions between "welcome culture” (“Willkommenskultur”) and racism in scenarios of cultural contact).

Half of the films and audiovisual materials will be pre-selected to ensure historical, cultural and aesthetic diversity. The selection includes recent refugee narratives such as GREEN BORDER, IO CAPITANO, the documentary HUMAN FLOW or the essay film on sea rescue HAVARIE. As for classic examples of film history, we will focus on African representations of post-colonial dreams and realities of mobility (e.g. LA NOIRE DE..., TOUKI BOUKI) and on German cinema's reflections on the "Gastarbeiter" situation (ANGST ESSEN SEELE AUF) and the so-called post-migration society. The second half will feature films suggested by the participants. Each screening will be preceded by a short introduction and followed by a discussion.

Fulfilment criteria for ungraded accreditation: Regular attendance, active participation in discussion, introduction to one of the films or topics — possibly as part of a team, depending on the number of participants (as an alternative to the presentation you can also hand in a short written essay on one of the films).

Brigitte Weingart is professor of Media Theory at the UdK. Previously she was Professor of Media Studies at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (2019-2020) and at the Universität zu Köln (2014-2019), and inter alia an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Columbia University in New York. She worked on the Editorial Board of Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (ZfM) between 2013 and 2022. She is currently a principal investigator at the Collaborative Research Center Intervening Arts (SFB 1512) where she directs a study group on internet memes. Other research interests include film studies, media practices of appropriation, concepts of contagion, media aesthetics of fascination and celebrity cultures. For more information and publications, see http://www.brigitte-weingart.de.