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SUMMARY:The city stripped bare by her histories\, even: 1948 Berlin film -
  Daniel Wolpert (University of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20131014T160000Z
DTEND:20131014T173000Z
UID:TALK48326@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Katie Stone
DESCRIPTION:This paper examines how contested urban narratives set in the 
 immediate aftermath of war were\nrepresented in the German film of the tim
 e. These ‘Trümmerfilme’ offer a narrative of\notherworldliness whilst
  striving to establish spaces and narratives of recuperation. The narrativ
 e\nreframing of the ruins often located the fragmentary images of destruct
 ion within a set of\ncounter-narratives which offered reconciliation with 
 both past and future cities. The ruined present in the cinematic frame thr
 eatened to shatter the carefully contrived narrative\nconstructs of futuri
 ty and history by mounting an overwhelming ‘attack of the present on the
  rest\nof time’. As an unmediated partial object representing a static e
 mbodiment of a traumatic\ninterpretive space within a negative historical 
 narrative that could not appear on screen as having\nthe possibility of an
  afterlife. However\, these tropes of focalistion were unable to abate the
  unsustainable visual tensions which\nthreatened the sustainability of the
  narrative form itself. This predicament required drastic nondiagetic\nint
 ervention. The use of focalisation in a time beyond the present\, therefor
 e also\nnecessitated recuperative metalepses to shield the narrative from 
 the radical emptiness in the\nimages of urban destruction. In this way\, t
 he city narrative in the Trümmerfilm often breaches a\n‘fourth wall’ 
 in an effort to involve the urban cinema audience directly in the construc
 tion of a\nshared narrative in an attempt to re-establish cohesion for the
  narrative form itself as a means of\ncircumventing the impossibility of a
  suspension of disbelief when faced with the unwelcome\nReal.
LOCATION:Grad Seminar Rm\, 3rd Fl. Raised Faculty Bldg.\, Sidgwick Site
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