Tagung: Signs of the Times: Fritz Lang's "M" Event

This symposium seeks to test the premise that multidisciplinary work is best done when centered on a single cultural object. To this end a group of experts from different disciplines (law, psychiatry, urban studies, literature, Jewish studies, and others) will analyze one text–Fritz Lang’s canonical film “M”.
Made in 1931, the film resonates with the struggles of the late Weimar Republic and the transition to the Nazi period. How do World War I and the economic crisis figure in Lang’s film? How does it deal with violence, trauma, and collective paranoia at the end of Germany’s first democracy? How do image and sound complicate the film’s narrative? While new historicist analysis seeks to explicate the larger political, juridical, sociological, medical, and cultural discourses that shaped Lang’s film, it also attends to formal qualities that transcend these discourses. The experiment in multiperspectival analysis will implicitly address methodological questions central to contemporary research in the humanities: Does textual archeology challenge the autonomy of the text? What is the status of the artistic work in historical analysis? Where exactly does the “object” of cultural studies reside?

CONCEPTION: Anton Kaes (Department of German and Film Studies, University of California, Berkeley)
PARTICIPANTS: Christoph Bareither (Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen), Peter Becker (Institut für Neuere Geschichte und Zeitgeschichte, Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, IFK_Senior Fellow), Elisabeth Bronfen (Englisches Seminar, Universität Zürich), Edward Dimendberg (Department of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Irvine), Karin Harrasser (Kunst und Medienwissenschaften, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln), Eva Horn (Institut für Germanistik, Universität Wien), Galili Shahar (Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures, University of Florida), Garrett Stewart (Department of English, University of Iowa), Andrew Webber (Department of German and Dutch, University of Cambridge), Jay Winter (Department of History, Yale University)

TAGUNG
Signs of the Times: Fritz Lang’s “M” and the End of the Weimar Republic
16.-18.06.10

16.06.10, 18.15
FILM SCREENING FRITZ LANG´S “M”
IFK, 1010 Wien, Reichsratsstraße 17/DG

17.06.10, 9.45-17.30, und 18.06.10, 9.30-13.30
TAGUNG
IFK
mit freundlicher Unterstützung der Kulturabteilung der Stadt Wien - Wissenschafts- und Forschungsförderung - MA 7