FAVz027 Film Heritage – Archives, Found Footage, and the Cinema of Werner Herzog

Faculty of Arts
Spring 2012
Extent and Intensity
0/0/0. 5 credit(s). Recommended Type of Completion: k (colloquium). Other types of completion: zk (examination).
Teacher(s)
Crhistoph Wahl (lecturer)
Mgr. Šimon Bauer (assistant)
Mgr. Radomír D. Kokeš, Ph.D. (assistant)
doc. Mgr. Pavel Skopal, Ph.D. (alternate examiner)
Guaranteed by
doc. Mgr. Pavel Skopal, Ph.D.
Department of Film Studies and Audiovisual Culture – Faculty of Arts
Contact Person: doc. Mgr. Petr Szczepanik, Ph.D.
Supplier department: Department of Film Studies and Audiovisual Culture – Faculty of Arts
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.
The capacity limit for the course is 120 student(s).
Current registration and enrolment status: enrolled: 0/120, only registered: 0/120, only registered with preference (fields directly associated with the programme): 0/120
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
there are 15 fields of study the course is directly associated with, display
Syllabus
  • This series of six sessions is dedicated to the cinema of Werner Herzog, who will be 70 years old on September 5, 2012, as well as to questions of the film heritage, which have been discussed more intensively and controversially than ever since the digital revolution has reached the film business. The link between Herzog and the film heritage is threefold: First of all, he has recently donated his premortem bequest to the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin and thus to a film heritage institution – a gesture of hope that he will be accepted as one of Germany’s most important filmmakers in the future. In the past, and this is the second aspect, German film criticism and film history writing has – in contrast to attitudes taken in other countries – mostly attacked him (for example as a »Fascist«) or ignored him, which is what makes him an interesting subject to study – ex negativo – the process of canonisation. The third aspect will be tackled from one of his latest films, CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (2010), not only because one could argue that Herzog uses the history of the recently discovered 30.000 years old paintings as a starting point to reflect about the role of archives (in this case: the naturally sealed cave) in general, but also because in this film, to emphasise and to illustrate one of his arguments, he uses a piece of found footage – not for the first time in his career and notwithstanding the fact that he has repeated countless times how serious he is about finding new images for our civilisation. The first lecture will give an overview of the most interesting theoretical and practical questions about the film archive yet to be answered, while the second lecture concentrates on a typology of films entirely made of or partially using archival material. In the second lecture I will study the remarks Herzogs makes about archives in CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREMAS as well as his general ways of using archival footage, and in the fourth his reception in Germany and elsewhere is portrayed with the focus on the reasons for his non-canonisation. The fifth and sixth lecture will eventually study core aspects of Herzog’s filmmaking, which help to understand why the German Kinemathek should strive to establish him as an important part of the German film heritage: the blending of documentary and fiction, the philosophy of ecstasy, the urge for new images, the physicality of his filmmaking, and the “Bavarianness” of his films. Chris Wahl, PhD, is a researcher at the Film and Television University “Konrad Wolf” in Potsdam-Babelsberg, Germany. He has published on language and cinema (coming of sound, dubbing, subtitling, polyglot films) and especially on the multiple language versions produced by the German studio Ufa in the 1930s. His study Sprachversionsfilme aus Babelsberg. Die international Strategie der Ufa 1929-1939 (2009) is about to be translated into English and will be published by Amsterdam University Press in 2013. Recently, he has (co-)edited three books on German directors who have so far been neglected by German film history: on Kurt Hoffmann (belleville 2010), on Werner Herzog (etk 2011), and on Dominik Graf (etk August 2012). Currently he is interested in questions of film style (especially slow motion and superimpositions) through the different “ages” of cinema as well as in the topic “film archives and archive films”. The former interest has led to the writing of an introduction into video art (in: Preserving and Presenting Media Art: Challenges and Perspectives, Amsterdam UP Spring 2012). The latter is also due to the fact that he is involved in the conception of a new master program concerned with the “audiovisual cultural heritage” at his University.
Teaching methods
lecture
Assessment methods
Written test. Full time students: 100% presence at the lectures is required. Distance students: two absences are tolerated.
Language of instruction
English
Further comments (probably available only in Czech)
Study Materials
Information on completion of the course: Full time students: 100% presence at the lectures is required. Distance students: two absences are tolerated.
The course is taught only once.
The course is taught: in blocks.
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