Description
Book SynopsisClaudia Breger argues that contemporary European cinema provides ways of thinking about and feeling collectivity that can challenge the twenty-first century's political trends. Through a new model of cinematic worldmaking,
Making Worldsexamines how films produce unexpected and destabilizing affects that invite viewers to imagine new connections.
Trade Review[A] timely study. -- Carlos Kong * Film Quarterly *
Her readings of the films she surveys are sharp and insightful...This is a bracing and timely work of scholarship. * Choice *
Making Worlds offers a rich array of conceptual and affective tools to stimulate complex readings and imaginative openings, which will be of value to film theorists and ethical philosophers alike. -- ASTRID KORPORAAL, Kingston University, London, U.K. * Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television *
Claudia Breger’s
Making Worlds is a vital contribution to the political dimensions of contemporary film and media theory. Breger’s meticulous readings of contemporary cinema create generative openings in impasses that have petrified debate over the past three decades, developing models of cinematic worldmaking for critically feeling out the possibilities of creative assemblage and collective assembly in the face of authoritarian enclosure and humanitarian crisis. -- James Leo Cahill, University of Toronto
Claudia Breger’s ambitious book draws its energy from our current moment of social dissolution. She sets out to counter collective closures with a focus on affective worldmaking in cinema. Her perceptive readings range from countercultural cinema of the 1960s to contemporary films set in Turkey or Iran. Making Worlds recharges European art cinema, known for its aesthetics of critical defamiliarization, with visual pleasure and possibilities of transnational empathy. -- Deniz Göktürk, University of California, Berkeley
Framing storytelling as a form of worlding or world assembly, Breger undertakes uncommon pairings of film not previously thought together, hereby unsettling inherited ways of compartmentalizing their aesthetic, social, and political significance.
Making Worlds intervenes in a conjunctural moment when we sorely need compassionate and reasoned voices, calmly and carefully navigating the thicket of our global political morass with attention to the complexities of human identifications and multiple categories of belonging across shared layers of bounded earth. -- Angelica Fenner, author of
Race Under Reconstruction in German Cinema: Robert Stemmle’s “Toxi”An exciting journey which reveals veiled alternative worlds within the cinematic universe. * Film Matters *
Breger's book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of contemporary European cinema, global cinema, transnational film and media studies, film theory, and migration studies. * Monatshefte *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. Affects in Configuration: Controversy and Conviviality in Fatih Akın’s
The Edge of Heaven and Asghar Farhadi’s
A Separation2. Critical Intensity: Jean-Luc Godard’s and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Defamiliarized Worldmaking Practices
3. Genre Assemblages: Affective Incisions in Fatih Akın’s
The Cut and Aki Kaurismäki’s Refugee Trilogy
4. Tenderly Cruel Realisms: Objectfull Assembly and the Horizon of a Shared World
Epilogue: Reconfiguring Resistance
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
