Aesthetic atmospheres are forms of knowing and feeling that are as irrefutable and powerful as they are intangible and nonverbal. How can something as enveloping as an aesthetic atmosphere allow for the distance or rupture necessary for critique? Or does the pervasiveness of engineered atmospheres necessitate new forms of critique? This talk seeks to develop a framework for situating cinematic atmospheres in the triangulation of mood, milieu, and mediation in order to grasp their affective, environmental and mediated dimensions and analyze them as multiple and uneven. To probe this framework, the talk will draw on early 20th century animal photography by George Shiras III and Max Ophüls’ and Eugen Schüfftan’s 1939 French melodrama Sans lendemain (There Is No Tomorrow), and suggest an expanded understanding of Siegfried Kracauer’s classical film theory as a contemporary media theory.
Inga Pollmann is Associate Professor in German Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her work, she situates film and media theory within larger questions concerning aesthetics, philosophy and theories of science. In addition to her monograph Cinematic Vitalism: Film Theory and the Question of Life (AUP, 2018), she has published on contemporary German cinema, early hunting films, melodrama, etc. Her current book project Mood, Medium, Milieu: Environmental Film Aesthetics draws on films, artworks, and media objects to map out a critical environmental aesthetic at the intersection of atmospheres, affections, ecology, and mediation.
DEPARTMENT of GERMAN STUDIES