{"id":1166,"date":"2019-04-08T19:42:40","date_gmt":"2019-04-08T18:42:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/radicalfilmnetwork.de\/?p=1166"},"modified":"2019-04-08T19:42:40","modified_gmt":"2019-04-08T18:42:40","slug":"scandalizing-poverty-radical-film-making-in-berlin-90-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radicalfilm.net\/2019\/scandalizing-poverty-radical-film-making-in-berlin-90-years-ago\/","title":{"rendered":"Scandalizing Poverty: Radical Filmmaking in Berlin, 90 Years Ago"},"content":{"rendered":"The late 1920s saw the first large scale wave of radical political film making in Germany. Deploring \u2018how broadly and deeply the cinema influences and confuses proletarian audiences\u2019, B\u00e9la Bal\u00e1zs cried out in 1922: \u2018We must create our own film companies! This is absolutely necessary!\u2019 <!--more-->(Bal\u00e1zs 2016 [1922], p. 352). The same urge is present in Willi M\u00fcnzenberg\u2019s manifesto Erobert den Film! (\u2018Conquering cinema\u2019). M\u00fcnzenberg conversed words into action by taking over the recently founded production company Prometheus. He turned it into the biggest left wing film company of the Weimar republic, producing alternative newsreels, short documentaries and feature films with proletarian subjects. Comparing two Prometheus films set in Berlin\u2019s northern district Wedding \u2013 the feature film Mother Krause\u2019s Journey to Happiness (Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Gl\u00fcck, Piel [Phil] Jutzi, D 1929) and the short documentary Zeitprobleme: wie der Arbeiter wohnt (Slatan Dudow, D 1929) \u2013 Guido Kirsten\u2019s analysis is aimed at showing how the two films scandalize working class poverty by using (in part) similar imagery but different rhetoric strategies. The underlying question is what elements of these strategies are, even today, relevant and vital for political representations of poverty and precarity.\n\nDr Guido Kirsten is the principal investigator of the Emmy Noether research group \u201cCinematic Discourses of Deprivation: Analysing the Representation of Precarity and Exclusion in European Fiction Film and Documentary\u201d at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF (Potsdam). He is the author of Filmischer Realismus (2013) and co-editor of Christian Metz and the Codes of Cinema: Film Semiology and Beyond (Amsterdam University Press 2018; together with Margrit Tr\u00f6hler). Since 2007 he has been an editor of the film and television studies journal Montage AV, for which he co-edited issues on film and politics (2014), Roland Barthes\u2019 film related writings (2015) and new ways of film distribution (streaming and BitTorrent; 2017).\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The late 1920s saw the first large scale wave of radical political film making in Germany. Deploring \u2018how broadly and deeply the cinema influences and confuses proletarian audiences\u2019, B\u00e9la Bal\u00e1zs cried out in 1922: \u2018We must create our own film companies! This is absolutely necessary!\u2019","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3,4],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radicalfilm.net\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1166"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radicalfilm.net\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radicalfilm.net\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radicalfilm.net\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radicalfilm.net\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/radicalfilm.net\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radicalfilm.net\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radicalfilm.net\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radicalfilm.net\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}