Forschungskolloquium

Meredith C. Ward (The Johns Hopkins University) online
Listening Women and the Problem of High Fidelity: Connoisseurship, the Feminine Turn of Mind, and Knowledge in Twenty-First Century Televisual Representation

When it was announced in the spring of 2019 that Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, already the subject of an adaptation in Stephen Frears’ 2000 film starring John Cusack, was optioned for television, the substance of the buzz surrounded the fact that protagonist Rob would now be played by a woman. Starring (and executive produced by) Zoë Kravitz, High Fidelity featured Kravitz as a music snob and romantic ne’er-do-well pathologically exploring the wellspring of her life of romantic failure. The reviewers asked themselves: did the new show live up to Hornby, Frears, and Cusack? The answers often depended upon the reviewer’s assessment of Kravitz as woman. While some reviews were overtly sexist (one New Yorker review compares Kravitz’s Rob to Cathy from the newspaper comic strip and Carrie Bradshaw) many others focus on the potentially very significant question: what difference does it make in terms of both text and reception of the program when Rob is a woman? Does Kravitz’s Rob pass muster? Is her Rob believable in the role and in the text, or is Kravitz – and, by extension, Rob the character – just doing an impression of a man? Answering this question, this paper takes up a very different genealogy to solve its puzzling central question. It delves significantly below the surface of the critical dialogues regarding the show to date to explore how its central issues rest not upon the show’s skill in its execution, but its adherence (or lack thereof) to gender norms. Drawing upon the history of aural culture, specifically in the form of musical listening, fandom, and connoisseurship, inflected by intellectual history, it gets to the question of what it means to listen as a woman, and what it means to know as one too. How does femininity, in this television show, become reconciled with an aural culture of expertise, and how does feminine knowing get coded and interpreted in a traditionally male culture of music collection, and the traditionally male environment of the record store, where such connoisseurship comes into play in debates over cultural capital? Delving into the rise of specialized knowledge in the form of connoisseurship in the arts in the eighteenth century, the gendering of aural culture through classical music and its translation into record collecting and popular music subculture, and the ways women are perceived to know, this paper conceives of how such implicit modeling of mind affects what is seen as “natural” and “unnatural” or workable and unworkable for female characters on television. It also begins to sketch how a specifically feminine way of knowing through listening is sketched through Kravitz’s Rob. Touching on Rob’s male and female antecedents in both music culture and high culture, ranging from eighteenth century antiquarian collectors through rock n’ roll tastemakers, I find why she feels like an impersonation of male qualities at times - and what can be done about this problem of representation of hearing women as time moves forward.

Guido Kirsten (Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf)
Découpage: Elemente einer begriffshistorischen Rekonstruktion der europäischen Filmkultur  

In seinem Vortrag zeichnet Guido Kirsten die bewegte Geschichte des Begriffs der Découpage nach: von ihren Anfängen in den späten 1910er-Jahren über die Hochphase des Konzepts in der Zeit nach dem 2. Weltkrieg und seine anschließende Marginalisierung im Zuge der politique des auteurs bis hin zur Wiederentdeckung und Neubewertung in jüngster Zeit. Davon ausgehend stellt er allgemeinere Überlegungen zum begriffshistorischen Zugang zur Geschichte der Filmkultur zur Diskussion.

Babylonia Constantinides (Universität Zürich)  

Überleben in der Simulation: Versuchsanordnungen zum Posthumanismus  

Caroline Schöbi (Universität Zürich)  

Schweigend in Beziehung treten: Momente des Nicht-Wissens im dokumentarischen Film