Kolloquium: Feeling through Film: The Open Memory Box and the Intimate Social History of the GDR
- Datum: 14.05.2019
- Uhrzeit: 17:00
- Vortragende(r): Laurence McFalls
- Ort: Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin
- Raum: Kleiner Sitzungssaal
- Gastgeber: Forschungsbereich Geschichte der Gefühle
- Kontakt: sekfrevert@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its summer semester 2019 colloquium:
Laurence McFalls, Université de Montréal
Feeling through film: The Open Memory Box and the Intimate Social History of the GDR
The Open Memory Box is an online (anti-)archive of over 400 hours of
home movies from the GDR. It offers insight into the emotional universe
of everyday life in the GDR. This talk will explore the challenges of
curating the at-once touching, banal, boring and extraordinary family
histories captured on 8mm film between 1947 and 1990. Rarely do families
film the tragedies, conflicts, and platitudes of daily life, yet the
memories that family films elicit ultimately do reveal the shadows of
betrayal and shame that underlie personal and political histories. The
talk will explain how digital techniques can actually enrich (and not
just can) the humanities by suggesting new interpretive and emotional
linkages between images and narratives and how home movies can provide
historians with documentation that speaks to the heart.
Laurence McFalls is Professor of Political Science at the Université de
Montréal, where he directs the Canadian Centre for German and European
Studies and the International Research Training Group “Diversity:
Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces”. His research spans
questions of German reunification, the social theories and
epistemologies of Max Weber and Michel Foucault, and the political
theory of post-liberalism. Alberto Herskovits is a visual anthropologist
and award-winning documentary filmmaker whose works also span issues
from German reunification to global migration, gender, and the arts and
memory.