Christian Quendler
University of Innsbruck, American Studies, Faculty Member
- American Studies, Film Studies, Film-Philosophy, Media and Cultural Studies, Early Cinema, Cognitive Narratology, and 14 moreLiterature, American Literature, Diary Studies, Autobiography, Photography, Personal Narratives, Digital Humanities, Documentary Film, Embodied Mind and Cognition, Memoir and Autobiography, Quantified Self, Mountain & mountaineering literature, English Studies, and Mountain Studiesedit
This book explores the cultural, intellectual, and artistic fascination with camera-eye metaphors in film culture of the twentieth century. By studying the very metaphor that cinema lives by, it provides a rich and insightful map of our... more
This book explores the cultural, intellectual, and artistic fascination with camera-eye metaphors in film culture of the twentieth century. By studying the very metaphor that cinema lives by, it provides a rich and insightful map of our understanding of cinema and film styles and shows how cinema shapes our understanding of the arts and media. As current new media technologies are attempting to shift the identity of cinema and moving imagery, it is hard to overstate the importance of this metaphor for our understanding of the modalities of vision. In what guises does the "camera eye" continue to survive in media that is called new?
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... aspects of early romantic theory - Romantic Irony in Brentano's Godwi and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus - Self-Reflexivity in Postmodernism - From Romantic Irony to Postmodernist Self-Reflexivity: theoretical aspects in... more
... aspects of early romantic theory - Romantic Irony in Brentano's Godwi and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus - Self-Reflexivity in Postmodernism - From Romantic Irony to Postmodernist Self-Reflexivity: theoretical aspects in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Derrida - Postmodernist Metafiction ...
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The German notion of Heimat is a form of place attachment that is simultaneously shaped by senses of longing and belonging. Heimat not only accommodates the unhomely in the homely, it also blends foreign perspectives with stylized forms... more
The German notion of Heimat is a form of place attachment that
is simultaneously shaped by senses of longing and belonging. Heimat not
only accommodates the unhomely in the homely, it also blends foreign perspectives with stylized forms of self-exoticization. To the extent that Heimat responds to a desire for rediscovering the (trans)national in the local, the urban in the provincial, the modern in the anti-modern, and so on, it may be described as a delocalized place. This article examines changing national, gendered, and generic transpositions of Alpine imaginaries by analyzing film adaptations of two novels that prefigure and refigure Heimat art respectively: Wilhelmine von Hillern’s Die Geier-Wally (The Vulture Wally), which appeared in 1873 and became the source of many film and TV adaptations, and Thomas Willmann’s Alpine Western Das finstere Tal (The Dark Valley), published in 2010 and adapted to a motion picture by Andreas Prochaska in 2014.
is simultaneously shaped by senses of longing and belonging. Heimat not
only accommodates the unhomely in the homely, it also blends foreign perspectives with stylized forms of self-exoticization. To the extent that Heimat responds to a desire for rediscovering the (trans)national in the local, the urban in the provincial, the modern in the anti-modern, and so on, it may be described as a delocalized place. This article examines changing national, gendered, and generic transpositions of Alpine imaginaries by analyzing film adaptations of two novels that prefigure and refigure Heimat art respectively: Wilhelmine von Hillern’s Die Geier-Wally (The Vulture Wally), which appeared in 1873 and became the source of many film and TV adaptations, and Thomas Willmann’s Alpine Western Das finstere Tal (The Dark Valley), published in 2010 and adapted to a motion picture by Andreas Prochaska in 2014.
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Studies in mountain cinema often focus on the innovations and legacies of the classical German film of the 1920s and ’30s. This introduction to a special issue on cinematic mountains proposes to rethink the relationship between mountains... more
Studies in mountain cinema often focus on the innovations and legacies of the classical German film of the 1920s and ’30s. This introduction to a special issue on cinematic mountains proposes to rethink the relationship between mountains and cinema along a different path. Drawing on the criticism of Jean Epstein, Béla Balázs, André Bazin, and Luc Moullet, we discuss three film-theoretical figurations of mountains. The first one concerns the politics of cinema; it invokes mountains as sites of creative visions at a remove from accustomed habits, standards, and conventions. The second addresses the environmental relation of cinema as a spatial and geographic artform. The third cinematic figuration of mountains regards filmic techniques and their virtue to reveal new facets of mountains and meaningful environmental connections.
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Mountains confront us in many guises. They visualize space and provide geopolitical orientations that address questions of historical, cultural, social, national, and individual identities. Mountains are subjects of philosophical... more
Mountains confront us in many guises. They visualize space and provide geopolitical orientations that address questions of historical, cultural, social, national, and individual identities. Mountains are subjects of philosophical reflections, environmental meditations, and ecocritical ontologies. They serve as a means of spiritual invigoration, scientific experimentation, medical therapy, and recreation. They are sources and resources of technological and artistic innovations, human and nonhuman exploitations. Mountain spaces are often borderlands, contested zones of imperial expansion, war, and migration. They are sites of tourism and industrialization, deposits of waste, and repositories of cultural memory; their forms are shaped and reshaped through processes of cultural and geological erosion. This polymorphous and fluid nature turns mountains into a dynamic medium that both reflects and grounds subjectivities. Mountains may also be conceived of as what Timothy Morton calls &quo...
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In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the New York scientist and politician Samuel Latham Mitchill proposed ‘Fredonia’ as a new national name for the United States. Despite his clever promotional strategy that involved Noah... more
In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the New York scientist and politician Samuel Latham Mitchill proposed ‘Fredonia’ as a new national name for the United States. Despite his clever promotional strategy that involved Noah Webster, the eminent national geographer Jedidiah Morse, and Thomas Jefferson, Mitchill failed as a naming patron. Yet, “Fredonia” prevailed as a critical and satirical expression of a distinct national discourse. It surfaces in national debates on language, geography, and history and nds its most elaborate response in Jonas Clopper’s utopian satire Fragments of the History of Bawlfredonia (1819). Even though Fredonia is but a minor, nominal event, it illustrates well the stakes and con icts of nation build- ing. It is exemplary in the way naming, mapping, and historicizing the United States are put to use as key strategies for projecting a communal basis of national identity. Tracing Fredonia from its national, idealistic conception to its polemical appropriation in political discourse and its imaginative transformation into “Bawlfredonia” sheds light on the ideological and politi- cal ruptures in the young republic. It also shows the political limits of the scienti c empiricism that drove nation building in a spirit of Enlightenment. The literary recoding of Clopper’s sat- ire brings out, in particular, the political, representational, and aesthetic transformations that shaped the literature of the Early Republic. Fragments of the History of Bawlfredonia offers a satirical commentary on how historiography, geography, and linguistics served as metasettings in the search for an American character. Its humorous and re exive encounter also becomes an investigation of the con nes of literary imagination and its social functions.
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Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1951) assumes a special place in the career of the French filmmaker Robert Bresson. Joseph Cunneen describes the film as “a major step in the discovery of his own approach to... more
Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1951) assumes a special place in the career of the French filmmaker Robert Bresson. Joseph Cunneen describes the film as “a major step in the discovery of his own approach to cinema” and for Tony Pipolo Diary of a Country Priest is Bresson’s “first truly great work … that augurs a formal breakthrough.” The film has been celebrated for transposing the materiality of writing into the realm of cinema. It is praised both as an ingenious adaptation of Georges Bernanos’s diary novel as well as a unique vision of cinematography. Although these two aspects have been widely discussed by film critics and scholars, little attention has been paid to the role the diary plays in adapting the novel and exploring a writerly vision of cinema. On the one hand, Bresson’s recourse to the diary form is true to its literary source. As a highly performative mode of writing, the diary foregrounds the dramatic structure of the film. In this respect the film also deviates — more so than the novel — from the diary form as an open or even plotless genre. On the other hand, the diary provides a congenial frame for reflecting on his ideas of cinematography as “a writing with images in movement and with sounds” (Bresson). This paper examines the diary as a figuration of the medium of film that simultaneously defines film and defies a definition of film.
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Metaphors of the camera eye are among the oldest and most powerful tropes to depict human vision and subjectivity. As a proto-cybernetic metaphor that lends itself both to anthropomorphic and mechanomorphic readings, the camera eye has... more
Metaphors of the camera eye are among the oldest and most powerful tropes to depict human vision and subjectivity. As a proto-cybernetic metaphor that lends itself both to anthropomorphic and mechanomorphic readings, the camera eye has become a double agent of subjectivity. It has served as midwife for a modern philosophy of the subject in René Descartes's discourse on Optics and as a gravedigger for classical notions of subjectivity in Dziga Vertov's radically constructivist aesthetics of the kino-eye. By looking at Descartes's early modern and Vertov's modernist notions of the camera eye as two paradigmatic case studies, this paper sets out to explore the intricate relation between subjectivity and mediality. It examines figures of the camera eye as conceptual metaphors that construct subjective relations to orders of discourse and media spaces. Drawing on Joachim Paech's reflections on the dispositif for a theory of the order(ing) of media, I will review the concept of the dispositif as strategic place in the alignment of medium, discourse and genre.
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ZIAS Lecture Series, Summer Semester 2023 Mountain ranges such as the Andes, the Rocky Mountains, and the Alaska Range dominate the landscapes of the Americas. Captured in, and by, the visual imagination, what we see of mountains, and... more
ZIAS Lecture Series, Summer Semester 2023
Mountain ranges such as the Andes, the Rocky Mountains, and the Alaska Range dominate the landscapes of the Americas. Captured in, and by, the visual imagination, what we see of mountains, and what we think of when hearing “mountain,” is largely limited to their surface: their shapes as iconic representations, their slopes as key elements in the winter industry, and their plateaus as habitats for different forms of life. Much as the outside of mountains is both a material presence and a projection screen for human ideas, wishes, and anxieties, the inside of mountains, too, consists of living environments, mineral deposits, and subterranean spaces that not only inspire the human imagination but also play a vital role in the extractive ecologies of the twenty-first century.
This lecture series will explore the material and imaginary dimensions of mountain interiors. The talks will cover B-movies in which Americans explore the inside of Mexican mountains; the extreme working conditions in mines in the Peruvian Andes; the horror, dread, and awe experienced when confronted with deep time and space; the myths and realities of mining in the Argentinian Andes; and the significance of Gros Morne National Park in the context of extractivism in Canadian cinema.
The lecture series is organized in collaboration with the International Film Festival Innsbruck (June 6–11, 2023), which will show a retrospective on “World Visions” featuring a film by Salomé Lamas, who will give a talk on April 27, and films discussed in Rachel Jekanowski’s talk on June 5.
Concept & Organization: Michi Fuchs & Christian Quendler
Mountain ranges such as the Andes, the Rocky Mountains, and the Alaska Range dominate the landscapes of the Americas. Captured in, and by, the visual imagination, what we see of mountains, and what we think of when hearing “mountain,” is largely limited to their surface: their shapes as iconic representations, their slopes as key elements in the winter industry, and their plateaus as habitats for different forms of life. Much as the outside of mountains is both a material presence and a projection screen for human ideas, wishes, and anxieties, the inside of mountains, too, consists of living environments, mineral deposits, and subterranean spaces that not only inspire the human imagination but also play a vital role in the extractive ecologies of the twenty-first century.
This lecture series will explore the material and imaginary dimensions of mountain interiors. The talks will cover B-movies in which Americans explore the inside of Mexican mountains; the extreme working conditions in mines in the Peruvian Andes; the horror, dread, and awe experienced when confronted with deep time and space; the myths and realities of mining in the Argentinian Andes; and the significance of Gros Morne National Park in the context of extractivism in Canadian cinema.
The lecture series is organized in collaboration with the International Film Festival Innsbruck (June 6–11, 2023), which will show a retrospective on “World Visions” featuring a film by Salomé Lamas, who will give a talk on April 27, and films discussed in Rachel Jekanowski’s talk on June 5.
Concept & Organization: Michi Fuchs & Christian Quendler
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Cinema and mountains afford us with new vistas and visions and offer deep insights into the mobility of the gaze. This conference examines the many connections between mountains and cinema as well as the different ways in which they... more
Cinema and mountains afford us with new vistas and visions and offer deep insights into the mobility of the gaze. This conference examines the many connections between mountains and cinema as well as the different ways in which they mediate each other. Mountain cinema enacts global and local visions of the world and is a site of transnational and transcultural negotiations. Although historical studies of mountain film frequently focus on national aspects or approach mountains as cultural and national borders, mountain films have always been deeply invested in globalized panoramic views and charged with ideologies of empire, economy, geopolitics, and gender. By its virtue of rendering the world dynamic and open, cinema shows us the changing social, cultural, and material figurations of mountains. Mediating between human and geological time, cinema reveals the fluidity of mountains and allows us to register changes beyond the human scalar. Mountains afford transnational perspectives and deep insights into conceptions of cinema. Their persistence turns mountain cinema into a stage where the historical interconnectivity of geopolitical, cultural, social, and ecological agencies can be studied in particularly productive ways.
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Presentation at the International Mountain Studies Symposium, Appalachian State University, NC, March 12, 2019.
Round-Table Discussion with Jerry W. Williams at the International Mountain Studies Symposium, Appalachian State University, NC, March 12, 2019.
Guest Lecture for Interdisciplinary Brown Bags Lecture Series hosted by the Department of Cultural, Gender and Global Studies at Appalachian State University, NC, January 23, 2019.
Guest Lecture at the University of Salzburg, March 13, 2018.
Guest lecture at the University of Vienna. January 10, 2018.
Lecture at the University of Innsbruck. November 14, 2017.
Presentation at the International Mountain Studies Film Workshop at the University of Innsbruck. June 23, 2017.
Guest lecture at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, September 19, 2014.
Presentation at the Summer Institute for Advanced Studies at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, July 21, 2014.
Habilitationsvortrag at the University of Innsbruck, June 26, 2013.
Guest lecture at the Chicago Film Seminar. School of the Arts Institute Chicago, October 14, 2010.
Guest lecture at the Film and Media Studies Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara, May 28, 2010.
Presentation at the International Symposium “Moving Images - Mobile Viewers,” University of Stuttgart, February 7, 2009.
Guest Lecture at the University of Notre Dame, March 26,2008.
Presentation at the 42nd Annual Appalachian Studies Conference “AppalachA’ville: Engage, Sustain, Innovate,” University of North Carolina Asheville, March 15, 2019.
Presentation at the Fifth Salzburg Institute Symposium “The Good Life,” University of Salzburg, July 27, 2017.
Presentation at the 21st World Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association at the University of Vienna, July 25, 2016.
Presentation at the International Conference on Narrative at MIT, Cambridge, MA, March 27, 2014.
Presentation at the 60th annual conference of the German Association of American Studies, University of Erlangen, June 1, 2013.
Presentation at the international conference of the Swiss Association of North American Studies and the Austrian Association of American Studies “Cultures in Conflict / Conflicting Cultures” at the University of Zurich, November 10,2012.
Presentation at “Media Acts,” the 10th International Conference of the Nordic Society of Intermedial Studies in Trondheim (Norway), October 27,2011.
Presentation at the NECS (European Network for Cinema Studies) Conference “Sonic Futures: Soundscapes and Languages of Screen Media” in London, June 26,2011.
Presentation at the Iconicity Conference at the Linnaeus University of Växjö (Sweden), June 17,2011.
Presentation at the SCMS (Society of Cinema and Media Studies) Conference in New Orleans, March 11, 2011.
Presentation at the 25th International Conference on Narrative, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, April 10, 2010.
Presentation at the 27th International Film Studies Conference, Università degli Studi di Udine, March 17, 2010.
Presentation at the Winter Conference “Limits of the Human” of the Early Modem Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, March 5, 2010.
Presentation at the International Conference on Narrative, Georgetown University, Washington DC, March 18, 2007.
Presentation at the Colloque annuel de la Société des Amis d’Inter-textes “Cadres, cadrages, encadrements,” Université Paris IV Sorbonne, March 17, 2006.