Film and media Theory

The fields of "film studies," "visual culture," and "media theory" have emerged over the last decades to embrace a wide-range of interdisciplinary approaches to studying the cultural significance of media and the ways in which technologies of seeing are imbricated by various social and political concerns. On the one hand, visual culture is a new - and still hotly contested - discipline, traversing art history, film, photography, popular culture, literary theory, comparative literature, among other fields. On the other hand, many of the theoretical and historical roots of visual culture, film, and media theory can be traced back to the first third of the twentieth-century, reaching a high-point during the 1920s in Weimar Germany. It is here that the most significant and far-reaching elaborations of the impact of new media on mass culture - ranging from film, radio, photography, the photomontage, and the gramophone to advertising, theater, and the cabaret - were first articulated by the likes of Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Alfred Doeblin, Bertolt Brecht, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Hoech, Kurt Tucholsky, Ernst Juenger, and others. Years later, when Marshall McLuhan famously declared that the "medium is the message," he drew attention to what had long since been recognized and astutely analyzed in Weimar Germany: Media, far from simply being the static containers of culture, are themselves a kind of content, which need to be studied in their historical, social, and cultural complexity.

Members of the department teach classes addressing a wide-range of problems in interdisciplinary media studies. Professor Hewitt currently teaches both classical Weimar cinema and the film of New German Cinema and is particularly interested in the latter in the light of contemporary radical left politics and terrorism. Professor Presner has developed a series of graduate-level courses on visual culture and media theory, including "Weimar Visual Culture" and "War and Media Theory." He regularly teaches an undergraduate course on "The Holocaust in Film and Literature." Additionally, he is currently working on an interdisciplinary research and curriculum development project called "Hypermedia Berlin," based on his GE course of the same name. Professor Wild's research strives to question the media-technological a priori of contemporary media history and theory by taking a long-range view and investigating the materiality of communication before the advent of technical media. His current project is informed by the contention that theology prefigures modern media theories as it was forced to think media and mediation in the face of the irreducible (and at times even unbridgeable) distance between God and man.

The department's leadership role in media-related research initiatives has just been recognized as Professors Presner and Wild were chosen to lead the Faculty Seminar "Media, Technology, and Culture" funded by the Mellon Foundation Grant to Transform the Humanities at UCLA. A group of faculty working on new and old media will meet throughout the academic year 2007/08 to examine and critique the changes effected by global media and the technologies that enable them. In conjunction with the Faculty Seminar, the lecture series "Genealogies of Media Theory" will assess the historical significance of media and media technologies - ranging from film to moveable type, podcasting to the rotary printer - and probe the cultural genealogies of media theory from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. For more information click on www.digitalhumanities.ucla.edu.