Submitted Abstract
The planned dissertation wants to devote itself to transnationally diffusing pictorial formulas within the modernist cinema of the 1960s and thus define a similarity moment within an eventful period of national political, social and aesthetic upheavals. Following transnational film studies, local film spaces are no longer defined exclusively through national borders, but rather as transnational phenomena. It is therefore assumed that national borders are permeable for the diffusion of typical image patterns in different geographical regions.Accordingly, diffusing narrative and image formulas will be investigated on the basis of films from different regions of the world: Western and Eastern Europe, Asia and South America.Film historiography has so far considered cinematic modernism in the 1960s primarily in fixed, national categories. In contrast, these categories are to be reconsidered through the approach of “diffusion” in order to gain a better understanding for the dynamics of cinematic language across national borders.The focus is thus on images that contribute to the cinematic narrative construction of post-war experience and form corresponding social images. How do these pictures transport meaning, evoke emotional moods and change the viewer’s perception? The project will show that geographical cinematic spaces can be connected by means of the transfer of images and that national and cultural dimensions play a role in the development of both similar and differing pictorial formulas.This approach aims at a new perspectivation: How can one argue for conventionality in relation to modernist cinema of the 1960s, while these international renewal movements want to be precisely the negation of all this? The relevance of the project lies in the fact that there is as of yet no research work devoted to the transnational circulation of cinematic pictorial formulas in this period, and thus a complementary contribution to film historiography can be achieved.