Making worlds : affect and collectivity in contemporary European cinema /
Claudia Breger
- New York : Columbia University Press, 2020
- 336 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
Affects in Configuration: Controversy and Conviviality in Fatih Akın's The Edge of Heaven and Asghar Farhadi's A Separation Critical Intensity: Jean-Luc Godard's and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Defamiliarized Worldmaking Practices Genre. Or, Simple Stories? Affective Incisions in Akın's The Cut and Ari Kaurismäki's Refugee Trilogy Tenderly Cruel Realisms: Objectfull Assembly and the Horizon of a Shared World Epilogue: Reconfiguring Resistance
The twenty-first century has seen an intensification of racial violence, religious chauvinism, class division, and the politics of hatred in the West. In Making Worlds, Claudia Breger argues that contemporary European art house cinema provides ways of thinking about and producing new types of collectivities in response to these political trends. In readings of key contemporary European films such as Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, Aki Kaurismaki's Le Havre, and Inarritu's Biutiful, Breger examines the ways in which these films produce unexpected and frequently destabilizing affects that invite viewers to imagine new connections among individuals. These films and their depictions of refugees, immigrants, and communities do not simply counter dominant political imaginaries of hate and fear with positive alternatives. Instead, they produce new sensibilities, responses, and affects among viewers that allow them to see the world in new ways