Guido Kirsten

Principal Investigator
g.kirsten(at)filmuniversitaet.de

Dr Guido Kirsten is the PI  of the Emmy Noether Research Group “Cinematic Discourses of Deprivation: Analysing the Representation of Precarity and Exclusion in European Fiction Film and Documentary” at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF (Potsdam). His research interests include questions of representation and  audio-visual discourse and narration, questions of proximity and distance in cinema, and the history of film and film theory. He is the author of Filmischer Realismus (2013), co-editor of Christian Metz and the Codes of Cinema: Film Semiology and Beyond (Amsterdam University Press, 2018; with Margrit Tröhler), and editor of Étienne Souriau’s collected film-related writings, Das filmische Universum: Schriften zur Ästhetik des Kinos (Fink, 2020). Since 2007 he has been an editor for the film and television studies journal Montage AV, for which he co-edited issues on André Bazin (2009), the sociology of film in French filmology (2010), film and politics (2014), Roland Barthes’ film-related writings (2015), new film distribution (streaming and BitTorrent; 2017), and questions of proximity and distance (2019).

Kirsten’s research project deals with recurring patterns of the experience of poverty and precariousness in developed industrial countries from the mid-19th century to the present. In analysing these patterns, it draws from source material provided by feature films and documentaries, photographs, and sociographic and autobiographical literature. In each case, patterns of perception and experiences of time and space are investigated. Questions of legitimacy, invisibility and shame; questions of cyclical and progressive time structures, amorphous duration, and time stress ; as well as questions of social segregation and spatial narrowness play important roles here. The project aims to broaden and deepen the understanding  of experiences of poverty through a media studies view of cultural products, testimonies of those affected and corresponding analyses, and thus also to open up new thematic fields, new perspectives, and new analytical instruments for film and media studies.

Elisa Cuter

Research Associate and Ph.D. Candidate
e.cuter(at)filmuniversitaet.de

Elisa Cuter studied Philosophy at the Università degli Studi di Torino (Bachelor) and Film Studies at the Freie Universität (Master). While completing her studies, she has worked at the archive of the National Museum of Cinema in Turin and as a film critic for several publications in Italy and Germany. She served as an assistant to the artistic director for Cinema Lavoro Migrazioni: Carbonia Film Festival; as a curator of scientific panels for Lovers Filmfestival LGBTQI Turin Visions; and as a member of the selection committee for Berlin Feminist Film Week. She is part of the editorial board of the Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema. Since September 2018 she is chief editor of the politics and society section of the online magazine Il Tascabile, edited by the Treccani Institute for the Italian Encyclopedia. Her contributions have been published in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections.

Her research for the project “Cinematic Discourses of Deprivation” concerns depictions in contemporary cinema of the precarious condition of the forms of work that most explicitly exemplify the tertiarization of Western capitalism in the times of its crisis: artists, journalists, academics, and other intellectuals and creative workers. Through diverse formats, genres, and national productions, she is researching the variegated formal strategies that contribute to different and contradictory cinematic discourses. They range from the romanticization of the penniless artist and the rhetoric of intellectual privilege, to attempts to offer portraits and narratives of the growing and endangered category of cognitive workers. Through a multidisciplinary theoretical approach, her aim is also to situate such filmic discourses within current socio-political debates.

Hanna Prenzel

Research Associate and Ph.D. Candidate
h.prenzel(at)filmuniversitaet.de

Hanna Prenzel studied Art, Arts and Media Administration (M.A.) and Art history in a global context focusing on African art (M.A.) in Berlin, Osnabrück, Rennes (France) and Dakar (Senegal), as well as Documentary Filmmaking at the self-organized film school filmArche in Berlin-Neukölln. In 2017, she completed her master’s degree at the Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on documentary films dealing with (post-)colonial family histories in Germany. Her areas of interest include documentary ethics, postcolonial theory, intersectionality, and feminist film theory. She co-founded the TINT Filmkollektiv and is a certified social justice and diversity trainer. In addition to her academic career, she works as a freelance documentary filmmaker and media educator.

In her scientific-artistic research project, she focuses on forms of resistance in precarization processes based on a feminist-intersectional approach. Analysing a corpus of feature films and documentaries from the 1970s to the present day, she discusses alternative forms of strike in precarious living and housing conditions. Her work negotiates questions of subjective, non-union forms of strike, becoming precarious beyond normal working conditions, precarious housing and rent protests as well as the intersectional forms of discrimination. In her artistic research, she uses historical film examples to explore current debates surrounding precarization against the backdrop of temporal ruptures and continuities in cinematic depictions of forms of resistance in precarious conditions.

Josefine Knuth-Pollok

Research Assistant

Josefine Knuth-Pollok studied German Language and Art, Music and Theatre at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (2013-2017). During her B.A., she focused on the areas of modern German literature and theatre studies, as well as related film and media analysis practices. She is currently completing her M.A. in Film Heritage at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF (Potsdam). Since 2018, she has served as a research assistant for the Emmy Noether Research Group “Cinematic Discourses of Deprivation: Analysing the Representation of Precarity and Exclusion in European Fiction Film and Documentary”.

Alexandra Miljkovic

Research Assistant

Aleksandra Miljkovic studied Art History at the Philosophical Faculty in Belgrade, Serbia, where she completed her master’s degree with a focus on contemporary art and film. She has been involved in several special exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Serbia and at the Museum of Yugoslav History. Her journalistic texts have been published both in the magazine of the Yugoslav Film Archive and in the German newspapers der Freitag and Junge Welt. Now living in Berlin, she is currently pursuing a M.A. degree in Film Culture Heritage at the Film University.