2018 | 2

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  • Review
  • Review
  • Review
    Festival Review: 71st Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland, 1–11 August 2018
    Adler, Dietmar; Martig, Charles (2018) , S. 127-131
  • Article
    Marriage and Its Representations in Classical Hollywood Comedy, 1934–1945: Stanley Cavell, the Concept of Skepticism, and Kierkegaard’s Legacy
    El-Khoury, Toufic (2018) , S. 23-37
    This article explores the questions of marriage and divorce as discussed by Stanley Cavell in his study of Classical Hollywood comedies, dubbing what he considered as a popular subgenre of the American comedy of the thirties and forties: the “comedy of remarriage”. We will focus on Cavell’s analysis of a series of films, and the way these comedies belong to a specific American school of thought, with a case study of The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, US 1937). We will then try to identify, in Cavell’s original approach of marriage and divorce in the light of his discussion of philosophical skepticism, traces of Kierkegaard’s moral legacy, by way of Wittgenstein’s influence on the American thinker.
  • Article
    Anatomy of a Wedding: Examining Religiosity, Feminism, and Weddings in Grey’s Anatomy
    Lauricella, Sharon; Scott, Hannah M. (2018) , S. 39-53
    Medical drama "Grey’s Anatomy" features weddings as pivotal life events, with 14 unions portrayed over the program’s 13 seasons on ABC. This paper is a synthetic approach combining communication, gender studies, and rigorous methodology to examine weddings in "Grey’s Anatomy" through a feminist lens. We employ Butler’s theory of gender performance and Rich’s concept of compulsory heterosexuality to examine weddings throughout the show’s extensive run. Depictions of women and weddings demonstrate dissonance between hegemonic gender performance and the potential to redefine the performance of “woman” in one’s own ways. Tension exists between the program’s portrayal of traditional heterosexual weddings and its progressive inclusion of a lesbian ceremony. We argue that the program’s portrayal of both traditional “white” weddings and ceremonies which are more private and self-defined reflect the challenges inherent in navigating cultural expectations and personal objectives associated with performing as a “woman” in contemporary culture
  • Article
    Charivari or the Historicising of a Question: The Irrelevance of Romantic Love for the Audio-Visual Performance of Marriage in Bern in the 18th and 19th Centuries
    Haldemann, Arno (2018) , S. 55-66
    Citing Oscar Wilde, the editors of this volume ask the question “who, being loved, is poor?” in their call for papers. On a meta-theoretical level, this article aims at contextualising this question and its citation socially. On an empirical level, it intends to contrast the socially highly determined question and its implicit presuppositions with the findings of a locally situated case study in the canton of Berne in the 18th and 19th century. By studying precarious marriages through petitions for the dispensation from the preacher’s threefold reading of the banns from the pulpit, the collective audio-visual dimension of marriages in an agrarian-shaped society of scarce resources becomes apparent. With the petitions, the couples tried to avoid attention and thus, to escape the communal tribunal of a charivari and the like. In Bern, concerning the material and media dimensions, weddings were largely governed by local standards. Charivaris were the audio-visual means of society to communicate shared values regarding marriage. They did not reflect romantic ideals of love, but were an expression of the locally accentuated moral economy. The performance of weddings as large and public rituals was a communal compulsion rather than the expression of an individualistic and therefore creative event. Performative weddings as the epitome of individualism are a very young historic development and strongly linked to a late-modern bourgeois culture of singularity.
  • Article
    Bridal Mysticism, Virtual Marriage, and Masculinity in the Moravian Hymnbook Kleines Brüdergesangbuch
    Bauer, Benedikt (2018) , S. 67-79
    This article discusses the connection of virtual interaction, masculinity and bridal mysticism in the Moravian hymnbook "Kleines Brüdergesangbuch" (1754). Hereto, the motifs inherent in the hymnbook are examined according to the anthropological presentations as well as the perception of the divine, i.e. Jesus Christ, using mainly the conceptions of virtual interaction (S. Knauß) and hegemonic masculinity (R. Connell).
  • Article
    “What God Has Joined Together…”. Editorial
    Höpflinger, Anna-Katharina; Mäder, Marie-Therese (2018) , S. 7-21
  • Article
    Revisiting the Relevance of Conceptualism of Godard’s Film
    Uskokovic, Vuk (2018) , S. 83-113
    Jean-Luc Godard’s filmmaking is analyzed as a conceptual art, as in agreement with his most accomplished role as a film critic, not a classical filmmaker. In his 1970 manifesto, Godard argues that 1) we must make political films, and 2) we must make films politically. While the first point provokes a constructive critique of the art of cinema, the other one leads to the provision of an absolute cinematic experience. Correspondingly, it is argued that albeit rare and systematically unsupported in the academic setting, a most prolific scientific work is such that it implicitly questions the dominant presentation styles and methodological paradigms in parallel with providing meaningful basic and/or practical findings. The relevance of other elements of Godard’s conceptual approach to revolutionizing the art of cinema to scientific studies is elaborated too. The importance of ad hoc improvisation, deliberate imperfectness, the aesthetics of poverty, the embracement of collective uncertainties and the eagerness to constantly get lost to be found is particularly emphasized. “I don’t make movies; I make cinema” is Godard’s precept whose translation to any professional field, including scientific research and teaching, could produce uncountable benefits. Godard’s art is intimately tied to the iteration of the point that the value of an act is measured by the extent to which it reaches out away from the subject and into the world, correlating with the Buberian ontology. Corresponding annihilations of the protagonists symbolize the necessity of the artist’s working against the self in the attempt to use her art to destroy the art in question and point at everything as an equally precious art. The discourse follows an impulsive and unstructured course so as to veritably reflect Godard’s approach to filmmaking.
  • Journal Issue