Barton Byg: Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (1995)

“Fervently admired and frequently reviled, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet—who have lived and worked together since the 1950s—may well be the most uncompromising, not to say intransigent, filmmakers in the history of the medium. Their radical and deeply political films placed them as forerunners of the New German Cinema movement in the 1960s and influential figures in the subsequent explosion of the European avant-garde. In Landscapes of Resistance, Barton Byg fills a significant gap in modern German and European cinema studies by tracing the career of the two filmmakers and exploring their connection to German modernism, in particular their relationship to the Frankfurt School.

Although they are not German themselves, Straub and Huillet have used German material as the basis for the majority of their films. They have transcribed prose by Böll and Kafka, operas by Schoenberg, and verse dramas by Hölderlin. Byg explores how their work engages German culture with a critical distance and affection and confronts the artificiality of divisions between high and low culture.”

Publisher University of California Press, 1995
Open access
ISBN 0520089081, 9780520089082
xiii+303 pages

Reviews: Ulrich Kriest (Medienwissenschaft 1997, DE), Margret Eifler (The German Quarterly 2000).

Publisher
WorldCat

HTML
single HTML
JPGs

Raul Bopp: Cobra Norato (1931–) [BR-PT, EN]

“Raised in the south of Brazil, trained as a lawyer in Recife and Rio, and seasoned as a diplomat in Japan and the United States, Raul Bopp found his true subject in Manaus, where he discovered what he insisted was the authentic Brazil. Bopp brought to the early Modernist movement in Brazil a fascination with the folklore, Indian languages, and culture of the vast hinterland of the Amazon basin. As a contributor to the magazine Revista de Antropofagia (Anthropophagical Review) in the 1920s and 1930s, Bopp defined the concerns of what he called the “Cannibalist school” of poetry. ‘Anthropophagical’ in their appropriative and assimilative relation to European experimental writing, the theories of Bopp and Oswald de Andrade further associated them with the tenets of the cosmopolitan/indigenist “Verde e Amarelo” writers, who took their name (“The Green and Yellow”) from the colors of the Brazilian flag.

His long poem Cobra Norato (The Snake Norato or, as translated by Renato Rezende, Black Snake) was written in 1928 and published in its first version in 1931. In it Bopp embodies his primitivist, mystical sense of the life of Brazil’s interior, whose energy he and the other “Cannibalists” proposed as an alternative to the compromising forces of modern urban life. Skeptical, impressionistic, rhythmically complex, and erotically playful, the poem moves at times like a dream or a fairy tale. Its politics, however, are humanitarian and ecologically alert to the dangers o fexploiting the rain forest and its indigenous cultures. In later editions, Bopp softened the bluntness and difficulty of the poem’s diction, making the tone less austerely visionary and more tender. In his later poems, in his criticism, and in his several volumes of memoirs, Bopp continued his Modernist advocacy of Amazonian and Afro-Brazilian folklore as sources of energy and psychic survival.” (Source)

First published in Rio de Janeiro, 1937.

Cobra Norato / Black Snake (BR-Portuguese/English, trans. Renato Rezende, 1996, excerpts, HTML)
Cobra Norato (English, trans. Chris Daniels, 2008)

Deborah Ascher Barnstone: Beyond the Bauhaus: Cultural Modernity in Breslau, 1918-33 (2016)

“Although the Breslau arts scene was one of the most vibrant in all of Weimar-era Germany, it has largely disappeared from memory. Studies of the influence of Weimar culture on modernism have focused almost exclusively on Berlin and the Dessau Bauhaus, yet the advances that occurred in Breslau affected nearly every intellectual field, forming the basis for aesthetic modernism internationally and having an enduring impact on visual art and architecture. Breslau boasted a thriving modern arts scene and one of the premier German arts academies of the day until the Nazis began their assault on so-called degenerate art. This book charts the cultural production of Breslau-based artists, architects, art collectors, urban designers, and arts educators who operated in the margins of Weimar-era cultural debates. Rather than accepting the radical position of the German avant-garde or the reactionary position of German conservatives, many Breslauers sought a middle ground.

This richly illustrated volume is the first book in English to address this history, constituting an invaluable addition to the literature on the Weimar period. Its readership includes scholars of German history, art, architecture, urban design, planning, collecting, and exhibition history; of the avant-garde, and of the development of arts academies and arts pedagogy.”

Publisher University of Michigan Press, 2016
Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany series
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0
ISBN 0472119907, 9780472119905
xi+256 pages

Publisher
OAPEN
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (32 MB)