[ecrea] UPenn German Graduate Film Conference: Geist and the Machine

University of Pennsylvania

Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

Graduate Student Conference 2013



Geist and the Machine: A Graduate Student Conference on German Cinema 
and Film Theory



Keynote: Gertrud Koch, Freie Universität Berlin



Submission due date: January 15th, 2013



Conference date: March 15th, 2013



The German term Geist bears no simple translation into English. From 
spirit to mind to ghost to intellect, it exists both as a singular 
philosophical concept and an elusive shapeshifter. In The Spirit of 
Film, Béla Balázs writes that “the camera can photograph the 
unconscious,” citing cinema’s ability to use technology in order to 
reveal immaterial thoughts and desires, while placing it in a 
penetrating relationship to the idealist and invisible nature of Geist. 
Throughout film’s relatively short history, discussion and theorizing of 
the impact of the intrusive nature of the medium on individuals and 
society at large has remained ever-presently suspect. Yet writers such 
as Walter Benjamin offer an alternative approach to this seemingly 
symptomatic problem by proposing that the film actor is not exploited by 
technology, but rather “preserve[s] one’s humanity in the face of the 
apparatus,” and futhermore, offers the spectator a chance to regain 
one’s own humanity by proxy. This conference seeks to animate the debate 
surrounding film’s value for society by exploring the relationship 
between technology and imagination as illuminated by cinema.



While the focus of the conference is on German cinema and film theory, 
we encourage submissions from other disciplines, not limited to: art 
history, cinema studies, media studies, philosophy, history, 
communications, sociology, comparative literature, and theology. We 
welcome topics on the translation of German film theory and its 
influence, non-German films and theoretical writing inspired by the 
German film canon and its deviations, and methodologies that question 
cinema as an institution and its relationship to marginalized 
spectators. We also welcome submissions from practicing film-makers, 
animators, and video artists whose work is influenced by the German 
philosophical tradition of Geist and the technological experimentation 
of German directors.



Please feel free (but not obliged) to use the following broad themes as 
a springboard:



- early German film and theoretical writing (visualizing the speed and 
movement of industrialism, anxiety over relationship between the human 
and the machine between the World Wars, landscape/cityscape in early film)

- filming the unconscious (the uncanny, film’s potential to depict 
alternative desires and modes of subjectivity, Benjamin’s optical 
unconscious)

- film technology and film-making (the production process, the filmic 
actor, the impact of advances of camera technology, relationship between 
sound and image)

- representation of the immaterial in the material world (the 
relationship between the spiritual and technology, the camera as a 
demiurgical eye)





Please send your 250-300 word abstracts in both the body of the e-mail 
and as an attachment to Jehnna Lewis and Roksana Filipowska at 
(jehnna /at/ gmail.com) by midnight on January 15, 2013. Submissions should 
include the paper title, author’s name, affiliation, and e-mail address. 
Those whose submissions are accepted will be notified within the week.



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