Between 1997-2002, I taught film history at the International School for Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Amsterdam (UvA), Netherlands. Between 1992-1996, I conducted courses on the history of sexuality within the University’s PEECH Program on European History and Culture. Member of Huizinga-Institute (1993-2002).
These interdisciplinary seminars brought together historical science, film history, and cultural studies. We approached films as products of their time: as historical sources and complex sign systems that change in the course of time and through their changing audiences. Our interest was a double focus: to learn to position a film within its historical, political and esthetic context as well as to understand our own contemporary way of looking. The seminar was organized with the support of the Goethe-Institute Amsterdam, which provided us with 16mm copies of the films.
FILM, NATIONAL IDENTITY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEMORY
Post-war Germany, struggling with its Nazi past, has gone through a complex process of historical memory-work. These seminars explored the important, if not decisive position post-war German film production played in the construction of collective memories. Cinematic representations of the past and present not only influence our memory, but tend to become memories of ‘how it has been’. We investigated the relations between experience, memory and image by analyzing German films and their narrative strategies, and explored how German films dealt with guilt, denial, alienation and radical renewal.