Hermann Kappelhoff casts the evolution of cinema as an ongoing struggle to relate audiences to their historical moment. Appreciating cinema's unique ability to bind concrete living conditions to individual experience (which existing political institutions cannot), he reads films by Sergei Eisenstein and Pedro Almodóvar, by the New Objectivity and the New Hollywood, as well as the New German Cinema to demonstrate how cinema situates spectators within society, how it repositions audiences with respect to their reality as participants in political communities. Kappelhoff applies the Deleuzean pra ... More

Hermann Kappelhoff casts the evolution of cinema as an ongoing struggle to relate audiences to their historical moment. Appreciating cinema's unique ability to bind concrete living conditions to individual experience (which existing political institutions cannot), he reads films by Sergei Eisenstein and Pedro Almodóvar, by the New Objectivity and the New Hollywood, as well as the New German Cinema to demonstrate how cinema situates spectators within society, how it repositions audiences with respect to their reality as participants in political communities. Kappelhoff applies the Deleuzean practice of “thinking in images” to his analysis of films and incorporates the approaches of Jacques Rancière and Richard Rorty, who see politics in the permanent reconfiguration of poetic forms. This enables him to conceptualize film as a medium that continually renews the audiovisual spaces and temporalities through which audiences confront reality. He thus defines “cinematic realism” as an interplay and fusion between the world of film and the world of the spectator as though the audience participated with the film in a shared reality. This process comprises a perceiving, feeling, and thinking activity that is organized by the rules of the poetic, the rules of fantasy and creation. Revitalizing the reading of films by Visconti, Fassbinder, Kubrick, Friedkin, and others, Kappelhoff affirms cinema's historical significance while discovering its engagement with politics as a realm of experience.