The first Research Training Group ever with a focus on film studies will be established in the course of the coming year at Goethe University Frankfurt. This was announced by the German Research Foundation on the 14th of November. In the framework of the RTG with the title “Configurations of Film”, twelve doctoral researchers and two post-docs will examine from 2017 onwards how film culture is changing in the context of advancing digitalisation in various areas.
Contemporary film culture is often referred to as the “post-cinematographic era”. Professor Vinzenz Hediger, scholar and film expert at the University who will also be the RTG’s speaker, remarks: “Film has expanded its reach more and more beyond public screenings in the cinema. With the proliferation of digital platforms, new forms are developing and new patterns of cinematic experience emerge.” At the same time, film serves increasingly as a creative template in theatre, fine arts and music. Hediger says: “As films circulate ever more widely, they affect other art forms and have a growing impact on other areas of life, including interpersonal communication. This increasing presence of filmic images and formats in all areas of life also constitutes a growing societal challenge.”
The “Configurations of Film” RTG of the German Research Foundation wants to take on this challenge by investigating the current transformations of film and their impact on other art forms and areas of life from an interdisciplinary perspective. The RTG combines an emphasis on historical research with systematic and comparative perspectives; in addition, the programme will use digital methods for film analysis and data mining on the internet, with which, for example, the proliferation of new film formats via platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo can be tracked.
The Research Training Group will build on successful cooperation between Goethe University Frankfurt and the German Film Institute (Deutsches Filminstitut), which together run the Masters degree programme in “Film Culture: Archiving, Programming, Presentation”, and profit from links to other cultural institutions in the Rhine-Main region. The RTG also builds on the interdisciplinary Masters degree programme in “Aesthetics”, which is unique to Frankfurt and in which all the disciplines participating in the RTG are also involved.
Twelve doctoral researchers and two post-docs, who can apply for a German Research Foundation scholarship in the framework of the Research Training Group, will start with their research in 2017. They will be supervised and mentored by 15 researchers from six universities: Goethe University Frankfurt, Offenbach University of Art and Design, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the University of Mannheim and Philipps University Marburg. Alongside film studies and media studies, the disciplines involved include theatre studies, philosophy, musicology, literary studies and sociology. The RTG has an international focus and cooperates with the film studies programmes at Yale University (New Haven, USA) and Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). Funding amounts to about € 3.3 million for the first phase from 2017 to 2022.
In the spirit of the “citizen’s university”, the study programme will include a series of public lectures and events, for example at b3, the Biennale of the Moving Image, and at the cinema of the German Film Museum (Deutsches Filmmuseum), in the framework of which the RTG’s themes and research questions will be discussed in public and address a broader audience.
Source: Press Release 18/11/16
