Marco Abel
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Professor and Chair, Department of English, University of Nebraska at Lincoln

Dirk Ippen Fellow - Class of Fall 2019

Marco Abel currently chairs the department of English at the University of Nebraska. He completed his BA at Georgia State University and PhD at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation (Nebraska, 2007) and The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School (Camden House, 2013), which won the German Studies Association’s 2014 Prize for Best Book. Abel also co-edited Im Angesicht des Fernsehens: Der Filmemacher Dominik Graf (text + kritik, 2010), about one of Germany’s most influential contemporary genre filmmakers, The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art-Cinema (with Jaimey Fisher, Wayne State, 2019), and Celluloid Revolt: German Screen Cultures and the Long Sixties (with Christina Gerhardt, Camden, 2019). Abel is also the co-editor of a special issue on Berlin School filmmaker Christian Petzold for Senses of Cinema 84 (summer 2017) and “What was Politics in ‘68? A Special Issue on the West German Sixties” (2015) for The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture.

Project Description

Left Politics without Leftism: A Counter-Genealogy of Germany’s Political Cinema

At the Academy, Abel will start a new book project, tentatively titled “Left Politics without Leftism: A Counter-Genealogy of Germany’s Political Cinema.” It creates a fascinating pre-history to his award-winning work on the Berlin School by investigating a previous great era of postwar “political” cinema, the 1960s and 1970s. “How was political cinema configured in the context of (West) German film history?” Abel asks. Here he takes up the question of Was war links? (What was Left?) raised by Andreas Christoph Schmidt in his 2003 TV documentary, which explored the nostalgia permeating the discourse of “1968” in post-1989 Germany. Rather than assuming that images re-present a preexisting world against which we can measure and evaluate an image’s meaning, veracity, morality, and political viability, Abel asks the filmic image, “How does it work?” and “What does it do?” To explore these questions, he plans to conduct research in the collections of the dffb, Deutsche Kinemathek, and Filmuniversität Babelsberg, as well as interview filmmakers such as Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Christoph Hochhäusler, Dominik Graf, Klaus Lemke, May Spils, and Werner Enke.

Academy Activities

12 Nov 19
Political Cinema and the German Left Film Studies

Dirk Ippen Lecture

Political Cinema and the German Left

Marco Abel uses examples from West German film history to sketch a counter-genealogy of what “political” filmmaking can be.

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28 Oct 19

Fellow Spotlight: Marco Abel

At the Academy, Marco Abel is working on a new book project, tentatively titled “Left Politics without Leftism: A Counter-Genealogy of Germany’s Political Cinema.” ...

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12 Nov 19

Political Cinema and the German Left

Marco Abel examines how German film history and historiography have configured political cinema, arguing that two conceptions have roots in the revolts of the “long 1968” and the era’s models of political, or leftist, filmmaking: experimental films seeking to assault viewers’ senses ...

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