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Culture and Crisis (Level 5)

Overview

  • Credit value: 30 credits at Level 5
  • Convenor: Dr Eckard Michels
  • Assessment: a 2500-word essay (50%) and 3-hour in-class examination (50%)

Module description

In this module we explore the shared but also distinctly different experience of World War II and its aftermath in European, Latin American and Japanese cultural contexts. We focus particularly on the way in which film, both at the time and in retrospect, has served as a medium in which to engage with experiences of war, trauma, resistance, exile, collaboration and recovery. You will learn how films and other artefacts can engage with and facilitate our understanding of these topics and explore how this can happen differently across different cultural contexts.

Indicative syllabus

  • Introduction: the Second World War and its aftermath in Europe: Germany, France and Italy, 1939 to 1950
  • The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1970)
  • The Conformist (dir. Bernado Bertolucci, 1970)
  • Compromising with Nazism: Klaus Mann's Mephisto (novel, first published 1936) and István Szabó's Mephisto (film, 1981)
  • Reckoning with the Nazi past: Die Mörder sind unter uns/The murderers are among us (dir. Wolfgang Staudte, 1946)
  • France and the Holocaust: Au revoir les enfants (dir. Louis Malle, 1987)
  • Memories of the warfront in Japan: Red Angel/Akai tenshi (dir. Masumura, 1966) and The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On/Yuki Yukite Shingun (dir. Hara, 1987)
  • Memories of the home front in Japan and Germany: The trope of the mother. A Hen in the Wind/Kaze no naka no mendori (dir. Ozu, 1948) and Germany, Pale Mother/Deutschland bleiche Mutter (dir. Sanders-Brahms, 1980)  
  • Film and 'Good Neighbor: Cultural Diplomacy in Latin America During World War II'
  • Spain and the Nazi concentration camps: The Photographer of Mauthausen (dir. Mar Taragona, 2018)

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you will:

  • understand how the experience of World War II and its aftermath has manifested differently in different cultural contexts
  • understand the way in which film can illuminate these experiences, particularly in relation to war, trauma, resistance and recovery
  • appreciate some of the complexities of working with cultural artefacts from more than one cultural context
  • be able to employ a range of skills to analyse films.