GER 376 Screening Swissness: An Introduction to Swiss-German Film
This course will trace the development of Swiss-German film over the last several decades paying close attention to motives such as gender, the tension between city/countryside, ideas of Swiss identity, depictions of foreigners, and Swissness. Swiss-German film made its entry on the international stage in the thirties, with films that reacted to the threat of war and critically reflected on the notion of the Geistige Landesverteidigung, or the spiritual resistance, a concept, which should become a rallying call during World War Two. The fifties and sixties with the so-called Gotthelf Filme, in which Jeremias Gotthelf's novels and stories were brought to the big screen in beautiful black and white renditions that fuelled the national imaginary with more soothing notions of what it meant to be Swiss followed the earlier critical stances. A host of related Heimatfilme-films in which the nineteenth century Heile Welt depictions of Gotthelf were transposed into the 20th century with little regard for changing political landscape. The seventies and eighties then saw rather more reflected takes on what it meant to be Swiss: films, like for instance Rolf Lyssy's Die Schweizermacher, that explored the arduous process of procuring a Swiss passport, and is thought of today as a break-through in Swiss film history. Today, we look back on three decades of Swiss film since Die Schweizermacher as a site avid and often provocative cultural criticism that has turned the idea of Swissness upside down even as its relentless search for a Swiss identity speaks the language of enduring Heimweh.
This class is a split-level class, and will be taught in German with some attention to the peculiarities of Swiss dialects. Film screenings will take place regularly on a weekday evening and must be attended in addition to the regular classes.