Dr. Ervin Malakaj, associate professor of German, published a chapter titled, “Aerial Aesthetics, Queer Intimacy, and the Politics of Repose in the Cinema of Nils Bökamp and Monika Treut.”
The chapter uses an analysis of the films of Bökamp and Treut as a venue to identify a shift in how queer cinema configures the political. Here, breath and breathing come to constitute a vital feature of the cinematic operations underpinning queer filmmaking that seek to attune viewers to the patterns of breath deployed in the film. In so doing, these filmmakers pursue a gentle aesthetic practice intended to help audiences find some rest as a means by which to practice how one might opt out of hostile systems.
The chapter was published in a volume titled, Transnational German Film at the End of Neoliberalism: Radical Aesthetics, Radical Politics, edited by Claudia Breger and Olivia Landry. The book is available through Koerner Library.
