Families and kinship, father-daughter relations, in film, graphic novels, etc.

Research in this area focuses on the cultural representation of families and kinship. Klaus Rieser is particularly interested in the visual representation of father-daughter relationships. As Stella Bruzzi has pointed out (Bruzzi, xv), historically, father-son movies have greatly outnumbered father-daughter movies. Recent years, however, have brought a greater number and more diverse representations of fatherhood. Some of these also establish new modes of daughter-father relations, while others continue the tradition of silencing the mother or exculpate incestuous-abusive relationships. Graphic Novels, in contrast to films, portray a wider variety and often allow for a more active part on the part of daughters.

Liminal masculinity, heroic masculinity, in visual culture

Gender relations and gender hierarchies continue to play an essential role both in western cultures and their forms of representations. Starting from the 1990s, masculinity studies are a twin area to feminist research that analyzes and critiques patriarchal practices. Such research is always both focused on questions of power but also of representation because (gendered) identity is itself created in social performativity (Butler). In this process, media not only distribute but also norm the representations of these individual-social subjectivities. However, the normative (re)production of masculine and feminine identity in films is always in response to their inherent fluidity and heterogeneity (in terms of race, age, economies of desire, etc.). Klaus Rieser has analyzed liminal masculinities, heroic figures and is now particularly interested in representations of fatherhood.

Iconicity, images, visual culture

Images are overwhelmingly present in American life, a fact that has prompted Frederic Jameson in 1988 to diagnose a "transformation of reality into images" (14) and W.J.T. Mitchell in 1994 to pronounce a "pictorial turn" (11). Amongst this flood, a limited number of images gain wider prominence and remain in the public consciousness for some time, thereby becoming icons. In contrast to common images, thus, icons are special markers within the cultural matrix of meaning, highly relevant for the day-to-day integration of the American social landscape which, due to population size and heterogeneity has always been in particular need of nationally integrative symbols.

Obviously, icons are embedded in national (and global) discourses and power relations (cf. Lauren Berlant's "National Symbolic"). However, in their appeal to a broad and heterogeneous audience they also serve democratic functions. They achieve this because they tend to have multiple and constantly shifting meanings and epitomize social realities, including conflicts and contradictions. The research into iconic images reveals a surprising ambivalence and openness. Despite their hegemonic base and distribution, they often depend on grass-roots or individual proliferation and reproduction and are often legible in diverse, even contradictory ways.

Narrative fiction film, comparison of film and literature, film genres

Research in the area of culture and representation is not necessarily based on constructionist approaches to the social - nor necessarily directed at ideological critique. It is also engaged in an analysis of the functioning of media texts, in a formal analysis of the narrative and audio-visual properties of visual artifacts. Research in this vein, loosely to be defined as film narratology, looks at how description/depiction work in film in comparison to literature, on the uses of absence in narrative fiction film, or at the textual functioning and functions of amateur film. For example, research filmic absences reveals that film differs essentially from literature in that, due to its multi-modal and pluri-codal character, it depends essentially on a play with presence and absence. Specifically, the border-zone of significant absences to mere non-presences and to the level of the signified is more porous than in literature, depending particularly on filmic codes or traditions and their variation in individual films.

Another project, an ethnographic/textual analysis of "ephemeral film", shows that amateur film practitioners mix and combine the languages of mainstream film and "home movies," to ultimately establish a unique discourse. Film club meetings and competitions on a local, regional, national, and international level result in a formal and social codification of this discourse. Thus, a reading of the filmic text has to be extended to its social production and presentation settings.

The global and the local, representations of cultural interaction, questions of space, place, and time

Contemporary theories regard space/place as both enabling and themselves the result of social practices. "Space is permeated with social relations," wrote Lefebvre in The Production of Space, quite some time before the announcement of a "spatial turn." Often, the analysis rests on a distinction between an abstract, Cartesian, "map" space and embodied, lived-in space, the latter of which is more likely to be represented in narrative. These space/place theories (by David Harvey, Edward Soja, and others) are particularly useful for analyzing the representation of social phenomena such as cultural contact, migration or of utopian reimaginations thereof.

The social functioning of artistic practices is at the center of a project on two social dance forms - Contact Improvisation and Five Rhythms. Here, the analysis encompasses both phenomenological aspects such as the affective effects of shared feelings of gravity as well as the interrelation between the actual dance its organizational forms. Contact Improvisation, which combines intense contact with unscored improvisation, is an extremely open and flexible but highly interpersonal form of social dance. This improvisational, anarchic aspect of the dance itself is matched by a non-codified, almost non-existent organizational structure: There is no "school of contact improvisation" or an official teacher training and it is practiced in workshops, festivals, and, predominantly, open jams. In contrast, Five Rhythms is at the same time more individualistic and organized. The dance is most often guided through the interventions of a certified teacher/MC, its predominant form is that of a workshop, and it is a registered trademark with a centralized organizational structure. Interestingly, despite these differences, the two dance forms in part draw on the same type of practitioners and aim for similar effects.