1989 and consequences: the representations of absence in the post-Mauer German films

Abstract

It might sound odd to work with the theme of absence, a theme which has occupied the minds of anthropologists, artists, and semioticians for a long time. So we present a brief conceptualization of absence and a short panorama of German movie after 1989, to show how film and literature have developed similarly in the same period. The main goal of this analysis is to detect structures of absence in German films after the German reunification. To illustrate the representation of absence, we propose an analysis of film stills. We rely mainly on the theories and concepts of Lehmann/Weibel, of the German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels, as well as those of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Chion.