Alice Lovejoy, “Chemistry, Autarky, and Empire: Manufacturing Film in Fascist Germany”

Memorial Library Rm 126
@ 4:00 pm CDT

We often think of cinema’s politics as matters of subject and style, distribution and reception. This talk, however, locates them in film’s raw materials—in substances like silver, gelatin, and cotton, on which cinema’s play of light and shadow depends. It does so through the case of Nazi Germany, examining the Agfa film company’s embrace of the fascist politics of autarky (material and economic self-sufficiency).

A German Music Student in Madison, 1966-67: The Letters of Michael Kopfermann

5520 Humanities
@ 4:00 pm CDT

The German composer and musicologist Michael Kopfermann (1936-2010) spent his student years on a scholarship that brought him to Madison in 1966-67 to study with Pro Arte violinist and School of Music faculty member Rudolf Kolisch. Musicologists Dörte Schmidt (Berlin) and Reinhard Kapp (Vienna) have uncovered a large cache of Kopfermann’s letters to his family, in which he offers a rare and detailed account of the cultural and intellectual life in Madison in the 1960s and the vibrancy of the community of German émigrés who made Madison their home after World War II.