The class meeting focussed on the relation between narrative and affect in film. How do narrative frames contain and reinforce emotional events? Blue is one of three films by Kieslowski on the three colors of the French Revolution that represent its motto liberté, egalité, and fraternité. The film reflects on freedom and its color blue, and what we see thematically is a film on a woman who loses her husband, a famous composer, in a car accident that she survives. The film shows her attempt to isolate herself in grief and how she finds her way back to a word of social relationships and creativity (she composes the symphony for Europe that her husband left incomplete.) Profanation and the recognition of a relative value of conventional morality are crucial aspects. The Sweet hereafter is a film that related two traumas: the trauma of a lawyer whose daughter is a drug addict, and the story of a town that has lost its children in a school bus accident. Through its non-chronological order it unfolds the affective implications of the law's intervention in the process of grief after a tragic loss. Amenabar's Abre los ochos concluded our discussion of the relationship between affect and catastrophe in film. It tells the story of a young man who is disfigured through an accident the day after he has fallen in love. The irreversible consequences of the event - facial disfiguration - make it impossible for him to continue his life. Through a retrospectively revealed contract with a creonization company we learn that the different versions the film gives us of the life after the accident are the result of the fact that he is frozen and brought back to life at a time when medicine has a solution for his face. To allow him to continue his life where he left it, the real is replaced by an imaginary world in which he can continue to live with his contemporaries. But a mistake has been made in the virtual recreation of his world, and he is thrown from very positive affects to very negative ones. This alteration of affect in relation to a past possibility and the recognition of irreversibility as accident was the core pf our discussion.

We began by reminding ourselves of the novelty of cinematic time we had first approached through the texts of Doane and Kittler in our first meeting in order to understand how filmic narrations differ from literary narrative. Then, we began our discussion of central films that treat accidents and catastrophes by taking a close look at Buster Keatons first film after he signed on with a large studio, The Camera Man from 1928. We read this film first as an archeology of the medium of film because it is the story of a poor young man who makes a living by producing tintypes, a precursor of the photograph in the streets of NY. He falls in love and because his love works as a secretary in a film office producing newsreels, he begins to aspire to become a camera man. Social ascension and professional development lead us through the making of a camera man, who, according to the film, is a heroic figure as the images from WWI show. War and urban disasters such as gang war and major fires are the themes that allow film to showcase the making of film as the creation of an actuality that transform sensation into history. Figures such as the ape that takes on the east of filming and through whom the final revelation of truth becomes possible, add to this intricate reflection on film. At the same time, the film is also a story about an immunization in the context of modern urban space. While this film was a silent movie made right before sound, Brian de Pamla's Blow out is a film about the making of films from the vantage point of sound. It shows how an accident turn out to be a assault that goes wrong, so that what at first appress and accident is firs revealed as part of a scheme into which can accident of second order intervenes. It is sound that allows the song engineer to detect that a blow out was really caused by a gun shot. Both films are a reflection of contingency and the accidental in its relation to the making of film. 

The class meeting as devoted to the examination of the accident as a contingent event that characterizes modernity. We devoted the first part of the session to the emergence of the accidental as a new type of event in the context of modern means of mass transportation. Since the 1830s, the railway system emerged in European countries that introduced a new type of speed and collectivity into travel. It challenged traditional forms of experience. In this context, the first accident occurred that were widely spread through modern media such as the newspaper that was a bit later also able to add photographic evidence to its narratives. It is in the wake of this modernization that the clinical observation of trauma first occurs under the name of "railway spine." traumatic events are therefore typical modern events that challenge comprehension and experience. In our discussion of the literary texts we looked at accounts that discuss the difference between newspaper and literary representation. Both Mann and Joyce establish their narratives against the backdrop of media language and newspaper reports play an important role as a theme as well. For Kafka, the juridical perspective was crucial – an aspect of accidents he was familiar with from his work as an employee of the public insurance company in Prague. In Virginia Woolf, finally, the dimension of the social and the way that accidents synchronize the social space was the focus of our discussion. A more nuanced perspective on the role of the accident in the discourse of modernity emerged through our discussion. 

This class meeting was devoted to the discussion of a historical event, namely the 1755 so-called earthquake of Lisbon. It introduced the students to the importance of this historical event as well as to the basic historical and geological facts: the event occurred on al saints day 1755, it was a tsunami caused by the tectonic shifts, and in its wake Lisbon was d destroyed. This was on of the first global events for two reasons: for one, Lisbon was a center of trade with the colonies so that many European nations had trading relations and ships there. there was therefore an interest in events based on the trading relationships that were becoming global.  Second, a media infrastructure existed through which news traveled in a global scale. We discussed the local consequences the earthquake had: after the complete destruction of the city and the country the Marques de Pombal was able to modernize and rebuild the country. On a larger scale, the earthquake stirred a debate between enlightenment and religion stirred by the attempt of the counter reformation and its forces to instrumentalize it for its purposes. in Voltaire, we examined the best known reaction to this attempt in the medium of literature: Voltaire is critical of a religious interpretation that would justify the event and the incredible amount of human suffering. In his Candide, he also attacks Leibnitz philosophy of optimism in his Theodicy by using the means of the picaresque novel and establishing the conte philosophique as a new genre. Kleist's literature is a complex rewriting of earthquake accounts in different media, he comments on religious interpretations as well as on Enlightenment patterns such as Devine intervention, the state of nature and the state of culture etc. The question of the emergence of a neutral nature during the period allowed us to state in a more nuances way our position in relation to this historical period and its literary productions.