This talk will present a work in progress which attempts to consider the ways in which criminality is depicted in three major Weimar Films (Fritz Lang’s Dr Mabuse der Spieler (1922), and M (1931) and G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1921)) but also the methods (including forensic) by which detectives frame, locate and identify the criminal, the ways in which police work and organized crime are distinguished but also reflected, and the significant and often cryptic role of court room scenes in film (Pandora’s Box and M). More generally the seminar will investigate the politics of criminality/criminalization and how the legitimation of the law vis-a-vis the concept of criminality (along and against the contested lines of delinquency, genius or madness) is reflexively shaped by popular film. The undercurrent in this talk is a consideration of the place of cinema in framing and augmenting, in both drawing from and contributing to a social narrative that exceeds the sphere of jurisprudence, but one that also functions in part to ground or justify the juridical sphere – positive law – in the popular imagination. At the same time these films appear to open up a critical space of inquiry concerning the legitimation of the law and its enforcement. The ambivalence depicted regarding the place of the law, its enactment in society, that then appears to situate the terms of popular debate on criminality [often framed as new crimes, or crimes of the times, like serial killing, organized crime, financial crime,  and Lustmord], responsibility, the law and law enforcement in the sphere of cinema itself.  Nevertheless, the permanence of the law and the legitimation of Weimar jurisprudence in cinema often, if not always, signals its necessity, even perhaps simply as an imperfect condition of modern life. In this way the legal order is depicted as a work-in-progress along with the frenetic pace of modern development that so profoundly shaped the time. I am interested in excavating this complex ambivalence in producing the criminal subject in Weimar Cinema. 

Hannes Charen teaches philosophy, politics and film at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York where he has also developed and regularly teaches a course called Weimar Film and Culture: Modernity as Catastrophe. He is the Coordinator of the Critical and Visual Studies Major, and has published widely on political philosophy, literature, Weimar film and aesthetics. 

The event is free and open to all. Registration Link.

The seminar series is part of the project Imagining Justice: Law, Politics and Popular Visual Culture in Weimar Germany, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.