Mit ihrem Titel würdigt die Reihe „Kracauer Lectures in Film and Media Theory“ den gebürtigen Frankfurter Philosophen, Soziologen, Schriftsteller und Film- und Medientheoretiker Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966), einen der einflussreichsten Denker des 20. Jahrhunderts im Feld der Film- und Medientheorie. Zugleich verwies der Reihentitel auf die Rolle Frankfurts und seiner Universität als Gründungsorte der kritischen Reflexion des Films und der technischen Medien im 20. Jahrhundert.

Die Reihe setzt sich zum Ziel, avancierte aktuelle Positionen der Film- und Medientheorie und der Medienphilosophie sowie der Medienreflexion in der Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaft und der philosophischen Ästhetik zur Darstellung zu bringen und damit einen Beitrag zur Erweiterung und Entwicklung des Feldes der Film- und Medienwissenschaft zu leisten, der am schnellsten wachsenden geisteswissenschaftlichen Disziplin in Deutschland.

Dienstag 25.11.2025, 18 Uhr
Lucie Česálková (Charles University (Prag))
Screening Extractivism with a (More than) Human Face
Vortrag in englischer Sprache.
Eisenhower-Raum, IG Farben-Gebäude 1.314
Campus Westend, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Playfully referring to the program of radical reform of socialism in Czechoslovakia at the end of the 1960s (so-called “socialism with a human face”) and at the same time to the potential of environmentally conscious imagination in state socialism, this lecture aims to rethink industrial and agricultural film as a specific form of mediation of the human/nature/technology complex. It will primarily focus on films that have produced political rationality and aesthetics of energy and contributed to the neutralization (or questioning) of extractivism. Eastern European films celebrating coal miners, depicting the construction of large hydroelectric power plants and refineries, mapping the welding of transnational infrastructures such as oil and gas pipelines, explaining the construction of nuclear power plants, or revealing the possibilities of solar energy, as well as those communicating various energy crises, allow us to examine the connections between extractivism, energy, labour, and the environment differently than from the traditional perspective of the capitalocene, offering also a different map of geopolitical energy relations than between the West and the Global South.

This lecture will therefore offer a reframing of these concepts and dynamics through an Eastern perspective, while emphasizing the importance of studying the aesthetics of utility media as an essential complement to global material and intellectual histories and critical infrastructure studies. Drawing on a broad corpus of films spanning raw material sources and decades of the second half of the twentieth century, it will ask whether we can conceive industrial aesthetics beyond processuality, techno-optimism, and acceleration.

Lucie Česálková is a film historian and works as an Associate Professor at the Department of Film Studies, Charles University, and as an editor-in-chief of the academic journal Iluminace, published by the National Film Archive in Prague. In her research, she focuses on the history of nonfiction cinema, specifically its educational, promotional, or instructional variants, and on the history of noncommercial film exhibition and moviegoing. Recently, she co-edited the volume Non-Fiction Cinema in Postwar Europe. Visual Culture and the Reconstruction of Public Space (eds. Lucie Česálková, Johannes Preatorius-Rhein, Perrine Val, Paolo Villa, AUP 2024). Engaging the environmental and energy humanities perspective, her current project analyzes the ways nature was framed as a resource in Czech industrial and agricultural film and asks how a (post)socialist perspective can shift existing concepts of extractivism and the capitalocene.

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