The Centre for Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Wrocław has the honor to invite you to the second lecture in the series “International Voices in Children’s Literature Studies” Prof. Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer “Children’s Films and the Avant-garde”.
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer is professor in the German Department at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She has published widely on international children’s literature, the history and theory of picturebooks, and children’s films.
She has authored four monographs and (co)edited more than twenty collections, among them Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde (with Elina Druker, 2015; winner of the ChLA Edited Book Award 2017 and the IRSCL Edited Book Award 2017), The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks (2018), and Exploring Challenging Picturebooks in Education (with Åse Marie Ommundsen and Gunnar Haaland, 2021).
The notion of “avant-garde film” spontaneously evokes the impression of famous films produced in the first half of the twentieth century, such as the German silent movies inspired by Expressionism, the constructivist movies by Sergey Eisenstein,
and the surrealist films by Luis Bunuel. These films are distinguished by a sophisticated film language that includes highly abstract form experiments, non-linear stories, an unusual manner of representation, and a mixing of styles or genres. It may thus seem unlikely that children’s films have anything
in common with avant-garde films. Despite these reservations, vanguard styles and experiments effectively emerge in children’s films from very early on. This lecture focuses on the relationship between children’s films and avant-garde movements, emphasizing avant-garde films. This time period spans almost
a hundred years, from the 1920s to the present, and considers different films from four countries: France, Germany, Russia, and the USA.
DATE: 21 April 2021
TIME: 18.00 (CET)
VENUE: MS Teams
If you are interested in taking part in the lecture, please contact us
by email by 19 April at the following address: mateusz.swietlicki@uwr.edu.pl.
Previous lectures organised by the Centre for Research in Children’s and Young People’s Literature are available on the YouTube channel – search for information here: http://www.cbldm.uni.wroc.pl/en/lectures-on-line/.