by Prof. Dr. Oliver Fahle,
Dr. Felix Hasebrink, Jennifer Wermuth
Infrastructures of transport, communication and supply play a central role in modern societies. They also appear in countless films and related forms of moving-image media. However, they often remain in the background—as inconspicuous settings in which action unfolds. The research project focuses on these hard infrastructures in moving image media and explores the conditions under which they can become the subject of audiovisual representation. Tracing long-term trajectories of these cinematic renderings, the project examines how infrastructures shape, and are in turn shaped by, film aesthetics at different historical moments, proposing the concept of the "infrastructure scene."
Combining interdisciplinary theories of film and media with a purpose-built digital database, the project maps key historical formations of infrastructural imagery. Building on a joint framework of infrastructures in feature films along three historical axes, three individual subprojects turn their attention to contemporary cinema from the early 2000s onwards. The subprojects focus, respectively, on scenes of data-driven infrastructures (“Data-based Cinematic Scenes of Infrastructure”), infrastructural abandonment and post-industrial remains (“Idle Worlds. On the media aesthetics of vacant infrastructure”), and apocalyptic infrastructural breakdowns (“Cosmic Disaster Films as an Aesthetic Repair of Caesural Temporality”). Together, they aim to conceptualize infrastructures as perpetually shifting dynamics and formative elements of cinematic aesthetics.
Subproject 1
by Prof. Dr. Oliver Fahle (PI)
This project examines contemporary films in which infrastructures become visible, audible, and recognizable in the background of cinematic and audiovisual narratives and are staged and »back-staged« as spaces for media and cinematic reflection.
The aim is to examine the impact of digital, data-based infrastructures on the aesthetics of films from a transnational perspective, focusing on films made since the early 2000s. It can be assumed that data-based infrastructures are increasingly becoming a topic in contemporary cinema, for example in the form of surveillance cameras, GPS, drones, or Artificial Intelligence (examples: O Invasor, Beto Brant, Brasil 2001, Caché, Michael Haneke, France 2005, Her, Spike Jonze, USA 2013, La Loi du Marché, Stéphane Brizé, France 2015, Bacurau, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brasil 2019). Data-based infrastructures define new modes of transport that, unlike in slapstick, go beyond the material confrontation with means of transportation. They are more immediate, direct and anonymous, and can often be understood not only as the entanglement of a body with infrastructures—although this remains a powerful figuration—but also as addresses to collectives. Infrastructures thus represent a new challenge for the »Optical Unconscious« (Benjamin) or technically unconscious of audiovisual media imaginary.
The project observes infrastructures in cinema in the form of what we call »infrastructure scenes.« In infrastructure scenes, infrastructures come to the fore within cinematic mise-en-scène. At the same time, the scene is reevaluated as an essential aesthetic form within the framework of film-theoretical considerations.
See also:
Subproject 2
by Dr. Felix Hasebrink (PI)
The project investigates the aesthetics of unused and suspended infrastructures in contemporary cinema and related forms of moving image media. By paying increasing attention to this dimension of infrastructure, these works appear to register a significant historical shift: a move away from the paradigm of expanding prosperity and continuous technical progress enabled by ample networks of transportation and supply, which has been a dominant understanding of infrastructure from the mid-19th to the late 20th century. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, however, physical infrastructure increasingly manifests in a different register: as cumbersome systems that often fail to fulfill the functions they were designed to perform and as built environments marked by stagnation and arrested circulation. Infrastructure as a built base, i.e., as physical installations and facilities, is still present, yet the movement of people, goods, resources, and services is reduced, intermittent, or entirely absent.
Against this backdrop, the project examines feature films depicting social life in post-industrial urban peripheries, experimental documentaries centered on empty roads, bridges, or shopping malls, and phenomena in digital cultures, including the “liminal spaces” and “backrooms” trends and audiovisual renderings of metaverses as digital ghost towns. Despite differences in genre, format, and medium, these examples share a common concern: the exploration of a world in which infrastructure has turned idle. They tentatively envision a reality “after infrastructure”—neither utopia nor dystopia, but an “after-time” of temporal suspension and enduring uncertainty. To further examine this condition and its specific aesthetic manifestations, the project draws, on the one hand, on scholarship on physical infrastructures within cultural anthropology. On the other, it turns to lesser-known infrastructure theories from regional planning (Benton MacKaye), land art (Robert Smithson), and documentary literature (particularly Georges Perec’s concept of the “infra-ordinary”).
See also:
Subproject 3
by Jennifer Wermuth (PhD candidate)
This subproject examines contemporary disaster cinema as an aesthetic response to altered forms of experiencing catastrophe in the Anthropocene.
Departing from classical disaster films that frame catastrophe as a singular, resolvable crisis, the project argues that recent works in the genre increasingly displace destruction into extended temporal regimes of anticipation (“Before”) and survival (“After”). Drawing on theories of infrastructure, hyperobjects, and eschatology, the project focuses on films that stage cosmic threats such as asteroid impacts, planetary collisions, or even extraterrestrial forces as phenomena that exceed human-scale perception and therefore narrative closure.
Through close analyses of selected films, the project aims to show how infrastructures of prediction, media, biopolitics, and life support mediate catastrophe, transforming diffuse existential anxiety into scaffolding for imaginations of continuation, selection, and survival. While the „Before“ section focuses on situating the chosen films within religious and eschatological traditions to show how apocalyptic narratives shape contemporary cinematic imaginaries, the „After“ section emphasizes films that stage survival aboard a spacecraft, treating these particular enclosed environments as micro-laboratories in which new social, infrastructural and ethical arrangements are tested under conditions of extreme fragility. Astrophobic disaster films function as potent case studies because their scale destabilizes human agency and challenges assumptions about survival, human preeminence and a collective future, revealing the fault lines of a new world defined by permanent crisis.
See also:
by Prof. Dr. Oliver Fahle,
Dr. Felix Hasebrink, Jennifer Wermuth
Infrastructures of transport, communication and supply play a central role in modern societies. They also appear in countless films and related forms of moving-image media. However, they often remain in the background—as inconspicuous settings in which action unfolds. The research project focuses on these hard infrastructures in moving image media and explores the conditions under which they can become the subject of audiovisual representation. Tracing long-term trajectories of these cinematic renderings, the project examines how infrastructures shape, and are in turn shaped by, film aesthetics at different historical moments, proposing the concept of the "infrastructure scene."
Combining interdisciplinary theories of film and media with a purpose-built digital database, the project maps key historical formations of infrastructural imagery. Building on a joint framework of infrastructures in feature films along three historical axes, three individual subprojects turn their attention to contemporary cinema from the early 2000s onwards. The subprojects focus, respectively, on scenes of data-driven infrastructures (“Data-based Cinematic Scenes of Infrastructure”), infrastructural abandonment and post-industrial remains (“Idle Worlds. On the media aesthetics of vacant infrastructure”), and apocalyptic infrastructural breakdowns (“Cosmic Disaster Films as an Aesthetic Repair of Caesural Temporality”). Together, they aim to conceptualize infrastructures as perpetually shifting dynamics and formative elements of cinematic aesthetics.
Subproject 1
by Prof. Dr. Oliver Fahle (PI)
This project examines contemporary films in which infrastructures become visible, audible, and recognizable in the background of cinematic and audiovisual narratives and are staged and »back-staged« as spaces for media and cinematic reflection.
The aim is to examine the impact of digital, data-based infrastructures on the aesthetics of films from a transnational perspective, focusing on films made since the early 2000s. It can be assumed that data-based infrastructures are increasingly becoming a topic in contemporary cinema, for example in the form of surveillance cameras, GPS, drones, or Artificial Intelligence (examples: O Invasor, Beto Brant, Brasil 2001, Caché, Michael Haneke, France 2005, Her, Spike Jonze, USA 2013, La Loi du Marché, Stéphane Brizé, France 2015, Bacurau, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brasil 2019). Data-based infrastructures define new modes of transport that, unlike in slapstick, go beyond the material confrontation with means of transportation. They are more immediate, direct and anonymous, and can often be understood not only as the entanglement of a body with infrastructures—although this remains a powerful figuration—but also as addresses to collectives. Infrastructures thus represent a new challenge for the »Optical Unconscious« (Benjamin) or technically unconscious of audiovisual media imaginary.
The project observes infrastructures in cinema in the form of what we call »infrastructure scenes.« In infrastructure scenes, infrastructures come to the fore within cinematic mise-en-scène. At the same time, the scene is reevaluated as an essential aesthetic form within the framework of film-theoretical considerations.
See also:
Subproject 2
by Dr. Felix Hasebrink (PI)
The project investigates the aesthetics of unused and suspended infrastructures in contemporary cinema and related forms of moving image media. By paying increasing attention to this dimension of infrastructure, these works appear to register a significant historical shift: a move away from the paradigm of expanding prosperity and continuous technical progress enabled by ample networks of transportation and supply, which has been a dominant understanding of infrastructure from the mid-19th to the late 20th century. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, however, physical infrastructure increasingly manifests in a different register: as cumbersome systems that often fail to fulfill the functions they were designed to perform and as built environments marked by stagnation and arrested circulation. Infrastructure as a built base, i.e., as physical installations and facilities, is still present, yet the movement of people, goods, resources, and services is reduced, intermittent, or entirely absent.
Against this backdrop, the project examines feature films depicting social life in post-industrial urban peripheries, experimental documentaries centered on empty roads, bridges, or shopping malls, and phenomena in digital cultures, including the “liminal spaces” and “backrooms” trends and audiovisual renderings of metaverses as digital ghost towns. Despite differences in genre, format, and medium, these examples share a common concern: the exploration of a world in which infrastructure has turned idle. They tentatively envision a reality “after infrastructure”—neither utopia nor dystopia, but an “after-time” of temporal suspension and enduring uncertainty. To further examine this condition and its specific aesthetic manifestations, the project draws, on the one hand, on scholarship on physical infrastructures within cultural anthropology. On the other, it turns to lesser-known infrastructure theories from regional planning (Benton MacKaye), land art (Robert Smithson), and documentary literature (particularly Georges Perec’s concept of the “infra-ordinary”).
See also:
Subproject 3
by Jennifer Wermuth (PhD candidate)
This subproject examines contemporary disaster cinema as an aesthetic response to altered forms of experiencing catastrophe in the Anthropocene.
Departing from classical disaster films that frame catastrophe as a singular, resolvable crisis, the project argues that recent works in the genre increasingly displace destruction into extended temporal regimes of anticipation (“Before”) and survival (“After”). Drawing on theories of infrastructure, hyperobjects, and eschatology, the project focuses on films that stage cosmic threats such as asteroid impacts, planetary collisions, or even extraterrestrial forces as phenomena that exceed human-scale perception and therefore narrative closure.
Through close analyses of selected films, the project aims to show how infrastructures of prediction, media, biopolitics, and life support mediate catastrophe, transforming diffuse existential anxiety into scaffolding for imaginations of continuation, selection, and survival. While the „Before“ section focuses on situating the chosen films within religious and eschatological traditions to show how apocalyptic narratives shape contemporary cinematic imaginaries, the „After“ section emphasizes films that stage survival aboard a spacecraft, treating these particular enclosed environments as micro-laboratories in which new social, infrastructural and ethical arrangements are tested under conditions of extreme fragility. Astrophobic disaster films function as potent case studies because their scale destabilizes human agency and challenges assumptions about survival, human preeminence and a collective future, revealing the fault lines of a new world defined by permanent crisis.
See also: