What would it mean to conceive of the film image as affective milieu – where would this put us and what about the cinematic apparatus? In her lecture The Image as Affective Milieu: Mood, Medium and Environmental Aesthetics, Cinepoetics senior fellow Inga Pollmann (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) suggests that photography and film are media in a double sense: environmentally, in the sense of milieus, environments, Umwelten; and aesthetically, in the sense of moods, Stimmungen, atmospheres. As such, media disclose being in the world, and themselves condition life and form environments (or parts thereof).

Taking cues from the paradigm of the hunt, Pollmann turns to Max Ophüls’ SANS LENDEMAIN (F 1939/40) and focuses the role of mise en scène and point of view for an environmental reading of images. This melodrama, shot in exile on the cusp of World War II, will be shown after the lecture.