The following essay originally appeared in German in Bahamas 94 (Spring 2024). Translated by Xuxu Song.
 For decades now, everything has been known about Rudolf Höss and his ostensible double life as both an enforcer of the Holocaust and a loving family man. Robert Merle’s 1953 roman à clef Death Is My Trade was based in part on publicly accessible notes that Höss had composed while in prison for war crimes. Pictures of the affable Mr. Höss with his wife and colleagues appeared in Alain Resnais’s 1956 film Night and Fog. The testimony of prison psychologist Gustav M. Gilbert, who had spoken with Höss at length in Nuremberg, came up in 1961 during the Eichmann trial. Höss’s autobiographical notes were published by DTV in 1963 under the title Commandant of Auschwitz. Things got especially German in 1977 when the film Death Is My Trade—the German title translates as Excerpts from a German Life—by Theodor Kotulla, based on Robert Merle’s novel and starring the prominent actor Götz George, the son of two celebrated German thespians, was released in German cinemas. A review from the Catholic magazine Filmdienst in December 1977, and quoted on Wikipedia, revealingly states:
The interchangeability of collective thinking and The Enemy becomes frighteningly clear in Kotulla’s emotionless psychohistorical analysis….In Kotulla’s film, political and moral superficiality and the volatile idea of “peace, order and above all cleanliness,” irrationally propagated as the highest value in itself—under this pretext, up to 9,000 people were sent into the “shower room” every day in Auschwitz—rightly appears as the main cause of the totalitarian abuse of power, which is why it can continue to function openly or covertly worldwide in various forms and ideological guises. In this respect, this fact-oriented fiction is a lesson that every teacher, especially every history teacher, should discuss with young people.
Even back then, the pedagogical lesson lay in the notion that Auschwitz merely provided the backdrop for vague musings about man’s responsibility for his actions in times of unfreedom.
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By Telos Press · Friday, February 11, 2022 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Vivian P.Y. Lee about her article “The City in Flux: Toward an Urban Topology of Hong Kong Cinema,” from Telos 197 (Winter 2021). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss Hong Kong’s urban space and its cinematic reinventions; the relationship between cinematic space and disappearance; the cinematic lineage of Patrick Lung and John Woo, and their different depictions of modern urban institutions and individual heroes; the use of nostalgia in film to reveal darker realities of the dystopian present; how post-Umbrella Movement films have created new forms of production and distribution; the present and future of Hong Kong cinema; and the ways in which filmmakers have turned the city of Hong Kong into a protagonist. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 197 are available for purchase in our online store.
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By Telos Press · Friday, January 21, 2022 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Xuesong Shao about her article “Restoring and Reimagining Socialist-Built Cities: Wang Xiaoshuai’s ‘Third Front Trilogy,’” from Telos 197 (Winter 2021). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the history of the Third Front Movement in China; how migration is depicted in Wang Xiaoshuai’s Third Front trilogy; the article’s approach to the issue of nostalgia; the relationship of nostalgia and ruination in Red Amnesia; the ways in which Wang Xiaoshuai uses the male gaze to reinforce gender stereotypes; the personal versus the historical in Eleven Flowers and how elusive personal recollections align with the master narratives of the nation-state; and the different ways that Wang Xiaoshaui and Jia Zhangke depict places of memory and places of history. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 197 are available for purchase in our online store.
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By Jaimey Fisher and Sheldon Lu · Wednesday, December 15, 2021 Telos 197 (Winter 2021): The Modern City in World Cinema, edited by Jaimey Fisher and Sheldon Lu, is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 The theme of this special issue of Telos is the modern city in world cinema. Its various essays examine the depiction of cities and their constitutive contexts through the lens of critical theory, political theory, cultural theory, and film theory. The contributors tackle a range of topics: the experience of modernity in urban contexts; cities in relation to civil society and the public sphere; the metropolis and cosmopolitanism; the urban/rural divide; cities and gendered, racial, and class divides; urban planning and urban space; film as a particular medium, with specific parameters, in the broader age of media; film as mass entertainment and as revolutionary propaganda. Even with this wide range of topics and their themes, there are many more to be explored, herein and elsewhere, so complex and rich are the relations of the urban to the cinematic.
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By Matt Applegate · Tuesday, December 17, 2013 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Matt Applegate looks at Yvette Biro’s “The Intellectual Film: Eisenstein’s Plan to Film Marx’s Capital“ from Telos 39 (Spring 1979).
 It is difficult to think of what cinema is in the present, and indeed, what cinema might be in the future, outside of large studio systems, box office opening numbers, and global profit intake. Even so-called “independent” films often circulate in a virtual minor league of the Hollywood studio system, vying for wide release. To be sure, cinema’s thorough commodification both limits its potential for aesthetic experimentation and makes it easier to equate it with other forms of media. When cinema becomes secondary to the metrics of profit, its distinct aesthetic qualities are subordinate to its function as a product comprised of moving images and sound. Moreover, as film moves away from celluloid and toward digital formats, one is compelled to ask what makes cinema distinct as visual technology is homogenized. This is not to say that cinematic experience and practice are bankrupt aesthetic qualities or that film is doomed to devolve into an indistinct mesh of CGI and user-generated websites like YouTube and Vine. Rather, as Yvette Biro suggests in her “The Intellectual Film: Eisenstein’s Plan to Film Marx’s Capital,” the horizon of cinematic thought and practice is perhaps best imagined by examining the relation between ideology and cinematic aesthetics.
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