25.05.2016
19 Uhr
Salon des ehem. Palais Dürckheim, Cranachstraße 47, Weimar

Screening & Sequence Talk: The Affair Sequenzgespräch mit Susanne Schmetkamp

Belonging to the so called Quality TV Series "The Affair" tells scrupulously precisely the story of an extramarital relationship. Noah, a novelist, and Alison, a waitress, fell in love during a summer holiday of Noah`s family in Montauk. In each episode the story is shown from two different narrative points of view (in season 2 there are even four points of view). „The Affair“ thereby serves as a paradigm for the new ways of storytelling, aesthetics, distribution and reception of complex television series (such as "The Wire", "Breaking Bad", "Homeland" etc.). I claim that long-term-series themselves evolve a particular meta- and long-term-perspective which reaches beyond the narrative itself. My thesis is, that we can speak of a complex "rhizom" of perspectives within and beyond the series in generell which lead to particular aesthetics of contemporary television and, by doing so, to a much more condensed relationship between the series and the viewership. Insofar as not everyone might be familiar with "The Affair", at the beginning of the Sequence Talk I will show 40 minutes of the first episode of season 1 and will then discuss some aspects of a particular sequence.