News

On Friday, July 14, 2023, the HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES Research Group will host an in-person workshop on “Global Hollywood, Global Audiences.” The workshop is designed to discuss the global impact of Hollywood cinema and its importance to global audiences. It will bring together scholars of historical and contemporary audiences, memories of moviegoing, and home movies in local, national, and global contexts. A central goal is to think critically about how we can examine the global influence of Hollywood cinema in the study of global audiences. We would also like to look at recent thinking on cultural imperialism, as well as issues of representation and national identities. Another goal of the workshop is to reflect on audience research methods and critically discuss the work of data analysis and the presentation of research results.

Speakers at the workshop include Ana Rosas Mantecón (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa), Philippe Meers (University of Antwerp), Christine Hämmerling (University of Zurich/University of Hamburg) and Fabiola Alcalá Anguiano (Universidad de Guadalajara), as well as members of the HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES research group Kathleen Loock, Stefan Dierkes and Alejandra Bulla (Leibniz Universität Hannover). In addition to the presentations and discussions, the workshop will also feature Maya Nedyalkova’s (Oxford Brookes University) research project on film consumption by Bulgarian cinema audiences.

The morning sessions of this workshop are open to the public. The workshop takes place in room 112 (Conti campus, bulding 1501).

Sign up for the workshop at Leibniz University Hannover under: hollywood@uni-hannover.de

The full program for the workshop “Global Hollywood, Global Audiences” is now available on our website.

Kathleen Loock, Alejandra Bulla, and Stefan Dierkes of the HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES project are part of the panel “Hollywood Memories: Film Consumption and Reception Practices in Germany and Mexico” at this year’s HoMER conference in Barcelona.

HoMER (History of Moviegoing, Exhibition, and Reception) is an international research network founded in 2004. The goal of the network is to advance understanding of the international phenomena of moviegoing, exhibition in movie theaters, and the reception of films.

Kathleen Loock will give a talk on “Hollywood memories and movie generations: A cross-cultural, comparative approach.” Alejandra Bulla’s talk is on “The dominance of Hollywood movies in Mexico: remakes, sequels, and franchises as cultural reference points,” and Stefan Dierkes’ talk is on “Curiosity, comfort, and commerce: Hollywood remaking and the reception of German audiences.”

Kathleen Loocks’s video essay on different movie adaptation of Stephen King’s It has been published in issue 11 of Tecmerin. Journal of Audovisual Essays. This videographic work deals with remaking practices and their entanglement with personal and generational memories. The videographic work hereby combines the scholarly with the personal as Kathleen explores her own childhood memories of watching the 1990 adaptation and connects them to the Reunification of Germany.

You can watch the video essay and read about her process here.

From May 19th to 26th we had the visit of Yining Zhang, our future Hollywood Memories team member. On this occasion we had the opportunity to talk in more detail about the project, what we are doing at the moment and what is to come. It also took place largely on administrative issues and everything related to preparing for her joining the university in what we hope will be this year for the winter semester.

We look forward with great anticipation to her joining the team.

On May 11, Kathleen will give the talk “Movies: Memories for a Lifetime” as part of the Citizen Science Lecture Series at Leibniz University Hannover (Bielefeldsaal B305). The lecture series aims to showcase various examples of Citizen Science, inform attendees about the different forms of this kind of research, and encourage participation by bringing together citizens, researchers, and students. For more information about the lecture, please click here (only in German).

We share with you our impressions and experiences during our visit to Mexico, where Kathleen Loock and Alejandra Bulla were from February 15 to 24 presenting the Hollywood Memories project, and inviting more people to participate in the main study of the Mexico case study in different institutions in Guadalajara and Mexico City. Find the trip report on our website.

On February 23, Kathleen Loocks’s presentation at El Colegio de México was live streamed on the university’s YouTube channel, fortunately for us and for those who missed it that day, the video was saved on their channel and here we share the link for you to watch it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=371byLMkFgU

We have returned to Germany with excellent experiences from Mexico and ready to work on what lies ahead. All presentations went according to plan, which allowed us to share project information and get a significant number of participants for our main study that will start in the last week of March.

However, we are interested in having even more participants than those who are currently registered. To this end, we are calling on all those who are interested in participating in our Mexican case study to register here on our website by following the Participate tab where you will find the form to fill out. If you have any questions about the project and your possible participation in it, please do not hesitate to contact us, we will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

We will close our visit to Mexico with one last event at the Center for Literary Studies of the UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). Kathleen Loock will give the guest lecture “Del reciclaje cultural a la memoria generacional: efectos duraderos de los remakes, secuelas y franquicias de Hollywood.” This event will take place on February 24 at 12:00 and was organized with the help of our associated member Nicolas Licata and Carlos Alberto Rubio Pacho, who are both researchers at the Center for Literary Studies at the UNAM.

During our visit to Mexico City, we will have the opportunity to talk about our project at the Centro de Estudios Históricos of the Colegio de México. On 23 February at 12 p.m., Kathleen Loock will give a guest lecture there entitled “Recuerdos de Hollywood: Remakes, secuelas, franquicias y la construcción de identidades generacionales.” The event was organised by Bernd Hausberger (Centro de Estudios Históricos, ColMex).

On Wednesday, 22 February 2023, the Hollywood Memories project will head to the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México. There, Kathleen Loock will give a guest lecture on “Memories made in Hollywood: Del repertorio cinematográfico compartido a la identidad generacional” at 5 pm. The event is organized by Rubén Rebolledo as part of the course “Cine del mundo”.

The Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) opens its doors to the Hollywood Memories research project. Kathleen Loock will give a guest lecture entitled “Cuando Hollywood se repite: reflexiones sobre medios, memoria y generación.” This event will be moderated by Rocío Romero Aguirre and Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón. It takes place on February 21 at 11:30 a.m., and is the first in a series of guest lectures in Mexico City.

Under the title “Hollywood Memories: Recuerdos, experiencias y actitudes,” we present our work in Guadalajara (Mexico) at an REDIC event (Red de Investigadores de Cine). We have been cordially invited by REDIC’s coordinator and associate member of Hollywood Memories, Fabiola Alcalá Anguiano. This event will take place on Friday, February 17 at 10:30 a.m. at Casa Guadalupe Zuno. Kathleen Loock will present the project, including the research design, central concepts, and first results. There will be time for discussion after the presentation in which both Fabiola Alcalá Anguiano and Alejandra Bulla will provide their thoughts on the Mexico case study.

Kathleen Loock and Alejandra Bulla travel to Mexico from February 14-26 to present the Hollywood Memories project in Guadalajara and Mexico City. The purpose of this trip is to give talks in different institutions, but our main interest is to make more people aware of the project and to encourage them to participate in our main study that we are launching in March 2023. We start in Guadalajara with a presentation organized by Fabiola Alcalá Anguiano and the REDIC (Red de investigadores de cine) and continue in Mexico City with presentations at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, the TEC CDMX (Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México), El Colegio de México, and the UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). We owe our thanks to Fabiola Alcalá Anguiano, Nicolas Licata, and Rubén Rebolledo who have helped us in the organization of the talks. We are very excited about this trip and about sharing our project with all those who wish to attend any of our talks.

Hollywood Memory just started its own Newsletter. We sent out the first issue in February 2023. From now on, the newsletter will provide regular updates on our activities and news about our research.

If you want sign up for our study (using the form at the bottom of this page), you will automatically receive the newsletter. Or you can subscribe to the newsletters, by sending an e-mail to hollywood@uni-hannover.de.

On Friday, 10 February 2023, Kathleen Loock will present the Hollywood Memories project at the DASI Shoptalk (2-5 p.m.). The event will feature current digital research projects in the field of American Studies.

The goal of DASI (Digital American Studies Initiative) is to provide a forum for digital research in German American Studies and to advance the discussion of digital methods and approaches for American Studies.

On 12 December 2022, Kathleen Loock will give a guest lecture at the University of Giessen entitled “Streaming Christmas: Netflix’s Holiday Programming.”

On 6 December 2022, Kathleen Loock will give an online lecture as part of the “Audience Projects Seminar Series”, a collaboration between Oxford Brookes University (England) and Örebro University (Sweden). She will present the project “Hollywood Memories: Cinematic Remaking and the Construction of Global Movie Generations.”

On 1 December 2022, Kathleen Loock will give a guest lecture at the University of Freiburg. The title of the talk is “Endlessly Repetitive Futures: Climate Change, Reproduction Logics, and Linear Time in Blade Runner 2049.”

From the 10th until the 12th November the DGfA (German Association for American Studies) will host their post graduate forum in Regensburg. Alejandra Bulla and Stefan Dierkes will hold a talk about “Beyond Hollywood Borders: Politics, Identities, and Memories" there.

Kathleen Loock and Stefan Dierkes from the Hollywood Memories project present their paper “Rethinking Time: Media, Memory, and Generation in the Age of Streaming Platforms” at the ECREA 2022: 9th European Communication Conference in Aarhus (Denmark). They are part of the panel “The more things change…: SVOD platforms and recycled content strategies” which explores on streaming platforms like Netflix and their focus on remaking series and films. 

Kathleen Loock was asked about the use of artificially generated voices and images in films for the radio contribution “KI-Stimmen in Filmen: Darth Vader lebt für immer” (AI Voices in Films: Darth Vader Lives Forever) which aired on October 2, 2022, as part of the program “Breitband” on the German public radio station Deutschlandfunk Kultur. She answered questions about whether the use of AI voices is a new trend in the entertainment industry. The actor James Earl Jones, who gave Darth Vader his low, monotone voice in the Star Wars films, sold the rights to his Darth Vader voice. Now an artificial intelligence can clone his voice for the use in future Star Wars films. The whole conversation (in German) is available here.

On September 28, 2022, Laura Mee launched her book Reanimated: The Contemporary American Horror Remake and presented it in a zoom event. Kathleen Loock, Bruna Foletto Lucas (Kingston University) and Kendall Phillips (Syracuse University) talked to Mee about her ideas, in a discussion round chaired by Iain Robert Smith (King’s College London). The main argument of Reanimated is that the remaking of horror films shows the genre’s capacity for creative recycling, adaptation and evolution.

The German audience survey on HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES is now closed. New registrations for participation in the study are now no longer possible. Over 100 people from many parts of Germany have been active on our digital research platform, sharing their memories, experiences, and attitudes towards Hollywood movies. We are very pleased about the great interest in our project and sincerely thank all the participants for their support for our research.

While it is now time for us to analyze the data for the German case study, the Mexican audience survey is now beginning. If you want to receive updates about the development of our HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES research project, you can sign up for our newsletter below.

We are now starting with our Mexican case study! Currently, we are in the pre-test phase, which will be followed by our pilot study in November 2022. If you are interested in participating, please register here on our website. If you know someone who might be interested in participating, don’t hesitate to share the link to our website. The main study will be conducted in March 2023. Registration is open after the end of the pilot study.

You can find more information about the project on our website.

On Monday, 11 July 2022, from 2-4 p.m., Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison), who is an associate member of the HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES research group,  will give a guest lecture at Leibniz University Hannover. His talk is entitled “Fallen from Grace, or, When Sequels Attack” and is part of the “Film Remakes and Franchises” course that Kathleen Loock is teaching this summer term.

On Friday, 8 July 2022, the HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES research group is holding the in-person workshop “Audience Research: Methods and Approaches” at Leibniz University Hannover. The workshop brings together scholars who study historical and contemporary audiences, cinemagoing and home viewing contexts, national identifications and the global impact of film, memories and experiences as well as attitudes and tastes. One central aim is to critically reflect on the process of doing audience research – including choices and challenges as well as thoughts on working with the data, the presentation of research results (beyond the traditional modes) and opportunities for public engagement.

Among the speakers at the workshop are Annette Kuhn (Queen Mary University of London), Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Christine Hämmerling (University of Zurich), Eduard Cuelenaere (University of Ghent) as well as the members of the HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES research group Kathleen Loock, Stefan Dierkes, and Alejandra Bulla (Leibniz University Hannover). In addition to the presentations and discussions, the workshop will also feature the audience research done by Kate Egan (Northumbria University) and Peter Turner (Oxford Brookes University) and screen video essays by Catherine Grant, Ariel Avissar, Evelyn Kreutzer, Cormac Donnelly, and Kathleen Loock.

The workshop will be held in the Niedersachsensaal (Conti Campus, Königsworther Str. 1) at Leibniz University Hannover. It is free and open to the public.

Register for the in-person event at Leibniz University Hannover: hollywood@uni-hannover.de

Find more information on the program and the speakers on our website.

On Tuesday, 21 June 2022, Kathleen Loock will give a guest lecture in the research colloquium “‘How to tell stories digitally (fast)’: Digitale Perspektiven auf Literatur” which belongs to the master program “Neuere Deutsche Literaturwissenschaft” at LUH. Her talk will focus on “Memories, Temporality and Strategies of Retelling and Continuation on Streaming Platforms.” Please note that the talk will be held in German.

On Monday, 20 June 2022, from 2-4 p.m., Brunella Tedesco-Barlocco (Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain), who is an associate member of the HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES research group,  will give a guest lecture at Leibniz University Hannover. Her talk is entitled “Shaken, not stirred: Character Re-construction and the Role of Time in the James Bond Reboot” and is part of the “Film Remakes and Franchises” course that Kathleen Loock is teaching this summer term.

Starting now, the HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES website is also available in Spanish. In autumn 2022 we are starting into the next sub-project, this time focusing on Mexican film audiences and their memories.

Whether in the cinema, at home, or on the road — Hollywood movies can be watched almost everywhere. Nowadays, the program is often dominated by remakes and sequels. We are interested in your memories, experiences and attitudes concerning Hollywood movies. Are there any special moments, favorite movies, or collections you would like to tell us about?

You can find more information about the project and on how to participate on our website.

On 21 April 2022 at 6 p.m., Kathleen Loock will give an online lecture as part of the Atlantic Academy’s TV Thursday discussion series.

Register here to attend the lecture (in German).

Event description (from the Atlantic Academy):

Fuller House, One Day at a Time, or Twin Peaks: The Return – in recent years, several beloved American television series have celebrated their return to American television and streaming platforms with brand new episodes and old cast members. The so-called reboots and revivals deliberately draw on past TV experiences to create something new in the crowded contemporary media landscape, deliberately invoking past successes. In this talk, Kathleen Loock from Leibniz Universität Hannover discusses how series revivals attempt to represent the legacy of the original series, evoke feelings and emotions of generational belonging, and negotiate notions of past, present, and future in meaningful ways.

In our discussion series, we look at the cultural export of the United States: TV series! On selected Thursdays, we will take a look at the multifaceted television landscape of the U.S.

In April 2022, Alejandra Bulla joins the HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES research project, where she will work on her PhD. Alejandra holds a Master’s degree in American Studies from the University of Erlangen and a Bachelor’s degree as an English teacher from the Universidad Francisco José de Caldas in Bogota, Colombia. Within the HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES project, Alejandra is responsible for the sub-project that studies the movie memories of audiences living in Mexico.

We invite applications for a PhD position in the DFG-funded Emmy Noether Research Group “Hollywood Memories: Cinematic Remaking and the Construction of Global Movie Generations.” This 3.5 year position (salary scale 13 TV-L, 65 %) is to be filled by April 1, 2022. The sub-project, which the successful candidate will work on, involves quantitative and qualitative research with audiences in Mexico that focuses on the intersections between memory and Hollywood movies (questionnaires and interviews). Excellent language skills in English and Spanish are required. You can apply until January 31, 2022.

The full call for applications can be found here: Job Exchange Leibniz University

More information on the “Hollywood Memories” Research Group is available
here: Project Website

Under the Twitter handle @HollyMemories, the DFG-funded Emmy Noether Research Group “Hollywood Memories” is now present on social media. You can follow the Twitter account for regular updates the research of the group as well as polls, video essays, reviews, production news, and insights on memories, remakes, sequels, and Hollywood franchises.

Film critic and professor of media and film studies at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota (USA) Greg Carlson interviewed Kathleen Loock for his "Collecting Movies" series. They talked about her growing up in East Germany, how she became interested in movies, her research on remakes, sequels, and franchises, and her collection of DVD box sets – from Psycho I-IV to Alien to Jurassic Park.

The full interview is available here: Collecting Movies with Kathleen Loock

In October 2021, Stefan Dierkes joined the HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES research project, where he will work on his PhD for the next 3.5 years. Stefan holds a Master’s degree in Literature and Media Practice and Anglophone Studies from the University of Essen and a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Literature and Cultural Studies, Political Science, and Journalism from the TU Dortmund University. Within the HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES project, Stefan is responsible for the sub-project that studies the movie memories of audiences living in Germany.