Antrittsvorlesung: Prof. Franz Müller – Professor für Drehbuch für neue narrative Formen an der KHM

Director and author Franz Müller has been teaching screenwriting for new narrative forms in the Film/Television department at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne since June 2023. In his inaugural speech, Prof. Franz Müller will use excerpts from his films "Science Fiction", "Die Liebe der Kinder", "Worst Case Scenario" and "Die bewohnte Insel" and other artistic works to explain why he considers cinematic narrative work to be "folk art" rather than "high culture". It will be about symmetries and high concept, about predictability and inconsistency, about coincidence and the "constructed", about curiosity, rock'n'roll and carpets.

Franz Müller writes: "My lecture will be about why 'new narrative forms' have more to do with collective manual and mental labor than with avant-garde. It will be about Caucasian carpets, about stealing, copying and imitating, about reacting and driving on, about anger, rejection and defiance as the motor of artistic work. It will be about how much inconsistency a cinematic narrative can withstand before it falls apart, and how much consistency before it dies. How much abundance and anarchy and how much "less is more", the taming of symmetry.

How chance comes into the cinematic narrative and how much this chance has to do with the wonderful feeling of experiencing a cinematic narrative in which anything can happen at any time and which therefore doesn't seem calculated. And why that makes you happy. That working collectively favors chance and the feeling of purposelessness. And that this is also where the cinematic narrative meets "folk art". If there's time, perhaps we'll also talk about why comedies are political and that entertainment has something to do with attitude."