Brigitte Peucker, Film Studies and German

“Film creates its language out of… literature on the one hand, and… art history on the other.”

Brigitte Peucker (PhD ’77) has been a faculty member in the German department since 1975 (the second woman to be hired in this department) and is the founder of the Film and Media Studies program. Upon receiving tenure in 1984, she was, by her count, only the 11th woman to have been granted tenure at Yale. Peucker began her academic career working primarily on German poetry, but she began teaching film courses after participating in a Yale panel of New York film critics in the late 1970s. This shift in focus played into Peucker’s existing interest in the optical: “Even when I was writing about poetry, I was always interested in the visual aspect of it.” Since then, her work on film has shifted slowly from being more narrative-focused to focusing more on visuals. She describes her third book, Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts, as “about the in-between-ness of film as a medium,” while her most recent book, published in 2019, focuses more squarely on visual arts in film.

When Peucker arrived at the University, undergraduates could not major in Film Studies without filing a petition. Peucker soon successfully advocated for the creation of a formal major for Yale College students; she notes that the faculty voting on the institution of the major were resistant to formalizing an “unconventional” area of study, and the struggle lasted several years before the major was finally approved in 1985. Howard Lamar, former President of Yale and longtime advocate of film studies, noted that it was Peucker’s “faith and relentlessness” that ultimately secured the existence of the Film Studies major, which has now graduated many successful alumni. She served as chair of Film Studies for fourteen years after its inception (1986-2000). Along with this service to Film Studies, Peucker has also served as DGS and Chair (1997-2002; 2003-04) of the German department and was the Associate Head of Ezra Stiles College from 1995-2002. Despite longstanding resistance to film studies at the outset, a graduate program was finally added to the Film and Media Studies Program in the early 2000s, and there are now around 30 graduate students studying film and media at Yale.

Selected works of Brigitte Peucker:

  • Peucker, B. (2019). Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film. Northwestern University Press.
  • Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed.  (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
  • The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film, Cultural Memory in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal and Hent DeVries, (Stanford University Press, 2007). 
  • Peucker, B. (1995). Incorporating images: film and the rival arts. Princeton University Press.
  • Lyric Descent in the German Romantic Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

Profile by Sarah Babinski, PhD candidate in Linguistics