Film as a Medium of Cultural Memory: Cinematic Representations of the Post - War Expulsion of Germans and its Changes

As a result of the development of visual media and the related tendency in social sciences described as "pictorial turn", many disciplines have incorporated in the field of their research also the study of phenomena that used to stay out of their attention. In sociology, this tendency resulted in the emergence of a new sub-discipline, referred to as sociology of the image or visual sociology. The subject of this dissertation falls within this sub-field: the attention is focused on movies, which today stand as a powerful media of cultural memory. The main goal of this project is to describe the specific practices of cultural remembering following from the nature of the film medium, and to explore the significance of the film as a source of sociological cognition. In the first part, film is recognized as a cultural/social phenomenon, which shouldn't be understood only as a product of individual authors, as there are many institutions and other subjects (which together form a cinematographic field) who also contribute to the making of a film by defining its possibilities and thus influence the way how particular events are represented. The second part of the work presents different theoretical approaches that map the nature of relation between film representation and reality - they describe the..