In the twentieth century, we discovered how to capture our culture and history using the underappreciated medium of moving images. We can stop that image, slow it down, rewind it, and play it back. We have always been captivated to watch.

Film professor Scott Curtis is captivated by what lies beneath the image, and he wants to share his appreciation of film with others — on and off the Northwestern campus. The Gene Siskel Film Center, 37 S. Wabash, has given Curtis his own lecture series on German film, which began yesterday.

“German Cinema” is a series of 14 lectures accompanied by appropriate film screenings. From “Metropolis” to “Run Lola Run,” Curtis will discuss the relationship between Germany’s troubled history and the representation of that history through moving images.

Marty Rubin, assistant director of programming, had been trying to schedule a course for Curtis at the film center for the past six years.

For centuries Germans have trusted lengthy words, as opposed to visual art, to represent their culture. “They are ambivalent towards image even in masterpieces,” Curtis says. “They are uneasy with the extent film can capture culture.”

The rise of the Nazi State brought a very unique image to German national identity. With the invention and popularization of film, the age also brought a new way to illustrate and distribute this image.

German silent cinema was preoccupied with questions of technology and modernization. Now a postmodern German cinema has learned to deal with “Vergangensheitbew