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On 20–21 July, ULIDE member Johannes Pause delivered a keynote lecture at the conference Performing Populism: The Poetics, Production and Circulation of Populism in Contemporary European Audiovisual Media in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. The conference was funded by the Horizon Europe project MORES (Moral Emotions in Politics).

The event examined how populist movements have reshaped European political discourse, spreading emotionally charged narratives of nationhood, leadership and “the people” above all through the affective imagery of screen media. Approaching populism less as a fixed ideology than as a political style, the participants explored how fictional film, television and streaming series create, promote or contest populist attitudes — and how these dynamics unfold across Europe’s linguistic borders and its competing nationalist and transnational frames of reference. Papers drawn from a wide range of media, historical and geographical contexts continued a cross-border dialogue on populism in audiovisual culture and laid the ground for future collaborations.

In his keynote, Government by Revelation: Populism and Political Theology in 1930s Hollywood, Johannes Pause traced the historical roots of audiovisual populism back to the “populist” cinema of the Great Depression. Reading populism as an applied political theology of democracy, the lecture contrasted several films of the period and introduced a screening of Gregory La Cava’s Gabriel Over the White House (1933).