made for the Internal Peer Review Conference, November 2024, Lucerne School of Design, Film and Art.

The volcano represents a borderline phenomenon of the photographic image: trying to depict the volcanic eruption is doomed to fail since the optical apparatus will inevitably be destroyed the closer it gets to the crater. However, by melting images and their machines, the volcano is not only an end, but also a new beginning of … volcanic vision weiterlesen

As an homage to film theorist and experimental filmmaker Thierry Kuntzel, his work on waves, and in particular his interactive video installation „The Waves“ this video essay is a meditation on the wave as an optical phenomenon, as philosophical object, and as a form of media self-reflexivity.

in: NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies, Jg. 12 (2023), Nr. 1, S. 281-283. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/19738. Desk, this word for a ‘table especially adapted for convenience in reading or writing’, as the dictionary explains, is derived from the medieval Latin ‘desca’ and ultimately from the Greek ‘diskos’, which means quoit, platter, or dish. Thus, a quick look … Desktop Documentary weiterlesen

When watching Agnès Varda’s DOCUMENTEUR from 1981 I am struck by this recurring visual motif of the typewriting woman’s gaze out to the ocean. The beach, the sea, the horizon – they form lines or blocks, lying on top of each other. They resemble the lines of a poem, and also the different part of … trembling line [on Agnès Varda’s cinécriture] weiterlesen

Watching John Ford …with Jean Epstein. Approaching the materiality of film …through the faces of its stars.

In the films of Georges Franju the irreal lies right next to reality. It takes just a mere pan of the camera to move from the familiar to the horrible. The simplest cinematic device of the movable camera produces the most disturbing effects. A study in the uncanny that is always already there, just beyond the … close by. Georges Franju, the uncanny, and the moving frame weiterlesen

A video essay on shaking up the cinematic apparatus as feminist intervention and an homage to my teacher Elisabeth Bronfen.

What is there to see when characters turn their back on us? Back views in cinema are experienced as disturbances of their visual regime. But by hiding the faces these images point towards another presence, both familiar and uncanny to us all: there’s an off-space we all carry with us but can never look at … Reproduction Interdite weiterlesen

  A cat video of a different sort. Following a cat in Alfred Hitchcock leads to other cats and other films, to radical politics and the trouble with the gaze.

In the two film versions of IMITATION OF LIFE (directed by John M. Stahl in 1934 and by Douglas Sirk in 1959) the stage prop of stairs acquire a particular rich meaning. The staircase as transitional space is the place where not only different people but with them also different classes meet. A heterotopia the … transitional steps [Sirk | Stahl | Stairs] weiterlesen

Reading a moment from A STAR IS BORN (USA 1954) The combination of what is irreconcilable, the transition from the self to the other, the shiver between continuity and discontinuity – that is the task of philosophy. And that is the art of one of Hollywood’s greatest philosophers: Judy Garland.  

An essay in (un)readability. Just one novel, filmed countless times. Just one shot, watched countless times. They make me aware of how every act of reading is threatened by its reversal, the inability to understand and how repeating the same words only long enough renders them illegible. The text and the shot, turned in my … Unfold weiterlesen

A man is getting cornered. The past is closing in, thightening its grip… A detail in Jacques Tourneur’s „Out of the Past“ (USA 1947) becomes visible as metaphor. For the film’s story… …and it’s mise-en-scène.