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Assistant Professor
Department of Cinema and Media Studies; the College; affiliated faculty at the Center for Gender Studies
Ph.D. 2006, The University of Iowa
Director of Undergraduate Studies, 08-09
Gates-Blake, 420
Phone: (773) 834 8818
jenniferwild@uchicago.edu
My research and teaching encompass the areas of early American and European cinema and culture; classic and contemporary film theory; theory of the avant-garde; film aesthetics and historiography; experimental film; French cinema; and the cinema’s relationship to the other arts. In my work, I consider films as objects that participate in a multi-disciplinary lineage of formal, cultural, economic, and aesthetic resonance. In turn, I understand interdisciplinarity as a means to demonstrate how the close study of films and their culture informs, and is informed by, intricate legacies that do not belong to film (or film studies) alone, but to a much vaster history of images and creative traditions.
I am currently completing a manuscript on the “cinematic impression” that explores how the new media of early twentieth-century cinema influenced and transformed the creative processes and plastic experiments of the European historical avant-garde. I have examined the early cinema’s transformation of urban geography; artists’s reception and visual-perceptual experience of the cinema in both the theater and within the expanded cultural field; the industrial and representational frameworks that the early cinema introduced to culture at large, and that in turn revolutionized artists’s formal, conceptual, and performative expression. This project reroutes traditional hermeneutic and historical approaches toward avant-garde art from the standpoint of film history -- or the cinema’s radical cultural incursion before 1915 -- and the theories of influence.
While I have focused primarily on the art of the Cubists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists, my interests span the twentieth century and include the films and film-related works of the neo-avant-garde, contemporary film movements, and time-based, moving image works and installations. My new project concerns a theory and a history of the “arrival” of the moving image into the gallery. This project does not simply re-trace the steps leading to our contemporary moment in which we find museums and galleries saturated with film projections, film programs, and moving image works. Instead, I am interested in the “shape of arrival”-- a project that maps the history of the cinema and its relation to art practice in spatial, conceptual, and graphic terms. I am also developing several other projects on ciné-littérature; specialized cinema theaters of the 1920s and 1930s; and on the history of darkness and the experience of light volumes.
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