It’s always a great pleasure to share the work of our colleagues. The latest publications by Adam Szymanski and Dru Jeffries, two Concordia PhD candidates, demonstrate some of the diverse, high quality contributions Concordia students are making within the Film Studies discipline.
Adam Szymanski’s “Toward a Melancholy Aesthetics of the Cinema” analyzes how Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier 2011) uses aesthetic technique to construct a melancholic film world and considers how this relational construction of melancholy offers insight into both the ontology of depression but also the political aesthetics of contemporary global art cinema. Adam’s essay is part of a special issue on Melancholy and Politics in |Π| Magazine for Live Arts Research*, which grapples with melancholy as an inherently political concept and artistic expression that demands to be read in light of contemporary historical developments, particularly in Europe.
You can read Adam’s essay here
Published in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Dru Jeffries’ “Comics at 300 Frames per Second: Zack Snyder’s 300 and the Figural Translation of Comics to Film” explores how comic books and film visually intersect. Using 300 (Zack Snyder 2007) as a case study, Dru analyzes how the comic book translates onto the big screen, offering unique visual tropes that blur the line between cinematic and comic book conventions.
You can read Dru’s essay through the Concordia Library. Here’s the direct link to the article
Both are excellent reads. Great job Adam and Dru!
*MHSoC faculty member, PhD Erin Manning, also published an essay in this issue entitled “In the Act: The Shape of Precarity”, which offers a critique of Bifo’s recent work on depression and its assertion that neoliberalism has rendered action — and activism — hopelessly bound to instrumentalization. Manning’s essay affirms the capacity for action and activism to emerge from various neurodiverse communities along the contours of a schizoanalysis that works tangentially to capitalism.
If you have any recently published work, Grad Aperture would love to share it. Send it our way! gradaperture@gmail.com
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