Film and Audiovisual Media colloquium - Vinzenz Hediger (University of Frankfurt): The Repentant Cinephile Revisited. On the Colonial Antecedents of Modern Film Theory

Does French film theory, the dominant paradigm in the first decades of the new academic discipline of cinema studies, have colonial antecedents? Focusing on the work of Jean-Louis Comolli, an Algerian-born film critic, film theorist and co-editor in chief of Cahiers du cinema after 1968, this talk argues that the post-68 turn in film criticism from art appreciation to materialist critical theory, which goes hand in hand with a turn from cinephile film criticism to the self-criticism of the repentant cinephile, can, at least in part, be traced to the experience of colonial violence during Algeria’s war for liberation in the 1950s.