Dr Mattias Frey – The Crises of Film Criticism and the Promises of Film Studies

EDINBURGH FILM SEMINAR

Tuesday 22 November 2016
Time: 17:30 – 19:30
Venue: Project Room 1.06, 50 George Square

Dr Mattias Frey
Reader in Film Studies
University of Kent
https://www.kent.ac.uk/arts/staff-profiles/film/frey.html

The Crises of Film Criticism and the Promises of Film Studies

For a discipline in its relative adolescence, film studies has experienced a whole host of trends in its methodologies, emphases and even subject matter. This talk argues against a zero-sum scenario and for a more comprehensive and broad-church attitude to film and media research, using the example of a research project on the future of film criticism in the age of the internet. Plunging print circulations, immaterial online advertising revenues and the sacking of prominent critics have put the profession and institution under intense journalistic and increasing scholarly scrutiny. This talk anatomises the contours of the debate and offers historical and institutional approaches (among others) in order to relativise and tentatively resolve these ‘teeth-baring and wound-licking moments of “crisis”’ (Nick James).

Bio: Mattias Frey is Reader in Film at the University of Kent. He is an Editor of the journal Film Studies (Manchester UP) and his books include Postwall German Cinema: History, Film History, and Cinephilia (Berghahn, 2013); Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice, and Spectatorship (Routledge, 2014; coedited with Jinhee Choi); The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism: The Anxiety of Authority (Amsterdam UP, 2015); Film Criticism in the Digital Age (Rutgers UP, 2015; coedited with Cecilia Sayad); and Extreme Cinema: The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today’s Art Film Culture (Rutgers UP, 2016).