Description:

A lecture by Jennifer Wild, University of Chicago

This talk is built largely from recent work in French and Belgian archives associated with a new project concerning the aesthetics of materiality in avant-garde film and art between 1929 and the post-World War II period. Insofar as I evoke the category of the “found object” in its traditional Surrealist sense, I also use it as a metaphor for the archival research process that accompanied my efforts to identify an unattributed photograph that appeared in the journal Documents in 1930. As a meditation on interdisciplinary research, this talk animates the challenges of both the archive and the writing process that strives to track and historicize the interconnected
material discourses of film, photography, sculpture, and other objects in a history of Surrealism.

JENNIFER WILD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. In her research and teaching she focuses on the history and theory of modernism and the avant-garde; experimental film; French cinema; the history of film exhibition; and the cinema’s relation to the other arts.

She is the author of The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900-1923 (The University of California Press, 2015), which takes the point of view of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp in order to examine the formal and experiential components of the historical cinema experience in Paris before 1923.