Fellow Seminar by Dalia Neis
IAS Affiliated Teaching Fellow in Visual Theory and Practice (in cooperation with the Visual Studies Platform, CEU)
(Zoom invitation will be sent to the participants on 29 April)
What can the essay learn from the wind? My research investigates the borders in between theory and practice, via the creative mode of the (film) essay. I have been exploring cinematic and textual representations of wind via the particular expressive framework of cinepoetry as coined and expounded by the media theorist, Christoph Wall-Romana (2015): an intermedial aesthetic which sits in between genres and forms. Through expressively crossing over the preconceived dichotomies between film-theory/film-making, and the triad of frame/word/world, cinepoetics paves the way for a singular mode of the essay as a method in which to potentially embody and reverberate the liminal, and intangible force of wind.
In this talk, I propose the aesthetic framework of cinepoetics as a potential exemplary mode of the unfilmable. I consider it as a creative method in which productions of knowledge enter into complex and transformative processes of critical and expressive forms. I will illustrate this talk through a reading of Victor Sjöström’s silent film The Wind (1928) and consider it as a singular case study for thinking through various strategies of cinepoetics; a tool which has since become fundamental in shifting my perception of wind, visuality, as well as the function of moving images in the post- cinematic age.
Dalia Neis is a writer, filmmaker and musician. She is co-founder of Wanda Portal, an imprint and radio show that traverses the literary, cinematic, and sonic spheres, and has founded with Enir Da, the musical/poetry group, FITH. Her first book Zephyrian Spools (An Essay, a Wind) was published by the Knives, Forks, and Spoons press in December 2019 and her second publication Hercules Road, was published by Ma Bibliothèque in January 2020.