Nadine Boljkovac

Film-Philosophy, Falmouth
Fellowship: 22.10.2018–21.04.2019

Vita

Nadine Boljkovac (PhD Cambridge) is Senior Lecturer in Film at Falmouth University. In 2018, Boljkovac is also Guest Lecturer for the Rotterdam Film School/Royal Belgian Film Archive, and a Visiting Fellow of the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons, The New School for Design. Boljkovac was a University of New South Wales 2015-17 Postdoctoral Fellow (Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia), the Brown University 2012-13 Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow (Pembroke Center for Teaching & Research on Women), a University of Edinburgh 2010 Postdoctoral Fellow (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities) and University of Aberdeen 2009-10 Film Teaching Fellow. Her monograph examining affect and ethics via Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema (Edinburgh University Press 2013), was reissued in paperback in 2015. A second monograph in progress, Beyond Herself: Feminist (Auto)Portraiture and the Moving Image, assesses works by international filmmakers, especially documentarians and those exploring (auto)portraiture and (self)perception. Most recent peer-reviewed works include: In [No] Home Movie Style: Her Death and Rebirth for ‘Materialising Absence in Film and Media’ (in a 2018 Special Dossier co-edited by Saige Walton & Nadine Boljkovac for Screening the Past: A Peer-Reviewed Journal of Screen History, Theory & Criticism); Screen Perception and Event: Beyond the Formalist/Realist Divide (in The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory, editors Tom Conley and Hunter Vaughan, 2018); and [Non]Style is Feeling: Direct Tenderness from Sirk, Fassbinder and Haynes to Berressem (in On Style: Transdisciplinary Articulations, editor Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank, 2018). Other peer-reviewed works appear in Understanding Deleuze, Understanding ModernismDeleuze Studies (‘Schizoanalysis and Visual Culture’ Special Issue); Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory (‘Remembering Barbara Godard’ Festschrift); Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French CultureGilles Deleuze: Image and Text

Fields of Research

(self)portraiture; (self)perception; feminist self-imaging; affect; screen & film theories; continental philosophy; women directors (Chantal Akerman, Agnès Varda & others)

Project outline

Beyond Herself: Feminist (Auto)Portraiture and the Moving Image

With a focus on moving image portraiture, auto-portraiture and the emergence of ‘auto-perception,’ a term I put forward in my first monograph, Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema, this second monograph in progress, Beyond Herself, examines a woman’s self-perception and breaking-down as witnessed and precipitated through the (auto)portrait across a select series of international films. This project especially focuses on a seemingly paradoxical process of simultaneous identity and separation as the perception of an Other becomes also a perception of one’s self and self-dissolution. In contrast to more conventional approaches, this project does not seek to celebrate a more intimate and knowing relation with the female subjects but to discern how the cinematic (auto)portrait might proffer women artists a means for shattering any pure and stable construction of identity. Of particular interest are images and bodies that the films manifest as sites of chance, ambiguity, uncertainty, fluctuation, delirium and sublimity, but also banality, suffering, dying, aging and survival. While studies on filmic subjectivity, the personal documentary and filmic (auto)biography exist, Beyond Herself addresses a gap in several current debates that do not explore the unique offerings of feminist filmic (auto-)portraiture.

Publications (Selection)

BOOKS
- Author. Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema. Plateaus – New Directions in Deleuze Studies Series, Edinburgh University Press, 2013 hardcover/2015 paperback.
- Author. Beyond Herself: Feminist (Auto-)Portraiture and the Moving Image. In progress. 

COLLECTIONS
- Co-Editor with Hanjo Berressem. Against Nature: Herzog’s Cinema. In progress.
- Co-Editor with Saige Walton; Contributor. ‘Materialising Absence in Film and Media,’ a special dossier of Screening the Past: A Peer-Reviewed Journal of Screen History, Theory & Criticism. April 2018.

ESSAYS/CHAPTERS

- ‘[Non]Style is Feeling: Direct Tenderness from Sirk, Fassbinder and Haynes.’ On Style: Transdisciplinary Articulations. In Press (Peter Lang). Fall 2018.
- ‘Screen Perception and Event: Beyond the Formalist/Realist Divide.’ The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory, eds Tom Conley and Hunter Vaughan. (London: Anthem Press, 2018), 309-26.
- ‘In [No] Home Movie Style: Her Death and Rebirth’ [on Akerman’s 2015 No Home Movie, Hoffman’s 2001 What These Ashes Wanted and Haneke’s 2012 Amour] in ‘Materialising Absence in Film and Media,’ a special dossier of Screening the Past: A Peer-Reviewed Journal of Screen History, Theory & Criticism, eds Nadine Boljkovac and Saige Walton. (2018). <http://www.screeningthepast.com/2018/02/in-no-home-movie-style-her-death-and-rebirth/>.
- ‘Memory’; ‘Time-Image.’ Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism, ed. Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 264-65; 278-80.
- ‘Signs Without Name.’ Deleuze Studies 5:2 (2011; Special Issue on ‘Schizoanalysis and Visual Culture’): 209-240.
- ‘From depths and ashes, love’s eternal return.’ Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory 14:6 (2011; ‘Remembering Barbara Godard’): 144-161.
- ‘Intimacy and Prophecy: Marker and Resnais’s Memories.’ Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture, ed. Peter Collier, Anna Magdalena Elsner and Olga Smith (Oxford: Peter Lang, Modern French Identities Series, 2009), 257-69.
- ‘Mad Love.’ Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text, ed. Eugene W. Holland, Daniel W. Smith & Charles J. Stivale (London: Continuum International, 2009), 124-42.