I am in the process of expanding a new line of research that examines the cultural meanings of home movies and amateur films. Home movies are traditionally the genre of the family patriarch, however, since the 1980s, feminist filmmakers in Germany and Austria have reinvented the “format” by rethinking the conventions of domestic, autobiographical, and documentary filmmaking, while raising important questions about the nature of amateurism and the cultural and political conditions of (feminist) film production, and the practice of art more broadly conceived. My goal is to explore the contribution of this kind of “subjective amateurism” to the filmic construction of memory and gender identity and thereby establish a new way of reading home movies as alternative, intersectional, and often transformative, counter-histories from below.
 

Recent courses:

• Film and Gender
• Aesthetics and Politics of the Avant-garde

His publications cover topics that range from eighteenth-century literature and thought through the early twentieth century, with film, the visual arts and psychoanalysis being particular foci. His current project is concerned with Romanticism and Weimar cinema.

Articles: 

• ​Silence Restored: Three Re-Released Films by F.W. Murnau
• The Eye of the Panther: Rilke and the Machine of Cinema
• F.W. Murnau, C.D. Friedrich, and the Conceit of the Absent Spectator