Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "Marqué par une image: research into the status of the (film)image concerning the paradisms of memory in postdramatic aesthetics" "Christel Stalpaert" "Department of Art, music and theatre sciences" "In this porject the following inquiries will be made: What is the status and the function of film in the construction of collective memory and individual processes of remembering? What do these processes signify in the postdramatic aesthetics of film? And how can we place the work of filmmakers Gustav Deutsch, Aleksandr Solurov and Chris Marker in this complex field of tensions?" "From 'Film is Truth' to 24 Frames: Cinematic 'Revelationism' in Jean-Luc Godard's Late Films and the Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami." "Tom Paulus" "Research Centre for Visual Poetics" "This project aims to further understanding of the aesthetic paradigm at work in the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami and late Jean-Luc Godard. This paradigm – essentially an answer to the question posed by André Bazin of what cinema is – I want to call 'revelationism'. It can be traced back to the 'ontological tradition' in 1950's French film theory. As a new art form grounded in the unique representational properties of the photographic image, Bazin thought cinema capable of revealing reality. The 'semiotic tradition', on the other hand, stressed the mediated nature of the image and criticized Bazin's ontology - and the 'long-take' style that he favoured - for encouraging 'mysticism'. Despite their association with Bazinian aesthetics, the films of Kiarostami and late Godard rely for the better part on Eisensteinian constructivist tactics of 'montage' that question the direct reproducibility of 'reality'. Starting from this apparent discrepancy, my proposal is organized around three central questions: first, how revelationism as a historical paradigm, informs the work of these contemporary filmmakers. Secondly, I will ask which audio-visual strategies and stylistic forms are employed by Kiarostami and Godard to actualise or reexamine these theoretical presuppositions. And third, I will ask in what ways their constructivist approach towards revelationist aesthetics can be seen to constitute a synthesis between 'ontological' and 'semiotic' traditions in film theory." "From 'Film is Truth' to 24 Frames: Cinematic 'Revelationism' in Jean-Luc Godard's Late Films and the Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami." "Tom Paulus" "Research Centre for Visual Poetics" "This project aims to further understanding of the aesthetic paradigm at work in the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami and late Jean-Luc Godard. This paradigm – essentially an answer to the question posed by André Bazin of what cinema is – I want to call 'revelationism'. It can be traced back to the 'ontological tradition' in 1950's French film theory. As a new art form grounded in the unique representational properties of the photographic image, Bazin thought cinema capable of revealing reality. The 'semiotic tradition', on the other hand, stressed the mediated nature of the image and criticized Bazin's ontology - and the 'long-take' style that he favoured - for encouraging 'mysticism'. Despite their association with Bazinian aesthetics, the films of Kiarostami and late Godard rely for the better part on Eisensteinian constructivist tactics of 'montage' that question the direct reproducibility of 'reality'. Starting from this apparent discrepancy, my proposal is organized around three central questions: first, how revelationism as a historical paradigm, informs the work of these contemporary filmmakers. Secondly, I will ask which audio-visual strategies and stylistic forms are employed by Kiarostami and Godard to actualise or reexamine these theoretical presuppositions. And third, I will ask in what ways their constructivist approach towards revelationist aesthetics can be seen to constitute a synthesis between 'ontological' and 'semiotic' traditions in film theory." "Imperial Extractivist Infrastructures: Petrocultural Violence and Resistance in Contemporary Indigenous Literature, Art, and Film" "Pieter Vermeulen" "English Literature, Leuven" "This proposed project, entitled ""Imperial Extractivist Infrastructures"", will offer the first in-depth study of literary and artistic Indigenous (American, Canadian, and Australian) responses to settler-colonial extractivism from three carefully chosen sites; namely the coal and uranium mines in the Navajo Nation (USA), the Athabasca tar sands (Canada), and the Adani Carmichael coal mining site in Queensland (Australia). The impact of fossil fuel extraction has been a key concern in the field of the energy humanities, and this project will break new ground in assessing that impact in the cultural production of demographics directly exposed to extractivist violence. This project aims to document the understudied concomitant contemporary cultural and aesthetic Indigenous responses of trauma and resistance that the violence of extractivism has evoked in Indigenous communities. Through an examination of contemporary Indigenous creative materials, this project will contribute a new critical perspective to crucial conversations of extractivist violence and environmental justice, in order to expand ongoing discussions of extractivism, settler colonialism, and Indigenous rights and futures. This project is original in its exploration of environmental (and thus racial and social) justice, trauma, and resistance as expressed in Indigenous cultural production which addresses petrocultural infrastructural violences." "Expiring rhetoric: expression theory in the Anglo-American academy and its discursive context, 1880s-1920s." "Sascha Bru" "Cultural Studies Research Group, Literary and Cultural Studies Research Unit, Leuven" "This PhD dissertation investigates the relationship between literature and rhetoric in the Anglo-American world in the period between 1900 and 1940. It challenges the critical narrative, engendered in the modernist period itself, about the anti-rhetorical stance of modernist literature and modernist writers. The prevailing account of the modernist movement is that it rebelled against the literary conventions of the past, revolutionized poetic language, and proclaimed the absolute autonomy of the literary artwork. Central to this attitude, it is argued, was the definitive rejection of rhetoric and oratory by modernist writers. Divesting language and literature of the formulas of rhetoric and of its collectively shared codes of expression, they liberated the writer (and the word itself) of the artificial constraints of stylistics, decorum, and diction. However, the present study offers a revision of that narrative by concentrating on the actual state of rhetoric in education and on the nature of oratorical practices in the early twentieth century, as well as on the multifarious engagements of modernist writers with these practices. It ultimately argues that modernist writers conceived their literary work not in opposition to, but in consonance with early twentieth-century rhetoric.        The different chapters in this dissertation scrutinize ways in which modernist writers creatively engaged with various practices of public speaking belonging to different domains of society: education, politics, racial subjectivity, and technological media. For each of these domains, a specific practice or genre is singled out: elocution in education, the mass oration in democratic politics, the sermon in African American racial discourse, and the rhetoric of recorded and broadcast speech in the realm of the new media.        The academic discipline of elocution—the reading aloud of literary texts—prompts a revision of the commonly held view that the emergence of modernist literary criticism (‘Practical’ or ‘New Criticism’) caused the demise of this specific site of synthesis between literature and public speech. An examination of the history of this discipline as well as of its ties to other disciplines such as psychology demonstrates that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century elocution, as exemplified by Samuel Silas  Curry, Solomon Henry Clark, and Elsie Fogerty, had adapted itself to modern needs and tastes. Moreover, modernist writers from the American ‘New Poetry’ movement (Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Amy Lowell) and William Carlos Williams, to Pound, Yeats, and James Joyce all incorporated elocutionary practices into their literary aesthetics and performance practices.        The modes of speech and gesture proper to mass political oratory were obsessively satirized, but thereby also described and aestheticized, by Wyndham Lewis. This style had organically changed when established politicians themselves revised political rhetoric to suit extraparliamentary politics. Although some commentators at the time lamented the demise of deliberative rhetoric, the style had simply adapted itself to the new democratic audience. Sociologists as well as literary writers such as Lewis picked this up and explored the mechanism and the style of mass political oratory.        African American modernist writers likewise incorporated and remodeled in their writings the black sermon as it was being conceived and used as the primary site for emancipatory speech by African Americans. Fusing art with expressions of racial subjectivity, artists of the Harlem Renaissance claimed the sermon and the oral performance style of the black preacher as the distinctly African American contribution to American culture, even though the sermon was of course an old genre of the western rhetorical tradition. It was precisely in the works of modernist poets James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes that the sermon was thus recreated as African American poetry.        The new media of the turn-of-the-century period introduced a new orality that had to be molded into appropriate rhetorical styles from scratch. The phonograph, film, and radio so profoundly altered the perceived relations between voice and body and between speaker and listener—they required in fact new theories of communication—that a vast area of experimentation was opened up for artists and writers. The phonograph recording and silent film both offered the possibility of purity, because they addressed only one sense and thus isolated speech and gesture respectively. As H.D. was attracted to the degree of suggestiveness they allowed, she devised a rhetoric of symbolic, depersonalized speech and gesture, which she tested in her recording by highlighting the non-linguistic means of signification of poetic speech. Of a different nature was T. S. Eliot’s engagement with radio. He tapped into the characteristic aspects of the medium and of the speech style it required when reconsidering his ideas about poetic communication during the 1920s and 1930s.        Rhetoric had thus not “died” by the beginning of the twentieth century, as histories of the classical rhetorical tradition often suggest. Neither did modernist writers deal the final blow to rhetoric, as literary histories tend to argue. It is true that rhetoric had lost its prestige and power as a cultural and educational force in the nineteenth century, but it had not disappeared; it had simply changed. It was no longer an immutable and well-defined body of theories and practices to be handed down from one generation to the next. Practices of public speaking were highly fragmented by the beginning of the twentieth century, but they were still ubiquitous, and they needed to be reaffirmed and renewed every day. Modernist writers participated in the process of constant reassessment and recommunalization." "The Reductive Cinema of Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras (1968-1978): A Comparative Study in Aesthetic Negativity." "Tom Paulus" "Research Centre for Visual Poetics" "This project examines what I will term the 'reductive' cinema of Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras by means of a study into the philosophical, political and artistic connections that marked the work of these multidisciplinary artists. Their experiments with reduction in the sound and image tracks are characterized by a minimization of visual signifiers in combination with an increased reliance on sound, particularly voice-overs, emphasized silences and anti-naturalistic speech. These stylistic traits are matched with elliptical, anti-dramatic narratives and anti-psychological characterization and acting. The anti-capitalist, self-made art of Akerman and Duras privileges autofiction and ascetic, reductive modernism and is a radical aesthetic expression of the anti-institutionalism and anti-authoritarianism of the post 1968 period. The related ways in which the films of Akerman and Duras inhabit what is traditionally called 'minimalism' will allow me to requalify and historically situate this overused term in contemporary film studies. My comparative and genealogical research with emphasis on the catalytic turn in Continental philosophy toward negativity and transcendence, will allow for an analysis of the origin and nature of reduction in the cinema of Akerman and Duras as it relates to conceptions of aesthetic negativity in the art, literature, criticism and philosophy of the period under study." "Remembering the City of Life. The literary memory of the occupation of Fiume (1919-2015)" "Bart van den Bossche" "French, Italian and Spanish Literature, Leuven, Cultural Studies Research Group" "In September 1919 a group of volunteers headed by the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio occupied the town of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) to claim its annexation to Italy. During the occupation, that lasted till December 1920, Fiume became a unique political and artistic labyrinth, attracting all sorts of political activists, as well as many Italian and foreign avant-garde artists. Extensive scholarly attention has been devoted to the political-historical significance of Fiume and to the role of D’Annunzio’s aestheticism in the occupation, yet surprisingly little research has been carried to the large body of literary writings dedicated to the occupation. The aim of this project is to analyze the literary representations of the Fiume occupation from 1919 till the present day, and to relate the literary dimension of accounts on Fiume to broader transformations of the cultural and political memory of Fiume. By an in-depth analysis of a selected corpus of 50 items across different genres and periods (from the years of the occupation till the 21st century), the project will contribute substantially to a greater awareness of the historical significance of the occupation of Fiume, a significance that has hithertho been underestimated if not almost entirely ignored in avant-garde and modernism studies." "The Critical Realist Cinema of Wang Bing: A Comparison with the Films of Chantal Akerman and Jia Zhangke" "Tom Paulus" "California Institute of the Arts, University College Ghent, Research Centre for Visual Poetics" "This project aims to position contemporary Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing at the center of the debate on new forms of realism in film. Wang Bing is celebrated worldwide as the most important documentary filmmaker of the past decade, yet his work has still to receive proper academic study in the West. His style is geared towards a detailed and slow-paced documentation of people living in the margins of Chinese post-socialist society. My aim is double: to explore the critical significance of Wang's cinema at the level of his specific aesthetic choices and, second, to elucidate these core properties within the context of a perceived 'new realist' turn in contemporary art cinema and through comparison with two filmmakers, the first European the second Chinese, Belgian cinéaste Chantal Akerman and Wang's contemporary Jia Zhangke. The degree to which these filmmakers put their faith in the real and attach value to materiality and testimony returns us to Marxist philosopher and literary historian Georg Lukács' theorization of the representation of a 'social totality' as found in 19th century realist novels of Tolstoy and Balzac. In order to understand this turn to the real in contemporary film and in Wang's work in particular, I will reconsider the concept of 'critical realism' as it was originally put forward by Lukács, while at the same time weighing his original insights against the recent writings on politics in film and art by the French Post-Marxist philosopher Jacques Rancière." "The Critical Realist Cinema of Wang Bing: A Comparison with the Films of Chantal Akerman and Jia Zhangke" "Tom Paulus" "Research Centre for Visual Poetics" "This project aims to position contemporary Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing at the center of the debate on new forms of realism in film. Wang Bing is celebrated worldwide as the most important documentary filmmaker of the past decade, yet his work has still to receive proper academic study in the West. His style is geared towards a detailed and slow-paced documentation of people living in the margins of Chinese post-socialist society. My aim is double: to explore the critical significance of Wang's cinema at the level of his specific aesthetic choices and, second, to elucidate these core properties within the context of a perceived 'new realist' turn in contemporary art cinema and through comparison with two filmmakers, the first European the second Chinese, Belgian cinéaste Chantal Akerman and Wang's contemporary Jia Zhangke. The degree to which these filmmakers put their faith in the real and attach value to materiality and testimony returns us to Marxist philosopher and literary historian Georg Lukács' theorization of the representation of a 'social totality' as found in 19th century realist novels of Tolstoy and Balzac. In order to understand this turn to the real in contemporary film and in Wang's work in particular, I will reconsider the concept of 'critical realism' as it was originally put forward by Lukács, while at the same time weighing his original insights against the recent writings on politics in film and art by the French Post-Marxist philosopher Jacques Rancière." "European Experimental Art Documentaries 1940-1960" "Steven Jacobs" "Department of Art, music and theatre sciences" "Dealing with the history of the art documentary, this research project focuses on its “Golden Age,” which can be situated in the 1940s and 1950s in countries such as France, Italy, and Belgium. Before the breakthrough of television, directors such as Luciano Emmer, Alain Resnais, Henri Storck and Paul Haesaerts presented the art documentary as a truly experimental genre that enabled them to combine cinematic experiments with artisticprofundity. On the one hand, the project investigates the aesthetic of the postwar experimental art documentary, which entailed specific forms of narrativization as well as specific cinematic devices such as camera movements, editing, animation techniques, and special effects. As a result, experimental art documentaries developed into a highly self-reflexive genre that enabled directors to investigate the relations between film and the other visual arts by juxtaposing movement versus stasis, narrative versus iconic images, and cinematic space versus pictorial surface. On the other hand, the project will situate these films in a broader cultural and social context. It will investigate its almost completely forgotten institutional background, in particular the FIFA (Fédération International du Film sur l’Art), which was founded in 1948 and involved the participation of leading filmmakers, producers, and museum officials. In addition, the project will analyze the phenomenon of the experimental art documentary in the light of the postwar politics of popularization and vulgarization of the fine arts, which also entailed the breakthrough of the illustrated art book."