e-Guest Lecture: Temenuga Trifonova

The New European Cinema of Precarity

Temenuga Trifonova, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at York University, is fellow-in-residence at CY AS invited by laboratory HERITAGES.

‘Precarity’ and ‘the precariat’ have become two of the buzz words in studies of neoliberalism’s restructuring of the global economy and of the human sensorium. The transformation of work and work relations under neoliberalism, and its central role in the construction of personal and collective identity, is one of the main preoccupations of the new European cinema of precarity. After providing a general overview of some of the most important issues in current debates on neoliberalism, focusing on the definition of neoliberalism, critiques of neoliberalism, possible paths of resistance to it, and the rethinking of traditional notions of ‘class’ and ‘work’, I will briefly identify a few of the characteristics of the new European cinema of precarity and some of its most important historical precursors, before analyzing in detail a number of French films as different cinematic moments in the historical arc of neoliberalism.

Bio :

Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at York University. She is the author of the monographs The Figure of theMigrant in Contemporary European Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2020), Warped Minds: Cinemaand Psychopathology (Amsterdam University Press, 2014) and The Image in French Philosophy (Rodopi, 2007), the edited volumes Screening the Art World (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming in 2022), Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime (Routledge, 2018) and EuropeanFilm Theory (Routledge, 2008), and the novels Tourist (2018) and Rewrite (2014).

Day: 18 January 2022 from 12:30 to 14:0

The video is online on CY AS YouTube channel.