Research

Research at the Department of Film Studies encompasses a broad range of themes pertaining to film and its contexts of reception. Aesthetical, historical, and theoretical issues are explored from a liberal arts/cultural studies perspective. Individual and collaborative research projects fall into three general areas, which inevitably overlap:

Film history (including historiography) and film theory (including the history of theory):

• basic research in film history, film theory, and conceptual history
• the historiography of film and the history of discourses on film 
• the history of film exhibition and reception in a variety of contexts

Aesthetics and technologies

• visual, narrative, and pragmatic aspects of film and its reception, from cinema to recent media platforms
• film in the context of other arts, popular media, and gender discourses
• genres of fiction, documentary, experimental, and non-theatrical film

National heritage and transnational circulation

• cinematic heritage, especially in Switzerland
• material, technical, and economic aspects of film, cinema, and recent mobile contexts of reception
• problems of film digitization, presentation, and archiving

Thematic priorities are set through the launch of or participation in larger research projects. At present, key research areas are:

• Film Reception and the Public and The Diffusion of Cinematic Images and Imagery, examined in the context of the ProDoc program Discourses and Practices of Cinema and the Audiovisual (2009–2014), a joint project with the University of Lausanne. To renew this cooperation, the SUC program Film, Photography, and Other Visual Media was launched in 2013.
• Dynamics of Cinematic Display as part of the NCCR Mediality: Historical Perspectives, an interdisciplinary project at UZH’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
• Early Cinema, which includes a cooperation with the Universities of Utrecht (Netherlands) and Trier (Germany) within the framework of the Early Cinema Colloquium.