Codruţa Morari

Trained as a film theorist and intellectual historian, I wrote a dissertation on film metaphors entitled "The Topographical Mind". The concept of "metaphor" is used to examine the relationship between film medium and the cognitive, affective and ideological basis of film perception. The book above all aims to remap discourses in film theory. My second book, "The Melancholy of Knowing: the legacy of authorship in French cinema", is about the political significance of film authorship and cinephilia, in the context of intellectual history. The excellence and singularity of the artist were established in discourses that arouse after the French Revolution, and remained dominant in film theory, despite the challenges brought by the technological evolution of film medium. My project argues that the emphatic canonization of film authors along with its cinephilic movements are driven by an intellectual obsession with, indeed a melancholy for an absolute source of knowledge.

I teach classes in the history and theory of French cinema. My main concern is to train students to read filmic forms in relationship with the historical context that produced them, whether we explore cinema's place in the formation of modernity, filmic articulations of desire, or the history of political cinema. I also teach French language courses that beyond the linguistic part of the process, encourage students to articulate their experience in a new language.

Although my current project is in French film history, it is informed my a long standing interest in film phenomenology and aesthetics, as well as history of ideas. My intellectual work is above all inspired by the Ernst Cassirer and his "Philosophy of Symbolic Forms", and owes many of the questions to the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière.