Codruța Morari
Associate Professor of Cinema & Media Studies
Film Theory and Media Aesthetics, Media Ecologies, History of Ideas, French Culture and Intellectual History, Surveillance Studies, Environmental Humanities.
Trained in film theory at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle, I completed a dissertation that focused on the cognitive, affective, and ideological properties of film perception. I went on to write The Bressonians: French Cinema and the Culture of Authorship (2017), a book that revisits the legacy of the so-called politique des auteurs and incorporates previously underappreciated aesthetic, epistemological, and sociological perspectives. In particular, the study ponders the interplay between the singularity of individual filmmakers and the plurality of professional communities, talking about film authors not as solitary geniuses but as working artists. in addressing the key concepts in our understanding of authorship, the book relies on close analyses of exemplary films by Robert Bresson, Jean Eustache, Maurice Pialat, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette. My scholarly work, though to a great extent devoted to film and visual studies, takes its larger impetus from 20th- and 21st-century intellectual history. To date my articles include studies on such topics as art, labor, and the market, Roland Barthes's ambivalent relation to the film medium, Jacques Rancière on the democratic potential of cinephilia, and French film criticism of the early 1960s. I have also written essays on the films of Olivier Assayas, Alain Resnais, Claire Denis, Thomas Bidegain and Valeska Grisebach. My current research focuses on the place of cinema in the public sphere, media ecologies, and the status of film industries in the age of climate change.
In addition to chairing the Cinema and Media Studies Program, I offer classes on such subjects as film theory, mass media in the public sphere, surveillance media, film festival culture, world cinema, and the history and theory of French cinema. In my classroom endeavors I train students to understand the historical and political implications of aesthetic forms, to fathom the shaping power of moments in time for artistic expression, and to appreciate both the historical determinations of theoretical discourses as well as the theoretical ramifications of historical constructions. I also teach cinema courses in French where I aim to enable students to expand their sense of the real and the possible as they partake of a foreign culture.
As a scholar, teacher, and program director, I am committed to fostering an academic environment that stands in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and movements for racial and social justice.
Recent publications:
"Jean Eustache, L'Autorisation de l'intime: Je(ux) d'Auteur dans La Maman et la putain," in La Maman et la putain de Jean Eustache, ed. Arnaud Duprat de Montero, Paris: Éditions du Bord de l'eau, coll. Ciné-focales, 2020
"European Auteurs Revisit the Western. Thomas Bidegain's Les Cowboys (2015) and Valeska Grisebach's Western (2017)" in New German Critique 138, Fall 2019, 11-34
"'Equality Must Be Defended!' Cinephilia and Democracy," in Distributions of the Sensible: Rancière, Between Aesthetics and Politics, eds. Scott Durham and Dilip Gaonkar, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019, 97-118
"Properties of Film Authorship," in The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory, eds. Hunter Vaughan and Tom Conley, London, New York: 2018, 157-172
"Le Cinéma comme festival d'affects: Roland Barthes et le septième art," in Roland Barthes: Création, émotion, jouissance, ed. Maja Zoric Vukusic, preface Eric Marty, Paris: Flammarion/Classiques Garnier, 2017, 147-158
"New Cinema, New Critique: French Film Criticism at the Crossroads, 1960," Film Criticism, Vol. 41, Issue 1, February 2017
"Art, Labor and the Market: Jacques Rivette and Maurice Pialat at Cannes," Contemporary French Civilization, Vol. 41, no. 3-4, 2016, 477-488
Education
- B.A., Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3
- M.A., Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3
- Ph.D., Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3
Current and upcoming courses
Aesthetics of Cinema and Media
CAMS202
Examining cinematic forms and styles, this course retraces film's emergence and development as an art and its relations to other artistic, cultural, technological, and socio-economic practices. Analysis of representative films will help understand cinema's relationship to reality, including its reproduction and construction of the "real," the changing terms of spectatorship, and the ways in which film aesthetics have been employed to build ideology and interrogate it. Understanding form as inextricably bound to content, we will appreciate the aesthetic significance of formal choices and innovations within particular films, directorial oeuvres, periods and movements, from classical Hollywood cinema to European New Waves of the 60s and 70s, to the contemporary cinemas of Asia and Latin America.
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What makes an informed and engaged citizen of media, culture, and society in the second quarter of the 21st century? This course will equip students with crucial skills for navigating contemporary media environments: how to engage in formal and visual analysis across media, how to be discerning consumers of information, and how to think critically about the political and economic systems that structure our heavily mediated lives. Critical terms for the study of media, such as industry, information, infrastructure, interactivity, networks, publics, screens, will be examined through the analysis of various media artifacts from photography, cinema, broadcast TV and digital platforms.
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The humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences are indispensable to understanding the climate crisis. Drawing on perspectives from across the liberal arts, the course instructors will plumb the depths of the climate crisis and imagine the possible ways of responding to it. What can the role of climate in human history reveal about our uncertain future? How do social constructions, including race and gender, shape our understanding of this problem? How have diverse cultures of the world related to nature and climate and how can our own relationships to nature and climate inform our responses? Can the arts help us to reconceive the crisis? How can the sciences help us assess and adapt to our future climate? Can we leverage psychological processes to change individual attitudes toward the environment? By examining such questions, we aim for deeper knowledge, both of the climate crisis and of the power of liberal arts education. (ES 125H and PEAC 125H are cross-listed courses.)