Name: Augustin
College: Wolfson
Email: ajwjld2@cam.ac.uk
Supervisor: Laura McMahon
Research Topic
The Alchemy of Film: The transformational and combinatorial politics of film’s processual motions.
About Me
Augustin is a French first-year PhD student at the Centre for Film and Screen. They studied for the MPhil in Film and Screen Studies in 2021-2022, writing a dissertation on the politics of processual interaction and combination in Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021), Chris Marker”s Sans Soleil (1983) and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018), graduating with a Distinction. Other essays discussed the politics of Gilles Deleuze’s organic territoriality in William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) through Michel Foucault’s account of power. They also discussed the sensible space of the political scenes of Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006) through Jacques Rancière’s notion of the sharing of the sensible. Finally, they discussed the proximity between Gilles Deleuze’s radical immanence with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “chair” and “entrelacs” through the issues of perception and organic territoriality in Franz Kafka’s The Burrow (1931). They hold a dual BA degree from the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris and the University of British Columbia in Political Theory and Film Studies.
Research
Augustin is currently working on how a processual understanding of film helps to understand how film produces a politics. This approach shifts focus from questions about what a film’s politics are and towards questions of what politics a film enacts, what a film does.
Scholarships/Prizes
Jennings Prize (Wolfson College, 2021-2022)
John Morrison Scholarship (2022-2025)
Teaching
Supervising Undergraduates for SOC2: Social Theory
