Name: Augustin
College: Wolfson
Email: ajwjld2@cam.ac.uk
Supervisor: Laura McMahon
Research Topic: The Alchemy of Film: The Transmutation Politics of Film’s Processual Motions.
About: Augustin is a PhD student in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge. They received an MPhil in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge with Distinction. They hold a dual BA from The Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris and the University of British Columbia in Political Theory and Film Studies.
Research: Augustin’s work examines how a processual understanding of film thought reveals the production of a film politics. They draw from medieval Shaivist alchemical thought and its contemporary resurgence through Indian theories on dance and affect, to investigate decolonization, revolution, and political intervention in general. This inquiry moves with Jacques Rancière against the depoliticized redemptive discourses of the ethical turn and the metaphorization of political action as identified by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. Shifting focus from questions about what a film’s politics are and towards questions of what politics a film produces, Augustin turns towards transmutations developed through the material conflicts that films embody. These transmutations are understood from their place of occurrence in vehicles, stages and dance as political technologies in films like Lost Highway (1997), Vanaprastham (1999), Taxi (2015), Western (2017), Devdas (2002), among others.
Their other research engages the politics of processual interaction in Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021), Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018). They have explored the politics of Gilles Deleuze’s organic territoriality through Michel Foucault’s account of power in William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980). They have investigated sensible space in the political scenes of Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006) through Jacques Rancière’s notion of the sharing of the sensible. They have also written on the proximity between Gilles Deleuze’s radical immanence with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “chair” and “entrelacs” through issues of perception and organic territoriality in Franz Kafka’s The Burrow.
Selected Scholarships/Prizes:
Jennings Prize (Wolfson College, 2021-2022)
John Morrison Scholarship (2022-2025)
Selected Publications:
Book review in “Film-Philosophy” for Eugenie Brinkema’s Life Destroying Diagrams.
Book Review in “Alphaville” for Chelsea Birks’ Limit Cinema: Transgression and the Nonhuman in Contemporary Global Film.
Teaching/Research:
CS7: Cinema and the Political
SOC2: Social Theory
Convenor of the Cross-Faculty Research Seminar: Palestine Cultural Series
Filmmaking:
Director: Good Grief (2023), Nocturne (2023), Amare (Live Session) (2023),
Fin Heureuse (2020), Reaction (2017).
Director of Photography: Thesis Submission (2022).
Producer: Zaza (2019), Brother Mary (2019).
