Cinema, Aviation and the Aerial Subject

The MA in Film Studies offered by the Faculty of Arts, University of Malta announces the public talk, Adrenaline Views: Cinema, Aviation and the Aerial Subject by Prof. Jeffrey Geiger on Wednesday, 3 May in Lecture Centre 119 at the University of Malta, Msida Campus at 5pm.

Prof. Geiger will draw on film footage ranging from aerial cinematography of the 1910s-1940s (when aerial photography and film were aligning with other “globalizing” experiences and technologies), to Second World War films such as The Memphis Belle (William Wyler, 1944), moving ahead to Maverick missile POV and Predator drones, aerial surveillance and recent aerial combat imagery.

Considering the constantly changing relationship between cinema and aviation, the talk contests accounts of aerial views as always indicating, as one critic put it, an “imperious and transcendent modern subjectivity”. Instead, aerial cinema might be characterised in both graphic and haptic terms: at the same time both visual and embodied experience.

Jeffrey Geiger is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Essex, where he founded the Centre for Film and Screen Media. He gained a Ph.D. from the University of California Los Angeles and his books include Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the US Imperial Imagination (2007), American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation (2011), the co-edited Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (expanded edition 2013) and Cinematicity in Media History (2013).

His research, ranging from studies of documentary to issues of globalisation and environment in moving images, has appeared in many collections and journals such as New Formations, Third Text, African American Review, Film International, Cinema Journal and PMLA.

The public is cordially invited to the event. Information on the MA in Film Studies, which is sponsored by the Ministry for Tourism and the Malta Film Commission, can be accessed on http://www.um.edu.mt/arts/ove rview/PMAFLMPET5-2017-8-O