Brian Price
Associate Professor of Cinema Studies
Undergraduate Appointment: Department of Visual Studies (UTM)
Graduate Appointment: Cinema Studies Institute (St. George)
Contact
brian.price@utoronto.ca
905-828-3757
CCT 3024, UTM
Education
PhD, New York University, Cinema Studies, 2003
MA, New York University, Cinema Studies, 1996
BA, University of Maryland at College Park, English, 1994
Biography
My work, as both a scholar and a teacher, is largely concerned with ontological questions—not how images come into being, as is more common in film studies, but how our being, individually and collectively (who we are, what we think, what we can thus do together) is constituted by images. While my work is informed by continental philosophy and traditions of critical theory that have been critical of vision and representation, my work tends to privilege the emancipatory potential of images insofar as they present us with ways—whether as an idea or as a material site—of being together. The themes of my teaching and research include various aspects of film style, colour, friendship, globalization, the problems of epistemology, the burden of metaphysics, as well as avant-garde film and video practices.
Current Research Projects
I am currently at work on two book projects. The first, Cinema and the General Idea: Metaphysics, Morality, and the Tradition of Film, involves a critique of the moral and metaphysical suppositions of film theory from the classical era to the present. The second book, Olivier Assayas and the Labor of Friendship, is a broad theory of globalization as a promise and problem of labour in and as friendship, which I am developing in relation to a close reading of the films of Olivier Assayas and the late work of Jacques Derrida.
Courses Taught
Undergraduate
CIN 303 Global Auteurs: Assayas, Hou, Haneke
CIN 306 The Comedic Image
CIN 401 Topics in Cinema Studies: Film Noir and the Problem of Style
CIN 401 Topics in Cinema Studies: Crime and Cinema
Graduate
CIN 1005 Special Studies in Cinema: Colour and the Moving Image
CIN 1005 Special Studies in Cinema: The Thought of Film: Cinema and the Mind
Select Publications
Books
Neither God Nor Master: Robert Bresson and the Modalities of Revolt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
Co-editor, with John David Rhodes, On Michael Haneke (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010).
Co-editor, with Angela Dalle Vacche, of Color, The Film Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 2006).
Essays
“A Theory of Regret,” World Picture 6 (Winter 2011).
“Color, Melodrama, and the Problem of Interiority,” Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed. Brigitte Peucker (London: Blackwell, forthcoming, Spring 2012): 159-180.
“Moving through Images,” in The Place of the Moving Image, eds. John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011): 299-316.
“Bureaucracy and Visual Style,” Michael Haneke, ed. Roy Grundmann (London: Blackwell, 2010): 301-320.
“Art/Cinema and Cosmopolitanism Today,” in Global Art Cinema, eds. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010): 109-124.
“Pain and the Limits of Representation,” expanded and reprinted in On Michael Haneke, eds. Brian Price and John David Rhodes (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010): 35-50.
“Heidegger and Cinema,” in European Film Theory, ed. Temenuga Trifonova (New York and London: Routledge, 2008): 108-121.
“The Latest Laocoon: Medium Specificity and the History of Film Theory,” in Handbook of Film and Media Studies, ed. Robert Phillip Kolker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008): 38-82.
“Color, the Formless, and Cinematic Eros,” reprinted in Color, the Film Reader, eds. Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (London and New York: Routledge, 2006): 76-87.
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