James Cahill

Assistant Professor
Cinema Studies Institute and Department of French

Office: Room 323, Innis College
Phone: 416-978-6883
Email: james.cahill@utoronto.ca

 

Research and Teaching:

James Leo Cahill’s research focuses on early French cinema, documentary and experimental media, and critical theory, with a special interest in the relationships between scientific uses of cinema, cinematic uses of science, and film pedagogy. These fields converged in his 2010 dissertation on the interwar work of the French scientific filmmaker and para-surrealist Jean Painlevé, which he is presently revising as a monograph. He is also a co-editor of Discourse: Journal of Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture.

Professor Cahill teaches French Cinema, Film Cultures (on the history and theory of international cinema), and Animals and Cinema. At the graduate level he teaches seminars on Surrealism and Cinema and Theories and Practices of Cinema. 

 

Select Publications:

"Anthropomorphism and its Vicissitudes: Reflections on Homme-sick Cinema,” in Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human, eds. Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway (Oxford: Berghahn Books, Forthcoming).

“授レツスン業 を忘れること,” trans. Harumi Osaki, Ecce 3 (2012): 2-36. To be published in English as “Forgetting Lessons: Jean Painlevé’s Gay Science,” Journal of Visual Culture: “Science and Documentary,” eds. Oliver Gaycken and Joshua Malitsky (Forthcoming).  

“Hors d’œuvre: Science, the Short Film, and The Perception of Life,” Framework: “Things Fall Apart: Peter Whitehead,” eds. Paul Cronin, James Riley, and Drake Stutesman (2011): 66-82.

“How It Feels To Be Run Over: Early Film Accidents,” Discourse, 30.3: Special Issue: “Cinema and Accident” (Fall 2008): 289-316.

 “Substance Abuse, or, on the essence of cinema,” in The Prisoner’s Cinema, ed. Melvin Moti (Rotterdam, 2008), 4-35.

“Anacinema: Peter Tscherkassky’s Cinematic Breakdowns (Towards the Unspeakable Film),” Spectator, 28.2 (Fall 2008): 90-101.

“… and afterwards? Martin Arnold’s Phantom Cinema,” Spectator: Special Issue: “Deaths of Cinema,” 27 (Supplement: Summer 2007): 19-25.

“The Cineseizure,” in Martin Arnold: The Cineseizure (Vienna: Index; Paris: Re/Voir, 2006), 2-10.