Brian Price
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E-mail:
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Phone:
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Room:CCT 3024
Undergraduate Appointment: Department of Visual Studies (UTM)
Graduate Appointment: Cinema Studies Institute (St. George)
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
Broadly construed, I work on the philosophy of moving image media. I am interested in the aesthetic dimension of moral and political philosophy, especially as the questions that emerge there address the problems and possibilities of mediation and are expanded by moving image media, avant-garde and popular. In recent years, I have been exploring the various ways in which a more complicated conception of morality, one that is unbeholden to first principles and external forms of judgment, is necessary to the development and practice of a politics that dispenses, in turn, with conviction and absolutes. I am the author of two books, A Theory of Regret (Duke, 2017) and Neither God nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics (Minnesota, 2011), and co-editor of two anthologies, On Michael Haneke (Wayne State University, 2010) and Color, the Film Reader (Routledge, 2006). Currently, I am finishing a book on the French film director, Olivier Assayas, Assayas and Political Seriousness. Along with John David Rhodes and Meghan Sutherland, I am a founding co-editor of World Picture. I am also the editor of book series devoted to film philosophy for Northwestern University Press, Superimpositions: Philosophy and the Moving Image.
Courses Taught
- Undergraduate
- CIN203H5 The Films of Alfred Hitchcock
- CIN204H5 The Films of Martin Scorsese
- CIN303H5 Global Auteurs
- CIN306H5 The Comedic Image
- CIN307H5 Movement
- CIN401H5 Film Noir and the Problem of Style
- CIN401H5 Colour
- CIN402H5 Avant-Garde Film and Video
- Graduate
- Adorno and Media Theory
- Contemporary Political Philosophy and the Moving Image
- The Image of Equality: Jacques Rancière’s Film Philosophy
- Cinema and Moral Perfectionism: Stanley Cavell
- Colour and the Moving Image
- The Thought if Film: Cinema and Mind
Teaching
My teaching interests are significantly varied, and yet are bound together by a commitment to understanding—in ways that are as varied as they are unpredictable—how moving image media, and art more broadly, contributes to the enrichment of our lives, personally and socially. Typically, I am less concerned to describe the essence of an image and the technical specificity of image-making technologies than I am in inquiring, with others, about what it means to be-with-images. I teach courses on film and philosophy, color, international cinema (both popular and avant-garde), movement, comedy, emotion, and aesthetic autonomy.
Publications
A Theory of Regret (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017)
Neither God Nor Master: Robert Bresson & Radical Politics (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).
Selected Essays
“The Displacement Project,” Discourse, 2016, 38:2, 235-245.
“Eternally Early,” in New Silent Cinema, eds. Katherine Groo and Paul Flaig (New York: Routledge, 2015).
“The Steady Unsteadiness of Theory: On D.N. Rodowick’s Elegy for Theory,” New Review of Film and Television, October 2014, 12 (4): 463-480.
“What Persists in Iconoclasm,” The Third Rail, Issue 2 (Spring 2014): Download PDF.
“Aesthetic Inequality and Political Seriousness,” World Picture 9 (Summer 2014:
http://worldpicturejournal.com/WP_9/Price.html
“Concept,” in Encyclopedia of Film Theory, eds. Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 104-111.
“Specificity, Medium I,” in Encyclopedia of Film Theory, eds. Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 436-446.
“The Green Screen (Slightly Toxic)” in Apologies: Stephen G. Rhodes, ed. Raphael Gygax (Zurich: Migros Museum and JRP/Rangier Books, 2013), 43-54.
“Color, Melodrama, and the Problem of Interiority,” Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder,
ed. Brigitte Peucker (London: Blackwell, 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.
“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.