Narrative

Siobhan Craig's book project, "Cinema After Fascism" focuses on the political, aesthetic and theoretical re-visioning of film as medium in the aftermath of Fascism. It explores the new cinematic languages that emerge from the rubble, both literal and symbolic, of the European cities after 1945. The specter of Fascism haunts European cinema after the war; filmmakers confront the legacies of fascist cinema in complex, ambivalent and highly coded ways. Preexisting structures of subjectivity, the boundaries of identity, sexuality, nationality and historiography, have collapsed with the Fascist regimes that sustained them. "Cinema After Fascism"examines the intersections between the rubble on the screen and the rubble of cinematic representation itself as postwar directors engage with the fascist past of their medium, arguing that attempts to reconfigure the idioms of cinema, ranging from the Neorealism of Rossellini to Fassbinder's "neo-melodramas," remain highly precarious. Professor Craig is working on a second book, "Ecce Homo: the Body of Cinema." She has been a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, and was awarded a single semester research leave, a McKnight Summer Fellowship and a Faculty Summer Research Fellowship. She recently received the Ruth Christie Distinguished Teaching Award in English.