Dr Alasdair King, BA MA PhD FRSA

Profile

My research is interdisciplinary, drawing on philosophy and film and media (often but not exclusively in a German context). My first monograph was on Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Marxist media theory, see here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/hans-magnus-enzensberger/alasdair-king/9783039109029 and also revisited recently here: https://www.lespressesdureel.com/EN/ouvrage.php?id=8064&menu=0

I'm preparing a monograph on finance capital and contemporary film using a Deleuzian and post-Marxist film-philosophical framework (see my Twitter feed, The Financial Image : https://twitter.com/financialimage?lang=en [Please retain the hyperlink] for an archive of related material). The Financial Image: Finance Capital and Contemporary Film addresses how film engages with systems of finance capital and derivatives, looking at moving images from the mainstream across to more experimental works by filmmakers like Isaac Julien, Melanie Gilligan, Harun Farocki, and Hito Steyerl. I’ve published recently on film and financial time, on film and the financial city, and on documenting financial performativity. I've also written on moving image ethics in Deleuze and in Rancière, and a collaborative essay on art and ‘hacking’ the Bloomberg terminal.

I publish regularly on contemporary cinema, with a number of essays on Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Christoph Hochhäusler and Edgar Reitz. I was a DAAD Visiting Research Fellow at the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main (2015).

I welcome PhD and post-Doc enquiries and collaborative and public engagement work in the areas listed above. I’d be keen to support projects that want to think about the moving image in relation to contemporary political and philosophical questions, especially in the areas of speculation, acceleration and futures, financialization, debt, and neoliberalism

Teaching

• FLM5203 What is Cinema? Critical Approaches
• FLM5025/GER5025 The Divided Screen: German Cinema 1945-82
• FLM302: Contemporary German Cinema
• SMLM035 MA Film Core Course
• FLM6202 Undergraduate Film Research Project
• MA Research Dissertation

Current PhD Supervision

I have supervised six PhDs to successful completion.

Current PhDs:

• Weijia Zeng: Alfred Hitchcock and his Specters (Chinese Scholarship Council funded, 2020-ongoing, co-supervised with Dr Mario Slugan)
• Tim Lindemann: New Rural Cinema – The Landscape of Rural Poverty in Recent American Indie Films, QMUL Principal’s Studentship funded, 2018-ongoing, co-supervised with Dr Guy Westwell)

Research

Research Interests:

• aspects of film philosophy
• political aesthetics
• finance aesthetics
• cinema, space and time
• German cinema

Publications

Books and edited works

• The Financial Image: Finance Capital and Contemporary Film (Palgrave MacMillan: Literature, Culture, and Economics Series, forthcoming, 2021)
• Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Writing, Media, Democracy (Peter Lang AG: Cultural History and the Literary Imagination Series, 2007)

Selected articles and book chapters

• ‘Écritures d'un présent visible. Diffusions et réceptions anglo-saxonnes du Baukasten’ (traduit de l'anglais par Jeremy HAMERS & Céline LETAWE) in Hans Magnus Enzensberger:
• ‘Wenn Die Provinz zweimal klingelt: Christian Petzolds HeimatfilmNoir Jerichow’. Translated into German by Ilka Brombach, in Über Christian Petzold, ed. Ilka Brombach (Verlag Vorwerk 8, 2018).
• ‘Film and financial time’, Archiv für Mediengeschichte, Special issue: Media and financialization, Translated into German by Andrea Stumpf, Winter 2017
• ‘Terminal Value: Building the alternative Bloomberg’, co-written with C. Wood, R. Catlow, and B. Scott, Finance and Society, Special Issue: Finance and Art, 2:2 2016
• ‘Film and the Financial City’, Studies in European Cinema, 14:1, 2016
• ‘Documenting financial performativity: film aesthetics and financial crisis’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 9:6, 2016
• 'Fault Lines: Deleuze, cinema and the ethical landscape', in Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice, and Spectatorship, ed. by Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey (Routledge Advances in Film Studies, 2014)
• 'Still Lives in Transit: Movement and Inertia in Angela Schanelec's Orly (2010), Studies in European Cinema, 11:2, 2014
• 'What the World Needs Now: Rancière, ethology, and Christian Petzold's Toter Mann and Wolfsburg', in Edinburgh German Yearbook 7: Ethical Approaches in Contemporary German Language Literature and Culture, ed. by Emily Jeremiah and Frauke Matthes (Camden House: 2013)
• 'No Place Like Heimat: Mediaspaces and moving landscapes in Edgar Reitz's Heimat 3', in New Directions in German Cinema, ed. by Paul Cooke and Christopher Homewood (I.B. Tauris, 2011)
• 'Heimat 3: Edgar Reitz's Time Machine', in Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria, ed. by Gabriele Mueller and James Skidmore (Wilfried Laurier University Press, 2011)
• 'The Province Always Rings Twice: Christian Petzold's HeimatFilm Noir Jerichow', Transit, 6:1, 2010. Translated into Mandarin, 2014. Translated into German in Christian Petzold, ed. by Ilka Brom-bach (Verlag Vorwerk 8, 2018).
• 'Literatur und Linse: Enzensberger Goes to the Movies', in Transpositions: Literature to Film - Film to Literature, ed. by Hermann Rasche and Christiane Schonfeld (Rodopi, 2007)
• 'Enzensberger's Titanic: The sinking of the German Left and the aesthetics of survival', in The Titanic in Myth and Memory: Representations in Visual and Literary Culture, eds. Tim Bergfelder and Sarah Street (I.B.Tauris, London) pp. 73-83.
• 'Placing Green is the Heath (1951): Spatial politics and emergent West German identity' in Light Motives: German Popular Cinema, ed. by Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy (Wayne State UP, 2003)
• 'Landscape, ideology and national identity in the German cinema: A case study of Die goldene Stadt (1942)' in Deutschland im Spiegel seiner Filme, ed. by Martin Brady and Helen Hughes (CILT, 2000)

Other Publications 

• Translation: TLS/Poem of the Week, 'Short History of the Bourgeoisie' by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Times Literary Supplement, 20 July 2013
• Various Encyclopedia Entries: The Concise CineGraph: Encyclopaedia of German Cinema, ed. by H-J Bock and Tim Bergfelder (Berghahn Books, 2009)
• ‘When Heimat Meets Hollywood. German Filmmakers and America 1985-2005’, Colloquia Germanica, 40:3-4, 2007
• Review Article: `The Ministry of Illusion?', Journal of Area Studies, 13, Autumn 1998
• Review Article: Culture in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945-1995, ed. by Reiner Pommerin (Berg, 1996), in 'Nation, Place and Culture: Issues of Identity in Contemporary Europe', Journal of Area Studies, 10, Spring/Summer 1996
• Translation: 'Geo Milev - The Road to Freedom', babel, Summer 1991
• Translation: `Visit to Ingres', H.M. Enzensberger, Times Literary Supplement, 13-19 July 1990
• Translation: `Short History of the Bourgeoisie', H. M. Enzensberger, Times Literary Supplement, 15-21 June 1990