Lina Jurdeczka

I recently completed my PhD in Film Studies at King’s College London. My research proposes a rethinking of cinephilia from a personal attachment to film to a mode of thinking about the politics of time. I have presented my work at numerous conferences, such as Film-Philosophy and BAFTSS. I hold an MA in Film Studies from King’s College London, as well as a BA in North American Studies and Theatre Studies from Ludwig Maximilian University Munich.

My PhD project ‘Cinephilia and the Politics of Time’ was funded by AHRC/LAHP and supervised by Dr. Belén Vidal. In this thesis, I propose a rethinking of cinephilia from a personal attachment to film and position it instead as a theoretical mode of engaging with history. Concentrating on cinephilia’s intrinsic displacements in time, I explore how the engagement with cinema can function as a form of temporal resistance that challenges the hegemony of linear history. My work focusses on self-reflexive recourses to the cinematic past and investigates how these returns can disrupt perceptions of past, present and future as a linear continuum. Considering films by Christian Petzold, Paweł Pawlikowski, Leos Carax, Garrett Bradley and Sarah Polley, I conceptualise cinephilia as an aesthetic and political strategy capable of laying bare temporal tensions and contested memories.