Biography
James Lastra specializes in American film, and has published extensively on sound in film, especially as it relates to the unfolding history of modernity and the aesthetics of both high and vernacular modernisms. Other sound interests include the material history of human sensory experience and how it conditions the emergence and normalization of representational technologies. His latest sound research deals with theories of asynchronous sound in film, and with the Wagnerian aesthetics of modern sound design in American film. Lastra has a specific research interest in Surrealism both in Europe and in the United States, silent film comedy, American experimental film, and the films and writing of Luis Buñuel. Like most of the members of Cinema and Media Studies, he approaches the American cinema as part of a global system of cultural production and exchange.
Publications
Teaching
Autumn Quarter 2024
CMST 14400 Film and the Moving Image
CMST 67200 Classical Film Theory
Winter Quarter 2025
CMST 28600 History of International Cinema Part II: Sound Era to 1960
Spring Quarter 2025
CMST 25363 Experimental Cinema
Previous courses taught include: Horror and Beyond (CMST 65500), Issues in Film Sound (CMST 28003/38003), The Camera and Other Creatures (CMST 67103), Sound Studies (CMST 68004), Senior Colloquium (CMST 29800), The Single-Shot Film (CMST 67120), Contemporary Horror (CMST 25503 / 35503), Senses and Technology (CMST 68008), Cinemas of Immersion (CMST 65510), and Surrealism and the American Cinema (CMST 25800)