The Department of Cinema and Media Studies Presents, as Part of the Marva West Tan Lecture Series:
“Cinematic Atmospheres, Mediation and Experience”
Inga Pollmann
Associate Professor
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
February 6, 2025 | 4:00 pm | Cobb 307
Reception to follow in Cobb 310
About the Lecture
Aesthetic atmospheres are forms of knowing and feeling that are as irrefutable and powerful as they are intangible and nonverbal. How can something as enveloping as an aesthetic atmosphere allow for the distance or rupture necessary for critique? Or does the pervasiveness of engineered atmospheres necessitate new forms of critique? By drawing on examples from wildlife photography, classical film theory, and melodrama, this talk seeks to develop a framework for situating cinematic atmospheres in the triangulation of mood, milieu, and mediation in order to grasp their affective, environmental and mediated dimensions and understand them as multiple and uneven.
About the Speaker
Inga Pollmann is Associate Professor in Film, German and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her work, she situates film and media theory within larger questions concerning aesthetics, philosophy and theories of science. In addition to her monograph Cinematic Vitalism: Film Theory and the Question of Life (Amsterdam UP, 2018), she has published on contemporary German cinema, early hunting films, melodrama, etc. Her current book project Mood, Medium, Milieu: Environmental Film Aesthetics draws on films, artworks, and media objects to map out a critical environmental aesthetic at the intersection of atmospheres, affections, ecology, and mediation.