Dr Alasdair King, BA MA PhD FRSA
Reader in Film
Email: a.king@qmul.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7882 8311
Room Number: Arts One 2.08
Website: http://qmul.academia.edu/AlasdairKing
Profile
My research is interdisciplinary, drawing on philosophy and film and media (often but not exclusively in a German context) to think about the relationship between aesthetics and critical political economy. My current research looks at the contemporary condition of the moving image, most centrally in the use made by filmmakers of posthuman image generation to address processes and technologies of valuation and extraction.
I’ve been working for some time on the relationship between the contemporary moving image (fiction and non-fiction films, mainstream and experimental) and economics, particularly on images that engage with the contemporary financial regime. This work began with articles on film and the financial city (Studies in European Cinema), on documenting financial performativity (Journal of Cultural Economy), on film and financial time (Archiv für Mediengeschichte), and a collaborative essay on art, activism, and ‘hacking’ the Bloomberg terminal (Finance and Society: Art and Finance Special Issue).
The first stage of this project culminated in my monograph, The Financial Image: Finance, Philosophy, and Contemporary Film, that appeared in the Palgrave Macmillan series, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture, and Economics in December 2023. The book sets out how film has registered systems of finance capital and derivatives, looking at moving images from the mainstream (including studies of Equity, The Wolf of Wall Street, Yella, The City Below, Master of the Universe, The Girl Rosemarie et al.) across to more experimental works by filmmakers like Emma Charles, Melanie Gilligan, Isaac Julien, Harun Farocki, Zachary Formwalt, and Hito Steyerl.
My first monograph, Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Writing, Media, Democracy (Peter Lang, 2007) grew out of my PhD research and considered Enzensberger’s critical essays and cultural production across poems and media outputs in the context of Frankfurt School and Marxist media theory and (West) Germany’s economic and political development in the second half of the twentieth century. I revisited this work recently with a chapter on the Anglophone reception of Enzensberger’s celebrated Constituents of a Theory of the Media essay for Les presses du réel.
I publish regularly on contemporary cinema, with a number of recent essays on Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Christoph Hochhäusler and Edgar Reitz and on moving image ethics in Deleuze and in Rancière. My earliest articles were on German film history and analysed spatial politics in National Socialist cinema and in the Heimatfilm.
I was a DAAD Visiting Research Fellow at the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main (2015).
In 2020 I set up and co-convened CAPITAL FORMS, a postgraduate training programme in the Economic Humanities, funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership.
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 economic, political and philosophical questions, especially in the areas of AI and philosophy of technology, speculation, acceleration and futures, financialization, debt, and global capital generally. I am a member of the Film Philosophy research cluster and the Centre for Film and Ethics at QMUL.
X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/FinancialImage
Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/alasdairking.bsky.social