Dr Libby Saxton, BA, MPhil, PhD

Profile

My research focuses on connections between film, photography and philosophies of images and ethics. I am particularly interested in ethical questions posed by treatments of political violence. I work mainly on cinema and theory from the Second World War to the present, paying special attention to Francophone material, some of which has not been translated into English and has received little attention in Anglophone scholarship.

I have discussed cinema and the Holocaust in my 2008 monograph Haunted Images and a series of essays, several on films linking memories of concentrationary and colonial systems of domination. A concern with appropriate forms for remembering and bearing witness connects these publications to my co-authored 2010 book with Lisa Downing (Birmingham), Film and Ethics.

Not only political violence but also protest are key subjects of my 2020 study of iconicity, No Power Without an Image, which examines intimate and vital exchanges between photography and film. This was one of the publications that evolved out of a project with Guy Westwell and Jeremy Hicks (both QMUL) on iconic camera images. I consider these further in an article on belief and power in cinema which draws on the philosophy of Marie-José Mondzain.

My most recent essays explore the figuration of the human and what the writer Jean Cayrol calls its ‘disfigurement’ in various films including a strand of documentary, a horror film – Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1960) – and its afterlives, and a compilation of colourised photographs and footage. I am currently writing a book on the entangled histories of iconic camera images, humanism and environmentalism. Interactions between still and moving images will also be central to a planned future project on women photographers in twenty-first-century literature and film.

My work benefits from discussion with other researchers in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film and beyond, as well as QMUL students at all levels, at the regular and eclectic events of the Centre for Film and Ethics, which I have jointly and individually led since 2019. One of the Centre’s aims is to support collaboration between its members and diverse academic and non-academic partners. Relatedly, I have also enjoyed contributing to public events run by organisations including the Ciné-Lumière at the French Institute, the Goethe Institute, Belfast Exposed Photography Gallery, the Jewish Film Festival and the Open City Documentary Festival, and speaking on the radio show Suite (212).

Teaching

FLM5203 What is Cinema? Critical Approaches

FLM5221 Screening Memory: Cinematic Witnessing, Trauma and Traces of Violence

FLM6207 Film and Ethics

FLM6202 Film Studies Research Project

FLM7210 MA Film Studies Core Course

SMLM005 and FLM7200 MA Dissertation and Final Project

Research

Research Interests:

• the philosophy of film and images
• cinematic ethics
• film and photography
• images of political violence (especially the Holocaust and concentrationary terror) and protest
• memory and witnessing
• iconicity
• figuring the human and inhuman

Publications

Books

• No Power Without an Image: Icons Between Photography and Film(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020)
• Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium, co-ed. with Axel Bangert and Robert S. C. Gordon (Oxford: Legenda, 2013)
• Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters, co-authored with Lisa Downing (London; New York: Routledge, 2010)
• Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust(London: Wallflower, 2008)
• Seeing Things: Vision, Perception and Interpretation in French Studies, co-ed. with Simon Kemp (London, Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2002)

Journal Special Issue

• ‘Religion in Contemporary Thought and Film’, co-ed. with Anat Pick, Paragraph, 42: 3 (November 2019). Every year the Paragraph editorial board chooses to publish one of its Special Issues as a stand-alone Edinburgh University Press book; our SI was selected as the book for 2019.

Selected Journal Articles and Book Chapters

• ‘A Crowd in Every Face: Distrust, Disfigurement and Documentary Images’, in Witnessing in Art: Documentary Literature, Film and Theatre in Eastern Europe and the Baltics, ed. Johanna Lindbladh and Anja Tippner (Budapest: Central European University Press, forthcoming)
• ‘Make Believe: Marie-José Mondzain and Cinema’s Christian Economy’, Paragraph, 42: 3 (November 2019), 301–15
• ‘The Falling Soldier and Film’, Screen, 57: 3 (2016), 353–61, in dossier on iconic images with introduction co-authored with Jeremy Hicks and Guy Westwell
• ‘Passion, Agamben and the Gestures of Work’, in Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image, ed. Henrik Gustafsson and Asbjørn Grønstad (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), pp. 55–70
• ‘Between God and the Machine: Buñuel’s Cine-Miracles’, in A Companion to Luis Buñuel, ed. Rob Stone and Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 414–30
• ‘Terms of Engagement: Algeria, France and the Middle East in Barbet Schroeder’s L’Avocat de la terreurand Philippe Faucon’s Dans la vie’, Modern and Contemporary France, special issue ‘France and Algeria in Contemporary Visual Culture’, ed. Joseph McGonagle and Edward Welch, 19: 2 (May 2011), 209–22
• ‘Night and Fogand the Concentrationary Gaze’, in Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s ‘Night and Fog’, ed. Maxim Silverman and Griselda Pollock (Oxford; New York: Berghahn, 2011), pp. 140–51 (winner of 2011 Kraszna-Krausz Prize for the best book on the moving image)
• ‘Holocaust Writing and Film’, in Cambridge History of French Literature, ed. William Burgwinkle, Nicholas Hammond and Emma Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 671–9
• ‘Horror By Analogy: Paradigmatic Aesthetics in Nicolas Klotz’s and Elisabeth Perceval’s La Question humaine’, Yale French Studies, special issue ‘Noeuds de mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture’, ed. Michael Rothberg, Debarati Sanyal and Max Silverman, 118/119 (2010), 209–24
• ‘Close Encounters with Distant Suffering: Michael Haneke’s Disarming Visions’, in Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon: Five Directors, ed. Kate Ince (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), pp. 84–111
• ‘History, Memory, Fiction in French Cinema’, in Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film, ed. Robert Eaglestone and Barry Langford (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 102–13
• ‘Fragile Faces: Levinas and Lanzmann’, Film-Philosophy, special issue ‘The Occluded Relation: Levinas and Cinema’, ed. Sarah Cooper, 11: 2 (August 2007), 1–14
• ‘Secrets and Revelations: Off-screen Space in Michael Haneke’s Caché’, Studies in French Cinema, 7: i (January 2007), 5–17
• ‘Anamnesis and Bearing Witness’, in For Ever Godard: The Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1950–2000, ed. Michael Temple, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt (London: Black Dog, 2004), pp. 364–79
• ‘Through the Spy-Hole’, in Exposure: Revealing Bodies,Unveiling Representations,ed. Kathryn Banks and Joe Harris (London, Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2004), pp. 143–55
• ‘Anamnésis: Godard/Lanzmann’, Trafic: revue de cinéma, 47 (Autumn 2003), 48–66
• ‘The Forbidden Real of French Filmic Testimony’, in Reading and Writing the Forbidden: Essays in French Studies, ed. Helen Roberts, Hugh Roberts and Bénédicte Facques (Reading: 2001 Group, 2003), pp. 91–102
• ‘Surrendering Possession? Images and Ethics after Auschwitz’, in Possessions: Essays in French Literature, Cinema and Theory, ed. Julia Horn and Lynsey Russell-Watts (London, Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2003), pp. 199–215

Selected Journal Articles and Book Chapters

· ‘Make Believe: Marie-José Mondzain and Cinema’s Christian Economy’, Paragraph, 42: 3 (November 2019), 301–15

· ‘The Falling Soldier and Film’, Screen, 57: 3 (2016), 353–61, in dossier on iconic images with introduction co-authored with Jeremy Hicks and Guy Westwell

· ‘Passion, Agamben and the Gestures of Work’, in Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image, ed. Henrik Gustafsson and Asbjørn Grønstad (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), pp. 55–70

· ‘Between God and the Machine: Buñuel’s Cine-Miracles’, in A Companion to Luis Buñuel, ed. Rob Stone and Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 414–30

· ‘Terms of Engagement: Algeria, France and the Middle East in Barbet Schroeder’s L’Avocat de la terreur and Philippe Faucon’s Dans la vie’, Modern and Contemporary France, special issue ‘France and Algeria in Contemporary Visual Culture’, ed. Joseph McGonagle and Edward Welch, 19: 2 (May 2011), 209–22

· ‘Night and Fog and the Concentrationary Gaze’, in Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s ‘Night and Fog’, ed. Maxim Silverman and Griselda Pollock (Oxford; New York: Berghahn, 2011), pp. 140–51 (winner of 2011 Kraszna-Krausz Prize for the best book on the moving image)

· ‘Holocaust Writing and Film’, in Cambridge History of French Literature, ed. William Burgwinkle, Nicholas Hammond and Emma Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 671–9

· ‘Horror By Analogy: Paradigmatic Aesthetics in Nicolas Klotz’s and Elisabeth Perceval’s La Question humaine’, Yale French Studies, special issue ‘Noeuds de mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture’, ed. Michael Rothberg, Debarati Sanyal and Max Silverman, 118/119 (2010), 209–24

· ‘Close Encounters with Distant Suffering: Michael Haneke’s Disarming Visions’, in Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon: Five Directors, ed. Kate Ince (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), pp. 84–111

· ‘History, Memory, Fiction in French Cinema’, in Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film, ed. Robert Eaglestone and Barry Langford (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 102–13

· ‘Fragile Faces: Levinas and Lanzmann’, Film-Philosophy, special issue ‘The Occluded Relation: Levinas and Cinema’, ed. Sarah Cooper, 11: 2 (August 2007), 1–14

· ‘Secrets and Revelations: Off-screen Space in Michael Haneke’s Caché’, Studies in French Cinema, 7: i (January 2007), 5–17

· ‘Anamnesis and Bearing Witness’, in For Ever Godard: The Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1950–2000, ed. Michael Temple, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt (London: Black Dog, 2004), pp. 364–79

· ‘Through the Spy-Hole’, in Exposure: Revealing Bodies, Unveiling Representations, ed. Kathryn Banks and Joe Harris (London, Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2004), pp. 143–55

· ‘Anamnésis: Godard/Lanzmann’, Trafic: revue de cinéma, 47 (Autumn 2003), 48–66

· ‘The Forbidden Real of French Filmic Testimony’, in Reading and Writing the Forbidden: Essays in French Studies, ed. Helen Roberts, Hugh Roberts and Bénédicte Facques (Reading: 2001 Group, 2003), pp. 91–102

· ‘Surrendering Possession? Images and Ethics after Auschwitz’, in Possessions: Essays in French Literature, Cinema and Theory, ed. Julia Horn and Lynsey Russell-Watts (London, Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2003), pp. 199–215

Supervision

Students Supervised to Completion

·

• Chris Dymond, ‘Contemporary Experimental Cinema and Non-anthropocentrism’ (second supervisor)
• Alice Pember, ‘“In Her Hips are Revolutions”: The Dancing Girl in Cinema’ (second supervisor)
• Isabel Rocamora, ‘Cinema and Heidegger: The Call to Being in Ozu, Antonioni, Tarr’. Passed 2019 (co-supervisor)
• Oliver Kenny, ‘Ethics and Politics in New Extreme Films’. Passed 2018 (first supervisor)
• Victoria Walden, ‘Beyond the Unrepresentable: Haptic Encounters with Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Cinema’. Passed 2017 (first supervisor)
• Jacqueline Stirling, ‘The Spanish Film Adaptation of Golden Age Drama from Francoist Autarky to Alliance with the USA, 1946-1954’. Passed 2017 (second supervisor)
• Marios Psaras, ‘Family, Nation and the Medium under Attack: Queer Time and Space in Contemporary Greek Cinema’. Passed 2015 (second supervisor)
• Alex Lichtenfels, ‘Ethic of Film: Viewing, Criticism and Performance’. Passed 2012 (first supervisor)

Current Students

• Archie Wolfman, ‘Travelling Memory and Sound Design in Contemporary Holocaust Cinema’ (first supervisor)

Srikrupa Raghunathan, ‘My Body Feels With Me: Exploring Trauma in Women Through Lived Bodily Experiences Using Participatory Filmmaking’ (second supervisor)