LUX » Events » Screening/Talk » An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea by Erika Balsom — Book Launch

An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea by Erika Balsom — Book Launch

10 November, 2018

– 10 November, 2018

6pm – 9pm

Birkbeck Cinema

An Oceanic Feeling – book launch and screening in collaboration with BIMI. Join us to launch the publication and for a screening of two films, Rebecca Meyers’ Blue Mantle (2010) and Francisco Rodriguez’s Una luna de hierro (2017).

An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea (2018) is an essay by Erika Balsom that surveys the seascape of historical and contemporary filmmaking across genres, complicating the Romantic myth of the ocean as a dark, monstrous void of unknowable depths, populated by alien creatures. Across five themes – the elemental contingencies of water, the fascination of submarine cinematography, representations of littoral labour, approaches to the Middle Passage and illegalized migration, and the materiality of global maritime circulation – An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea drifts idiosyncratically through the history of cinematic representations of the sea, approaching the ocean as a vast and fluid archive traversing nature and culture.

Erika Balsom is a scholar and critic based in London, working on cinema, art, and their intersection. She is a senior lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London and holds a PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. She is the author of Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013), co-editor of Documentary Across Disciplines (2016), and author of After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2016).