arsenjuk@umd.edu
Cinematic evidence: the documentary fictions of the Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi
Luka Arsenjuk's research project consists of two parts. The first part is a short critical genealogy of the idea of evidence in cinema and film theory. When speaking of cinema, evidence becomes a shifty term. On the one hand, it cannot be explained simply by referring to the technological condition of cinematic art. Neither its emergence out of photography, nor the current crisis of its "photographic" status, exhaust fully the striking appearance of what cinema makes evident. On the other hand, one also does not explain cinematic evidence by attempting to stabilize it through a fiction/documentary distinction. The meaning of "cinematic evidence" thus needs to be clarified - as something rather singular - in relation to various generic distinctions (fiction, documentary, experimental, etc.), in the context of its technological conditions (a shift towards new media, digital, and increasingly diverse production and distribution of images), but also with respect to the questions that link the theoretical problem of cinematic evidence to broader problems of aesthetics and politics. The second part of this research project then consists in testing out the results of the first part in a discussion of the "documentary fictions" of the Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi.
Luka Arsenjuk received his B. A. in Cultural Studies from the School of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana. He is currently a Ph. D. candidate in the Program in Literature at Duke University in North Carolina (USA), writing a dissertation on political cinema. He is also co-editor of the 2009 issue of "Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics", dedicated to the figure of the student, multiple forms of study, and political implications of pedagogy within and outside contemporary universities.
Publications (among others): with Michelle Koerner, Eisenstein's Laughter, in: KINO, 7; (Ed.), Study, Students, Universities (Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics, 21) [estimated publication date 2009]; How To Film Marx's Capital: On Alexander Kluge's New Film, in: Ekran, 34, February-March 2009; Eisenstein's Idea of Intellectual Cinema, in: KINO, 5/6, Fall 2008; A Configuration of Political Cinema, in: Ekran, 32, February-March 2007; On Jacques Rancière, in: Eurozine, 2007-03-01, www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-03-01-arsenjuk-en.html.