Studium Generale Day 3

Erika Balsom: “Fluid Labours”

The films of Fluid Labours conceive of the sea not as an empty space but as an inhabited realm that is a site of work, contingency and relationality, as well as a place of fraught encounter between the human and other-than-human. Beginning in 1895, at the birth of cinema, and extending into the present, this selection explores how nonfiction filmmakers have mobilised diverse strategies to represent the myriad forms of labour that take place on the water. They bear many messages – messages of fantasy and necessity, exploit and exploitation, tradition and modernity, life and death.

Films and/or introductions by: Louis Lumière, Noriaki Tsuchimoto, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Rebecca Meyers, Francisco Rodriquez, Hira Nabi

Erika Balsom is Reader  in Film Studies at Kings College London. She is the author of four books including TEN SKIES  (2021), An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea (2018) and After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation  (2017), and the co-editor of Artists’Moving Image in Britain Since 1989  (2019) and Documentary Across Disciplines  (2016). Alongside her academic work, she regularly writes criticism for publications including  Artforum, 4 Columns and Cinema Scope.  She was the co-curator of the film programme Shoreline Movements for the 2020 Taipei Biennial and the exhibition Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines, currently on view at the Stavanger Kunsthall. In 2018, she was awarded a Leverhulme Prize and the Katherine Singer Kovacs Essay Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.