Presentation by Jennifer J. Wild, University of Southern California, as part of the Division of Cinema and Media Studies's "34th Street Sessions" presentation and workshop series. Please RSVP to [email protected] to attend.

Presentation Abstract: In May of 2025, I participated in “Critique and Modernity: Rediscovering Louis Delluc,” a conference originally timed to coincide with the centenary of Louis Delluc’s youthful demise in 1924. Delluc was a filmmaker who we associate with the French film industry’s “narrative avant-garde” of the 1920s. He is also, some argue, the first “film critic.” It was he who initially used the term “photogénie” that today anchors discussions in cinematic aesthetics. The talk you will see in our first session of the 2025/2026 34 St. Sessions is about what happened in the time between submitting the “blurb” about my talk to the conference organizers a month before and taking questions after presenting my research. This session will be as much about historiographical process, method, and the (everyday) practice of “doing research” as it will be about queering the very discourse attributed to Delluc: cinephilia.

Jennifer J. Wild is Associate Professor in the Departments of Cinema and Media Studies and French and Italian at the University of Southern California. She previously taught at the University of Chicago where she wrote her first book, The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900-1923 (University of California Press, 2015).