Alex Williams
PhD
Screen and Cultural Studies
Alex's research broadly concerns the onscreen body in international art cinema. Her Honours thesis, “Subversive Sensations: Deconstructing the Masculine Action Hero in You Were Never Really Here”, examined this film’s relationship to the representational traditions of the action genre through the body of its central character. She is also a committee member of the Melbourne Cinémathèque and co-editor of CTEQ Annotations on Film at Senses of Cinema.
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Thesis
Bodies Caught in Time: Corporeal Vulnerability in Contemporary Slow Cinema
My thesis addresses a prominence in representations of pain and mortality that has arisen in a strand of contemporary art cinema known as slow cinema. I aim to establish slow cinema as a form concerned with corporeal vulnerability and finitude, wherein time itself acts upon the body in the precarious and volatile conditions of late capitalism. A key outcome of slow cinema’s stylistic configuration that my thesis pursues is the transformation of corporeal occurrences frequently portrayed as acute, discrete events into chronic, gradual processes rendered aesthetically and durationally across complex arrangements of images and sounds.
Research interests
- International Art Cinema
- Slow Cinema
- Film style and aesthetics
- Gender Studies