David Schwartz
Early Cinema, Film History, Film Philosophy, Film Theory, Contemporary Cinema, World Cinema, Ecocriticism, Religion, Transcendental and Slow Cinema, Critical Theory, Decolonial Thought and Theory
Office: C706 Wells Hall
Email: schwa564@msu.edu
David Schwartz (He/Him) is a Ph.D. student in English and Film Studies at Michigan State University. His writing focuses on topics in film theory, film history, and film philosophy. He is currently conducting doctoral research that seeks to examine the nature and phenomenology of the sacred in world cinema. Through a careful study of cinematic and devotional practices in a variety of religious, cultural, historical, and philosophical contexts, David hopes to perform theoretically-engaged film scholarship situated at the intersection of art, religion, and philosophy. His recent presentations and publications have examined the permeability of frames in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950); nature and living machines in Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013); digital dasein in Shunji Iwaii’s All About Lily Chou Chou (2001); technology, empire, and “the human” in the body of atomic cinema generated since 1945; and the relationship between strangeness and the sacred in the recent films of Martin Scorsese, Alice Rohrwacher, and Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese. David Schwartz is a coordinator of the Moving Image Workshop.