Daniel Yacavone
Formerly Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) at the University of Edinburgh, where I was Director of the Film Studies Program, I have held two research fellowships-in-residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), Amsterdam (2020 and 2023). I have been a Senior Research Fellow at the Cinepoetics Center for Advanced Film Studies at the Free University Berlin (2021) and a British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow. I am currently teaching at the University of Marburg, Germany.
My interests include film aesthetics; film theory (incl. cognitive, semiotic, phenomenological, affect-based, and ecotheory approaches); modern and contemporary cinema; intermediality; the philosophy of film and art (analytic and continental); moving image atmospheres and environments; reflexivity; genre hybridity and revision; science fiction.
I am currently writing a book on the theory and practice of cinematic reflexivity - Reflexive Cinema: Rethinking Self-Consciousness, Affect and Intermediality in the Moving Image - under contract with Oxford University Press; and co-editing (with Steffen Hven) The Oxford Handbook of Moving Image Atmospheres and Felt Environments, featuring original essays from some of the world's leading film and media scholars.
I am the author of Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2014), to date reviewed in: The Los Angeles Review of Books; New Review of Film and Television Studies; Critique; The British Journal of Aesthetics; Projections: A Journal of Movies and Mind; Cinemas : Revue d'Études Cinematographiques; Senses of Cinema; Contemporary Aesthetics (publication of interest); Svenska Dagbladet (Swedish daily newspaper); Film-Philosophy (w. response). Shortlisted for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Best Monograph award.
I am currently on the editorial board of Brill's 'Contemporary Cinema' book series (devoted to cinema of the past 20 years) and welcome correspondence concerning ideas and proposals for the series.
In addition to keynote conference presentations, I have given invited talks and seminars at universities and institutions including Yale, The British Academy, Glasgow (Screen Journal seminar series), Bristol, Free University Berlin, Leiden, Erasmus Rotterdam, Groningen, and Ghent.
I hold a Ph.D. in Film Studies (Edinburgh) and an M.A. in Philosophy (University of York, UK), and did my undergraduate study at Connecticut College and Amherst College.
Homepage: www.danielyacavone.com
My interests include film aesthetics; film theory (incl. cognitive, semiotic, phenomenological, affect-based, and ecotheory approaches); modern and contemporary cinema; intermediality; the philosophy of film and art (analytic and continental); moving image atmospheres and environments; reflexivity; genre hybridity and revision; science fiction.
I am currently writing a book on the theory and practice of cinematic reflexivity - Reflexive Cinema: Rethinking Self-Consciousness, Affect and Intermediality in the Moving Image - under contract with Oxford University Press; and co-editing (with Steffen Hven) The Oxford Handbook of Moving Image Atmospheres and Felt Environments, featuring original essays from some of the world's leading film and media scholars.
I am the author of Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2014), to date reviewed in: The Los Angeles Review of Books; New Review of Film and Television Studies; Critique; The British Journal of Aesthetics; Projections: A Journal of Movies and Mind; Cinemas : Revue d'Études Cinematographiques; Senses of Cinema; Contemporary Aesthetics (publication of interest); Svenska Dagbladet (Swedish daily newspaper); Film-Philosophy (w. response). Shortlisted for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Best Monograph award.
I am currently on the editorial board of Brill's 'Contemporary Cinema' book series (devoted to cinema of the past 20 years) and welcome correspondence concerning ideas and proposals for the series.
In addition to keynote conference presentations, I have given invited talks and seminars at universities and institutions including Yale, The British Academy, Glasgow (Screen Journal seminar series), Bristol, Free University Berlin, Leiden, Erasmus Rotterdam, Groningen, and Ghent.
I hold a Ph.D. in Film Studies (Edinburgh) and an M.A. in Philosophy (University of York, UK), and did my undergraduate study at Connecticut College and Amherst College.
Homepage: www.danielyacavone.com
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Books by Daniel Yacavone
Always more than “fictional worlds” and “storyworlds” on account of cinema’s full perceptual, cognitive, and affective nature, film worlds are theorized as immersive and transformative artistic realities. As such, they are capable of fostering novel ways of seeing, feeling, and understanding experience. Engaging with the writings of Jean Mitry, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Christian Metz, David Bordwell, Gilles Deleuze, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, among other thinkers, Film Worlds extends Nelson Goodman’s analytic account of symbolic and artistic “worldmaking” to cinema, expands on French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience in relation to films and their worlds, and addresses the hermeneutic dimensions of cinematic art. It emphasizes what both celluloid and digital filmmaking and viewing share with the creation and experience of all art, while at the same time recognizing what is unique to the moving image in aesthetic terms. The resulting framework reconciles central aspects of realist and formalist/neo-formalist positions in film theory while also moving beyond them and seeks to open new avenues of exploration in film studies and the philosophy of film.
ENDORSEMENTS
"A half-century after Jean Mitry's magisterial integration of classical film theory, Daniel Yacavone has done the same for its modern counterpart, managing not just to reconcile, but to recruit the extremes of cognitivism and of phenomenology for his prodigious satellite mapping of the terrae incognitae he rightly calls "Film Worlds." Without hyperbole or histrionics, Yacavone delivers a stable and progressive suite of concepts that address films as texts and as embodied affect, he has culled these from a balanced review of an impressive roster of film theorists as well as of the 20th century thinkers many of them have drawn on, some of whom, notably Nelson Goodman and Ernst Cassirer, have been waiting in the wing to contribute to a compelling vision like Yacavone's. That vision not only illuminates how films work but how they work on us, and even work for us."
-Dudley Andrew, Professor of Film and Comparative Literature, Yale University
"Yacavone's Film Worlds is a major reconsideration of the nature of aesthetic experience through the medium of cinema. Film Worlds offers new insights into the hermeneutical and phenomenological perspectives of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Mikel Dufrenne, as well as Nelson Goodman's concept of world-making. The book also presents a significant revision of our understanding of modern and contemporary film theory from Mitry and Metz to Bordwell and Deleuze. This brilliant and original work will be of interest to philosophers and film scholars alike."
-D. N. Rodowick, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago
"Yacavone articulates an approach to cinema that incorporates elements of various tendencies in current film theory -- including, chiefly, those of a broadly sociocultural bent, those focused on empirical studies and cognitive science, and those stressing the phenomenological dimension of spectatorship -- and to unite them via the concept of cinematic "worlds." His command of the theoretical literature is impressive, and his references to analytic and continental philosophy and film theory are wide-ranging and inclusive of most of the approaches adopted over the last century."
-Ronald Bogue, Distinguished Research Professor, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor, University of Georgia
Interview: http://www.cupblog.org/?p=15620#more-15620
Many recent scholarly developments have contributed to the new attention to atmosphere, including new materialism, ecocriticism, affect theory, contemporary approaches in phenomenology, embodied cognition, and research on transmedial ‘world-making,’ as well as a movement away from fixed ontologies of discrete substances towards processes, relations, networks, assemblages, and collages. By uniting in one volume ideas from these and other areas and approaches, the Handbook aims to establish atmosphere as central to the contemporary research agenda of cinema and media studies, while also contributing to the establishment of atmospherics as an autonomous field of inquiry.
Articles by Daniel Yacavone
A fresh and largely sympathetic analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Film and the New Psychology” and related writings (alongside Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience) helps to differentiate between an existential phenomenology of the film medium and an existential phenomenology of film art. The latter is rooted in cinematic form and aesthetic perception as distinct from ordinary or non-aesthetic perception. In addition to explaining why the two are distinct, the essay indicates some of the ways in which a phenomenology of film art, as seldom pursued, has much to offer to film theory and the philosophy of film.
Adopting an aesthetic perspective, as distinct from a strictly narrato- logical one, this article centres on the represented reality of a film that the concept of diegesis in its various formulations posits. In particular, it addresses this reality’s experience by viewers, its figurative location, and its relation to other aspects of a narrative film work, as well as the real world. Although concurring with some significant criticisms of the diegetic/nondiegetic framework, it also calls for preserving aspects of what some theorists argue constitutes the semiotic and experiential character of diegesis. Including, for example, the existence of a distinct referential (denotational) level of a film, and the sort of variable gap between what is within and without the world of characters and narrative events (and fluid ‘border crossings’ between the two) that is suggested by Robynn Stilwell. These views are taken up into a different model, a topological one, which entails conceiving both fictional representations and narrative(s), together with film sound and music, as artistic elements within a fundamentally multi-layered whole. Equivalent to the created and experienced totality of a film’s presentation, this whole may, for short, be termed a film world as distinct from a represented, fictional, or diegetic world.
Book Chapters by Daniel Yacavone
Interviews by Daniel Yacavone
Papers by Daniel Yacavone
Always more than “fictional worlds” and “storyworlds” on account of cinema’s full perceptual, cognitive, and affective nature, film worlds are theorized as immersive and transformative artistic realities. As such, they are capable of fostering novel ways of seeing, feeling, and understanding experience. Engaging with the writings of Jean Mitry, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Christian Metz, David Bordwell, Gilles Deleuze, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, among other thinkers, Film Worlds extends Nelson Goodman’s analytic account of symbolic and artistic “worldmaking” to cinema, expands on French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience in relation to films and their worlds, and addresses the hermeneutic dimensions of cinematic art. It emphasizes what both celluloid and digital filmmaking and viewing share with the creation and experience of all art, while at the same time recognizing what is unique to the moving image in aesthetic terms. The resulting framework reconciles central aspects of realist and formalist/neo-formalist positions in film theory while also moving beyond them and seeks to open new avenues of exploration in film studies and the philosophy of film.
ENDORSEMENTS
"A half-century after Jean Mitry's magisterial integration of classical film theory, Daniel Yacavone has done the same for its modern counterpart, managing not just to reconcile, but to recruit the extremes of cognitivism and of phenomenology for his prodigious satellite mapping of the terrae incognitae he rightly calls "Film Worlds." Without hyperbole or histrionics, Yacavone delivers a stable and progressive suite of concepts that address films as texts and as embodied affect, he has culled these from a balanced review of an impressive roster of film theorists as well as of the 20th century thinkers many of them have drawn on, some of whom, notably Nelson Goodman and Ernst Cassirer, have been waiting in the wing to contribute to a compelling vision like Yacavone's. That vision not only illuminates how films work but how they work on us, and even work for us."
-Dudley Andrew, Professor of Film and Comparative Literature, Yale University
"Yacavone's Film Worlds is a major reconsideration of the nature of aesthetic experience through the medium of cinema. Film Worlds offers new insights into the hermeneutical and phenomenological perspectives of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Mikel Dufrenne, as well as Nelson Goodman's concept of world-making. The book also presents a significant revision of our understanding of modern and contemporary film theory from Mitry and Metz to Bordwell and Deleuze. This brilliant and original work will be of interest to philosophers and film scholars alike."
-D. N. Rodowick, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago
"Yacavone articulates an approach to cinema that incorporates elements of various tendencies in current film theory -- including, chiefly, those of a broadly sociocultural bent, those focused on empirical studies and cognitive science, and those stressing the phenomenological dimension of spectatorship -- and to unite them via the concept of cinematic "worlds." His command of the theoretical literature is impressive, and his references to analytic and continental philosophy and film theory are wide-ranging and inclusive of most of the approaches adopted over the last century."
-Ronald Bogue, Distinguished Research Professor, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor, University of Georgia
Interview: http://www.cupblog.org/?p=15620#more-15620
Many recent scholarly developments have contributed to the new attention to atmosphere, including new materialism, ecocriticism, affect theory, contemporary approaches in phenomenology, embodied cognition, and research on transmedial ‘world-making,’ as well as a movement away from fixed ontologies of discrete substances towards processes, relations, networks, assemblages, and collages. By uniting in one volume ideas from these and other areas and approaches, the Handbook aims to establish atmosphere as central to the contemporary research agenda of cinema and media studies, while also contributing to the establishment of atmospherics as an autonomous field of inquiry.
A fresh and largely sympathetic analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Film and the New Psychology” and related writings (alongside Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience) helps to differentiate between an existential phenomenology of the film medium and an existential phenomenology of film art. The latter is rooted in cinematic form and aesthetic perception as distinct from ordinary or non-aesthetic perception. In addition to explaining why the two are distinct, the essay indicates some of the ways in which a phenomenology of film art, as seldom pursued, has much to offer to film theory and the philosophy of film.
Adopting an aesthetic perspective, as distinct from a strictly narrato- logical one, this article centres on the represented reality of a film that the concept of diegesis in its various formulations posits. In particular, it addresses this reality’s experience by viewers, its figurative location, and its relation to other aspects of a narrative film work, as well as the real world. Although concurring with some significant criticisms of the diegetic/nondiegetic framework, it also calls for preserving aspects of what some theorists argue constitutes the semiotic and experiential character of diegesis. Including, for example, the existence of a distinct referential (denotational) level of a film, and the sort of variable gap between what is within and without the world of characters and narrative events (and fluid ‘border crossings’ between the two) that is suggested by Robynn Stilwell. These views are taken up into a different model, a topological one, which entails conceiving both fictional representations and narrative(s), together with film sound and music, as artistic elements within a fundamentally multi-layered whole. Equivalent to the created and experienced totality of a film’s presentation, this whole may, for short, be termed a film world as distinct from a represented, fictional, or diegetic world.