Simona Eva Schneider
DIUM
Simona Eva Schneider
Cinema, fotografia e televisione (L/ART-06)
- Assegnista di ricerca
- Email: simona.schneider@uniud.it
- Link: https://uniud.academia.edu/SimonaSchneider
Simona Eva Schneider
Cinema, fotografia e televisione (L/ART-06)
- Assegnista di ricerca
- Email: simona.schneider@uniud.it
- Link: https://uniud.academia.edu/SimonaSchneider
My undergraduate thesis in Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, New York City, inquired into the possibilities for bearing witness as an individual living under or after authoritarian conditions in the work of Daniil Kharms and Georges Perec. The basic questions interest me still in my work on interwar cinema and contemporary media. In 2020, I completed an MA in English with emphasis in the Creative Writing of Poetry from UC Berkeley and a PhD in Comparative Literature with an emphasis in Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on “lyrical spectatorship,” a reading methodology paying attention to techniques of indirect address and invocation in silent Soviet and Weimar era film, tracing these techniques into post-colonial cinema and contemporary video art. During my doctorate, I took part in Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography filmmaking program in Anthropology and Visual Studies and was a fellow at the Film Study Center, completing several short documentaries.
Since 2021, I have been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Udine, where my research has investigated Italian amateur cinema culture and the international politics and materiality of small gauge film. As part of my post-doctoral work with Andrea Mariani, I participated in the SSHRC-funded project “International Amateur Cinema Between the Wars (1919-1939)” coordinated by Charles Tepperman at the University of Calgary, contributing Italian amateur film material to the Amateur Movie Data Base. I am currently a Research Fellow for the PRNN project FilmBaseMatters. A Material Approach to the History of Small Gauge Film in Italy: The Case of Agfa-Milan and Ferrania in the 1930s-1950s), the aim of which is to investigate film stock materiality and the role of the chemical industrial complex in shaping early modern mobile and portable cinema.
I was a member of the organizational board of the FilmForum International Film Studies Conference and of the study day Fate of a Format, and am a co-founder and editor of the monograph series Ex-Series, which publishes contemporary debates on experimental cinema. Between 2021 and 2024, I taught Video Praxis to students at the Faculty for Design and Art at the Free University of Bolzano, and I have taught literature, cinema, media history, and media production since 2012. I have also curated a series of film screenings for FilmForum with the Cinémathèque de Tanger, Tangier, where I worked between 2005 and 2009, and Canyon Cinema, San Francisco.
My main research interests are the relationship between cinema, lyricism and propaganda; the voice in documentary, collective filmmaking and personal cinema; the ethics of restoration and artistic re-use of found footage; and links between geopolitics, diplomacy, the military industrial complex, technology, and amateur and experimental material practices between WWI and WWII. My writing is informed by critical, post-colonial and feminist theory. I continue to engage in critical practice through translation, filmmaking and artistic research.
My work has been published or is forthcoming The Intellect Handbook of Documentary, (2025), Sixteen at 100: Histories of a Radical Film Format (2025), on the AMDB website, and Cinephile (2021). I am a co-editor of two volumes on cinema and media, Fate of a Format (2023) and And Yet It Moves! Cinema, Media and Mobility (2023) and the translator of the long poem New Hull (UDP 2022).
Pubblicazioni
Fate of a Format: Small-Gauge Cinema in Postwar Italy
Milano-Udine 2023 (con A. Mariani)
And Yet It Moves! On Cinema, Media, and Mobility. Conference Proceedings from FilmForum XXVIII
Milano-Udine 2023 (a cura di A. Mariani, S. Schneider)
Invocation by Proxy: Ali Cherri’s My Pain is Real
Cinephile, “Cinematic Bodies,” 15, 1, 2010
Documentary Says ‘We’: Lyrical Polyphony as Practice
in: K. Nash, D. Williams (curr.), Handbook of Documentary, Bristol 2025
Format Wars: 16mm Standardization and Agfa’s Political Strategies in Fascist Italy
in: G.A. Waller, H. Wasson (curr.), Sixteen at 100: Histories of a Radical Film Format, Oxford 2025 (con A. Mariani)
New Hull
di M. Kuzmin, New York 2022 (traduzione e introduzione critica)
The Experimental Film in Fascist Italy, or: What is a Cineguf Film?
in: Ch. Tepperman, M. Salazkina, N. Avedisian-Cohen (curr.), Launching a Global Movement: Writings on Amateur Cinema, 1913-1943, in The Amateur Movie Database, University of Calgary, 2024 (con A. Mariani)