Faculty

TEMENUGA TRIFONOVA

BA (American University, Bulgaria), MA (Emporia State), MFA (California, San Diego), PhD (SUNY, Buffalo)
Assistant Professor, Cinema & Media Studies
Department of Film, York University

temenuga@yorku.ca

Temenuga Trifonova, imageDr. Trifonova's research and teaching focuses on European cinema, American cinema, film theory, film genres, film remakes and adaptations, and aesthetic theory.

She is the author of The Image in French Philosophy (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007) and European Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 2008). Her articles have appeared in many film and cultural journals including Cineaste, CineAction, Film and Philosophy, SubStance, Quarterly Journal of Film and Video, Kinema, Scope, Postmodern Culture, International Studies in Philosophy, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies and in several edited collections.

Professor Trifonova taught at the University of New Brunswick and the University of California, Santa Cruz before joining York's Film Department in 2008.

Research areas and areas of interest:

European Cinema, Screenwriting, Film Theory, Philosophy of Film, Film Remakes and Sequels, Film Adaptations, Film Criticism, Contemporary American Cinema, Psychopatholoy and Film, Migrant and Diasporic Cinema, Film/video Production, Creative Writing; Photography; Aesthetic Theory, 20th Century American Literature, Existentialism

Publications

"The Aesthetics and Politics of the Yakuza Sequel: Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill (1967) and Pistol Opera (2001)" in Genre in Asian Film and Television, eds. Angelina Karpovich, Felicia Chan, and Xin Zhang (forthcoming from Macmillan, 2010)

"The Disappearing Image: Cavell on Film and Skepticism" in Philosophy of the Image: Presence, Absence, and New Media, eds. Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell (forthcoming from Stanford University Press, 2010)

"Michael Haneke and the Politics of Film Form" in The Cinema of Michael Haneke: Europe Utopia, eds. Benjamin McCann and David Sorfa, Wallflower Press (2009)

“Stoned on Mars: Home and National Identity in Bulgarian Post-Communist Cinema,” Cineaste (June 2007), special supplement on Balkan Cinema, ed. Dina Iordanova (University of St. Andrews)

The Image in French Philosophy, Rodopi (Amsterdam & New York, 2007)

European Film Theory (editor and contributor), Routledge (AFI Film Readers, Series Editors: Edward Branigan and Charles Wolfe, UC Santa Barbara), August 2008

“From Distraction to Indeterminacy to Distraction: Kracauer and Contemporary Film Realist Discourse,” European Film Theory (ed. Temenuga Trifonova, Routledge, 2008.

"Anti-Theatre on Film", From Camera Lens to Critical Lens: A Collection of Best Essays on Film Adaptation, Cambridge Scholars Press (ed: Rebecca Housel), 2006

“Chance Encounters, Planned Coincidences, Serendipitous Discoveries: Fate and Accident in European and Hollywood Cinema”, Crossings: 'Killing Time: Inscribing Chaos in the Narrative of History"m 2008

“Code Unknown: European Identity in Cinema,” Scope (University of Nottingham), June 2007

“Distracted Cinema: Kracauer and Realist Film Discourse,” Excavatio, Vol. XXII, 2007

“John Ford’s Funeral Oration: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” Senses of Cinema, 2007

“Cinematic Cool: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai,” Senses of Cinema, Issue #39, April-June, 2006

“Orson Welles’ The Trial,” Senses of Cinema, Issue #38, January-March 2006

“Mind and Body Snatchers: The Evolution of the Sci Fi Film Genre,” Film and Philosophy, Vol. 9, 2005

“Anti-Theatre on Film,” Scope (University of Nottingham), Issue #3, November 2005

“The Fantastic Redemption of Reality,” Quarterly Journal of Film and Video 23.1 (2005)

“Special Effects: Simulation in Cinema,” Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media, No. 21, Spring 2004

“A Nonhuman Eye: Deleuze on Cinema,” SubStance # 104, Vol.33, no.2, 2004

“Is There a Subject in Hyperreality?” Postmodern Culture, Volume 13, Number 3 (2003)

“Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man: The Origins of the Postmodern Sublime in the Ethical Evaluation of the Aesthetic,” Kritikos, Volume 1, December 2004

“The Question of the Appendix: The Kantian and the Inhuman Sublime,” International Studies in Philosophy Volume XXXV/2 (2003)

“Matter-Image or Image-Consciousness: Bergson contra Sartre,” Janus Head, Spring 2003/6.1

“Time and Point of View in Contemporary Cinema,” CineAction #58, 2002

“The Poetry of Matter: Bergson and Stevens,” The Wallace Stevens Journal, Volume 26, Number 1 (Spring 2002)

“Saving Nietzsche’s Anti-egalitarianism from Postmodernism” (book review of Fredrick Appel’s Nietzsche contra Democracy, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999), theory@buffalo, #6, 2001

“The Gaze of Blanchot through the Lens of Heidegger,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Volume 2, Number 1 (Fall 2000)

“Discourse on Failure” (poetry), Verdure, SUNY Buffalo, October-November 1999

Co-editor: Perspectives in Higher Education Reform, vol. 6, October 1997

Co-translator (into Bulgarian) of Northrop Frye’s Myth and Metaphor, Nauka i Iskustvo Publishers Ltd., Sofia, Bulgaria, 1996