{"id":19882,"date":"2022-09-29T11:31:15","date_gmt":"2022-09-29T15:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/?p=19882"},"modified":"2023-10-30T18:02:45","modified_gmt":"2023-10-30T22:02:45","slug":"new-to-bu-meet-roshaya-rodness-visiting-assistant-professor-in-cinema-media-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/2022\/09\/29\/new-to-bu-meet-roshaya-rodness-visiting-assistant-professor-in-cinema-media-studies\/","title":{"rendered":"BU Humanists at Work: Meet Roshaya Rodness"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\u201cYou raise your camera to capture those dramatic clouds; you look good this evening and film yourself out with friends. You tap the shutter and the images appear, but they look nothing like what you just saw.\u201d Snapping a quick photo, whether you are using a professional camera or your smartphone, can lead to these moments of disjunction; it\u2019s a familiar experience, but not one most people spend much time analyzing. Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema & Media Studies Roshaya Rodness posits that recognizing these discrepancies between film\u2019s realism and our own imagined version of reality is the first step in opening up new lines of inquiry and possibilities for interpretation. Contemplating the gap between these realities means contemplating new meaning.<\/span><\/p>\n

For Rodness, each individual image holds a number of contradictory possibilities and meanings, whether a director intends to convey those meanings or not.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I see may always be both more and less than what the artist has decided to show,\u201d Rodness remarked. \u201cNo matter how purposive a film\u2019s narrative force feels, our eye is always invited to roam.\u201d A PhD in English, Rodness is interested in how film\u2019s openness can challenge the viewer in ways that are not always possible in written literature.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cLike film, literature has its own non-human medium. If for the cinema that medium is the moving image, for literature it is language,\u201d Rodness said. While both mediums are open to a variety of interpretations, Rodness finds the possibilities for interpretation expanded in film by the sheer amount of ambiguously purposive images.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rodness\u2019s interest in the ambiguity of the film image looks at the issue with attention to the camera as a non-human gaze, which shows us alternate images of the world not constructed by our own vision. Rodness\u2019s current work focuses on the automatism of the film camera as a queer encounter with human activity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe camera has no emotion, no drives, no memory. It has no subjectivity,\u201d Rodness said. While acknowledging that films are not objective, Rodness uses the concept of the camera\u2019s \u201cindifference,\u201d or lack of human feeling, to examine how film allows the viewer to look at the world it portrays from the perspective of a non-participant. She likens this outside or othered position to anonymous figures in queer theory and proposes that the indifference of film can provide us with a queer vision of the world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOur ego-centrism dissolves in our encounter with the movie screen as we see the world coming into existence through a sightedness that is not our own,\u201d she noted. Rodness sees film\u2019s ability to pull us outside of ourselves as one that may allow us to view and experience human differences in a new light.<\/span><\/p>\n

In her examination of how film queers perceptions of human difference and conflict, Rodness pulls from cinema studies, continental philosophy, and queer theory \u2013 the last of which she\u2019s thrilled to discuss with students in the Boston University community.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m excited to be able to introduce this area of cinema [queer cinema] to my students, and to highlight films inscribed with a queer identity for students who may especially be looking for material that speaks to their experiences,\u201d said Rodness. For Rodness, this queer identity may present itself in the film\u2019s inclusion of queer figures or the identity of the filmmaker, but it can also reveal itself in aesthetic choices. She hopes that students will dig deeply into queer media and explore how that media expands their own knowledge and experiences.<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition to introducing key pieces of queer cinema and leading her students through discussions in the \u201cIntroduction to Film & Media Aesthetics\u201d course, Rodness also teaches a course on the history of global cinema through the 1950s. When asked how students should approach media that is a product of another time period or cultural context, Rodness both encouraged an awareness of that context and warned against categorizing the films as products of the past.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe films I teach are never only cultural or historical objects, and no matter how remote in time or space, their legacies are incomplete,\u201d Rodness added. \u201cI want my students not to reflect on these films in isolation, but as occasions for questioning the nature of globality.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After two years of social distancing at University of Toronto Mississauga, Rodness is happy to enjoy more personal interactions with students as they ponder questions of film aesthetics and theory. She is also glad to mingle with students from across the University who attend her classes, whether they are drawn to the topics out of curiosity or the desire to fulfill a HUB requirement. No matter the reason, Rodness recognizes the value in a class of students with a diversity of backgrounds and intellectual commitments.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI see my students learning from their peers\u2019 experiences and perspectives,\u201d Rodness remarked. \u201cStudents will have interpretations of films that are unexpected, and it makes for a very dynamic classroom.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Rodness is also excited to exchange ideas outside of the classroom with Cinema & Media Studies faculty, who hail from a range of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. Film is a study of perspective, whether the perspective is that of the student, the scholar, the director, or the camera. Rodness hopes to use those perspectives and images to inspire others to question their own familiarities with the world.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou raise your camera to capture those dramatic clouds; you look good this evening and film yourself out with friends. You tap the shutter and the images appear, but they look nothing like what you just saw.\u201d Snapping a quick photo, whether you are using a professional camera or your smartphone, can lead to these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20263,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[387,398,400],"tags":[348],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19882"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20263"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19882"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21603,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19882\/revisions\/21603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}