Inesa Khatkovskaya defended her doctoral dissertation, "Fog and the Moving Image", on Wednesday, December 10, 2025. The committee consisted of Brian Price (supervisor), Sara Saljoughi, Kajri Jain, Brian Jacobson, exam chair Stefan Soldovieri, and external examiner Scott Durham (Northwestern University).
We asked Inesa about her work, as well as her plans for the future.
My dissertation, “Fog and the Moving Image,” looks at fog in cinema and suggests that fog challenges our experience of the moving image and asks us to think anew about time, movement, and our being in the world. It addresses fog not as something accidental or supplementary but instead looks at it as an indispensable element of both film style and narrative and attempts to see what kind of underlying narratives fog creates in films. The text travels along peripheral foggy geographies: from pre-Second World War France’s Le Havre in Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des brumes (1938), through post-Second World War Italian landscape of the Po Valley in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso (1964), and eventually arrives at the Hungarian Plain, which stands in Béla Tarr’s A torinói ló (2011) for a timeless and geographically anonymous location. The dissertation unfolds with the premise that fog in cinema is historically specific; it suggests that, similar to fog as a meteorological phenomenon that tells us about local topography and climate, fog in cinema tells us about its place and its historical time, its social history and its political climate, by making visible that which otherwise remains in the realm of invisibility: multiple entangled temporalities and geographies of a place, local resistance to the changing global landscape, and our imagination of the end of time.
This has been a long journey, and I would not have gotten to this point without tremendous support and faith in this project of my supervisor, Brian Price, and my committee members, Kajri Jain and Sara Saljoughi – encouraging yet challenging as well as endlessly patient and kind. I am deeply and boundlessly grateful for all the attention, guidance, and care they have given me throughout this time. I am grateful also to Scott Durham and Brian Jacobson, my examiners, for their extremely helpful and generous responses to my text. I also want to thank Cinema Studies Institute and its people for all the support throughout these years as well as my fellow graduate students whom I have had a chance to meet, work with and learn from. It is such an honour to be part of this wonderful community.
In the Winter semester, I’ll continue teaching at the Department of Visual Studies at UTM, and then who knows what will come next. Whatever it will be, I am excited.
Her supervisor, Brian Price, had this to say about Inesa's dissertation:
Congratulations to Inna for successfully defending her brilliant dissertation, "Fog and the Moving Image"! A stunning work of close formal analysis, historical contextualization and philosophical insight, the dissertation proceeds from a brilliant claim that fog is, as Inna puts it, the visualization of contingency. This makes for an extraordinary account of time, of thought, and of what it means to act well when it is difficult to understand ourselves, let alone the historical forces compelling us to respond to what we also can't always see clearly in the moment when we need to act. This is truly moving, deeply important work.
Congratulations, Dr. Khatkovskaya!
