Félix Veilleux

Félix’s areas of expertise include critical media theory, mid-century French cinema and film theory, the cultural history of cinema and technology, as well as sub-Saharan francophone cinemas. His dissertation aims to produce a techno-logical genealogy of France’s early postwar film culture, revisiting well-known filmic objects like the “tradition of quality”, the films of Jacques Tati and the French New Wave, in conjunction with lesser-known non-theatrical phenomena like Filmologie and Esthétique Industrielle. The project claims that cinema, as a medium both fundamentally implicated in technical infrastructures and central to France’s mid-century cultural valorisation, became at mid-century a hospitable site for relativizing human agency and approaching technique through an environmental, rather than prosthetic, perspective. This intervention into an overlooked French response to the unprecedented swift modernization of the trente glorieuses aims to historicize the present of always-on computing in order to relativize its claims of newness and better engage with its epistemological implications.

Awards

• 2021 Ontario Graduate Scholarship
• 2020-2021 Centre for the Study of France and the Francophone World Short-Term Doctoral Research Grant