Jennifer M. Barker ist Associate Professor of Communication an der Georgia State University, USA. Sie ist Leiterin des Doktorandenprogramms der Graduate Studies for the Moving Image sowie des Masterstudiengangs Film, Video, and Digital Image. Barker forscht im Bereich der Moving Image Studies mit speziellem Fokus auf das Kino und die Sinne, Synästhesie, Theorien der Zuschauerschaft und des Embodiment, Performance, Feminismus und Dokumentarfilm.

2009 hat sie das Buch The Tactile Eye. Touch and the Cinematic Experience veröffentlicht, das sich mit dem sinnlichen Austausch zwischen Film und Zuschauer auseinandersetzt. The Tactile Eye war im gleichen Jahr Finalist des "Best Book on Moving Image Studies"-Preises. Mit Barkers Beitrag "Cinema and Child's Play" erschien 2019 der Sammelband "In The Structures of the Film Experience by Jean-Pierre Meunier: Historical Assessments and Phenomenological Expansions". Ihre Arbeiten erschienen außerdem in Cinema Journal, Discourse, Film-Philosophy, New Review of Film & Television Studies, Paragraph, Screen.

Three Quick Questions:

In a few words, can you tell us about your current research interest?

I’m thinking about two films that may seem to have little in common — Jordan Peele’s Nope and Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow — both of which use the figure of the animal and particular patterns of light in ways that raise questions for me about the two films’ ideas about the animal, human, and “alien” (in several senses) in their reflection on the American Western. I’m also collaborating with my colleague Ethan Tussey on a project about the paradoxical materiality of props used in runaway productions, and I continue to pursue questions about synesthesia and moving images.

How do you relate the term poiesis to your work?
In my encounters with moving images, I try to cultivate a kind of synaesthetic sensitivity — focusing on qualities like intensity, rhythm, and gesture as they appear across modalities (visual, aural, tactile, and so forth) — that might reveal or facilitate unexpected resonances between spaces, bodies, and objects.

Which film or other audiovisual format has resonated with you lately and why?
Todd Field’s Tár resonated (quite literally) with me for the way its sound design materializes mental and physical space together and makes the line between the literal and the abstract vibrate, somehow.