About this Event
The Summer Institute for Audiovisual Criticism is an annual workshop devoted to the development of audiovisual essays for both undergraduates and graduate students. The workshop is organized by four leading international film and visual studies scholars: Bernd Herzogenrath (Goethe University, Frankfurt), Brian Price (University of Toronto), Alessandra Raengo (Georgia State University), and Domietta Torlasco (Northwestern University). The goal of the workshop is to help students think critically with, and not only about, sounds and images—to do criticism by means of a composite audiovisual language.
The first session took place at Goethe University, Frankfurt, July 14-18, 2025. The topic was RHYTHM: What is rhythm for filmmakers and spectators alike? A repeated pattern, a heartbeat, a control mechanism, an overflow of possibilities…how does it regulate—or release—our affects, thoughts, and perceptions? Is rhythm an ethical and political matter? Is there an experience of time that can only be derived from rhythm? Does rhythm present new epistemological possibilities? Participants began developing their video essays in Frankfurt and completed them in the following academic year in consultation with the organizers.
The screening will be followed by Q&A with Domietta Torlasco and Alessandra Raengo.
About the films:
Rhythmic Exodus (Calvin Bell III, Sofia Aklog, Flavio Papa, 2026, 6 min, digital)
Rhythmic Exodus seeks to immerse its audience in the ethos of what Ahmad Greene Hayes (2025) calls the underworld, a space shaped by Afrofuturism, Black aesthetic practices, intersecting bodily movements, and communal healing—cultivating a sonic-visual mediation on survival, where rhythm serves as a source of ontological possibility while navigating tensions throughout one’s material reality.
Silence as Expression: Inversions of Rhythm (Michał Bilski, Ella Brunßen, Serena Giulia Habermaier, Vansh Sharma, 2026, 6 min, digital)
The Humming of Anger (Miloš Rouzek, Sana Aljadaan, and Nikole McGregor, 2026, 4 min, digital)
U54S85A26 (Marin Liksarević, 2026, 5 min, digital)
Infinite Meat/Chopper (Sarah Sachar and Jillian Vasko, 2026, 9 min, digital)
Infinite Meat/ Chopper is a two-channel video installation that investigates issues of cinematic labor and pleasure through the gestures of the cut and the fold.
American Alternative: Kurt Heyl (Josh B. Mabe and Ben Creech, 2025, 11 min, digital)
Before Brakhage and Landow, there was Kurt Heyl, a South Side native, musician, and SAIC’s first film student, who briefly held together the school’s experimental film program with spit, spirit, and stubborn grit. Built from Heyl’s own words and images, this video essay kicks off the Chicago Media Histories Project with a rough-edged tribute to a nearly forgotten chapter in underground cinema.
Theory Underwater (Domietta Torlasco, 2026, 19 min, digital)
Theory Underwater is a small experiment with images of water in Western cinema: what do we see if we attune our vision to waves rather than rays, diffraction rather than reflection?
TRT: approx. 60 mins
About the filmmakers:
Sofia Aklog is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University and a video essayist focusing on black public intellectualism and visual cultures across film and communications mediums, particularly within frameworks of the Black Radical Tradition, Black feminisms, and knowledge production practices.
Calvin Bell III is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at Northwestern University as a Beinecke Scholar and a 2025-2026 Kaplan Institute Public Humanities Fellow aiming to bridge his understanding of philosophy with public policy; his interdisciplinary research includes Black aesthetics and Black intellectual and political thought.
Flavio Papa is a Swiss director and filmmaker and a CISA (Locarno) alumnus; he served as executive producer on TUSEN TONER, which won the Pardino d’Argento SRG SSR at the Locarno Film Festival; in 2025, he won the Rai Cinema Channel Award at the AI.Motion Festival with the AI-generated short film PURGATORIO.
Michał BIlski is originally from Poland and currently based in the Netherlands, where he lectures at the University of Amsterdam in Film and Media Studies.
Ella Brunßen is currently finishing her MA and pursued her BA in American Studies at the Goethe University Frankfurt.
Serena Giulia Habermaier is pursuing her MA in Film Studies at the Free University of Berlin; she participated in a study exchange at the Cinema Studies Institute of the University of Toronto in 2024.
Vansh Sharma, originally from India, is currently finishing his BA in American Studies at the Goethe University Frankfurt.
Miloš Rouzek holds a BA and an MA in English and Art Studies from Palacký University Olomouc (Czechia).
Nikole McGregor is a Peruvian-Canadian artist and scholar; she holds a BFA from OCAD University and an MA from Toronto Metropolitan University and York University.
Sana Aljadaan is pursuing a BA in American Studies at Goethe University in Frankfurt and is project manager of queer BiPoc music & culture collective C.C.BB.
Marin Liksarević is a Serbian artist living in Frankfurt.
Sarah Sachar is a PhD Candidate in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern University, writing her dissertation on the political potential of the cinema and the concept of transference.
Jillian Vasko is a filmmaker and PhD candidate at the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, working on ASMR and online pornography to reconceptualize contemporary notions of ‘value’ and ‘labor’; she serves as co-assistant editor at World Picture Journal.
Domietta Torlasco is a filmmaker, critical theorist, and professor of comparative literature at Northwestern University. Her video essays have screened at national and international venues, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and Kino Arsenal in Berlin.
Presented with sponsorship by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern University.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, United States
USD 0.00
