Paul Flaig

Biography

I am currently completing a monograph entitled Weimar Slapstick: American Eccentrics, German Grotesques and Hollywood Comedy Re-Functioned, which examines the influence and appropriation of American slapstick and cartoon comedies across visual, intellectual and political cultures of Germany’s Weimar Republic. I have also written several essays on theories of film comedy, re-reading foundational texts in the philosophy of comedy (Freud, Lacan, Bergson, Adorno, Benjamin, Cavell) vis-a-vis works by Chaplin, Disney, Pixar, the Marx Brothers, Capra, Keaton and others. I am also working on a new project entitled Slapstick After Fordism, which extends my interests in comedy into an examination of slapstick’s legacies in recent world cinema, literature and new media. I am co-editor of the recent, award-winning essay collection New Silent Cinema (Routledge / AFI Film Reader, 2015), which examines contemporary and historical returns to early and silent film across popular and avant-garde cinemas, art, literature and new media. My own contribution to New Silent Cinema has initiated a new project entitled Yesterday’s Hadaly, which maps the conditions and possibilities of a feminist media archaeology, focusing especially gendered voices telephonically circulating between antique, analog and digital mediascapes, from Homer’s Sirens to Edison’s phonographic dolls to Apple’s Siri.

Research Interest

My research focuses on transformations of film and film history across transnational space and anachronistic time, tracking transformations and appropriations of cinematic genres and stars in diverse cultural, medial and historical contexts. I am interested in the ways films move beyond themselves in terms of how they are not only understood or interpreted, but also in how they might be radically re-purposed and re-conceived through philosophical speculation, archival re-mixing or technological transformation. I focus especially on theories and histories of film comedy and in particular on American slapstick and screwball cinemas of the twenties and thirties as they were interpreted and appropriated by contemporary filmmakers, critics and avant-gardists in Europe and North America as well as by recent new media artists, advertisers and activists in digital culture.