Laurence Kent
Biographic Data
| ID | 5644753 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laurence Kent |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laurence |
| FAMILY NAME | Kent |
| SIGNATURE | KENT L |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0700-4931 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 8 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Missing Film in Sudan
Talking About Trees (Gasmelbari 2019) is a documentary film that follows members of the Sudanese Film Group (SFG) and their unsuccessful attempts to reopen a cinema in the city of Omdurman in Sudan. The aim of this initiative is to forge community against political repression, and the documentary works through the SFG’s failure alongside the traces of the many films not made and not seen in the context of Sudanese cinema. Gilles Deleuze put forwa…
Jiří Anger, Towards a Film Theory from Below
Hussein Shariffe's Filmic Ruins
My audiovisual essay explores Hussein Shariffe’s The Dislocation of Amber (1975) as a filmic “ruin” within his archive. Described by collaborator Sondra Hale as “Sudan’s first art film,” The Dislocation of Amber was filmed in the Sudanese city of Suakin, which lies in ruins. The available digitised copies of the film are degraded and disrupted by noise. Hale interprets the film as “a metaphor for a society decimated by colonialism,” and this essa…
Idealism and Contemporary Film Theory
Transcendental Reelism
Theories surrounding the spiritual aspects of cinema often utilise a concept of the transcendental, exploring film’s ability to transcend its worldly material. However, this equation of the transcendental and the transcendent evades an important moment in the history of philosophical idealism that sought to distinguish such terms. Immanuel Kant interjected into the tradition of dogmatic idealism with his own “transcendental idealism”: a move away…
Untamed Storms
The ocean, for Jean Epstein, figures the disruption that the cinematograph offers for human perception, presenting a nonhuman view on the world. This article will critically engage with Epstein’s writings on water to reflect on Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019) and its particular conception of the oceanic. Atlantics positions the ocean within the perspectives of its filmic subjects but also in excess of them. This perspectival nature of the oceanic sp…
Cinema Against Doublethink
True empathy is not a total understanding of the other, the gait of one in the satisfied knowledge of a walk in the otherâ s shoes, but an encounter with empathyâ s own limits, the impossibility of access to the otherâ s experiences and histories, an act of hesitation at the edge of an irreducible abyssal distance. What David Martin-Jones does in his bold and brilliant Cinema Against Doublethink is to extend this Levinasian insight to a perspecti…
Becoming-Flashdrive
An important but easily forgotten moment in the history of film-philosophy is Jean Epstein's assertion that cinema, more than merely thinking, has a kind of intelligence. If it is a newfound conception of rationality that is needed for any contemporary ethical relation to the world, as thinkers from Reza Negarestani and Pete Wolfendale to feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks have espoused in their respective neo-rationalist projects, then cinema …
Untamed Storms
The ocean, for Jean Epstein, figures the disruption that the cinematograph offers for human perception, presenting a nonhuman view on the world. This article will critically engage with Epstein’s writings on water to reflect on Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019) and its particular conception of the oceanic. Atlantics positions the ocean within the perspectives of its filmic subjects but also in excess of them. This perspectival nature of the oceanic sp…
Becoming-Flashdrive
An important but easily forgotten moment in the history of film-philosophy is Jean Epstein's assertion that cinema, more than merely thinking, has a kind of intelligence. If it is a newfound conception of rationality that is needed for any contemporary ethical relation to the world, as thinkers from Reza Negarestani and Pete Wolfendale to feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks have espoused in their respective neo-rationalist projects, then cinema …
Cinema Against Doublethink
True empathy is not a total understanding of the other, the gait of one in the satisfied knowledge of a walk in the otherâ s shoes, but an encounter with empathyâ s own limits, the impossibility of access to the otherâ s experiences and histories, an act of hesitation at the edge of an irreducible abyssal distance. What David Martin-Jones does in his bold and brilliant Cinema Against Doublethink is to extend this Levinasian insight to a perspecti…
Untamed Storms
The ocean, for Jean Epstein, figures the disruption that the cinematograph offers for human perception, presenting a nonhuman view on the world. This article will critically engage with Epstein’s writings on water to reflect on Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019) and its particular conception of the oceanic. Atlantics positions the ocean within the perspectives of its filmic subjects but also in excess of them. This perspectival nature of the oceanic sp…
Idealism and Contemporary Film Theory
Transcendental Reelism
Theories surrounding the spiritual aspects of cinema often utilise a concept of the transcendental, exploring film’s ability to transcend its worldly material. However, this equation of the transcendental and the transcendent evades an important moment in the history of philosophical idealism that sought to distinguish such terms. Immanuel Kant interjected into the tradition of dogmatic idealism with his own “transcendental idealism”: a move away…
Missing Film in Sudan
Talking About Trees (Gasmelbari 2019) is a documentary film that follows members of the Sudanese Film Group (SFG) and their unsuccessful attempts to reopen a cinema in the city of Omdurman in Sudan. The aim of this initiative is to forge community against political repression, and the documentary works through the SFG’s failure alongside the traces of the many films not made and not seen in the context of Sudanese cinema. Gilles Deleuze put forwa…
Jiří Anger, Towards a Film Theory from Below
Hussein Shariffe's Filmic Ruins
My audiovisual essay explores Hussein Shariffe’s The Dislocation of Amber (1975) as a filmic “ruin” within his archive. Described by collaborator Sondra Hale as “Sudan’s first art film,” The Dislocation of Amber was filmed in the Sudanese city of Suakin, which lies in ruins. The available digitised copies of the film are degraded and disrupted by noise. Hale interprets the film as “a metaphor for a society decimated by colonialism,” and this essa…
Cinema and Media Studies (6 works) · Movie theater (5 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · Art (3 works) · Epistemology (3 works) · Philosophy (3 works) · Politics (3 works) · Sociology (3 works) · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues (2 works) · Art history (2 works)