Joshua Taylor (Australia)

From sunny Sydney, Australia, I will be reading for a Master of Studies in Film Aesthetics at Oxford.

In 2015, I completed a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Sydney, with a double major in Art History and Film Studies. In 2017, I undertook a further Honours year in Film Studies, and was awarded First Class Honours and the University Medal.

My Honours dissertation offered an intervention into the ongoing ontological debates surrounding cinema’s transformation by digital technologies, contesting the notion that the shift in materiality has effaced the cinema’s capacity to communicate time and destabilised the essence of cinema itself. I posited a more dynamic framework based on the elements of time and movement that can transcend materiality, and thus restore time and ontological legitimacy to the cinema in both analogue and digital forms, whilst also challenging the primacy of indexicality to contemporary understandings of what cinema is. I am looking forward to further exploring these issues and cinema’s prevailing aesthetic questions through my work for the MSt.

I am immensely grateful to the Ertegun Graduate Scholarship Programme for the opportunity and support it has offered, without which I would not be at Oxford. I am excited to contribute to the vitality of the Ertegun community and learn from its uniquely interdisciplinary, cross-cultural setting at Ertegun House.