Jonathan Walley is a film scholar specializing in avant-garde or experimental film, a form of cinema radically opposed to the aesthetics and politics of mainstream cinema, and more closely aligned with avant-garde and modern art than traditional filmmaking. His research on this subject has appeared in October, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, The Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Millennium Film Journal, The Velvet Light Trap, Discourse, Senses of Cinema, INCITE! Journal of Experimental Media, Cinematograph, and in numerous collections of scholarly writing on cinema and art.
Walley has published extensively on “expanded cinema,” which refers to moving image works that alter or abandon the materials, forms, and spaces of conventional filmmaking, such as film and video installation, live performances using film projection, light art, and moving image works that cross the boundaries between cinema and other art forms. His book on the subject, Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia, was published in 2020 by Oxford University Press. It was named a 2021 CHOICE Reviews Outstanding Academic Title and was a finalist for the 2021 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award, the UK’s leading prize for books published in the fields of photography and the moving image.
His current research is on avant-garde/experimental cinema and emotion. His work in this area merges cinema studies, the philosophy of emotion, and research in psychology and neurology. He is writing a book about emotional response to non-narrative experimental films, which lack the kinds of things that elicit emotional responses in conventional cinema (characters, events, and dramatic conflict).
Dr. Walley teaches courses in cinema studies, including Film Aesthetics and Analysis, History of Cinema, Theory of Cinema, and seminars on avant-garde/experimental cinema, the horror film, women and cinema, and advanced topics in film aesthetics. He has also taught courses in 16mm filmmaking and screenwriting.
Dr. Walley’s other research and teaching interests include the history of film aesthetics, philosophies of the nature of cinema, the critical and theoretical discourses of filmmakers as artists, the effects of technological changes on film production and cinematic visual style, and the psychology of cinematic perception.