As part of Research Days, Carleton is highlighting innovative research being done by some of Carleton’s best and brightest researchers. Dr. Marc Furstenau, assistant professor in film studies, is working on a project on films that reflect on the uses that we make in modern culture of cameras – both video and still cameras.
The project is about the ways in which cameras are used to create imaginative engagements with the world. He is specifically interested in the way animals are represented, in ways that anthropomorphize them when we produce images of them. He is looking at wildlife films generally, but also at individual, amateur representations of animals, wild and domestic.
This Friday, he will give a talk about his research as related to the film Grizzly Man, a 2005 documentary film by German director Werner Herzog. It chronicles the life and death of bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell, showing some of Treadwell’s own footage of his interactions with grizzly bears before he and his girlfriend were killed and eaten by a bear in 2003.
Dr. Furstenau’s main research areas are: film theory and film history; new digital media; documentary cinema; cultural and media studies; histories and theories of media and communications technologies; theories of representation and semiotics; philosophy and film.
Before arriving at Carleton, he was a lecturer in Film and Media Studies at Lancaster University in the UK. He has also taught at the University of Bonn in Germany and at several universities in Canada. He is currently working on a book on cinema and new media.
Dr. Furstenau can be reached at 613-520-2600, ext. 2349 or marc_furstenau@carleton.ca.
