Zoë Laks
We’re pleased to announce that Film Studies MA Candidate Zoë Laks has received a substantial SSHRC Award of $17,500 for 12 months of research. As well, she will be presenting at two conferences this summer: the Film Studies Association of Canada (FSAC) in Toronto, Ontario and the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) 2017 here at UBC.
Zoë is entering her second year of graduate film studies at the UBC Vancouver campus. A published author in the Studies in Eastern European Cinema academic journal, she loves studying film theory and philosophy and plans to later pursue a PhD. In her spare time, she volunteers with animals at the BC SPCA.
Zoë is researching the function of artifice in postmodern melodrama films. She is concerned with the way artifice draws in viewers by evoking a sense of nostalgia, and how this effect is balanced out by postmodernist distance in the films of Guy Maddin and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Her research will explore the way that filmic artifice functions as a synthetic mechanism of memory, and uses a phenomenological and interdisciplinary approach to understand how this connects the film’s “body” with a viewer’s own.
