BU Humanists at Work: Meet Roshaya Rodness
“You raise your camera to capture those dramatic clouds; you look good this evening and film yourself out with friends. You tap the shutter and the images appear, but they look nothing like what you just saw.” Snapping a quick photo, whether you are using a professional camera or your smartphone, can lead to these moments of disjunction; it’s a familiar experience, but not one most people spend much time analyzing. Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema & Media Studies Roshaya Rodness posits that recognizing these discrepancies between film’s realism and our own imagined version of reality is the first step in opening up new lines of inquiry and possibilities for interpretation. Contemplating the gap between these realities means contemplating new meaning.
For Rodness, each individual image holds a number of contradictory possibilities and meanings, whether a director intends to convey those meanings or not.
“What I see may always be both more and less than what the artist has decided to show,” Rodness remarked. “No matter how purposive a film’s narrative force feels, our eye is always invited to roam.” A PhD in English, Rodness is interested in how film’s openness can challenge the viewer in ways that are not always possible in written literature.
“Like film, literature has its own non-human medium. If for the cinema that medium is the moving image, for literature it is language,” Rodness said. While both mediums are open to a variety of interpretations, Rodness finds the possibilities for interpretation expanded in film by the sheer amount of ambiguously purposive images.
Rodness’s interest in the ambiguity of the film image looks at the issue with attention to the camera as a non-human gaze, which shows us alternate images of the world not constructed by our own vision. Rodness’s current work focuses on the automatism of the film camera as a queer encounter with human activity.
“The camera has no emotion, no drives, no memory. It has no subjectivity,” Rodness said. While acknowledging that films are not objective, Rodness uses the concept of the camera’s “indifference,” or lack of human feeling, to examine how film allows the viewer to look at the world it portrays from the perspective of a non-participant. She likens this outside or othered position to anonymous figures in queer theory and proposes that the indifference of film can provide us with a queer vision of the world.
“Our ego-centrism dissolves in our encounter with the movie screen as we see the world coming into existence through a sightedness that is not our own,” she noted. Rodness sees film’s ability to pull us outside of ourselves as one that may allow us to view and experience human differences in a new light.
In her examination of how film queers perceptions of human difference and conflict, Rodness pulls from cinema studies, continental philosophy, and queer theory – the last of which she’s thrilled to discuss with students in the Boston University community.
“I’m excited to be able to introduce this area of cinema [queer cinema] to my students, and to highlight films inscribed with a queer identity for students who may especially be looking for material that speaks to their experiences,” said Rodness. For Rodness, this queer identity may present itself in the film’s inclusion of queer figures or the identity of the filmmaker, but it can also reveal itself in aesthetic choices. She hopes that students will dig deeply into queer media and explore how that media expands their own knowledge and experiences.
In addition to introducing key pieces of queer cinema and leading her students through discussions in the “Introduction to Film & Media Aesthetics” course, Rodness also teaches a course on the history of global cinema through the 1950s. When asked how students should approach media that is a product of another time period or cultural context, Rodness both encouraged an awareness of that context and warned against categorizing the films as products of the past.
“The films I teach are never only cultural or historical objects, and no matter how remote in time or space, their legacies are incomplete,” Rodness added. “I want my students not to reflect on these films in isolation, but as occasions for questioning the nature of globality.”
After two years of social distancing at University of Toronto Mississauga, Rodness is happy to enjoy more personal interactions with students as they ponder questions of film aesthetics and theory. She is also glad to mingle with students from across the University who attend her classes, whether they are drawn to the topics out of curiosity or the desire to fulfill a HUB requirement. No matter the reason, Rodness recognizes the value in a class of students with a diversity of backgrounds and intellectual commitments.
“I see my students learning from their peers’ experiences and perspectives,” Rodness remarked. “Students will have interpretations of films that are unexpected, and it makes for a very dynamic classroom.”
Rodness is also excited to exchange ideas outside of the classroom with Cinema & Media Studies faculty, who hail from a range of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. Film is a study of perspective, whether the perspective is that of the student, the scholar, the director, or the camera. Rodness hopes to use those perspectives and images to inspire others to question their own familiarities with the world.