Ken Eisenstein

Ken Eisenstein is an Assistant Professor in the English Department's Film/Media Studies Program. His research is centered on the American avant-garde film, especially that of the late 1960s and 70s, when artists like Hollis Frampton and Ernie Gehr came to the fore. In his much wider teaching interests, he happily follows other such figures into areas like Oscar Micheaux’s Race Films (via Ken Jacobs), Sergei Eisenstein’s montage (via Stan Brakhage), and Vincente Minnelli / music in film (via Warren Sonbert). Ken worked closely with both Anthology Film Archives and the Harvard Film Archive while completing his dissertation “‘Disembering’: The Activity of the Archive in Hollis Frampton” (2016), and he hopes to encourage Bucknell students' involvement in such enriching digs.

Educational Background

• Ph.D., University of Chicago, Department of Cinema and Media Studies
• M.F.A., School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Filmmaking
• B.A., Cornell University, English

Scholarly Interests

• American Avant-garde film
• Film aesthetics
• Film and the other arts

Current Research

Ken is writing two essays that take up aspects of Structural Film (its soundscapes, and its relation to surrealist animation), as well as ones on Brakhage’s editing, Brakhage’s use of found imagery and sound, and Frampton’s relationship with/to the painter Lee Lozano.

Selected Publications

'The Archives of our Memory': Hollis Frampton's Marmoreal Mammary," in October Files: Hollis Frampton, ed. Michael Zryd (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2022), pp. 267-271 [originally in The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists vol. 12, no. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 101-104].

Review of Gregory Zinman’s Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts in Critical Inquiry vol. 48 no. 1 (Autumn 2021), pp. 181-183.

“Ernie Gehr’s The Collector (2003) and Ernie Gehr the Collector,” in Provenance and Early Cinema, ed. Joanne Bernardi, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021), pp. 275-286.

“Finding One’s Feet: A Pair of Ernie Gehr’s Found Footage Videos,” Found Footage Magazine #6 (Spain: March 2020), pp. 92-100.

"Snowblind: Hollis Frampton's Vision of Michael Snow," Storyboard (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2018), n.p.

"'Where Time Does Not Play': Ernie Gehr Turning on a Dime," Ernie Gehr: Bon Voyage, ed. Andrea Bellini (Milan: Mousse Publishing/Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, 2015), pp. 23-47.

"Vicarious Vicario: Restocking John Vicario's Forgotten Shoppers Market (1963)," in Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980, ed. David James (London: John Libbey Publishing, 2015), pp. 115-127.

"Hapax Legomena," A Hollis Frampton Odyssey, The Criterion Collection no. 607 (2012), pp. 24-29.