Greg Cohen earned his Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University in June, 2008. As an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, he worked on a book manuscript titled The Spatial Unconscious: Latin American Cinema and the Limits of Political Modernism. Addressed to a corpus of highly idiosyncratic and inadequately studied films from Argentina and Brazil in the 1960s and 70s, the project traces a suppressed spatial discourse that, while less overtly oriented towards socialist revolution or national liberation, resonates critically with, on the one hand, elements of Anglo-American and European film theory of the period largely disregarded by Latin American film scholarship and, on the other, with certain “spatial concepts” emerging beyond film theory in various areas of post-structuralism. Ultimately, the study aims to bypass the monolithic critical paradigms of “Third Cinema” and the “New Latin American Cinema” that for so long have circumscribed the study of independent film produced in the Americas during the sixties and seventies, highlighting instead those spatial inflections of film form and practice that traffic among other cultural discourses addressed to the foundations of modern spatial knowledge, the nature of modern spatiality, and the presumed historical and geographic “limits” of the modern project.
More broadly, Greg’s research explores the intersections between “minor” new wave cinemas, geographic discourse, and modernist architecture and urbanism. Most recently, he has begun to explore the imbricated discourses of avant-garde cinema and television advertising. His article, “New Takes on the New: The Cinemas of 1960s Latin America,” appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, and his essay, “The End of Modernity, As Seen from the Air: Fernando Birri’s Throw a Dime and Jorge Bodanzky’s Iracema,” is currently under review at Cinema Journal.
Greg also held an appointment as Lecturer in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media in UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, where he lead graduate seminars in the Winter and Spring quarters on various aspects of his work. Currently, Greg works in the film industry.