Dr Nikolaus Perneczky

Profile

I am a research fellow working on a postdoctoral project titled “Restitution and the Moving Image: Decolonising Global Film Heritage” (2022–2025), which considers colonial legacies of uneven development and unequal exchange in global audiovisual archiving through the lens of restitution.

My wider research is concerned with moving image practices of the Global South and their insertion into a global economy of image-making, taking a critical transnational view of “World Cinema” as an uneven global relation rooted in a long history of (neo-)colonial extraction and extraversion. My work traces this uneven relation – between cinemas of the Global South and actors and institutions in the Global North – across the entire life cycle of the moving image: from funding and co-production arrangements to the preservation and “heritagisation” of Global Majority cinemas by archivists, curators, critics, and scholars.

Recent publications include an article on the futures past of African cinema (2022), a chapter arguing for the restitution of Africa’s displaced and sequestered film heritage (2023), and a forthcoming book chapter exploring how Indigenous claims to images held in Australia’s national heritage institutions challenge liberal conceptions of image authorship and property while suggesting radically different modalities of archival care. The edited volume Restitution and the Moving Image: On the Politics and Ethics of Global Audiovisual Archiving (co-editor Cecilia Valenti) is currently under review with Amsterdam University Press. I am also preparing a monograph titled Against Development: Early African Cinema as Worldmaking (Oxford University Press).

Nikolaus is a member of the Queen Mary Postcolonial Seminar.

Teaching

• Contemporary World Cinemas (with Ashvin Devasundaram)
• Decolonising Film Heritage and Curatorship (with Grazia Ingravalle)

Research

Research Interests:

• African cinemas
• World Cinemas
• Third Cinema
• North-South film co-production and distribution
• Global audiovisual archiving and curatorial practice after the digital turn
• Restitution and visual culture
• Postcolonial theory and decolonial methods in film and media studies
• Early television and Post-TV

Publications

Peer-reviewed publications

Perneczky, Nikolaus, and Cecilia Valenti, eds. Restitution and the Moving Image: On the Politics and Ethics of Global Film Heritage. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, under review.
“Footage Lost and Found: African Archival Film and/as Moving Image Restitution.” In “Visions of Life: Utopian Dreams, African Revolutionary Filmmaking, and the Film Archive.” Special issue, Sources: Materials & Fieldwork in African Studies, under review.
“Moving Image Restitution: Lessons from Australia.” In Inward Outward: On Witnessing and Care in the Archive, edited by Rachel Somers Miles, Alana Osbourne, and Eleni Tzialli. Amsterdam: Research Center for Material Culture, forthcoming.
“African Film Heritage: The Case for Restitution.” In Accidental Archivism: Shaping Cinema’s Futures with Remnants of the Past, edited by Vinzenz Hediger and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, 395–402. Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2023.
“Motor, Mirror, Reinvention: Paulin Soumanou Vieyra on the African Cinema to Come (1956–1961).” Black Camera 13, no. 2 (2022): 372–93.
“Continual Re-enchantment: Tunde Kelani’s Village Films and the Spectres of Early African Cinema.” Frames Cinema Journal 6 (2014): https://framescinemajournal.com/article/continual-re-enchantment-tunde-kelanis-village-films-and-the-spectres-of-early-african-cinema/.                                                                                    “Pasolini’s Africa or, The Crisis of the Eurocentric Image” [in German]. Zeitgeschichte-online (2010), https://zeitgeschichte-online.de/themen/pasolinis-afrika-oder-die-krise-des-eurozentrischen-laufbildes-ca-1968

In preparation

“Safi Faye with and against ‘Women in Development’: North-South Film Co-production and the Neoliberal Turn.” Missero, Dalila, and Masha Salazkina, eds. “Gender, Media and Developmentalism.” Special issue, Feminist Media Histories.
Korporaal, Astrid, and Nikolaus Perneczky, eds. “The Moving Image as Medium of Restitution.” Special issue, Journal of Visual Culture.
Against Development. Early African Cinema as Worldmaking. Research monograph under contract with Oxford University Press.

German-language books and edited volumes

Foerster, Lukas, Thomas Morsch, and Nikolaus Perneczky, eds.Before Quality: Zur Ästhetik der Fernsehserie vor HBO, Netflix und Co. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2019.
Foerster, Lukas, and Nikolaus Perneczky, eds. The Real Eighties: Amerikanisches Kino der Achtzigerjahre. Vienna: Austrian Film Museum/Synema, 2018.
Eschkötter, Daniel, Lukas Foerster, Nikolaus Perneczky, Simon Rothöhler, and Joachim Schätz. Amerikanische Komödie: Kino, Fernsehen, Web. Berlin: Kadmos, 2016.
Foerster, Lukas, Nikolaus Perneczky, Fabian Tietke, and Cecilia Valenti, eds. Spuren eines Dritten Kinos: Zu Ästhetik, Politik und Ökonomie des World Cinema. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013.