Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Sloane Dzhitenov: “In the Infinite Pool: The Cinematic Spectatorship of Sleep Has Her House (2017)” is an exploration of the slow and landscape cinema values contained within Scott Barley’s Sleep Has Her House, with a specific focus on modes of viewership and the audience-screen relationship. It touches on a lot of readings and concepts I’ve long been fascinated with, such as Deleuze’s concept of the cinema or Brakhage’s filmography, making it especially valuable to me, personally.
FM: Describe the original context for/when writing this article while an undergraduate student.
SD: The earliest form of this article came as a video final for an Environmental Philosophy class, of all things. It was considerably more focused on the writings of Kimmerer and Plumwood and much looser in its structure, being essentially just a short voiceover played over clips from the movie. The aspects of film theory that I was touching on still really intrigued me, however, so later that year I sat down and reworked the text into its current form.
FM: What do you enjoy most about your article?
SD: With this piece I really wanted to try integrating descriptive prose into a scholarly work – something I have never done, even though I have been writing for a while. I’m really interested in exploring unconventional essay structures/presentations and, in doing so, expanding my own writing. Particularly with scholarly writing, which is often considered only within strict regiments, I find it especially rewarding to see how I can elevate my presentation and make my analysis more enjoyable for audiences.
FM: What advice do you have for undergraduate film and media scholars?
SD: It’s kinda cliché, but there really is nothing like watching movies and thinking about them – and, preferably, writing your thoughts down! It’s all I’ve ever done, and it’s all you ever really need: practice makes perfect, after all. I’d also recommend throwing a website together to gather all of your works in one place, if not as a portfolio you can show others, then as something you can keep for yourself.
FM: What are your future plans?
SD: I am about to graduate from Wesleyan, so this question is definitely front-and-center in my mind. My immediate post-grad plans are to move to Brooklyn with my partner and their two cats, get lots of rest, and finish up my film projects: namely, I am currently in post-production for Baby Bits, a dark comedy about a young woman having an abortion, and Heartland, a docufiction climate change short I am making with the nonprofit film studio Anthropocine. As someone who is hopelessly in love with cinema, I hope to continue developing my voice as a filmmaker and a writer, with the goal of one day earning my PhD and becoming a film professor.
Author Biography
Sloane Dzhitenov is a freelance writer and student of Film Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Their writing has appeared in various publications and is centrally housed on their website, a-dzh.com, where they aim to produce engaging and entertaining film essays that contain a personal touch. Though they welcome film in any and all of its forms, they have a particular love for everything experimental and bizarre about ‘90s cinema and the current arthouse movement.
