still from Maya Deren's "Ritual in Transfigured Time" (1946)

Sheehan is a College Fellow in Visual and Environmental Studies. Her work explores the intersection between modernist poetics, philosophy and American avant-garde film. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory with a certificate in Cinema Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. Her book manuscript entitled American Avant-Garde Film: Art of Paradox, Loss of Index charts an alternative history for American avant-garde film through philosophical paradoxes that structure literary modernism (amongst them Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Zeno of Elea’s arrow, the limits of language articulated by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Mandelbrot’s Fractal Theory of Geometry). The manuscript examines how the films of Stan Brakhage and Marie Menken, Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow, frame the experience of film, its creation and its reception, as an extension of those subjective anxieties and affects that arise most poignantly through these paradoxes in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound, major influences on avant-garde film.

Sheehan’s next book project, Cinema’s Laocoön: the Time of Sculpture in Avant-Garde Film, looks at the role of sculpture and photography in avant-garde films of the 1940s-60s. Beginning with the multitude of photographs Auguste Rodin commissioned of his sculptures (which accumulated in the obsessive vein of Eadweard Muybridge’s human motion studies) the book considers the influence of technologies of reproduction like photography and film on sculpture, a medium which since Lessing’s “Laocoön” essay has figured in the world of aesthetics as a spatial art, frozen in time while its sisters, poetry and music, were thought to transcend the limits of form (this division of the arts was also responsible for film’s early discomfort in defining itself aesthetically). Within this context, the project explores sculpture as it is used in films like Maya Deren’s Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), Marie Menken’s Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945) and Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) to generate a moment of radical uncertainty on the part of the spectator about whether she is watching a moving or a still image (the photographic image of a sculpture being indiscernible from a moving image), leaning upon this uncertainty to question film’s form and the activity of its reception.