Alain J. J. Cohen

Cinema (History and Analysis);
Psychoanalysis (from Freud and Lacan to the present;
Semiotics (C.S.Peirce to A.J.Greimas);
Film Studies, Art History/Theory, Aesthetics;
Applied Semiotics (Art, Narratology, Digital special f/x);
History of Philosophy & 20th-century French Philosophy (phenomenology, structuralism, postmodernism)

Alain J.-J. Cohen is Professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies at the University of California, San Diego where he has spent his career. He has single-authored 95-odd research articles in professional journals and scholarly volumes (Please contact for early pubs) on cinema, semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, art and philosophy, presented 245 papers at invited lectures and conferences around the world, curated an art exhibition "Æsthetics of Science," made a documentary film and did a few TV programs on questions of cinema (see below).

After a French primary & secondary education and a B.A. in philosophy from McGill University at the age of 19, Cohen received his Ph.D. (UCLA) at 25, earned tenure at 31 (UC San Diego), and did independent doc and postdoc research in France and in Italy. He has a pluri-disciplinary and multi-national formation in aesthetics and philosophy, literary theory, psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, et al.), semiotics (C.S. Peirce, A.-J.Greimas, et al.), the history and analysis of cinema, film studies and art history. Early in his career, he wrote a book on Frankfurt school philosopher H. Marcuse studied from a Freudo-Lacanian perspective, and co-authored another book on the semiotic analysis of New Testament narratology. He recently co-edited a volume on the other arts involved in the art of cinema. His research and teaching focus on the semiotic methods applied to literary and filmic analysis (film history, film narrative, film poetics), and the semiotics of psychoanalytic discourse (case studies, metapsychology, psychoanalysis of art history). He interwove his early research in semiotic and psychoanalytic methods into the technical study of cinema with the advent of video technology and DV technologies. He has written about Eisenstein, Godard and Marker, Welles and Hitchcock, Kubrick and Greenaway, Lynch and Scorsese, as well as Billy Wilder, Rouben Mamoulian, Woody Allen, Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino, Terry Gilliam, Milos Forman, Stephen Frears, et al., to highlight methods of film analysis, the aesthetics of the filmic image, and the rhetoric of violence in contemporary US cinema.

Cohen has been dedicated to the dissemination of psychoanalysis (from the time when he attended Lacan's seminars in his youth), film theory (collaborated with Ch. Metz) and semiotics (was a presenter at the first Congress of the international association, Milan, 1974). In the mid-1970s-80s, he was responsible for inviting to UC San Diego leading European intellectuals, e.g. Baudrillard, Damisch, Eco, Greimas, Lyotard, Marin, as well as other scholars such as H. Parret, P. Fabbri, de Certeau, et al. Over the years he has been a plenary speaker at meetings of CISeL, AISS, IASS, SCC, SERCiA, UCIPC, AFEA, IAVS, et al. He was Visiting Professor at UC Irvine (Spring 2000), at the Université of Poitiers (Programme de cinéma, 2001) and every summer since 1975 at the Centro Internazionale di Semiotica in Urbino, Italy. Aside from his native French and quasi-native Italian and English, he reads Latin, Greek & Spanish (and intends to study Chinese some day).

On account of technical difficulties, several recent entries cannot be listed. Please refer above to the Pubs rubric for a selection from the past 12 years. Prior pubs available upon request.

- Technical analysis of films:
Shot-by-shot studies [sound and image]
Filmmakers' style
Film Genres [cross-ref.]
Image combination systems in film
History of cinema and video

- Cohen curated several exhibitions at the UCSD Ida and Cecil Green Faculty Club:
e.g. "Æsthetics of Science", Winter 2003, with the participation of Scripps Institute of Oceanography, San Diego Supercomputer Center, and other UCSD cutting edge labs. Refer to Links:
http://www.npaci.edu/online/v7.4/artshow.html
http://siovizcenter.ucsd.edu/news_events/2003/02/13th.shtml

- Over the years Cohen presented a series of TV programs -- on Godard, Kubrick, Woody Allen, Painting in Cinema, War Cinema. In 1998 he co-produced with J. Menier a documentary on the artwork of architect-artist Russell Forester.

* Cohen's 'Top 10 FILMS (response to 2001 survey, modified in 2003 - he also wrote about them).
Above-scale films:
- Billy Wilder: Some Like it Hot 1959;
- F. W. Murnau: Sunrise 1927;
- Ch. Chaplin: most of his silent work;
- Akira Kurosawa: Kagemusha 1980
- L. &. A Wachowski: The Matrix (I) 1999;
- et al. (and several other films by the directors listed below):

1. Chris Marker: La Jetée 1962
2. [ex aequo]
- Sergei Eisenstein: Ivan the Terrible 1944 & 1946
- Jean-Luc Godard: Le Mépris 1963
4. [ex aequo]
- Michelangelo Antonioni: L Avventura 1960
- Ingmar Bergman: Persona 1966
- Stanley Kubrick: A Clockwork Orange 1971
- Martin Scorsese: Taxi Driver 1977
- Peter Greenaway: Pillow Book 1996
- David Lynch: Lost Highway 1997
10. [ex aequo]
- Orson Welles: Touch of Evil 1958
- Alain Resnais: Hiroshima mon amour 1959
- François Truffaut: Jules & Jim 1961
- Woody Allen: Zelig 1983
- Claire Denis: Trouble every day 2000
- Ridley Scott: BladeRunner 1982
et al.