New publication: An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea by Erika Balsom 

The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre launches An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea by Erika Balsom, an essay that surveys the seascape of historical and contemporary filmmaking across genres.

The result of Erika Balsom’s 2017 residency with the Govett-Brewster as International Film Curator in Residence, An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea complicates the Romantic myth of the ocean as a dark, monstrous void of unknowable depths, populated by alien creatures.

Across five themes—the elemental contingencies of water, the fascination of submarine cinematography, representations of littoral labour, approaches to the Middle Passage and illegalized migration, and the materiality of global maritime circulation—An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea drifts idiosyncratically through the history of cinematic representations of the sea, approaching the ocean as a vast and fluid archive traversing nature and culture.

Through the essay Balsom asks: what if we understood the ocean not as dividing us but as connecting us? What politics, what ethics, would follow?

Balsom comments, “Sigmund Freud’s notion of oceanic feeling refers to the sensation of an unbreakable bond between oneself and the outside world. I was interested in taking this metaphor literally, returning it to its aquatic origins. The essay looks over a century of cinema to ask how the cinematic motif of the ocean might shed light on what it means to belong to the whole of the world in our time of ecological, humanitarian, and political emergency.”

“I’m so grateful to the Govett-Brewster for the opportunity to pursue this publication and its accompanying exhibition and screening series,” Balsom says.

An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea is published as the first of the Govett-Brewster’s STATEMENTS series of commissioned essays, published with the support of Creative New Zealand.

The Gallery’s senior curator and editor of the STATEMENTS series, Paul Brobbel: “The publication of Balsom’s text marks the confluence of several strands of our programming around film at the Govett-Brewster, bringing our residency and exhibition programmes together with a new and exciting publishing initiative.”

The publication will be accompanied by Projection Series #11: An Oceanic Feeling (August 4–November 18), a film programme and exhibition curated by Balsom featuring films by Peggy Ahwesh, Noël Burch and Allan Sekula, CAMP, Filipa César and Louis Henderson, Mati Diop, The Otolith Group, Maddie Leach, Rebecca Meyers, Philip Scheffner, G. Anthony Svatek and Francisco Rodriguez. Read more on Projection Series #11: An Oceanic Feeling.

An exhibition tour and book launch hosted by Erika Balsom in New Plymouth is on Saturday 8 September at 4pm, followed by a screening and book launch in Auckland on Sunday, September 9 from 3 to 4:30pm at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, as part of the 2018 CIRCUIT symposium.

The book will be available for purchase at the Govett-Brewster Shop and online at www.govettbrewster.com.

About Erika Balsom
Erika Balsom is a senior lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. Before joining the Film Studies department at King’s College in 2013, Erika Balsom held a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley (2010-2011) and was assistant professor of film studies at Carleton University, Ottawa (2011-2013). Erika Balsom has a PhD in Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, USA (2010); an MA in Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London and a BA Hons in Cinema Studies, University of Toronto, Canada. Her most recent book, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation, was published by Columbia University Press in 2017. She is author of Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013), the co-editor of Documentary Across Disciplines (2016), and a frequent contributor to Artforum and Sight and Sound. Her work has appeared in publications including Grey Room, e-flux, Cinema Journal, and numerous exhibition catalogues.