James Lastra

James Lastra specializes in American film, and has published extensively on sound in film, especially as it relates to the unfolding history of modernity and the aesthetics of both high and vernacular modernisms. Other sound interests include the material history of human sensory experience and how it conditions the emergence and normalization of representational technologies. His latest sound research deals with theories of asynchronous sound in film, and with the Wagnerian aesthetics of modern sound design in American film. Lastra has a specific research interest in Surrealism both in Europe and in the United States, silent film comedy, American experimental film, and the films and writing of Luis Buñuel. Like most of the members of Cinema and Media Studies, he approaches the American cinema as part of a global system of cultural production and exchange.