The dissertation deals with comics that combine a cinephile interest in film with methods typically associated with fan culture. These draw on film history in different ways, tracing, reusing and recombining cinematic images. Professional comic authors such as SeSar, Blutch or Charles Berberian, deal for example with their own cinematic memories or those of their protagonists, and combine seemingly disparate elements from different films in a form reminiscent of fanfictions. The project is located at the intersection of film studies, comics studies, fan studies and cultural memory studies. The aim behind this is to question the differences between cinephiles and fans that have dominated scholarly perceptions so far and to understand these cinephilic fan comics as an archive of (re)drawn cinematic images resulting from the close interplay between memory and imagination of their comic creators. Located at the centre of this ‘fan cinephilia’ is, thus, a transformative memory work that in addition to more traditional concerns for the ephemeral nature of film images focuses on their personal processing and creative appropriation.

Christian Alexius works as a research assistant at the Department for Media Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg and organizes the Marburger Kamerapreis and the Marburger Kameragespräche. He is an alumnus of the Graduiertenkolleg “Configurations of Film” at Goethe University, Frankfurt, and holds an M.A. in Film Studies from the University of Mainz. His publications include Den Glauben an die Welt mit dem Wahnsinn bezahlen. Reflexionen zum postklassischen Kino ( [To Pay with Madness for Believing in the World] Baden-Baden 2020) und Paolo Sorrentino. Das Werk eines Ästheten ([Paolo Sorrentino: The Work of an Aesthete] with Lucas Curstädt and Björn Hayer, Marburg 2020). His article „Comicforschung und Filmwissenschaft: Wechselwirkungen, ausgelassene Pfade und mögliche Wege in eine gemeinsame Interdisziplinarität” [“Comics Studies and Film Studies”] (MEDIENwissenschaft 39.1, 2022) was recognized with an Honorable Mention for the 2023 Martin Schüwer Publication Prize for Outstanding Comics Studies. Most recently, he co-organised the international conference “Thinking (in) Motion – Comics and Film” at Freie Universität Berlin (5-7 September 2024, with Björn Hochschild, Helene Bongers, Tim Glaser).

alexius[at]staff.uni-marburg.de