Nicole Beth Wallenbrock

Faculty Fellow

Nicole Beth Wallenbrock is an Assistant Professor of French at Hostos Community College and teaches in Film Studies at the Graduate Center. She wrote The Franco-Algerian War through a 21st Century Lens (Bloomsbury, 2020) and co-edited Migrants’ Perspective Migrants in Perspective: World Film with Frank Jacob (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). She currently is researching North African cinematheques.

Collected Work

“Pathé Baby Films of North Africa”

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This essay argues the Pathé Baby home projector and its documentaries of North Africa reveal the apex of the nineteenth-century domestic dream and a twentieth-century nostalgic grasp of crumbling Empires. Moving images that were controlled by the projectionist, and which were flattened on the shell walls, emblematized the racialized time that trapped North Africans in a vague past on the screen. However, if the projection suggests that the colonized farm, weave, dance, within the colonizers’ home, the small but present ways, we find the North Africans rejecting the camera and/or performing exoticism for a financial exchange complicate the previously read passivity in their objectification, and thwart their inclusion in a colonial home collection.

Participating Years

2022–2023

Revolutionary Arts

Wary of making politics an aesthetic in disguise, radical theory and practice have nevertheless embraced all kinds of artistic provocations and traditions in every form and genre. At the same time, the possibility for fundamental change demands a range of interpretive encounters that might elicit meanings for people whom Julius Scott, writing about a different time, described as “disenchanted people casting about for new options.”