Louise Bourgeois Essay Prize

Katherin Yu

Our 2022 Louise Bourgeois essay prize for a research essay by a Stanford Masters or early PhD student in Humanities, Arts or Social Sciences goes to Katherin Yu for Flux of Ethical Responsibility between Character and Camera in the New Wave Running Shot”.  Yu is currently completing her first year of a PhD program in French Studies in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.She received her B.S. in Mathematics from Emory, an M.S. in Statistics from Stanford, and another in Computer Science, specializing in Artificial Intelligence, also from Stanford.Before returning to graduate school, she worked as a machine learning engineer at Facebook.  In “Flux of Ethical Responsibility” Yu analyzes film directors’ characteristic use of the continuous running shot in French New Wave cinema to examine the relations this practice creates between character and camera.  New Wave directors, notably Jean-Luc Godard, regarded matters of cinematic style, practices and techniques, such as the running shot, in ethical terms, ascribing moral functions to aesthetic decisions in filmmaking. The ethical and aesthetic aspects of filmmaking come together in the manipulation of perspective: a stationary camera offers a single perspective on a scene, while a moving camera offers a succession of perspectives and enters into a series of relations with the character or characters in the scene, opening up different possibilities for moral understanding.  Yu shows how New Wave directors used running shots to alternate among relations of camera to character, and among perspectives and ways of showing, always with a fusion of ethical and aesthetic purposes in mind.