Eva Hielscher is a PhD candidate at the Art History Department of Ghent University and member of the Ghent Urban Studies Team (GUST). She holds an MA degree (with distinction) in ‘Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image’ from the University of Amsterdam, and has studied media culture and film history at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar and Utrecht University. In 2007 she was awarded the ‘Kodak Fellowship in Film Preservation’ for exceptional archival interests and studies by the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA). For her theses she did research on the representation of Amsterdam in early cinema and on picture postcards at the turn of the twenties century as well as on Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura, amateur film and the relationship to the mechanisms of the archive. Most recently she worked as a film archivist and assistant curator at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum and The Hague.
In April 2013 she commenced her PhD research under the supervision of prof. dr. Steven Jacobs within the research project ‘City Symphonies: Urban Modernity, Film, and Avant-Garde (1920-1940)’ – funded by the Special Research Fund (BOF). Focusing on experimental city films of the 1920s and 1930s, her PhD project investigates the interspace between film historiography and the film archives. By combining the written history on city symphonies with the archival and physical history of these films (including preservation, restoration, presentation and accessibility), her research examines the influence of film archives on the emergence and history of the city symphony concept and canon.
Eva Hielscher curated film programs for KASK-Cinema Ghent (B), Focus Filmtheater Arnhem (NL) and for the Pordenone Silent Film Festival (I). She is currently working on an edited volume on city symphonies of the 1920s and 1930s (with Steven Jacobs and Anthony Kinik).
Research Interests:
- City symphonies, city films and the cinematic city - Film archives, film preservation and the history and ethics of film restoration (analogue and digital) - Film history and film historiography - Early cinema and silent film - Media archaeology - Amateur film
