Department of English

Trevor Mowchun works as both a film scholar and filmmaker. He holds an MA in Film Studies (2010) from the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University, Montreal, and a PhD in Film Studies, Philosophy, and English (2019) from the Humanities Interdisciplinary program, also at Concordia. He teaches film studies and production courses at undergraduate and graduate levels in the Film & Media Studies program which he also directs.

Mowchun is the author of Metaphysics and the Moving Image: “Paradise Exposed” (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), an investigation into the medium of film’s inheritance of metaphysics – Western philosophy’s oldest and most ambitious form of truth-seeking – asking why the moving image of film takes up this ancient quest, renewing it at the very moment when philosophy sought to abandon it once and for all. His essays have been published in a variety of journals, such as Film International, New Review of Film & Television Studies, Evental Aesthetics, and Cineaction, and explore a wide range of topics from the question of contingency in film, to the tense relationship between film and painting, to the traumatized spectator of horror films. His most recent essay on the film criticism of philosopher Gilles Deleuze was published in the edited collection, Gilles Deleuze and Film Criticism (Palgrave, 2023). Some of this writing can be described as experimental, making use of diaries, diagrams, dialogues, aphorisms, and marginalia. This rethinking of the traditional forms of film studies is mirrored in his work as an experimental filmmaker in films such as Fidonacci Privacy Fence (2024), Drink Some Darkness (2020), and World to Come (co-directed with Daniel Eskin, 2015). Mowchun’s first feature film, World to Come experiments with poetic montage, offscreen sound, fragmentary space, elliptical time, and stream-of-consciousness voiceover to evoke one man’s attempt to reignite the disenchanted spirit of a religious community struggling to cohere, move on, and reconnect with the world in the wake of tragedy.

Mowchun is now at work on a film charting the passages and pitfalls of a “life of the mind” within the university microcosm, tentatively titled Degree of Difficulty. His current scholarly work seeks to overcome the rigid divide between narrative and avant-garde film through the concept of myth.

Professor Mowchun’s CV