The Department of Art History is delighted to announce that Heath Valentine successfully defended his dissertation, entitled “The Cinematographic Unconscious: Modern Art History and Film,” on May 6, 2026.
In this ambitious interdisciplinary project, Heath demonstrates how the narrative and rhetorical approaches of a range of disparate art historians deploy the visual language of film–particularly montage–to structure their arguments. This work boldly reorients the longstanding and sometimes contentious relationship between art history and cinema, showing how the practice of the former is enabled most fully in the twentieth century by the metaphorical resources of the latter. Conducting insightful readings of the strategies of three giants of twentieth-century art history, Heath has taken on what the external assessor identified as especially challenging work, and has produced a study “full of insights and remarkably sophisticated textual analysis.”
Heath’s committee comprised a group of scholars attuned to the interdisciplinary nature of the dissertation. Heath was advised by Professor Jordan Bear, with the deeply engaged support of Professor Elizabeth Legge and Professor James Cahill (French and Cinema Studies). Professor Brian Jacobson (now at Caltech) offered a most attentive reading of the text in light of the institutional structures of cinema and art history, whilst Professor Daniel Adler (York University), the external examiner, provided penetrating insights on the historiographical complexities of modernist art history’s engagement with cinema.
We are so pleased to congratulate Heath on completing his highly ambitious work, which will no doubt compel its readers to reconsider some of the basic suppositions about how modernist art history makes its claims.