Eli Boonin-Vail

  • Film and Media Studies Doctoral Student

Eli Boonin-Vail is a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. His work focuses on American cinemas, Hollywood and independent, in their relationship to incarceration. This emphasis on the carceral entails research into collaborations between the studio system and the Prison Industrial Complex, as well as into how the political economy of racialized accumulation by dispossession wrought by mass incarceration affects and can be seen in independent filmmaking. He participated in the Mellon-Foundation funded Visualizing Abolition Dissertation Workshop at UC Santa Cruz. A media historian and theorist with wide ranging interests, he has also published on queer theory and animation, race and American comic books, and French film production culture. His work can be found or is forthcoming in the peer-reviewed journals Animation Studies, Inks, Film Criticism, French Screen Studies, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Music, Sound, and The Moving Image, and in the edited collection Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in Early Comics, 1900 – 1960.

Representative Publications

 “The Battle of the Big House Bowls: Toilets, Prisons, and the Production Code’s Carceral Coprophobia.” The Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Forthcoming.

“In the Slammer: Acoustemologies of the Carceral in the Prisons of Classical Hollywood.” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image. 17, no. 1 (2023): 43-63. https://doi.org/10.3828/msmi.2023.3

“Hello Public! Jackie Ormes in the Print Culture of the Pittsburgh Courier.” Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics. Edited by Qiana Whitted, 141-157. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2023.

“The System of the Genius: French New Wave and the Politique des producteurs.” French Screen Studies. April, 2022. Published Online ahead of Print: https://doi.org/10.1080/26438941.2022.2057665

“Visible Stripes: Reenacting Trauma in Carceral Aesthetics.” Film Criticism 45, no. 1 (2021). https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.1032