Blandine Joret is Assistant professor of Media and Culture in the Film team at the University of Amsterdam. She received her PhD at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (2015) with a dissertation on the influence of André Bazin’s film criticism on postwar film culture and academia. She has a BSc in communication and social sciences (KULeuven, 2008) and an MA in Film Studies (UvA, 2009). Blandine’s current research is on film and popular education, film clubs and communities, critical- and ecopedagogy.
Her research is strongly intertwined with her educational practice at the University of Amsterdam: from 2020-2022, Blandine was Comenius fellow at the Netherlands Initiative for Education Research, and she is currently also Humanities Education Expert at the faculty’s Teaching & Learning Center, where she works mainly on inclusion and diversity, teacher appreciation and recognition, and education-research.
Blandine is initiator of the UvA film club, for which she received a Comenius Teaching Fellowship (NRO Educational Innovation award); read more about the film club here and here. Her first book, Studying Film with André Bazin, is published with Amsterdam University Press (2019) and can be ordered on the publisher's website or read on this OpenAccess platform.
- Studying Film with André Bazin is reviewed in the History of the Humanities (Vol. 6, No.1; June 2021): "In Bazin’s view, film had to be actively screened in the circuit of film clubs. As a critic, he felt obliged to make viewers rethink film again and again. Joret did the same for Bazin’s oeuvre. Studying Film with André Bazin is first and foremost a response to lazy readings of the Bazinian text and a powerful plea for actively interpreting it anew."
- Another review is accessible here (Society for French Historical Studies, H-review Volume 20, November 2020): "The analyses that emerge move freely and imaginatively across their subjects, integrating analyses of Bazin’s own writing, in-depth analyses of contemporary films, and a wide range of intellectual discourses, from existentialist philosophy to calculus to physics".