In the world of film comedy, things and bodies develop an insidious obstinacy and deeper meaning: Inanimate things come to life, body parts are turned back against the organic whole body, words bring about literal effects. In particular, the slapstick tradition of film comedy can be considered a laboratory for such fictional “quasi-body” (Rancière) and indeterminate “quasi-causalities” (Deleuze): The false beards, doppelgangers and word games of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and the Marx Brothers set in place a logic of nonsense that reduces the healthy human intellect to absurdity. The research project defines the concept of a quasi-body in a double sense: 1) As an aesthetic-technical transformation of the comic slapstick body, and 2) As the specific physicality of the cinema itself, which creates a new cinematographic quasi-body by means of mounting heterogeneous things, images, and sounds.

Sulgi Lie studied film science, German language and literature and philosophy in Bochum, Amsterdam, and Berlin. From 2005 to 2015, he was a research associate at the Seminar for Film Studies at the Free University of Berlin, and a 2016 post-doctoral fellow of the Volkswagen Foundation at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.