Fareed Ben-Youssef is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his BA in English Literature with a Film Concentration from Princeton University and his master’s degree in the Film Studies Program in the Department of Rhetoric at Berkeley. His dissertation, Visions of Power: Violence, the Law, and the Post-9/11 Genre Film, describes how traumatic language bled into the laws created to fight the War on Terror. He reads genre films (the western, film noir, and the superhero film) alongside legal texts from this period used to sanction torture and legitimate targeted killings. The dissertation shows how the contested roles of victim and perpetrator shift and reverse within political and cinematic rhetoric. His research interests include: genre film, world cinema, cultural trauma, media spectacle, post-9/11 law, post-colonial theory, neo-imperialism, intermediality, and intersectionality. 
Directors · Interviews · Visual Artists · Writers & Critics
MIKE LEIGH: People have said to me, “Oh, I’m surprised Turner was like that, I would have thought he would be rather Byronic and beautiful and ascetic and nervously brilliant”[…]
