Noah Teichner

Professor Teichner is a filmmaker, artist, and researcher who joined AUP as an Assistant Professor in Film Studies in 2024. Originally from the United States, he has lived and worked in Paris since 2007.

As a filmmaker and artist, Teichner often works with archival materials to experiment with creative forms of historiography across old and new media. He is a member of the artist-run film lab L’Abominable, where he has made installations, performances, and the feature-length documentary Navigators (2022). This experimental essay film recounts the 1919 deportation of 249 left-wing activists—including anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman—from the United States to Soviet Russia on the same ship that was later used as the set of Buster Keaton’s slapstick comedy The Navigator (1924). Navigators has been screened internationally (Centre Pompidou, ICA London, Light Industry, Svenska filminstitutet, Cinéma du Réel, Archivio Aperto, etc.) and had a theatrical release in France in 2023.

As a film and media historian, Teichner’s fields of research include comedy and popular entertainment, the history of film technology, sound studies, and media archaeology. In 2021, he completed a PhD dissertation at the University of Paris 8 that retraces the history of “canned” vaudeville and “canned” media in the United States from the beginnings of the phonograph industry to Hollywood’s transition to sound. He is reworking a part of this dissertation into an upcoming book focused on Warner Bros.’ sound-on-disc Vitaphone shorts (1926-1930).

His current project Comedy Objects mixes historical research with speculative fiction to think about comedy workers in the United States during the Great Depression. The project will take the form of lecture-performances, moving image installations, videographic essays, academic publications, and a feature-length film.

Link to personal website: https://noahteichner.com/