Dennis Hanlon doesn’t have a grand illusion that he will change the world through his film studies courses. However, he hopes his dissertation causes his colleagues in the field to look at the world through a different lens.

As a Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa, Hanlon examined how changes in participatory cinema are not simply matters of local practice. He revealed how the politics of cinema on both sides of the Atlantic are transformed not only by the filmmakers’ appreciation of experimental filmmaking techniques, but also by their search for ways to express collective, alternative political identities.

“(Hanlon’s) dissertation represents a new type of comparative study in our field, one that considers transnational cultural exchanges, that is, types of exchanges that transformed the Old World of Europe just as much as the New World of the Americas,” says Kathleen Newman, UI associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Hanlon’s dissertation director.

Hanlon’s dissertation—“Moving Cinema: Bolivia’s Ukamau and European Political Film, 1966-1989”—places the work of Bolivian filmmaker and theorist Jorge Sanjines  in a transnational context by revealing the previously unacknowledged extent to which his films and writings intervened in European debates about politics and film during the last two decades of the Cold War.

“My dissertation was about a filmmaker who believed cinema could be a tool for social transformation,” says Hanlon, who earned his doctorate in film studies in 2009 and won the UI Graduate College Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award for his work. “Sanjines made films for two radically different audiences: the indigenous people in the Andes Mountains who had never seen a film before and the most sophisticated film-going audience in the world in Europe.”

According to Newman, Hanlon argued that Sanjines advanced our understanding of ways in which film might communicate non-Western perspectives. 

“Sanjines anticipated a later shift in European film theory away from universalizing discourses toward more culturally specific conceptions of identity and subjectivity,” Hanlon says. “He advocated for filming in extremely long takes, sometimes lasting several minutes. This allowed him to avoid the fragmentation of montage, violate principles of the Western pictorial tradition, and frame a collective protagonist.”

In spring 2008, Hanlon, as a recipient of a T. Anne Cleary International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Graduate College, traveled to Bolivia to conduct archival research and interview key filmmakers, most notably the reclusive Sanjines.

One of Hanlon’s favorite films directed by Sanjines is the 1969 production “Blood of the Condor.” This movie focuses on a chief of a rural Indian community in Bolivia who grows suspicious when his wife and other village women are unable to conceive. When the village discovers that they are victims of a covert sterilization campaign, partially run by the U.S. Peace Corps, they fight back with plenty of bloodshed.

“Blood of the Condor” was in part responsible for the expulsion of the Peace Corps from Bolivia in 1971,” Hanlon says. “When I was in Bolivia, the Peace Corps were finally allowed to go back into the country.”

After earning his Ph.D., Hanlon became an ACM Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in film studies and emerging media at Beloit College in Wisconsin.  Hanlon taught courses on film analysis, film theory, and various world cinemas.

His is working on a study of New Latin American Cinema in Cold War Germany and a genre study of economic liberalization and the contemporary international gangster film.

“The reason I became interested in gangster films was I realized this is the genre for people to work through their feelings of coping with capitalist modernity and social turmoil resulting from economic crisis,” Hanlon says.

This fall, Hanlon will become faculty in the Department of Film Studies at Saint Andrews University in Scotland. St. Andrews University is Scotland's first university and the third oldest in the English-speaking world, founded in 1413.