Nicolas Helm-Grovas

Nicolas Helm-Grovas is a writer and a researcher working on film theory, experimental and radical cinema, critical theory and contemporary art. He received his PhD in Media Arts from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2018. He is the author of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Towards Counter-Cinema (published in Brill’s Historical Materialism book series, 2026), and his writing has appeared in publications such as Oxford Art Journal, Discourse, Radical Philosophy, Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Trafic: Almanach du cinéma, New Left Review: Sidecar and Public Review, as well as various edited collections.

With Oliver Fuke he has curated several exhibitions, most recently Intersections in Theory, Film, and Art at Camera Austria in Graz in 2022. With Kodwo Eshun and Oliver Fuke he is the editor of three volumes of selected writing by Peter Wollen – Arrows of Desire, Knight’s Moves and Fire and Ice – published by Verso from autumn 2026 onwards. He is also currently editing and translating a book of essays by the Spanish artist María Ruido, titled Sex and the Factory, which will be published by b_books in 2027.

This project traces two conceptual models in political-modernist cinematic discourse, in Britain and the USA, from the beginning of the 1970s to the early 1980s: metalanguage and translation. It focuses on Stephen Heath, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, three figures in whose work these categories surface in striking and insistent ways. The notion of metalanguage, part of film theory’s inheritance from structuralism, is paradigmatic of a change in scale, moving up from ‘ordinary’ or expressive discourse to a specialized, supposedly analytically superior one. It is a discourse on or about another discourse.

Against this, translation, understood as a non-scalar, generative transformation between languages, emerged as an alternative to such hierarchical thinking, although not always explicitly. (Etymologically, translation means ‘to carry across’.) Yet although anglophone film theory inherited poststructuralism’s critique of metalanguage, it remained haunted by its spectre. The project views the co-existence of scalar and non-scalar models as marking a desire to dialectically think the relation between the aesthetic and the theoretical within a non-dialectical framework.