Carl Elsaesser, Visiting Assistant Professor of Film, was awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship for his project Resonant Coastlines, a feature-length experimental film. The Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced on April 15 their appointment of the 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows, “based on both prior career achievement and exceptional promise.”

Carl’s film uses footage from the past decade as raw material to shape comparative and metaphorical threads of connection to history and culture through a Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age narrative. In 2015, he sent a box of cameras to the Larabee family—a mother, a father and two boys living in Portland, Maine—who responded to his proposal to make a co-authored film. They recorded their daily lives over the course of two years, each member of the family generating an archive of about 30 hours of film.

Through his project, we see how Ellis Larabee's emerging queer identity, captured in his stream-of-consciousness filmmaking practice, tethers him to Maine’s unseen histories and forgotten landscapes. The film functions both as a primer for the audience and for Ellis as he slowly becomes aware of the culture he’s inherited as a resident of Maine.

Resonant Coastlines is a film about small revelations that change a life; how one thinks their identity is self-made, but learns that it is actually created through chains of metaphors, speech acts, and connections from land to symbol; and how the self, like filmmaking, is a practice of selecting images to follow images in order to presume continuity. Carl’s project is a present-day reimagining of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. The way Stephen Dedalus experiences himself as both fractured and whole is a microcosm of the way Ireland sees itself. The way Ellis uses the camera to witness his life reflects both a conventional and changing image of Maine, and explores how a sense of self or tradition, abutting the edge of queerness, is created and maintained as a foundation for exploitation, exploration, and enrichment.