Critical Perspectives - Week 1

Caleb Turner
Matching your professional interests with an academic topic and approach.

Going to start to understand how to write a dissertation.

DEADLINES:
Draft: 23 MARCH
Final: 11TH MAY

Proposals can build on the solid foundations of academic substance in more depth.

Formalism - The elements that make up the structure the films "form"

Style:

• Mise en scene ( performance,, colour, lighting, set design and props, costume/makeup)

Editing:

• Continuity editing
• Discontinuity editing (soviet movie)
• Arthouse cinema (jean luc goddard)
• Avant-garde / experimental 

Cinematography:

• Framing
• Composition
• Frame rate

Other:

• Narration
• Story and plot
• Characterisation

Sound - Michel Chion

Realism and social realism:

• Documentary modes
• Poetic realism
• Neo-realism
• British realist
• social realism
• Sociology of urban spaces, class systems

Auteurship:

• Francios Truffaut - Auteur policy
• Andrew Sarris - AUTEUR THEORY
• Roland Barthes - Death of the Auteur
• Auteur Structuralism - Wollen, Author as unconsciously channelling social conventions
• Post Auteur - Collaboration with actors, producers and screenwriters

Genre Theory

• Formal elements
• Iconography
• Tone
• Lighting
• Music
• Cinematography
• Plot
• Themes
• Archetypes

Rick Altman: Vocabulary or Ingredients 

Thomas Schatz

Steve Neal: Difference and repetition of formulas, familiarity and innovation 

• Categories
• Subgenres and Hybridity
• Canon formation, revisionism and cycles
• Allegory and metaphor
• Industry and audience

NATIONAL CINEMAS

• british new wave
• french impressionism and surrealism
• soviet montage
• italian neorealism
• german expressionism
• french new wave
• new German cinema
• new Mexican cinema
• new Hollywood and independent American cinema
• hong kong cinema
• iranian new wave

Spectatorship

• Psychoanalysis (Male Gaze in Vertigo, Phallic symbolism)

Feminism

• Male gaze in vertigo
• post-feminism and consumer choice of branding, beautification and neoliberal exploration in new feminism.  

Representation

• Class
• Sexuality
• Gender
• Psychoanalysis

Digital cinema

• Manipulation of spaces and early effects
• Perceptual realism
• Persuasion tactics and paratexts
• Remediation
• Motion capture and performance
• Humanness and technology
• Transmediality
• Participatory culture and citizen journalism
• Convergence and spreadable media  

Animation

• Early animation
• Disney
• Warney Bros and UPA
• Pixar
• Music and abstraction
• anime
• stop motion

Industry, Production and Distribution

• Commercialism, Globalization, Marketing, Ratings, Franchises, money and spectacle

Art and fashion in Films and TV

• Art history
• Surrealism
• Dadism
• Situationism
• Mannerism
• Cubism
• Abstract modernism
• Deconstructionist
• Precisionist

Stars and Stardom

• Star system
• Studio system
• Celebrity studies
• Star presence

Audience reception

• Gathering information and codes and behaviour who why where how?
• Sources
• The hypodermic needle model
• Stuart Hall - encoding and decoding 1980

Politics and Political Economics

• Globalism, neoliberalism and free markets
• Marxism and Frankfurt School 

Structuralism and post surrealism

• Semiotics
• Mythology
• Deconstruction 
• Postmodernism

Phenomenology and Embodied spectatorship

• Haptic Visuality
• Carnal Senses

Film and TV History, Cultures, Criticism, Festivals