Faculty Member, Film Studies
About
My primary area of research is the aesthetics and cultural politics of the contemporary period film. I am interested in this genre as a form of hybrid cinema, with elements that draw back to the literary, the painterly and the photographic, as well as its intertextual relationship with past moments in film history. My work gives primacy to the film text to explore aesthetics and meaning. I look at the ways the period film can be considered an expression of the relentless cultural need to adapt, cite and reinvent existing cultural objects (and the gender politics behind such move) and more specifically (or perhaps more broadly) the relation between writing and the visual that underpins period aesthetics. As a symptom of a mannerist impulse in contemporary culture, I am fascinated by the ways in which the period film looks back in time for pleasure or escape, but also, why not, to make us feel our 'presentness' more intensely.
This work links with my long-term interest in the biographical film or 'biopic' and in the debates around the so-called 'heritage film' in British and European cinema. The latter interest has been fuelled by the love-hate sentiment that critics and historians devoted to particular national cinemas often seem to harbour towards this genre.
My monograph Heritage Film. Nation, Genre and Representation (Wallflower press, Short Cuts series; forthcoming 2011) revisits and updates these debates as well as the place of heritage cinema in contemporary film culture, and in particular its fluid position in relation to the middlebrow as well as issues of national and European identity.
A different project that is currently taking shape engages with the wave of renewed interest in theoretical and historical explorations of cinephilia. This project looks at the particular role of cinephilia in the conflicted history of Spanish cinema through cinephilic directors (see chapter on Isabel Coixet in Contemporary Spanish cinema and genre), films (see chapter on Torremolinos 73 in Cinema at the Periphery) as well as cinephilic moments in Spanish film culture.
Contact Information
| Homepage: | http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/depts/film |
