PhD students
Vera Burgos-Hernandez | Pasquale Cicchetti | Andrew Dorman | Fredrik Gustafsson | Matthew Holtmeier | Raluca Iacob | Heath Iverson | Paola Monaldi | Diana Popa | Kathleen Scott | Sarah Soliman | Beatriz Tadeo Fuica | Giles Taylor | John Trafton | Chelsea Wessels
Vera Burgos-Hernandez
Email: vbh@st-andrews.ac.uk
Thesis: The Rape of Europe: The Europeanisation of Spanish Cinema
Office: Resources Room, 99 North St
Spanish cinema has experienced an important transformation over the last three decades. This change can be observed in the main topics of the films as well as their ideological perspective and their aesthetic politics. Thus, the Spanish cinema of the 1960s and 1970s reflected a very traditional and sexist gender reality through the portrait of marriage, heterosexual relationships and a general obsession with sex through the male gaze. However, from the late 1980s it begins to reflect new models of heterosexual relationships, which parallel the new gender dynamics being negotiated in Spanish society and mirror the changes experienced by women in social, economic and symbolic arenas. The fact that Spain was under the political dictatorship of General Franco (1939-1975) for several decades is fundamental for approaching and analysing the films produced during these years and underpins most of the existing research on the matter. However, in existing accounts the Spanish Civil War and Franco's regime seem to be the only explanations for the evolution of Spanish cinema.
My critical approach raises the question: are the dictatorship and its end really the only factors involved in such a process of transformation? The answer would be no, since this transformation of Spanish cinema has been forged by multiple social process from the 1960s onwards, which surpass the time framework of Franco's politics. The entrance of Spain into the European Union in 1989 (or "European Economic Community" as it was at the time) as well as a longer and more complex process of Europeanisation are other factors that should be considered if we are to understand completely the richness of the field. The analysis of these 'other' factors, together with the existing political ones, will be the main focus of my research proposal.
I received my BA in Sociology from University of La Laguna in the Canary Islands. After finishing I furthered my education by completing a MA on Applied Social Research and Data Analysis from the Center of Sociological Research in Madrid. I also finished a MA as part of a PhD on 'Culture, Knowledge and Communication' in Complutense University of Madrid. This PhD on Spanish cinema is a project which I have been intending to pursue for some time now and I am looking forward to working with my co-supervisers, Dr Tom Rice and Dr Bernard Bentley.
Pasquale Cicchetti
Email: pc35@st-andrews.ac.uk
Thesis: Exploding Home: Iconographies of Home and Homeland
Office: Resources Room, 99 North St.
There's no place like home, said a jaunty Judy Garland in the conclusion of the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz. More than seventy years later, American imagination seems to find it harder than expected to come back from Oz. More exactly, it is the very border between the wild realm of Oz and good old Kansas that appears to be blurred.
Dealing with the cultural traumas that have marked the symbolic body of the nation in the last decade - from 9/11 to the housing market downturn - my research addresses the cinematic representation of both domestic and external spaces in contemporary American cinema, engaging long established cultural tropes (such as those related to the Puritan concepts of Wilderness and Errand) as well as issues of medial subjectivity and narrative patterns.
Ranging from recent combat films to Gran Torino and No Country for Old Men, this enquiry employs a variety of analytical approaches to focus on its subject. Building on the work of historians like Richard Slotkin and Sacvan Bercovitch, it aims at reframing those recent cultural strains within contrasting narratives of domestic and external space. This sort of narrative dialectics leads in turn to the core point of the production of identity, opposing strategies of linguistic resistance - as authored by de Michel de Certeau and Homi Bhabha - to superimposed, unifying rhetorics of national consciousness. In order to achieve this kind of socio-narrative breadth, film-texts will eventually be considered from the standpoint of Jurij Lotman's cultural semiotics, with a specific focus on the semantics of space (border crossings, re-enactment of the Frontier myth, etc).
By translating social strains into narrative and iconographic terms, my research aims at exploring the boundaries of the cultural approach within the framework of textual analysis. In addition, as it underlines the inner dialectics of American cinematic imagination, my thesis also contrasts the kind of centre/periphery model often used to describe national cinemas as opposed to an allegedly unified 'Global Hollywood'.
After a secondary education mainly focused on the humanities, I received my BA degree in Cultural Heritage at the University of Milan, Italy, with a major in History of Animation. Then I moved to Bologna, where I pursued my MA in Cinema, Television and Media production, expanding my interests in animation, culture-oriented semiotics and American culture. My final thesis, dealing with the mythological foundations of American cultural identity, was inspired by the work of the late Professor Franco La Polla and supervised by Dr Roy Menarini. My current supervisor at St Andrews is Professor Robert Burgoyne.
I also collaborate as a film critic with several Italian magazines, and I run an independent webzine called Sushiettibili.
Andrew Dorman
Email: ajrd2@st-andrews.ac.uk
Thesis: Cultural Specificity in Transnational Flows: The Non-National Cinema and the Construction of Japaneseness
Office: Resources Room, 99 North St./ Office Hour: Monday 1-2pm.
The amount of literature dedicated to Japanese cinema is considerable and wide-ranging, yet the majority of scholarship available remains fixated upon the supposed ‘Japaneseness' of the cinema and is fraught with issues of Western-centric analysis. As I have found, similar concerns are evident in attempts to identify national cinema as a clearly-defined film category and by association the nation as a finite cultural space. How does one measure the ‘nationality' of national cinemas? How is our assessment of this affected by geopolitics, the ‘global' and the transnational, as well as the decision-making of national film industries which either accentuate or deemphasise national characteristics?
In my research, I am looking at contemporary Japanese cinema (and specifically films that have been exported successfully to Western markets in recent years) as a case study with which to explore the transnational status of national cinema. I aim to locate the study of national cinema according to a more expansive set of criteria, taking into account cross-cultural exchanges that inform an alternative conception of cultural specificity - the non-national - and investigate the ways in which nation-ness is precariously constructed from both within and without. In this sense, certain national cinemas appear both global and local, and as a result downplay nation-ness while displaying stereotypical cultural characteristics.
In the context of modern Japanese cinema, a non-national framework enables us to look beyond the academic construction of Japanese aesthetics, film form and subject matter, and suggest that the nationality of national cinema is continually in flux, always in a state of ‘becoming', as Andrew Higson has suggested, and cannot be fully assessed through traditional approaches.
Films under discussion in this research include: Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989), Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2009), Visitor Q (Takashi Miike, 2001), and Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008).
As an undergraduate I received an MA Honours in Liberal Arts from the University of Glasgow before moving on to complete a MLitt within the St Andrews Film Studies department. Aside from my current research, my other interests include issues of invisibility in queer cinema since the 1920s, the stereotyping of East Asia in both Western and Asian cinemas, extreme cinema, and horror films in general.Fredrik Gustafsson
Email: fg223@st-andrews.ac.uk
Thesis: Hasse Ekman – a question of authorship in a national context.
Office: Resources Room, 99 North St./ Office Hour: Fridays 10-11.
Swedish cinema undoubtedly has a good reputation, worldwide. This reputation is partly due to its directors, such as the masters of the silent era, Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller (and the quite recently re-discovered George af Klercker) and later directors such as Alf Sjöberg, Jan Troell, Lasse Hallström, Lukas Moodysson and, obviously, Ingmar Bergman, who looms over all the others like a hawk over a family of mice. The reputation also stems from its actors and actresses such as Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman (no relation), Max von Sydow and Harriet Andersson.
But still a large part of Swedish cinema is hidden below the radar, namely the two decades after Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller moved to Hollywood in the early 1920s. There's a blank until the 1950s when the international discovery of Bergman and Sjöberg brought back an interest in Swedish cinema. What's striking though is how little is known today about the years that went before, even among scholars. This lack of knowledge leads to a problematic lack of context when someone like Ingmar Bergman is discussed. He did not rise out of nowhere; he came from a vibrant cinema culture, and if this is not taken into account, it will make for a flawed assessment of Bergman's career. So in my thesis I will discuss this era, with focus on the 1940s, which I would argue is something of a renaissance in Swedish cinema. And the leading light of this renaissance was Hasse Ekman, writer, director, producer, actor and composer. In the 1940s and early 1950s Ekman was Bergman's arch rival, and his equal, if not his superior. With my thesis I have three aims then. 1) to look at an important but forgotten era. 2) to look at an important filmmaker, and 3) by combining context and authorship, discuss and challenge many ideas about authorship.
Personally, I'm a film historian, with a keen interest in film aesthetics. My interest in, and knowledge of, cinema history particularly covers Western, Iranian, Indian and East Asian cinema. I have two Master's degrees from Stockholm University, one in Film History and Theory, and one in The History of Ideas. I've worked for six years at the Swedish Film Institute, one year of which I worked at the Ingmar Bergman Archives, responsible for going through all of his personal correspondence and cataloguing the letters. I've also worked as Bergman coordinator at the Swedish Institute, organising Bergman festivals all over the world. I write on film at http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com and I write a regular DVD column in a Swedish film magazine.
Matthew Holtmeier
Email: mh633@st-andrews.ac.uk
Thesis: Filming Invisible Peoples: Minor Cinemas at the Interstices of Film Culture
Office: Resources Room, 99 North St.
'Minor Cinema' is an increasingly popular term in the field of Film Studies, but while the term has a fairly concrete origin, it has been used with increasing ambiguity. I believe part of this confusion stems from the term being associated with various compatible film movements and manifestos, such as Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's Third Cinema (often misunderstood itself), and part of it stems from its origin as the complicated philosophical concept Minor Literature, authored by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Finally, because of the increasingly transnational characteristics of global films, the term is often difficult to apply to a film-text without first working through the complexities of its production and distribution.
By re-evaluating the term in light of these problematics and illustrating the way its theoretical concerns are even more significant in the era of transnational production, I will show the political importance of Minor Cinemas for audiences in several global sites of filmmaking.
After receiving my BA in English from Western Washington University, I continued on to earn my MA from Western Washington University as well, where I wrote my MA thesis on the production of subjectivity using the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari. After completing my MA, I taught composition and research writing at Bellevue College using films as objects of inquiry.
My supervisor is David Martin-Jones, whose research engages with Deleuze and cinema.
Raluca Iacob
Email: rsi2@st-andrews.ac.uk
Thesis: Urban Identities: Issues of Mobility and Marginality in Contemporary Romanian Cinema
Office: Resources Room, 99 North St.
Unlike other national cinemas in the region which garnered a lot of international attention during the 1990s, Romanian films only became a subject of discussion on an international scale in the last decade, thanks to the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers who have been described as belonging to a 'New Wave' of Romanian cinema. However, differences in themes and approaches have made it difficult to pinpoint a common characteristic of these films, which range from the 'minimalist hyper-realist' style of Cristi Puiu's films to Cristian Nemescu's almost Kusturica-style debut feature California Dreamin' (2007). There is also little to connect Cristian Mungiu's 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (2007) to Nae Caranfil's Filantropica (1999), or even less to Caranfil's epic, grand-scale, cinema-referential film The Rest is Silence (2008).
In my research I would like to study the ways in which the structure and history of post-communist Romania has influenced its urban identities, especially as they are reflected in contemporary Romanian films, and the effect that Romanian films have on the construction of Romanian identity, both nationally and in an international setting. I plan to follow two different directions in my research, both concerned with issues of urbanity. One of these directions refers to the history, production and exhibition of films in Romania, with a special focus on the film festivals running in Romania at the moment which promote Romanian films (Transylvanian International Film Festival, Iasi International Film Festival, Sighisoara Film Festival), and the web network that connects them to other festivals in the region and around the world. The other direction will focus on a content analysis of a number of Romanian films, focusing especially on issues of marginality and mobility/migration as they are portrayed in films.
I graduated with a BA in Journalism from Babes Bolyai University which I followed up with an MA in Theatre studies/Cultural studies at the same university. However, during my studies I became increasingly interested in the study of film, an interest which led to obtaining an MA in Film Studies from the University of Amsterdam. While at UvA my main interest revolved around theories of emotion, culminating with a MA thesis in which I tried to argue for a new perception of the concept of authorship in film, from the perspective of 'expressing emotion' (in the format described and argued for by Jenefer Robinson in her book Deeper than Reason. Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music and Arts).
For my current research project I am supervised by Professor Dina Iordanova, an expert on both the study of Eastern European and Balkan films, as well as the film festival market.
Heath Iverson
Email: hai@st-andrews.ac.uk
Thesis: Radical Landscapes: Images of National Space and Place in the Margin of British Cinema
Images of the national landscape have long been staples of the visual culture of Britain, especially in painting and, more recently, the cinema. Historically, landscape imagery has functioned as a site in which interconnected matters of national identity, political power, and environmental aesthetics have been negotiated and critiqued. In conventional, narrative British cinema, landscapes are typically ancillary and secondary to the dramatic action which they stage; however, beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century, a growing number of artist, avant-garde, and experimental filmmakers began to move representations of space and place to the center of their cinematic practice. My research will consider this foregrounding of landscape, location, and space in the periphery of British filmmaking as it seeks to understand the broader of aesthetic, political, and philosophical implications of these cinematic approaches to questions of place.
Examining films ranging from Peter Greenaway's early shorts and the works of many members of the London Film-makers' Co-op to contemporary filmmakers such as Patrick Keiller, Emily Richardson, and Gideon Koppel, my critical method is interdisciplinary in its approach. Drawing on a variety of art historical theories, I will consider these films' responses to historical formulations of landscape as variously picturesque, sublime, or banal. Additionally, informed by Gilles Deleuze's writings on cinema, especially his postulation of the affective power of landscape images to create zones of indetermancy or ‘any-space-whatevers,' I will also examine these films' as attempts to locate utopian possibilities in Brtitish topography and society. Finally, I will analyze these landscape films within the context of 20th century philosophy's turn toward the space and the question of being ‘s situatedness-‘dwelling' in Martin Heiddeger's formulation; ‘haunting' in the writing of Jacques Derrida-specific locales.
I received a BA in Humanities with Great Distinction from Shimer College, completing a thesis on early American cinema and the phenomenology of the urban experience. In 2011, I completed a Master's degree in the University of Ediburgh's Film in the Public Space programme, where my work focused on film's movement through various institutional spaces such as the archive and the film festival. My current project is supervised Dr Tom Rice and Dr Leshu Torchin.
Paola Monaldi
Email: pm422@st-andrews.ac.uk
Thesis: Re-envisaging Reality: Imaginative Narratives in Contemporary Latin American Cinema.
Office: Resources Room, 99 North St./ Office Hour: Tuesday 1-2pm
Latin America has a well know magic realist literary tradition. This has variously affected cinema too over the years, for example: the Brazilian films Macunaíma (1969) and Eréndira (1982); the eccentric work of Chilean-born Alejandro Jodorowsky, or Combat d'amour en songe (2000) by Chilean director Raoul Ruiz; the film adaptation of Mexican popular novel Like Water for Chocolate (1992), and so on. These imaginative narratives, far from escapist, are deeply rooted in the reality of the respective countries and convey deep political implications.
Surrealist atmospheres and magic realists elements, for instance, have been frequently employed by Cuban cinema of the '90s and beyond, when cinema increasingly moved beyond the tradition of political documentary, towards fictional realms. Films such as Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas (1991), Madagascar (1994), La vida es silbar (1998), Lista de espera, (2000), Madrigal (2006) - to quote a few - introduce an unreal image of reality, which stands as a passage for difference to enter a given order of thought. In Deleuzean terms, it could be said that these narratives are traversed by "lines of flight" that open reality to transformation. In particular, these films seem to witness a contradiction between the individual's attachment to homeland and tradition, and the desire to set off and move forward towards new possibilities of existence. Whilst in the traditional socialist view the citizen was indistinguishable from the body politic of the nation, a critical disjunction is now acknowledged between the private and the public.
My academic background includes film studies and multimedia production. Particularly, I am intrigued by the relationship that films entertain with the context they spring from. Consequently, I have decided to set my research within the field of cultural studies. On this regard, I've found the Deleuzean philosophical framework extremely useful to understand the "concatenation" in which diverse "images of thought" combine in producing reality.
My supervisor is Dr David Martin-Jones, whose work has given me the idea of researching in this direction.
Diana Popa
Email: edp2@st-andrews.ac.uk
Thesis: Exploring the Past in the Present – New Romanian Cinema’s Take on the ‘Everyday Life’
Although challenging new films appeared in the last decade from the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, New Romanian Cinema assumes a prominent position. To put it very simply, the post-socialist cinematic "revolution" starts in Romania. There is a tension in this statement. Romania is presented as having had a poorly developed film sector and a seemingly nonexistent cinematic tradition. On the other hand, it is as if Romania is finally catching up with the cinematic traditions not only of the region (East Central Europe and the Balkans) but (and especially) of Western Europe.
In many writings on New Romanian Cinema (hereafter NRC) several key "moments" are mentioned: the year 2000 is constantly referred to as the "year zero": not a single film was produced in Romania in this year. NRC came into being in 2001, with Cristi Puiu's debut film entitled Marfa și banii / Stuff and Dough, marking a new generation of filmmakers interested in a form of realist cinema dominated by honesty as opposed to the intricate allegorical, metaphorical forms of expression that were characteristic of cinema under state-socialism.
In order to contextualise my project, I will critically assess the widely held belief in international criticism that NRC emerged in a national vacuum. My intention is not to offer a comprehensive history of Romanian cinema, but to look at one aspect of Romanian cinema that has emerged in recent years: namely, the fact that it deals with the past. I am particularly interested in two related sets of issue. The first centres on the recognised thematic unity of these films, their preoccupation with the Ceaușescu era and its legacy, explored both through re-creations of that communist past and through contemporary dramas. I will look at how state-socialism and its ongoing legacy are managed and interrogated in contemporary Romanian films and ask: What does it mean to be a "new wave" after state-socialism? What unites and what separates Romanian New Wave, from previous new waves in the region, in relation to the way they configure state-socialism? Addressing these questions requires analysing these films and the debates they have generated as tools for tapping into current political questions about the past. The second related question concerns aesthetics. Common characteristics of these films - readily identified by both international and Romanian critics - include, dramatic narratives that put at their centre the everyday life of people, dominated by a fatalist deadpan, black humour, and filmed in a minimalist realist style. What is the function of the representations of 'everyday life' in these films? What are the (political) implications of emphasising the mundane and the everyday?
My background is in literary studies, I have received my BA in English and an MA in Irish Studies from Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania. Then, in 2005 I received an MA in Gender Studies from the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. During my studies I have gradually become interested in film via literary adaptations to film and feminist and queer film theory.
For my current project I am supervised by Professor Dina Iordanova and Dr Leshu Torchin.
Kathleen Scott
Email: kes20@st-andrews.ac.uk
Thesis: A Matter of Excess: Blindness and Haptic Visuality in Horror Film
Office: Resources Room, 99 North St./ Office Hour: Tuesday, 3-4pm
Film theory derived from Freudian psychoanalysis and linguistic semiotics has long argued that the cinematic apparatus transforms the spectator into a 'transcendental subject': a falsely omniscient eye/I sutured into the Imaginary of the screen image, an empty vessel for dominant ideology robbed of agency and intentionality.
Subsequent theorists who base their theoretical models on phenomenology and Deleuzian philosophy have thoroughly addressed the failure of apparatus theory to sufficiently account for the cinematic event as it is actually experienced by the spectator. I therefore aim to move beyond critiquing apparatus theory in exploring haptic visuality as a form of spectatorship that employs all of the senses as organs of touch, including the eye. The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that we are all originally synaesthetic; the hierarchy of the senses (with optical vision being dominant) and organ-ization of the body have prevented us from seeing to our full potential.
I am interested in discovering what happens when optical primacy disappears, and we are invited to view images with a tactile vision and corporeal intelligence. Using blindness in horror films as a case study, my research establishes the proprioceptive body as central to the perception of film. In addition to re-embodying the spectator, I also propose the filmic image as matter that signifies: a body with vision able to 'touch' the spectator via the pre-reflective shock of the horrific and abject, whose representational significance is grounded in its sensuality. Through this approach I investigate the possibility of an 'ethics of excess', which encourages the spectator to masochistically open themselves up to horror's invasion of the body and empathize with the imperfect body and vision of the blind; non-utilitarian and excessively material images of horror are also able to take an ethical stance as subversive bodies that resist binary regimes of signification and desire and refuse to be subsumed under a capitalist logic of narrative economy that abstracts and devalues bodies, both human and filmic.
I received my BA in Cinema & Media Studies and Political Science from Wellesley College in 2010. I have also studied film at King's College London. My supervisor is Dr. David Martin-Jones, an expert in Deleuzian film theory and popular cinema.
Sarah Soliman
Email: ss98@st-andrews.ac.uk
Thesis: The Influence of the Pop Musician on Film Narratives
Use of particular musicians, whose individual styles shaped the experience of a film, is deeply intertwined with the history of the cinema, as is the use of musicians within a film narrative. My research examines the effect of using a distinct and recognisable musical figure either as the subject of a film, or as the author of the film's soundtrack. Adding a distinct musical presence culturally categorizes a film. I am interesting in investigating the cultural capital attributed to specific musicians, and how that capital then lends itself to films with which the artist is associated.
I will be examining several subgenres in which musicians feature as the film's subject. I intend to look at biopics, film-a-clefs, and rock documentaries for a study of how musicians directly interact with a film's narrative. Additionally, I will be looking at films for which the soundtrack was composed primarily or entirely by one musician, to explore questions of film authorship, asking if these musicians can be said to author the film through their music.
Outside this project, other areas of research I am interested in are television studies, and feminism and gender studies.
I received my BA in Cultural and Media Studies from The New School in New York. Following that, I attended St Andrews for my MLitt in Film Studies. For my Ph.D., I'm extremely pleased to be working with Professor Richard Dyer and Dr. Joshua Yumibe.
Beatriz Tadeo Fuica
Email: btf@st-andrews.ac.uk
Thesis: Cinematic Reconstruction of National Identity after Dictatorship in Uruguayan Fiction Film and Documentary
Office: Resources Room, 99 North St.
Like several other Latin American countries in the 1970s, Uruguay went through a period of dictatorship (1973 - 1985) which had several lasting consequences for its society. The re-establishment of democracy following this event, which shocked and threatened what was believed to be a stable democratic country, has enabled the rethinking of Uruguayan national identity. This process can be explored through the fiction films and documentaries made after 1985. Since then, a clearly identifiable New Uruguayan Cinema has started to emerge, part of a broader blossoming movement which includes literature, music and visual arts.
Although Uruguayan cinema has finally begun to gain international recognition, there are very few articles published about it - in marked contrast to the cinemas of many other newly democratised Latin American countries, which have been amply studied by film scholars. It is important to highlight that the processes experienced by the different nations that make up Latin America cinema are different. Although the dictatorships of the Southern Cone tend to be analysed together, their transitions to democracy and representations of their recent past were diverse.
I graduated from Universidad de la República, Uruguay, as a Translator. I came to St Andrews to pursue a Masters Degree in Spanish and Latin American Studies. My Masters dissertation explored how Uruguayan men and women who were born immediately before or after the early phase of the dictatorship, and whose parents suffered imprisonment, torture, dissapearence or exile, approached that period through documentary film. This research focused in particular on the handling of time and space in the light of theoretical frameworks of memory and postmemory.
My PhD thesis, which is an interdisciplinary project, will be conducted under the supervision of Dr. Gustavo San Román from the Department of Spanish and Dr. David Martin-Jones from the Department of Film Studies.
Giles Taylor
Email: gwt2@st-andrews.ac.uk
Thesis: Reshaping the Film Frame
My research explores the aesthetics of aspect ratios through the transition to wide screens in 1950s cinemas. The frame's dramatic elongation (from 1.33/1.375:1 to 1.66-2.66:1, and even three-screen variations) throws into relief the function and dynamics of standard and wide screen shapes. I investigate how contrasting formats effect the organisation of the image, and therefore its semantics and affect. Through the consideration of altered spectatorial positions, and the comparison of compositional arrangements of characters/performers, décor, and space, I delineate filmic borders: between film world and film viewer, between onscreen and offscreen, between protagonists and the camera, and between protagonists, antagonists, and things. Scrutiny of the screen's shape will lead to a greater understanding of both the literal and metaphoric frame, allowing us to hone accounts of thresholds, the bounding of material, and positions inside and outside the text.
Before joining the PhD programme at St Andrews I read for degrees in comparative literature and film in London, first at King's College and then at UCL. My supervisors at St Andrews are Professor Richard Dyer, who specialises in my preferred methodology of combining textual analysis with aesthetic theory, and Dr Joshua Yumibe, who is an expert in the aesthetic and technological histories of film.
John Trafton
Email: jwt23@st-andrews.ac.uk
Thesis: Re-examining National Myth: Post 9/11 War Cinema as a Rejection of New Hollywood
Office: Resources Room, 99 North St., Office Hour: Wednesday, 11-12pm.
I received my B.A. from Chapman University in California in Film Studies. During these years, I focused strongly on screenwriting, film history, and genre studies. While at Chapman, I worked for two independent productions companies (one in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco) and for NBC/Universal. I was also the assistant director for two independent feature films shot in Southern California, and additionally I have extensive experience in post-production.
At the University of Edinburgh, I received a MSc. in Comparative and General Literature. For my dissertation, I looked at post-9/11 literature and cinema that focused on issues of disaster and global conflict and the increasing use of narrative empathy in addressing these issues. This project helped pave the way for what was to become my current project as a PhD student at St. Andrews: a study of the evolving visual codes of the war film and their relation to the post-9/11, American cultural landscape.
Post-9/11 war films lack a meta-language that will come to grips with the ambiguity and radical disorientation of the contemporary war context. Unlike World War II films, contemporary war movies are not engaged in constructing national mythology, and, unlike Vietnam era/New Hollywood war films, these films are not presenting a counter-history, a critical rethinking of the mythology of war and nation. Post-9/11 war films are altering the style and narrative devices of New Hollywood war cinema as both a symptom of changing history and evolving film craft and to confront the fact that cinema is no longer the dominant visual mode for experiencing and understanding foreign conflict.
These new film forms are ultimately a probing of the different representational strategies available for rendering combat context and ideology. The narrative structure of these films lack clear-cut narrative arcs and often closure as well. The characters of these films act as witnesses of the action rather than as its agents - a drift from the "great man" war narrative to the spectator acting as "patient" of the narrative. Our visual window into the world of combat has become the sum of various media interfaces taking us beyond the world of celluloid: mobile phone videos, internet broadcasts, satellite imagery, and other forms of IT play a role in both warfare and our proximity to it. In keeping with Hollywood historical trends, contemporary filmmakers are remapping the war narratives through innovations in cinematography, characterization, and narrative design that entail a rejection of the New Hollywood war film style.
My supervisor for this project is Professor Robert Burgoyne, an expert in historical cinema. Apart from historical fiction films, my other areas of interest are film noir, the Gothic horror film, and the documentary film.
Chelsea Wessels
Email: cw688@st-andrews.ac.uk
Thesis: Once Upon A Time Outside the West: Rethinking the Western in Global Context
Office: Resources Room, 99 North St.
Much of the scholarship on the western reinforces current conceptions of the western as a 'dead' genre, or a genre directly rooted in a particular construction of the American West. My research aims to address this view by arguing that, following the birth of cinema, the western created its own rhizome involving particular conceptions of spectacle, violence, gender, and landscape, among others. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari propose that the rhizome exists as a multiplicity, which creates and approaches connections diagrammatically. By tracing these thematics from the beginning of the western during the silent era to its heyday in the 1950s and 60s, I will then be able to show how these particular constructions separate from the genre of the 'western' as it is commonly conceived and begin to proliferate throughout other cinematic contexts. In turn, this will illustrate how the very formation of the western genre is heavily reliant on global cinema, from the early French silent films to spaghetti westerns and the samurai films of Japan. This reciprocal relationship is one that is often overlooked in scholarship, as it is generally examined using a Hollywood-centric approach. In this way, my project seeks to fill a gap in current studies of the western by removing the exclusive connection to America, and by tracing the reach of western thematics beyond oft-studied cases such as the spaghetti western in Italy to lesser studied cinemas such as those of Iran or Korea.
I received my BA in Film Studies and English from Willamette University, where my research interests focused on the intersecting influences of John Ford and Sergio Leone on the work of Clint Eastwood. While pursuing my MA at Western Washington University, I briefly detoured from the western, ultimately completing a thesis on filmmaking responses to Franco's regime through the work of Pedro Almodóvar and Guillermo del Toro. For my project at St Andrews, I am working with Professor Robert Burgoyne and Dr. David Martin-Jones.