Dr Lucy Fife Donaldson
Teaching Fellow in Film Studies
Research profile
My research focuses on Film Style, performance and the body. I am interested in bringing together close textual analysis with issues of embodiment, experience and sensation, and drawing on connections to a range of other disciplines, such as dance, philosophy and art. My research interests include the staging and presence of performance in cinema and TV; the relationship between bodily affect, agency and effort; structures of engagement, especially in relation to phenomenology and neurophysiology; genre, especially horror and melodrama; and British Film Criticism (especially in the Movie tradition). I have published on the materiality of performance in post-studio horror and its relationship to elements of film style, and have forthcoming publications on performance in Biopics and texture in film.
Member of the Editorial Board of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism
See also the PURE research profile.
Selected publications
Selected publications:
‘Effort and Affect: Engaging with Film Performance' in Reason, Matthew & Dee Reynolds (eds), Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2012.
‘"Normality is Threatened by the Monster": Robin Wood, Romero and Zombies', CineAction, 84, 2011, 24-31.
‘"The suffering black male body and the threatened white female body": Ambiguous Bodies in Candyman', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 9, 2011. (irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/Candyman.html)
‘Access and Excess in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)' in Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, 1, 2010. (www.warwick.ac.uk/go/moviejournal/)
Forthcoming:
‘Camera and Performer: Energetic Engagement with The Shield' in Jacobs, Jason & Steven Peacock (eds), Television Aesthetics and Style. London: Continuum Press, 2012.
‘Performing Lives: Performance, Embodiment and Intertextuality in the Contemporary Biopic' in Brown, Tom & Belén Vidal (eds), The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture. London: Routledge, 2013.
Texture in Film for Palgrave Close Readings in Film & Television. Series Editors: Gibbs, John & Douglas Pye. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014.
Recent papers:
September 2012: ‘Sensing Space: The Texture of Suppression and Revelation in Vertigo'. Film-Philosophy Conference.
December 2011: ‘Texture in Film'. Film and Television Aesthetics Research Seminar Series, University of Hertfordshire.
October 2011: ‘Camera and Dancer: Proximity, Pleasure & Performance' Not Just Fred and Ginger: Camaraderie, Collusion and Collisions Between Dance and Film, Annual Conference of the European Association of Dance Historians, London Metropolitan University.
Current research
I am currently working on a monograph ‘Texture in Film' for Palgrave Macmillan's forthcoming series: Close Readings in Film & Television (Series Editors: Gibbs, John & Douglas Pye). The book is a strongly interdisciplinary study of the concept in relation to mainstream cinema, and discusses texture in relation to its usage in film criticism, narrative, genre and specific decisions around mise-en-scène (lighting, aspect ratio, composition), editing, sound and bodies on-screen. My approach is based in close textual analysis, bringing together discussion of style, criticism and technology.
Teaching
I currently convene
FM1001: Key Concepts in Film Studies
FM1002: Film History and Historiography