Dr Jonathan Owen
Teaching Fellow in Film Studies
Email: jlo2@st-andrews.ac.uk
Research profile
My research focuses primarily on East European cinemas, notably Czech, Slovak and Polish cinema. I am particularly interested in how these cinemas engage with Surrealist and avant-garde traditions, both international and indigenous; in their hitherto under-examined transnational connections, for instance through co-production and the work of émigré filmmakers; and in animated, genre and cult cinema from Eastern Europe. My published work includes the monograph Avant-Garde to New Wave: Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties (Berghahn, 2011), which was positively reviewed in Sight and Sound. Elsewhere I have explored such topics as emergent postmodernism in Slovak 1960s cinema and the construction of cinematic taxonomies and heterotopic spaces by Walerian Borowczyk and the French ‘Left Bank Group'. My other areas of interest include British cinema and television, representations of work and representations of drinking and public health.
See also the PURE research profile.
Selected publications
Monograph:Avant-Garde to New Wave: Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties (Oxford; New York: Berghahn, 2011)
Chapters:‘An Island Near the Left Bank: Walerian Borowczyk as a French Left Bank Filmmaker', in Michael Goddard and Ewa Mazierska (eds), Beyond the Border: Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2013) [forthcoming]
‘Motion Without Escape: The Bleak Surrealism of Czech and Polish Animation', in Kamila Wielebska and Kuba Mikurda (eds), Dzieje grzechu: Surrealizm w kinie polskim/A Story of Sin: Surrealism in Polish Cinema (Krakow: Ha'Art, 2010)
Journal Articles:‘"Heroes of the Working Class"? Work in Czechoslovak Films of the New Wave and Post-Communist Years', Framework, Vol. 53, No. 1, Spring 2012, pp.190-206
‘Slovak Bohemians: Revolution, Counterculture and the End of the Sixties in Juraj Jakubisko's Films', Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Vol. 1, No. 1, March 2010, pp.17-28 (online at http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-issue,id=1791/)
‘Closely Observed Bodies: Corporeality, Totalitarianism and Subversion in Jiří Menzel's 1960s Adaptations of Bohumil Hrabal', Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. 51, No. 4, December 2009, pp.495-512
‘Współczesny surrealizm czeski i odnowa języka: wczesne filmy Jana Švankmajera', Panoptikum: Audiovizualia - Film/Media, Sztuka, Vol. 14, No. 17, 2008, translated by Michał Szczubiałka, pp.237-258
Reviews:‘John Phillips, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Douglas Morrey and Alison Smith, Jacques Rivette', Scope: An Online Journal of Film & TV Studies, October 2012 [forthcoming]
‘Taasleitud kadunud ja unustanud kino: Via Transversa: Lost Cinema of the Former Eastern Bloc, eds. Eva Näripea and Andreas Trossek', Kunstiteasduslikke Uurimusi, Vol. 20, Nos. 3-4, 2011, pp. 219-25.
‘Retrieving Lost and Forgotten Cinema: Eva Näripea and Andreas Trossek (eds), Via Transversa: Lost Cinema of the Former Eastern Bloc', Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Vol. 1, No. 3, 2011, pp.91-96
‘Valerie's Seductive Power: Valerie and Her Week of Wonders' [DVD review], Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Vol. 1, No. 3, 2011, pp.108-111
‘Peter Hames (ed.), Dark Alchemy: The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer and John Cunningham, Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to Multiplex', Scope: An Online Journal of Film & TV Studies, Issue 18, October 2010 (online at http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/bookreview.php?issue=18&id=1227)
‘Ewa Mazierska and Elżbieta Ostrowska, Women in Polish Cinema', Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media, No. 26, Fall 2006, pp.115-116 (online at http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/books062.htm)
Current research
I am currently writing an article on French writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet's Slovak co-productions, and a book chapter on representations of work and labour in Andy Warhol, Chantal Akerman and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I am also in the final stages of an AHRC-funded project concerning representations of binge-drinking in British film and television, on which I have worked as an Associate Research Fellow. This is an interdisciplinary project designed to intervene in current debates around British alcohol regulation. A larger project I am currently outlining addresses the existence of cult cinema (and cult audiences!) in communist Eastern Europe.