Dr Tyler Parks

Lecturer in Film Studies

Researcher profile

Email
tp36@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Biography

Dr. Tyler Munroe Parks is a Lecturer in Film Studies and has been at the University of St Andrews since 2018. His research and teaching interests include film and the environment, global art cinema, and the history of Japanese film style and its interpretation and influence in Europe, the US, and elsewhere.

His research on film and the environment is oriented around two topics. The first is the increasing number of ecologically minded landscape films produced since the final decades of the 20th-century. This work is especially concerned with moving image works that employ text and image in ways that position them somewhere between documentary and experimental film. In a recent article on James Benning’s Deseret, he examines how such films sculpt a sense of place through the conjunction of landscape and history. 

The other topic related to film and environment that Dr Parks is currently exploring is the production and promotional use of films by institutions that have worked to both alter and preserve landscapes. His research in this vein is focused on films made about water projects (such as dams) by the US Bureau of Reclamation and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. In addition, he is exploring the use of film by national parks such as Yosemite.

As concerns global art cinema, Dr Parks is currently completing a monograph for Edinburgh University Press called Unnatural Visions: Style, Philosophy, and Politics in 2000s Art Cinema. It examines the changing uses, interpretations, and valuations of what Pier Paolo Pasolini called free indirect discourse.

 The monograph builds its arguments through examing the work of filmmakers such as Lucrecia Martel, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Lynne Ramsay, and Wong Kar-wai, as well as its critical reception.  

Finally, Dr Parks also researches and teaches on topics related to ‘classical’ Japanese film style and modernity, with attention to both the pre- and post-WWII periods. This research is focused on the shared forms of experimentation evident in the work of filmmakers from the 1930s, particularly those working at Shochiku studios, such as Ozu Yasujiro, Naruse Mikio, and Shimizu Hiroshi. In addition, this work also considers the reception of Japanese cinema in the US and Europe and the implications of how and why it has been valued by scholars, critics, philosophers, and cinephiles.

He teaches on all of these topics and a number of others, such as film theory, film history and historiography, genre, and Third Cinemas.

Selected publications

 

See more publications