Dominic Lash
Dominic Lash's central research interest is the philosophical criticism of film. He completed a PhD at the University of Bristol in 2019, supervised by Alex Clayton. He has taught at the universities of Bristol, Oxford, Anglia Ruskin, Reading, and Cambridge, as well as at King's College London, University College London, and the London Film Academy. He is co-convenor for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies "Film and Philosophy" special interest group. He is an associate lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University and a postdoctoral affiliate in the Centre for Film and Screen at the University of Cambridge, and is also a musician active in improvised and experimental music.
His first monograph, "The Cinema of Disorientation: Inviting Confusions", was published by Edinburgh University Press in September 2020. His second, "Robert Pippin and Film: Politics, Ethics, and Psychology after Modernism" (the first ever monograph on Pippin's work on film) was published in the Bloomsbury Academic Film Thinks series in February 2022. A collection co-edited with Hoi Lun Law, entitled "Gilles Deleuze and Film Criticism: Philosophy, Theory, and the Individual Film", was published by Palgrave Macmillan in August 2023. Forthcoming publications include a BFI Film Classics volume on Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Cure".
His articles on the work of, among others, Paul Thomas Anderson, Nicole Brenez, Stanley Cavell, Abel Ferrara, Stanley Kubrick, V.F. Perkins, Kelly Reichardt, Ridley Scott, and Andrei Tarkovsky have appeared in "Screen," "Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism," "Film-Philosophy," "Film and Philosophy", & elsewhere. He wrote the chapters on "Film Theory" for "The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory" (OUP) from 2022 to 2024.
Active projects include a piece on rhythmic phrasing in cinema and a larger project, provisionally entitled "Cinema as Intended", that aims to develop an account of intention and intentionality in film by drawing on the work of the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe.
Supervisors: Alex Clayton
His first monograph, "The Cinema of Disorientation: Inviting Confusions", was published by Edinburgh University Press in September 2020. His second, "Robert Pippin and Film: Politics, Ethics, and Psychology after Modernism" (the first ever monograph on Pippin's work on film) was published in the Bloomsbury Academic Film Thinks series in February 2022. A collection co-edited with Hoi Lun Law, entitled "Gilles Deleuze and Film Criticism: Philosophy, Theory, and the Individual Film", was published by Palgrave Macmillan in August 2023. Forthcoming publications include a BFI Film Classics volume on Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Cure".
His articles on the work of, among others, Paul Thomas Anderson, Nicole Brenez, Stanley Cavell, Abel Ferrara, Stanley Kubrick, V.F. Perkins, Kelly Reichardt, Ridley Scott, and Andrei Tarkovsky have appeared in "Screen," "Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism," "Film-Philosophy," "Film and Philosophy", & elsewhere. He wrote the chapters on "Film Theory" for "The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory" (OUP) from 2022 to 2024.
Active projects include a piece on rhythmic phrasing in cinema and a larger project, provisionally entitled "Cinema as Intended", that aims to develop an account of intention and intentionality in film by drawing on the work of the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe.
Supervisors: Alex Clayton
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Books by Dominic Lash
Dominic Lash provides an in-depth analysis of Cure's themes, generic conventions, cinematography, editing, mise-en-scène, sound, and legacy. In examining the film's aesthetics he highlights the unique way in which it balances meticulous precision with a persistent and purposeful ambiguity. Lash goes on to situate Cure within its various contexts; firstly, as Kurosawa's 'breakthrough' film following a decade of mostly straight-to-video work and then its position in relation to the J-Horror boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Through a close reading of Cure's key scenes, particularly its final scene, Lash analyses the motivations behind Kurosawa's resistance to a definitive resolution. He argues that, just like its hypnotist antagonist, Mamiya, Cure unsettles some of our basic psychological assumptions. In doing so, he attempts to understand what it is about the film that lingers so disturbingly, long after the credits have rolled.
Dominic Lash and Hoi Lun Law, co-editors
See the EUP page for the book here: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-cinema-of-disorientation.html
And it is also on JSTOR here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1453jwp
Peer-reviewed papers by Dominic Lash
musical anachronisms to be found in Barry Lyndon, which I will present in detail, in fact make a significant contribution to the film’s explorations of history, representation and the relation between appearance and
reality. Anachronism undermines the claim of a fictional work to represent a past time by underlining the fact that it was constructed at a later date – it presents an apparent contradiction. This fact means that an examination of musical anachronism in Barry Lyndon also provides an opportunity to investigate the way Kubrick’s film deliberately puts multiple apparent contradictions into play. These include the relations between immediacy and distance, performance and intimacy, and also completion and incompletion. All these contradictions support the film’s pervasive theme, which, I will argue, is that of pretence. Despite their subtlety, then, anachronistic musical effects in Barry Lyndon can be shown to bear upon the very heart of what the film is about.
In this article, rather than simply enumerating the strengths of Film as Film I want to suggest some of its limitations, or rather some ways in which it might be seen not fully to follow its own proposals. I will defend two related propositions: firstly that some of the readings the book proposes could be otherwise framed, given an adjusted set of assumptions (chiefly regarding the nature of diegesis and artifice), without thereby departing from the book’s general tenor; secondly that the book’s fundamental methodological recommendations are more widely applicable than the author himself allows. Though I will, in what follows, be critical of a number of Perkins’s positions, I want to underline at the outset that this is precisely because his work is so effective in stimulating us to think harder and more clearly about how we understand and judge films, and that one could not ask for a finer legacy as a film critic.
Book Chapters by Dominic Lash
Dominic Lash provides an in-depth analysis of Cure's themes, generic conventions, cinematography, editing, mise-en-scène, sound, and legacy. In examining the film's aesthetics he highlights the unique way in which it balances meticulous precision with a persistent and purposeful ambiguity. Lash goes on to situate Cure within its various contexts; firstly, as Kurosawa's 'breakthrough' film following a decade of mostly straight-to-video work and then its position in relation to the J-Horror boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Through a close reading of Cure's key scenes, particularly its final scene, Lash analyses the motivations behind Kurosawa's resistance to a definitive resolution. He argues that, just like its hypnotist antagonist, Mamiya, Cure unsettles some of our basic psychological assumptions. In doing so, he attempts to understand what it is about the film that lingers so disturbingly, long after the credits have rolled.
Dominic Lash and Hoi Lun Law, co-editors
See the EUP page for the book here: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-cinema-of-disorientation.html
And it is also on JSTOR here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1453jwp
musical anachronisms to be found in Barry Lyndon, which I will present in detail, in fact make a significant contribution to the film’s explorations of history, representation and the relation between appearance and
reality. Anachronism undermines the claim of a fictional work to represent a past time by underlining the fact that it was constructed at a later date – it presents an apparent contradiction. This fact means that an examination of musical anachronism in Barry Lyndon also provides an opportunity to investigate the way Kubrick’s film deliberately puts multiple apparent contradictions into play. These include the relations between immediacy and distance, performance and intimacy, and also completion and incompletion. All these contradictions support the film’s pervasive theme, which, I will argue, is that of pretence. Despite their subtlety, then, anachronistic musical effects in Barry Lyndon can be shown to bear upon the very heart of what the film is about.
In this article, rather than simply enumerating the strengths of Film as Film I want to suggest some of its limitations, or rather some ways in which it might be seen not fully to follow its own proposals. I will defend two related propositions: firstly that some of the readings the book proposes could be otherwise framed, given an adjusted set of assumptions (chiefly regarding the nature of diegesis and artifice), without thereby departing from the book’s general tenor; secondly that the book’s fundamental methodological recommendations are more widely applicable than the author himself allows. Though I will, in what follows, be critical of a number of Perkins’s positions, I want to underline at the outset that this is precisely because his work is so effective in stimulating us to think harder and more clearly about how we understand and judge films, and that one could not ask for a finer legacy as a film critic.
pp. 231-252 in Sam Ladkin, Robert McKay and Emile Bojesen, eds., Against Value in the Arts and Education (Rowman and Littlefield International, April 2016)
Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) contains two major moments of rupture. The first is when the xenomorph bursts from Kane's (John Hurt) chest. The character's body is fatally ruptured, but the film's body is sutured: horrifically convincing acting and a mobile camera that puts the viewer in the midst of things contribute to diminishing the audience's sense of distance. We – like the diegetic onlookers – feel ourselves to be gripped (and terrified) because of what we see, not how the spectacle has been created. The second moment of rupture, however, is when the android Ash's (Ian Holm) head is reattached to its power supply. Diegetically this is a suture but this time the filmic body ruptures: the direct cut from a model head to Ian Holm's head poking up through the table is unconcealed, emphasising its construction and artifice.
I have long been fond of both these moments, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the first is widely considered a high-water mark in cinema, while the second seems – at best – a forgivable (if perplexing) error. This paper will argue that these two moments, considered together, offer an ideal site for considering the persistent power of Alien and the relation of that power to the means of its production, and that they might also prompt us to reconsider the relationship between "ruptures" and "sutures" in narrative film more generally.
This paper will explore two films that contain distinctions which cannot easily be assigned to particular types of image. Michael Haneke's Caché relies on a distinction between images that are also images within the diegesis and those which are not; the two types of image are, however, often indistinguishable on a purely visual level. The paradoxical narrative of David Lynch's Lost Highway might be explained as a series of distorted fantasties that flash through the mind of a man dying in the electric chair; but what kind of diegesis is it that is never shown, directly, to the viewer? My aim is to use invisible difference as a tool to show how cinema can refine our sense of the unrepresentable, revealing its complexity and variegation.
I propose to take Brenez's 2007 book on Abel Ferrara as a model of her practice. I will argue that how completeness relates to critical priorities remains something of an open question. Figural analysis can liberate us from obstructions (by, say, downgrading the importance of plausibility), but where do we finally locate that which has been demoted? At worst, a reorientation of hierarchies could conceal an evasion of issues which completeness demands be addressed. What are we to make of the gaps the method leaves? When Brenez calls the murder at the end of Ms. 45 both 'castrating' and 'protective', she does not mention the clearly phallic gesture wherein Laurie holds a knife erect at her crotch. When she declares that The Blackout 'cultivates confusion, in four modes', are these merely enumerated or do they map out all the possible territory? Ultimately, my goal is to consider whether figural criticism is best seen as a new model operating within a venerable practice (that of criticism), or as something more fundamentally distinct.
Andrew Tudor once distinguished between genres as lists of characteristics (offered skeptically, because of the critical circularity this entails) and genre as 'sets of cultural conventions', a more promising notion (Tudor in Nicols 1976: 122). Moving between genres as much as these films do might seem likely to emphasise arbitrariness and thus to be corrosive of genre: to reduce conventions to lists. Rather than resembling kaleidoscopes of genres, do these two instances of saturated narrative embedding end up instantiating a genre of "densely embedded narrative"? Alternatively, does the fact that one is a Hollywood-type production and the other emphatically "arthouse" overdetermine any structural similarities; do these "metagenres" win out in the end?
Other recent films employ generic codes as means of disorientation: Adam Lowenstein has written that Ben Wheatley's films cause us to lose 'our genre bearings' (Lowenstein 2016: 7). But here generic differences assist in distinguishing narrative threads: Tudor's dreaded lists are of great help in narrative comprehension, particularly in Cloud Atlas. Are generic identities, then, reinforced, more than they are undermined? I want, ultimately, to propose that the density of embedded genres in these films can serve to highlight some of the paradoxes and antinomies at the heart of the very notion of genre itself.
I want in this paper to investigate the weird and the notion of capture. Where – between the beautiful and the ugly – does the weird lie? Or is it other to that very distinction? If so, is the weird beyond the reach of aesthetics, or is beauty not a necessary condition for aesthetic appreciation? Questions of capture are related both to desire (can someone truly be said to be imprisoned if they want to remain so?) and to time. Carax's film displays techniques for capturing movement ranging from Marey and Muybridge's early studies to the modern procedures explicitly named "motion capture". Could we say that it is one of film's fundamental properties to capture the weird, the beautiful, and the bestial, to freeze them in time – only to thereby narrate the impossibility of so doing?
One of the virtues of myth is its inexhaustible applicability. This one-day interdisciplinary conference brings together papers on a great variety of version(s) and rendering(s) of the tale – whether in cinema, theatre, literature or other media – and also on the pairing of “beauty” with “beast” in the widest possible sense; rediscovering the tale in unexpected places.
http://sensesofcinema.com/2020/book-reviews/a-meet-and-happy-conversation-stanley-cavell-and-film-scepticism-and-self-reliance-at-the-cinema-by-catherine-wheatley/
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