Skip to main content

Bruce Bennett

Lancaster University, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Faculty Member

Followers

244

Following

59

Co-author

1

Public Views

Phone: 01524 594753
Address: Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, Director of Studies

Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts

Lancaster University

Bailrigg

Lancaster LA1 4YW

United Kingdom

less

University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP)

Travis Linnemann

Kansas State University

Yale University

The University of Texas at Austin

University of Ulster

Benjamin Isakhan

Deakin University

Gresilda (Kris) Tilley-Lubbs

Virginia Tech

University of Chichester

Kansas State University

University of Haifa

InterestsView All (37)

Uploads

Books by Bruce Bennett

Cycling and Cinema - chapter 1 excerpt (proof copy)

Cycling and Cinema (Goldsmiths Press), 2019

A unique exploration of the history of the bicycle in cinema, from Hollywood blockbusters and sla... more A unique exploration of the history of the bicycle in cinema, from Hollywood blockbusters and slapstick comedies to documentaries, realist dramas, and experimental films.

Cycling and Cinema explores the history of the bicycle in cinema from the late nineteenth century through to the present day. In this new book from Goldsmiths Press, Bruce Bennett examines a wide variety of films from around the world, ranging from Hollywood blockbusters and slapstick comedies to documentaries, realist dramas, and experimental films, to consider the complex, shifting cultural significance of the bicycle.

The bicycle is an everyday technology, but in examining the ways in which bicycles are used in films, Bennett reveals the rich social and cultural importance of this apparently unremarkable machine. The cinematic bicycles discussed in this book have various functions. They are the source of absurd comedy in silent films, and the vehicles that allow their owners to work in sports films and social realist cinema. They are a means of independence and escape for children in melodramas and kids' films, and the tools that offer political agency and freedom to women, as depicted in films from around the world.

In recounting the cinematic history of the bicycle, Bennett reminds us that this machine is not just a practical means of transport or a child's toy, but the vehicle for a wide range of meanings concerning individual identity, social class, nationhood and belonging, family, gender, and sexuality and pleasure. As this book shows, two hundred years on from its invention, the bicycle is a revolutionary technology that retains the power to transform the world.

Cycling and Cinema

A unique exploration of the history of the bicycle in cinema, from Hollywood blockbusters and sla... more A unique exploration of the history of the bicycle in cinema, from Hollywood blockbusters and slapstick comedies to documentaries, realist dramas, and experimental films.

Cycling and Cinema explores the history of the bicycle in cinema from the late nineteenth century through to the present day. In this new book from Goldsmiths Press, Bruce Bennett examines a wide variety of films from around the world, ranging from Hollywood blockbusters and slapstick comedies to documentaries, realist dramas, and experimental films, to consider the complex, shifting cultural significance of the bicycle.

The bicycle is an everyday technology, but in examining the ways in which bicycles are used in films, Bennett reveals the rich social and cultural importance of this apparently unremarkable machine. The cinematic bicycles discussed in this book have various functions. They are the source of absurd comedy in silent films, and the vehicles that allow their owners to work in sports films and social realist cinema. They are a means of independence and escape for children in melodramas and kids' films, and the tools that offer political agency and freedom to women, as depicted in films from around the world.

In recounting the cinematic history of the bicycle, Bennett reminds us that this machine is not just a practical means of transport or a child's toy, but the vehicle for a wide range of meanings concerning individual identity, social class, nationhood and belonging, family, gender, and sexuality and pleasure. As this book shows, two hundred years on from its invention, the bicycle is a revolutionary technology that retains the power to transform the world.

Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy

The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom: Borders, Intimacy, Terror

This comprehensive study of prolific British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom explores the themat... more This comprehensive study of prolific British
filmmaker Michael Winterbottom explores
the thematic, stylistic, and intellectual
consistencies running through the whole
of his eclectic and controversial work.
The volume undertakes a close analysis of
fifteen Winterbottom films ranging from
television dramas to transnational coproductions
featuring Hollywood stars, and from
documentaries to costume films. The critique
is centered on Winterbottom’s collaborative
working practices, political and cultural
contexts, and critical reception. Arguing
that his work delineates a “cinema of
borders,” the book examines Winterbottom’s
treatment of sexuality, class, ethnicity, and
national and international politics, as well
as his quest to adequately narrate inequality,
injustice, and violence.

Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices

"Within Film Studies and Media Studies, interest in technology has grown in recent years in respo... more "Within Film Studies and Media Studies, interest in technology has grown in recent years in response to rapid developments in digital and computer media. Cinema's relationship with the technological, however, remains contested. Many contemporary writers describe these technological shifts as alarmingly disruptive, threatening either to destroy or disfigure cinema. This collection of essays does something different. It seeks to situate changes in, for instance, film stock, animation, the depiction of robots and the development of 'synthespians', fire regulations in cinemas, or neurological accounts of spectatorship within more broadly defined technocultural processes around cinema. In order to understand the relationship between cinema and technology, the book draws on media and cultural studies, media anthropology, science and technology studies, philosophy and film theory. Analysing examples that range from cutting-edge Hollywood blockbusters to internet viral films, and from Victorian cinema to the present, this volume brings technology into debates around cinema's forms, meanings and audiences.

Contents:
Introduction: Bruce Bennett, Marc Furstenau & Adrian Mackenzie

PART 1: FORMAT
Peter Lester, 'The Perilous Gauge: Canadian Independent Film Exhibition and the 16mm Mobile Menace'

Andrew Clay, 'BMW Films and the Star Wars Kid: 'Early Web Cinema' and Technology'

James Elkins, 'On Some Limits to Film Theory (Mainly From Science)'

PART 2: NORMS
Paul Moore, 'Socially Combustible: Panicky People, Flammable Films, and the Dangerous New Technology of the Nickelodeon'

Jan Harris, 'Cinema and its Doubles: Kittler vs. Deleuze'

Kate O'Riordan, 'Genomic Science in Contemporary Film: Institutions, Individuals and Genre'

PART 3: SCANNING
Aylish Wood, 'Cinema as Technology: Encounters with an Interface'

Maja Manojlovic, 'Demonlover: Interval, Affect and the Aesthetics of Digital Dislocation'

Chris Rodrigues, ''Into the décor': Attention and Distraction, Foreground and Background'

Bruce Bennett, 'Children, Robots, Cinephilia and Technophobia'

PART 4: MOVEMENT
Michelle Langford, 'Lola and the Vampire: Technologies of Time and Movement in German Cinema'

Bill Schaffer, 'Inbetweening: Animation, Deleuze, Film Theory'

Marie-Luise Angerer, 'Affective Troubles and Cinema'

Thomas Elsaesser, 'Afterword: Digital Cinema and the Apparatus: Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies'

Papers by Bruce Bennett

Teaching transnational cinema: politics and pedagogy

Feminist Media Studies, 2017

This collection focuses on the value of the analysis and discussion of transnational films in the... more This collection focuses on the value of the analysis and discussion of transnational films in the university classroom, and the specific pedagogical, political and conceptual challenges that are posed by this subject. Exploring films like Children of Men, Babel, and Slumdog Millionaire, contributors engage with issues related to immigrant identities, transnational encounters, foreignness, cosmopolitanism and citizenship, the politics of visibility, terrorism and the War on Terror, legality, and race.

2018: Art & Mobilities Network Inaugural Symposium Instant Journal (Peter Scott Gallery)

Fugitive Aesthetics

Third Text

The cinema of Michael Bay:an aesthetic of excess

The hyper-kinetic action films of Michael Bay have come to exemplify the commercial, technical an... more The hyper-kinetic action films of Michael Bay have come to exemplify the commercial, technical and aesthetic transformations of contemporary blockbuster cinema during a period in which the dynamic, disorienting effects of media convergence are reconfiguring viewing practices and remodelling cinematic institutions. However, despite their commercial success and cultural visibility, these films remain more or less absent from academic criticism of late twentieth and early twenty-first century global cinema, except in dismissive asides as examples of the aesthetic and intellectual limitations of contemporary, post-classical Hollywood cinema. Through a close analysis of the $130m film Bad Boys II (2003), described in Rolling Stone as ‘the cinematic equivalent of toxic waste’, this article examines the key stylistic and thematic features of Bay’s cinema, arguing that the director’s films are marked by a distinctive ‘aesthetics of excess’. Discussing such features as narrative structure an...

The art of disobedience:the domopolitics of The Institute for the Art & Practice of Dissent at Home

Carnal thoughts: embodiment and moving image culture

Feminist Review, 2007

On the whole, the books' willingness to engage with key critiques of postmodernist thought, while... more

<I>The Hurt Locker</I>: Cinematic Addiction, "Critique," and the War on Terror

Cultural Politics: an International Journal, 2011

The article approaches The Hurt Locker, an enthusiastically received “critical” film, as a sympto... more The article approaches The Hurt Locker, an enthusiastically received “critical” film, as a symptom of today's prevailing cultural and political codes. First we dwell on the homologies between the state of exception and the narrative logic of the film, including its reflection on the banalization of exception. This is followed by a parallel between the biopolitical optic of the film and today's dominant ideology, which Badiou calls “democratic materialism.” We emphasize that, despite its critical credentials, The Hurt Locker is totally silent on the most crucial aspect of the war against terror, its depoliticizing effects. It is a depoliticized picture, in which the lack of antagonistic politics and subjectivities in today's democratic materialist constellation is countered with the inherent excess of the system, the protagonist's (self-)destructive passion for the Real. Following this discussion at the level of the narrative, we discuss the film in the context of wha...

Aporias of foreignness: transnational encounters in cinema

Transnational Cinemas, 2018

This introduction examines the meaning of foreignness, drawing on Jacques Derrida's discussion of... more This introduction examines the meaning of foreignness, drawing on Jacques Derrida's discussion of 'the aporia' to propose that foreignness is critically aporetic-undecidable and unstable. At a moment when racist political rhetoric is being normalized and xenophobic political movements are on the rise, thinking about 'aporias of foreignness' allows us to reflect upon questions of belonging and hospitality, and the complexity and historical contingency of the relationship between self and other, indigenous citizen and immigrant, asylum-seeker or refugee. The introductory chapter proposes that cinema is a crucial medium through which to rethink foreignness since cinema always involves a potentially disorienting encounter with the unfamiliar, an encounter that is at the centre of the work of artist Ai Weiwei in film and other media.

Close encounters with foreignness

Transnational Screens

A foreigner in principle is already a spy. ' --Trinh Minh-ha, Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) ... more A foreigner in principle is already a spy. ' --Trinh Minh-ha, Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) Encounter 1: Katarzyna Marciniak -Poland, 1970s/1980s Before I became an immigrant and thus foreign, and before I received any formal training in the U.S., my early film history education happened almost daily through socialist television, which exposed me to a conventional apprehension of cinematic foreignness. Perhaps assuming that behind the Iron Curtain there was only scarcity of everything, my American peers are always surprised when they hear that I grew up watching 'foreign' films on television by Tarkovsky, Godard, Kalatozov, Bergman, Fellini, Kurosava, Menzel, or Sturges that were shown under the banner of 'Kino interesujących filmów' [Cinema of Interesting Films], 'W starym kinie' [In an Old Movie House], or 'Filmoteka Arcydzieł' [Masterpiece Cinematheque]. They are specifically surprised to learn that this education happened through the medium of television. My favourite pastime was watching westerns with my father on Sunday nights (we both loved The Magnificent Seven (Sturges, 1960) and relished spaghetti westerns like The Legend of Frenchie King (Christian-Jacque, 1971) with Brigitte Bardot and Claudia Cardinale), or silent comedies with Chaplin or Keaton. In my memory, televison programming did not include many films by international female directors, though Márta Mészáros's films were certainly shown, and audiences were occasionally offered films by Polish female filmmakers such as Agnieszka Holland, Wanda Jakubowska, or Barbara Sass. My U.S. students might claim that I had access to a fairly elitist film education early on, but for my generation and those of our parents and grandparents, our media habits and cultural knowledge were shaped by the limited programming of one and eventually two TV channels. I tell this story because at a time in socialist-era Poland when the possibility of crossing borders was limited and heavily controlled, encounters with various cinematic cultures on TV, in the intimate setting of one's home, were powerful transnational encounters offering amazing forays into the world. This may not be so surprising since we lived during the era that honoured Lenin's famous saying that 'of all the arts the most important for us is the cinema' (Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, 2015), and Łódź where I grew up has been known as HollyŁódź because it was home to the prestigious Polish National Film School and the country's motion picture industry. Simultaneously, television broadcasting, like other arts, was censored, supposedly shielding the public from ideologically 'dangerous' western materials. Thus, while my generation routinely watched Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying (1957), Stanislav Rostotsky's The Dawns Here Are Quiet (1972) and other Soviet-bloc productions, we were also exposed to a rich

High theory:a report on the 'Figuring Addictions/Rethinking Consumption' conference, 1-5 April 2002, Lancaster University

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land': Darren Andrews' Pleasureland (2010)

'Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land': Darren Andrews' Pleasureland (2010).... more

Report on 1998 Screen studies conference

'Celebrity Chav': Fame, Femininity and Social Class

by Bruce Bennett and imogen tyler

European Journal of Cultural Studies, Jan 1, 2010

'Against Aspiration'

by imogen tyler and Bruce Bennett

A short piece on the political rhetoric of 'aspiration' and its appropriation by the left, co-wri... more

'The Cinema of Michael Bay: An Aesthetic of Excess'

Senses of Cinema, Jun 13, 2015

The hyper-kinetic action films of Michael Bay have come to exemplify the commercial, technical an... more The hyper-kinetic action films of Michael Bay have come to exemplify the commercial, technical and aesthetic transformations of contemporary blockbuster cinema during a period in which the dynamic, disorienting effects of media convergence are reconfiguring viewing practices and remodelling cinematic institutions. However, despite their commercial success and cultural visibility, these films remain more or less absent from academic criticism of late twentieth and early twenty-first century global cinema, except in dismissive asides as examples of the aesthetic and intellectual limitations of contemporary, post-classical Hollywood cinema. Through a close analysis of the $130m film Bad Boys II (2003), described in Rolling Stone as ‘the cinematic equivalent of toxic waste’, this article examines the key stylistic and thematic features of Bay’s cinema, arguing that the director’s films are marked by a distinctive ‘aesthetics of excess’. Discussing such features as narrative structure and spatial organization, the highly affective representation of movement and intense colour, and an insistently ironic self-reflexivity, I argue that Bad Boys II is a systematic exploration of inter-related modes of excess in terms of circumstances of production, style, narrative economy, and thematic focus. Drawing on Paul Willemen’s analysis of the ‘Sirkian system’ in Douglas Sirk Hollywood melodramas, this article explores the components of the ‘Bayian system’.

Cycling and Cinema - chapter 1 excerpt (proof copy)

Cycling and Cinema (Goldsmiths Press), 2019

A unique exploration of the history of the bicycle in cinema, from Hollywood blockbusters and sla... more A unique exploration of the history of the bicycle in cinema, from Hollywood blockbusters and slapstick comedies to documentaries, realist dramas, and experimental films.

Cycling and Cinema explores the history of the bicycle in cinema from the late nineteenth century through to the present day. In this new book from Goldsmiths Press, Bruce Bennett examines a wide variety of films from around the world, ranging from Hollywood blockbusters and slapstick comedies to documentaries, realist dramas, and experimental films, to consider the complex, shifting cultural significance of the bicycle.

The bicycle is an everyday technology, but in examining the ways in which bicycles are used in films, Bennett reveals the rich social and cultural importance of this apparently unremarkable machine. The cinematic bicycles discussed in this book have various functions. They are the source of absurd comedy in silent films, and the vehicles that allow their owners to work in sports films and social realist cinema. They are a means of independence and escape for children in melodramas and kids' films, and the tools that offer political agency and freedom to women, as depicted in films from around the world.

In recounting the cinematic history of the bicycle, Bennett reminds us that this machine is not just a practical means of transport or a child's toy, but the vehicle for a wide range of meanings concerning individual identity, social class, nationhood and belonging, family, gender, and sexuality and pleasure. As this book shows, two hundred years on from its invention, the bicycle is a revolutionary technology that retains the power to transform the world.

Cycling and Cinema

A unique exploration of the history of the bicycle in cinema, from Hollywood blockbusters and sla... more A unique exploration of the history of the bicycle in cinema, from Hollywood blockbusters and slapstick comedies to documentaries, realist dramas, and experimental films.

Cycling and Cinema explores the history of the bicycle in cinema from the late nineteenth century through to the present day. In this new book from Goldsmiths Press, Bruce Bennett examines a wide variety of films from around the world, ranging from Hollywood blockbusters and slapstick comedies to documentaries, realist dramas, and experimental films, to consider the complex, shifting cultural significance of the bicycle.

The bicycle is an everyday technology, but in examining the ways in which bicycles are used in films, Bennett reveals the rich social and cultural importance of this apparently unremarkable machine. The cinematic bicycles discussed in this book have various functions. They are the source of absurd comedy in silent films, and the vehicles that allow their owners to work in sports films and social realist cinema. They are a means of independence and escape for children in melodramas and kids' films, and the tools that offer political agency and freedom to women, as depicted in films from around the world.

In recounting the cinematic history of the bicycle, Bennett reminds us that this machine is not just a practical means of transport or a child's toy, but the vehicle for a wide range of meanings concerning individual identity, social class, nationhood and belonging, family, gender, and sexuality and pleasure. As this book shows, two hundred years on from its invention, the bicycle is a revolutionary technology that retains the power to transform the world.

Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy

The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom: Borders, Intimacy, Terror

This comprehensive study of prolific British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom explores the themat... more This comprehensive study of prolific British
filmmaker Michael Winterbottom explores
the thematic, stylistic, and intellectual
consistencies running through the whole
of his eclectic and controversial work.
The volume undertakes a close analysis of
fifteen Winterbottom films ranging from
television dramas to transnational coproductions
featuring Hollywood stars, and from
documentaries to costume films. The critique
is centered on Winterbottom’s collaborative
working practices, political and cultural
contexts, and critical reception. Arguing
that his work delineates a “cinema of
borders,” the book examines Winterbottom’s
treatment of sexuality, class, ethnicity, and
national and international politics, as well
as his quest to adequately narrate inequality,
injustice, and violence.

Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices

"Within Film Studies and Media Studies, interest in technology has grown in recent years in respo... more "Within Film Studies and Media Studies, interest in technology has grown in recent years in response to rapid developments in digital and computer media. Cinema's relationship with the technological, however, remains contested. Many contemporary writers describe these technological shifts as alarmingly disruptive, threatening either to destroy or disfigure cinema. This collection of essays does something different. It seeks to situate changes in, for instance, film stock, animation, the depiction of robots and the development of 'synthespians', fire regulations in cinemas, or neurological accounts of spectatorship within more broadly defined technocultural processes around cinema. In order to understand the relationship between cinema and technology, the book draws on media and cultural studies, media anthropology, science and technology studies, philosophy and film theory. Analysing examples that range from cutting-edge Hollywood blockbusters to internet viral films, and from Victorian cinema to the present, this volume brings technology into debates around cinema's forms, meanings and audiences.

Contents:
Introduction: Bruce Bennett, Marc Furstenau & Adrian Mackenzie

PART 1: FORMAT
Peter Lester, 'The Perilous Gauge: Canadian Independent Film Exhibition and the 16mm Mobile Menace'

Andrew Clay, 'BMW Films and the Star Wars Kid: 'Early Web Cinema' and Technology'

James Elkins, 'On Some Limits to Film Theory (Mainly From Science)'

PART 2: NORMS
Paul Moore, 'Socially Combustible: Panicky People, Flammable Films, and the Dangerous New Technology of the Nickelodeon'

Jan Harris, 'Cinema and its Doubles: Kittler vs. Deleuze'

Kate O'Riordan, 'Genomic Science in Contemporary Film: Institutions, Individuals and Genre'

PART 3: SCANNING
Aylish Wood, 'Cinema as Technology: Encounters with an Interface'

Maja Manojlovic, 'Demonlover: Interval, Affect and the Aesthetics of Digital Dislocation'

Chris Rodrigues, ''Into the décor': Attention and Distraction, Foreground and Background'

Bruce Bennett, 'Children, Robots, Cinephilia and Technophobia'

PART 4: MOVEMENT
Michelle Langford, 'Lola and the Vampire: Technologies of Time and Movement in German Cinema'

Bill Schaffer, 'Inbetweening: Animation, Deleuze, Film Theory'

Marie-Luise Angerer, 'Affective Troubles and Cinema'

Thomas Elsaesser, 'Afterword: Digital Cinema and the Apparatus: Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies'

Teaching transnational cinema: politics and pedagogy

Feminist Media Studies, 2017

This collection focuses on the value of the analysis and discussion of transnational films in the... more This collection focuses on the value of the analysis and discussion of transnational films in the university classroom, and the specific pedagogical, political and conceptual challenges that are posed by this subject. Exploring films like Children of Men, Babel, and Slumdog Millionaire, contributors engage with issues related to immigrant identities, transnational encounters, foreignness, cosmopolitanism and citizenship, the politics of visibility, terrorism and the War on Terror, legality, and race.

2018: Art & Mobilities Network Inaugural Symposium Instant Journal (Peter Scott Gallery)

Fugitive Aesthetics

Third Text

The cinema of Michael Bay:an aesthetic of excess

The hyper-kinetic action films of Michael Bay have come to exemplify the commercial, technical an... more The hyper-kinetic action films of Michael Bay have come to exemplify the commercial, technical and aesthetic transformations of contemporary blockbuster cinema during a period in which the dynamic, disorienting effects of media convergence are reconfiguring viewing practices and remodelling cinematic institutions. However, despite their commercial success and cultural visibility, these films remain more or less absent from academic criticism of late twentieth and early twenty-first century global cinema, except in dismissive asides as examples of the aesthetic and intellectual limitations of contemporary, post-classical Hollywood cinema. Through a close analysis of the $130m film Bad Boys II (2003), described in Rolling Stone as ‘the cinematic equivalent of toxic waste’, this article examines the key stylistic and thematic features of Bay’s cinema, arguing that the director’s films are marked by a distinctive ‘aesthetics of excess’. Discussing such features as narrative structure an...

The art of disobedience:the domopolitics of The Institute for the Art & Practice of Dissent at Home

Carnal thoughts: embodiment and moving image culture

Feminist Review, 2007

On the whole, the books' willingness to engage with key critiques of postmodernist thought, while... more

<I>The Hurt Locker</I>: Cinematic Addiction, "Critique," and the War on Terror

Cultural Politics: an International Journal, 2011

The article approaches The Hurt Locker, an enthusiastically received “critical” film, as a sympto... more The article approaches The Hurt Locker, an enthusiastically received “critical” film, as a symptom of today's prevailing cultural and political codes. First we dwell on the homologies between the state of exception and the narrative logic of the film, including its reflection on the banalization of exception. This is followed by a parallel between the biopolitical optic of the film and today's dominant ideology, which Badiou calls “democratic materialism.” We emphasize that, despite its critical credentials, The Hurt Locker is totally silent on the most crucial aspect of the war against terror, its depoliticizing effects. It is a depoliticized picture, in which the lack of antagonistic politics and subjectivities in today's democratic materialist constellation is countered with the inherent excess of the system, the protagonist's (self-)destructive passion for the Real. Following this discussion at the level of the narrative, we discuss the film in the context of wha...

Aporias of foreignness: transnational encounters in cinema

Transnational Cinemas, 2018

This introduction examines the meaning of foreignness, drawing on Jacques Derrida's discussion of... more This introduction examines the meaning of foreignness, drawing on Jacques Derrida's discussion of 'the aporia' to propose that foreignness is critically aporetic-undecidable and unstable. At a moment when racist political rhetoric is being normalized and xenophobic political movements are on the rise, thinking about 'aporias of foreignness' allows us to reflect upon questions of belonging and hospitality, and the complexity and historical contingency of the relationship between self and other, indigenous citizen and immigrant, asylum-seeker or refugee. The introductory chapter proposes that cinema is a crucial medium through which to rethink foreignness since cinema always involves a potentially disorienting encounter with the unfamiliar, an encounter that is at the centre of the work of artist Ai Weiwei in film and other media.

Close encounters with foreignness

Transnational Screens

A foreigner in principle is already a spy. ' --Trinh Minh-ha, Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) ... more A foreigner in principle is already a spy. ' --Trinh Minh-ha, Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) Encounter 1: Katarzyna Marciniak -Poland, 1970s/1980s Before I became an immigrant and thus foreign, and before I received any formal training in the U.S., my early film history education happened almost daily through socialist television, which exposed me to a conventional apprehension of cinematic foreignness. Perhaps assuming that behind the Iron Curtain there was only scarcity of everything, my American peers are always surprised when they hear that I grew up watching 'foreign' films on television by Tarkovsky, Godard, Kalatozov, Bergman, Fellini, Kurosava, Menzel, or Sturges that were shown under the banner of 'Kino interesujących filmów' [Cinema of Interesting Films], 'W starym kinie' [In an Old Movie House], or 'Filmoteka Arcydzieł' [Masterpiece Cinematheque]. They are specifically surprised to learn that this education happened through the medium of television. My favourite pastime was watching westerns with my father on Sunday nights (we both loved The Magnificent Seven (Sturges, 1960) and relished spaghetti westerns like The Legend of Frenchie King (Christian-Jacque, 1971) with Brigitte Bardot and Claudia Cardinale), or silent comedies with Chaplin or Keaton. In my memory, televison programming did not include many films by international female directors, though Márta Mészáros's films were certainly shown, and audiences were occasionally offered films by Polish female filmmakers such as Agnieszka Holland, Wanda Jakubowska, or Barbara Sass. My U.S. students might claim that I had access to a fairly elitist film education early on, but for my generation and those of our parents and grandparents, our media habits and cultural knowledge were shaped by the limited programming of one and eventually two TV channels. I tell this story because at a time in socialist-era Poland when the possibility of crossing borders was limited and heavily controlled, encounters with various cinematic cultures on TV, in the intimate setting of one's home, were powerful transnational encounters offering amazing forays into the world. This may not be so surprising since we lived during the era that honoured Lenin's famous saying that 'of all the arts the most important for us is the cinema' (Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, 2015), and Łódź where I grew up has been known as HollyŁódź because it was home to the prestigious Polish National Film School and the country's motion picture industry. Simultaneously, television broadcasting, like other arts, was censored, supposedly shielding the public from ideologically 'dangerous' western materials. Thus, while my generation routinely watched Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying (1957), Stanislav Rostotsky's The Dawns Here Are Quiet (1972) and other Soviet-bloc productions, we were also exposed to a rich

High theory:a report on the 'Figuring Addictions/Rethinking Consumption' conference, 1-5 April 2002, Lancaster University

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land': Darren Andrews' Pleasureland (2010)

'Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land': Darren Andrews' Pleasureland (2010).... more

Report on 1998 Screen studies conference

'Celebrity Chav': Fame, Femininity and Social Class

by Bruce Bennett and imogen tyler

European Journal of Cultural Studies, Jan 1, 2010

'Against Aspiration'

by imogen tyler and Bruce Bennett

A short piece on the political rhetoric of 'aspiration' and its appropriation by the left, co-wri... more

'The Cinema of Michael Bay: An Aesthetic of Excess'

Senses of Cinema, Jun 13, 2015

The hyper-kinetic action films of Michael Bay have come to exemplify the commercial, technical an... more The hyper-kinetic action films of Michael Bay have come to exemplify the commercial, technical and aesthetic transformations of contemporary blockbuster cinema during a period in which the dynamic, disorienting effects of media convergence are reconfiguring viewing practices and remodelling cinematic institutions. However, despite their commercial success and cultural visibility, these films remain more or less absent from academic criticism of late twentieth and early twenty-first century global cinema, except in dismissive asides as examples of the aesthetic and intellectual limitations of contemporary, post-classical Hollywood cinema. Through a close analysis of the $130m film Bad Boys II (2003), described in Rolling Stone as ‘the cinematic equivalent of toxic waste’, this article examines the key stylistic and thematic features of Bay’s cinema, arguing that the director’s films are marked by a distinctive ‘aesthetics of excess’. Discussing such features as narrative structure and spatial organization, the highly affective representation of movement and intense colour, and an insistently ironic self-reflexivity, I argue that Bad Boys II is a systematic exploration of inter-related modes of excess in terms of circumstances of production, style, narrative economy, and thematic focus. Drawing on Paul Willemen’s analysis of the ‘Sirkian system’ in Douglas Sirk Hollywood melodramas, this article explores the components of the ‘Bayian system’.

The comedy of terror: 'Gary: Tank Commander' and the TV sitcom's "discourse of impropriety"

The War on Terror post-9/11 television drama, docudrama and documentary, Lacey, S. & Paget, D. (eds.). Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 65-80, Jun 30, 2015

Reflecting on the predominantly solemn cinematic response to the September 11th attacks, Ryan Gil... more Reflecting on the predominantly solemn cinematic response to the September 11th attacks, Ryan Gilbey observes that ‘defiant comedy is surely one of the sharpest weapons at our disposal’ (Gilbey, 2011, 52). Within the deluge of popular representations generated by the war on terror, however, a small number of comic and satiric film and accounts have emerged, including Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo (2008, Hurwitz, Schlossberg), In the Loop (Iannucci, 2009), Four Lions (Morris, 2010) and Team America: World Police (Parker, 2004). This chapter discusses the UK TV comedy, Gary’s War and the three subsequent series, Gary: Tank Commander. Focusing on Gary McLintoch, a camp Scottish soldier who has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his interaction with officers, colleagues, and friends, the programmes parody the conventions of both sober documentary television, embedded reportage and those realist dramas that privilege the first-hand experience of the soldier.
This chapter asks what the function of comedy is in the face of the atrocities and quotidian horrors of the war on terror, and whether comedy offers a platform for subversion and criticism in its refusal to take seriously and reproduce the liberal anxieties, melodramatic urgency and ideological conservatism and earnest documentary realism of dramas such as Generation Kill, Occupation and Britz, or documentaries such as Armadillo: Frontline Afghanistan (Pedersen, 2010), Our War and Restrepo (Hetherington, Junger, 2010) . This piece also asks whether the foregrounding of a camp protagonist can be understood as a parodic critique of the consensual retrenchment of reactionary masculinities that underpin many ‘war on terror’ dramas. The TV series can be situated in a tradition of comedies about reluctant and incompetent soldiering and the everyday homosocial experience of (army) camp life that encompasses Shoulder Arms (Chaplin, 1918), Carry on Sergeant (Thomas, 1958), The Phil Silvers Show (1955-59), Dad’s Army (1968-77), and It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum (1974-81). In concentrating upon the trivial frustrations, tensions and tedium of life on a military base in Scotland, the programmes also eschew the breathless, sensational fascination with the immersive spectacle of battle, and in doing so, prompt reflections upon questions of national and regional identity, class relations, and the normalcy of militarisation and heightened security. The discussion of these series is framed by the broader question of the ‘social signification’ (Bergson) of comedy in the face of terror and the extent to which laughter in response to what Freud terms ‘tendentious jokes’ is here a potential mode of intellectual and political resistance. The chapter explores whether, in their refusal to reproduce the solemnities of ‘serious’ film and TV drama, and the refusal of certain taboos these TV comedies constitute a valuable critique of the limited and restrictive terms of representation that have emerged as the dominant conventions through which this global conflict is depicted in mainstream media representations.
-
Bergson, H, ‘Laughter: An Essay on the meaning of the comic’, trans. Brereton, C.
Freud, S. 1976, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey, Middlesex: Penguin
Gilbey, R. 2011, ‘How to tell a horror story’, New Statesman, 5 Sept. 2011, 51-2

Loving the Alien: Indigenous Protest and Neo-Colonial Violence in James Cameron’s Avatar

Katarzyna Marciniak, Imogen Tyler, Eds. (2014). Immigrant Protest: Politics, Aesthetics and Everyday Dissent, N.Y.: S.U.N.Y. Press, Nov 2014

This is the published version of a chapter published in the volume: Katarzyna Marciniak, Imogen ... more

'The normativity of 3D: Cinematic journeys, "imperial visuality" and unchained cameras'

Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, Nov 22, 2013

This article in the free online journal, JumpCut: A Review of Contemporary Media, is an analysis ... more This article in the free online journal, JumpCut: A Review of Contemporary Media, is an analysis of the emergent formal and ideological conventions of the current wave of digital 3D cinema, using Werner Herzog’s documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) and the cave-diving thriller Sanctum (Grierson, 2010) produced by James Cameron as the key case studies.

The heightened look of cinematic history: Excess and costume in Michael Winterbottom’s The Look of Love

This paper was delivered on 15th March 2014 at Screening Style: Costume, Cinema and Performance, ... more

Gary’s war on terror: soldiers’ stories, the ‘discourse of impropriety’ and the comedy of terror

This is an edited version of the paper I gave at the University of Northumbria symposium, ‘Acting... more This is an edited version of the paper I gave at the University of Northumbria symposium, ‘Acting Up; Gender and Television Comedy’ on 14th Jan, 2012. A revised and extended version of this entitled, ‘The comedy of terror: ‘Gary: Tank Commander’ and the TV sitcom’s “discourse of impropriety”’, will be published in June 2015 in Lacey, S. & Paget, D. (eds.). Representing the War on Terror. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.