The Development of a Modernist Narrative in Selected Films of Joseph Losey.

Abstract

The film career of Joseph Losey, the expatriate American director, presents one of the most perplexing problems in contemporary film scholarship. Although Losey was elevated to the status of cinema auteur by the editors of Cahiers du Cinema in 1960, this director has been neglected in Great Britain, where he made most of his films, and virtually ignored in the United States. American critics in particular have displayed antipathy for his style, which is often seen as pretentious or clumsy. This dissertation examines four films from Losey's career: The Boy With Green Hair (1948), Blind Date (1959), Accident (1967), and The Romantic Englishwoman (1975), employing a model of the classical Hollywood narrative to which Losey's films are then applied. This classical model includes seven categories: symmetrical plot, psychological motivation, identification, causal logic, spatial and temporal continuity, mise en scene, and transparency--all st and ards by which American film critics are wont to evaluate a film. The application of this model demonstrates Losey's ab and onment of conventional codes of classical narrative and the development of a modernist narrative style. The dissertation concludes that this more experimental subversion of the normative codes associated with the commercial feature film is responsible for the controversy over Losey's film. The director's films are not clumsy or incomprehensible, but carefully designed and articulated examples of the application of modernist concerns to the feature film. Thus, they constitute an unusual and valuable contribution to twentieth century art.PhDFilm studiesUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/158661/1/8204680.pd