'It's a film' : medium specificity as textual gesture in Red road and The unloved

British cinema has long been intertwined with television. The buzzwords of the transition to digital media, 'convergence' and 'multi-platform delivery', have particular histories in the British context which can be grasped only through an understanding of the cultural, historical and institutional peculiarities of the British film and television industries. Central to this understanding must be two comparisons: first, the relative stability of television in the duopoly period (at its core, the licence-funded BBC) in contrast to the repeated boom and bust of the many different financial/industrial combinations which have comprised the film industry; and second, the cultural and historical connotations of 'film' and 'television'. All readers of this journal will be familiar – possibly over-familiar – with the notion that 'British cinema is alive and well and living on television'. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, when 'the end of medium specificity' is much trumpeted, it might be useful to return to the historical imbrication of British film and television, to explore both the possibility that medium specificity may be more nationally specific than much contemporary theorisation suggests, and to consider some of the relationships between film and television manifest at a textual level in two recent films, Red Road (2006) and The Unloved (2009)

Letting the World Happen

Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second and my own Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees, which appeared in print within a few months of one another, share a similar set of concerns: the power of the filmic detail, that detail’s relation to film history and history in general, and the ways in which new digital technologies (with random access, freeze frame, and slow motion) encourages a spectatorial posture — one we generally associate with the cinephile — that facilitates the discovery of such moments.  Mulvey identifies two types of cinephile spectator — the pensive and the possessive — and notes that, in spite of their apparent differences, the intellectual curiosity of the first and the fetishistic fascination of the second are inevitably intertwined.  A discussion of several moments from Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) demonstrates this happy entanglement

Scholarship in Sound and Image: Producing Videographic Criticism in the Digital Age

This two-week workshop, scheduled for June 2015, will gather scholars interested in producing critical work in a multi-media format. The workshop is designed for 12 participants, ranging in rank from advanced graduate students to full professors, whose objects of study involve audio-visual media, especially film, television, and other new digital media forms. In a workshop setting, we will consider the theoretical foundation for undertaking such innovative work, and we will experiment extensively with producing multi-media scholarly work, resulting in at least one work of publishable quality per participant. The goals will be to explore a range of approaches by using moving images as a critical language and to expand the expressive possibilities available to innovative humanists. The curriculum and work produced by the participants in the workshop will be featured in a special issue of [in]Transition, the first peer reviewed journal devoted exclusively to videographic criticism

The use of an illusion: childhood cinephilia, object relations, and videographic film studies

Co-authored theoretical introduction about psychoanalytic object theories and childhood cinephilia and videographic film studies and then two more substantial ,individually authored texts and videos