Towards a pragmatist aesthetics

In this paper, I make the case that the tradition of pragmatism may usefully inform aesthetic criticism. To that end, I contrast the anti-essentialist outlook and the ethico-political concerns of neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty with the epistemological underpinnings of analytic aesthetics. The aim is to outline an alternative meta-theoretical perspective that ‘overwrites’ long-standing concerns with exactitude and objectivity. Drawing on examples from my own area of expertise, film, and television studies, I seek to explicitly set up aesthetic criticism, especially evaluation, as a means of social progress and human flourishing within the framework of liberal democracy.publishedVersio

Audio-description reloaded : an analysis of visual scenes in 2012 and Hero

This article explores whether the so-called new "cinema of attractions", with its supposed focus on visual effects to the detriment of storytelling, requires a specific approach to audio-description (AD). After some thoughts on film narrative in this type of cinema and the way in which it incorporates special effects, selected scenes with AD from two feature films, 2012 (directed by Emmerich) and Hero (directed by Zhang Yimou), are analysed. 2012 is a disaster movie aiming to thrill the audience with action. Hero is an equally visual movie but its imagery has an aesthetic purpose. The analysis investigates how space, time and action are treated in the films and the ADs, and how the information is presented in terms of focalization, timing and phrasing. The results suggest that effect-driven narratives require carefully timed and phrased ADs that devote much attention to the prosody of the AD script, its interaction with sounds and the use of metapho

«The way Bordwell tells it»: om klassisk og post-klassisk Hollywoodfilm

Intervju med filmforskaren David Bordwell

Relativt komplekst om narrativ kompleksitet

Anmeldelse av boken "Puzzle Films

New Narrative Depths? Spectacle and Narrative in Blockbuster Cinema Revisited

The article aims to tease out an implicit, possibly even instinctive, assumption about why big-budget blockbuster storylines come up short compared to other kinds of culturally sanctioned narratives. Briefly, the assumption is that there is a distinct difference between stories that are simply a pretext for a series of isolated attractions and stories that are guided by some greater predefined purpose or guiding idea. If we look more closely at it, this presumption throws up some surprising and paradoxical findings. My hypothesis is that this line of reasoning has tended to seep into the debate about classical and postclassical Hollywood cinema. The article argues that we should not take this assumption for granted, and that it has confused the debate about historical changes in Hollywood films. However, by restating the opposition between blockbuster narratives and more prestigious story-types in different terms, we can study blockbuster cinema from a more productive perspective than has been the case so far

Forfatterskap i TV-drama

The book explores authorship in TV drama through a production study of Kampen for tilværelsen, the first author-controlled series produced by NRK Drama. The writing practices in the American and Danish television industries serve as a point of departure. The book also contemplates the creative possibilities and constraints of multi-season dramas, contrasting their narrative conventions and processes of creation to those of films and novels

Forfatterskap i TV-drama. Showrunnermodellen, one vision – og Kampen for tilværelsen

Boken utforsker forfatterskap i TV-drama gjennom en produksjonsstudie av Kampen for tilværelsen, den første forfatterstyrte serien produsert av NRK Drama. Den amerikanske og den danske TV-bransjens organisering av skrivearbeidet tjener som omdreiningspunkt for diskusjonen. Boken er også en refleksjon over flersesongdramaets kreative muligheter og begrensninger, og trekker paralleller til film- og romankunstens ulike fortellingskonvensjoner og tilblivelsesprosesser

Cinematic TV drama

ABSTRACTSeveral television scholars have objected to the frequently made claim that TV drama in recent decades have become “more cinematic”, partly because cinematic-ness is such an ill-defined concept. This article seeks to make the concept less ambiguous and more useful by offering some basic distinctions between different meanings invoked by “cinematic”. I propose two meanings associated with production values, which are moderately evaluative, and two where “cinematic” serves as a higher compliment, one related to craft/skill, the other to notions of medium specificity. I also relate these meanings to the idea that TV series have grown increasingly cinematic. Here I argue that “film” and “television drama” are far too voluminous and heterogeneous categories to bear comparison in general, but that they can be meaningfully studied when framed as contingent creative practices grounded in time and place. The particular context for my discussion of “cinematic television” is American TV drama since the turn of the millennium. The article does not merely seek to clarify the connotations of “cinematic”, but to use cinematic-ness as a prism to through which important stylistic shifts in American TV drama can be examined. As such, the conceptual-theoretical discussion also serves historiographic purposes: The different meanings of “cinematic” highlight different industrial developments, which offer complementary perspectives on the aesthetics of American TV drama since the late-1990s