Tag Archives: film studies

Mise-en-Scène: Film Style and Interpretation – capsule review

Mise-en-scène can be a thorny critical area for students and scholars of production design. Nearly seventy years after its deployment by the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma, the term still carries the baggage of auteurism. Much of the scholarly writing on … Continue reading

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Art Direction & Production Design – capsule review

Art Direction & Production Design (I.B. Tauris 2015), edited by Lucy Fischer, is a must-read for anybody – scholar or otherwise – who hopes to deepen their understanding of how film design has grown and developed from the earliest days of … Continue reading

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Production Design: Architects of the Screen – capsule review

Jane Barnwell’s Production Design: Architects of the Screen was published by Wallflower in 2004, and it’s a fantastically handy guide for anybody who knows a bit about production design but is ready for a more thorough discussion of the process. Barnwell is … Continue reading

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Production Design Texts: Introduction

As any scholar who writes about production design will tell you, film studies has not traditionally been very enthusiastic in its engagement with the topic of who actually creates the practical images we see on screen – or how they … Continue reading

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Teaching Film Studies after Weinstein

This is my take on the recent disclosures about Harvey Weinstein. It is not meant to replace or supersede or in any way silence the many more heartfelt, eloquent, painful takes that others – mainly women – have been offering. … Continue reading

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Why New Hollywood?

As I’ve begun to discuss this project with friends and colleagues, one of the questions that regularly comes up is, why New Hollywood? What specifically about this era and the way it accommodated (or didn’t!) women’s work and creativity has … Continue reading

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Muscle: Variations on the Cinematic Car Crash

A video essay from May/Sep 2016. This video is the result of an assignment I was given at a workshop on the video essay at Maynooth University in May 2016. The workshop leaders, Catherine Grant and Liz Green, asked us … Continue reading

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Hal Ashby’s Endings

A video essay from December 2015. Of the 11 feature films that Hal Ashby directed, 9 end with one or more of the main characters’ back to the camera. His final film ends with the main characters walking towards the … Continue reading

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