This is a lecture that I delivered to first year students at the University of Roehampton, London, on 29 March 2012.
All excerpts from films are used under Fair Use and this is done for educational purposes only.
Films featured in this essay-film-lecture:
Arabseque (John Whitney, USA, 1975)
TRON (Steven Lisberger, USA, 1982)
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (James Cameron, USA, 1991)
Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, USA, 1993)
Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, USA, 1994)
The Incredibles (Brad Bird, USA, 2004)
A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France/USA, 2004)
Sleep Dealer (Alex Rivera, Mexico/USA, 2008)
Day Watch (Timur Bekmambetov, Russia, 2006)
The Host (Joon-ho Bong, South Korea, 2006)
Panic Attack! (Fede Alvarez, Uruguay, 2009)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel Coen, UK/USA, 2000)
Making Of O Brother, Where Art Thou?
300 (Zack Snyder, USA, 2006)
Beowulf (Robert Zemeckis, USA, 2007)
Singin' in the Rain Golf GTI Advert (Ne-o, 2005)
Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, USA, 2008)
Fight Club (David Fincher, USA, 1999)
War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, USA, 2006)
Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, USA, 2002)
Avatar (James Cameron, USA, 2009)
The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, USA, 2004)
The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, USA, 1999)
Planet Terror (Robert Rodriguez, USA, 2007)
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, USA/New Zealand, 2003)
Academic texts mentioned in this lecture:
Bordwell, David (2002). ‘Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film’, Film Quarterly, 55:3 (Spring), pp. 16-28.
Brown, William (2009). ‘Man Without a Movie Camera – Movies Without Men: Towards a Posthumanist Cinema?’ in Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies (ed. Warren Buckland), Abingdon/New York: Routledge/AFI, pp. 66-85.
Buckland, Warren (2006). Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster, London: Continuum.
Elsaesser, Thomas, and Warren Buckland (2002). Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis, London: Arnold.
Gunning, Tom (1986). ‘The Cinema of Attraction, Early Film, Its Spectators and the Avant-Garde’, Wide Angle, 8:3-4, pp. 63-70.
Manovich, Lev (2001). The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Minnis, Stuart (1998). ‘Digitalisation and the Instrumentalist Approach to the Photographic Image,’ Iris, 25, pp. 49-59.
Prince, Stephen (1996). ‘True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory,’ Film Quarterly, 49:3 (Spring), pp. 27-37.
Wood, Aylish (2002). ‘Timespaces in spectacular cinema: crossing the great divide between spectacle versus narrative,’ Screen, 43:4, pp. 370-386.
