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No description available.

My work in the 1970s and 1980s was developed with the evolving body of work now loosely called 'c e theory'. It centred on notions of authorship, spectatorship and art cinema with specific reference to the films of Carl Dreyer. In my research and writing on Dreyer's film Vampyr I applied the literary concept of the fantastigue to cinema, one of the first substantial theoretical contributions to a now established area of publication and research. According to one writer' this work was "probably the most ambitious attempt to apply Todorov's approach to cinema", a "notable exception" in the theoretical writing of that time. This was part of the wider movement associated with SEFT and Screen to interrogate the uncritical realism which dominated 1970s film studies. In my subsequent writing on Dreyer I explored a structuralist but more psychoanalytically informed discussion of genre, developing the concept of the "Dreyer text" as a way of bringing psychoanalytic concepts to compliment and complicate structuralist notions of authorship and genre. I was part of a loose group at Screen which was passionate both about cinema and ideas. While polemically defending the new concepts we were bringing to bear on cinema, we were equally concerned with their institutional placing. Our work concentrated both on regimes of looking allowed to the spectator by texts and their institutional placing. We focussed on political and discursive structures of the cinematic institution and developed a concept of 'cinema as social practice'. In particular I pushed for a cultural critique of British Independent cinema and its institutions, which was continued in my work on screen acting. I was also instrumental in extending Screen theory to other visual arts. I felt that the sometime parochialism of film studies lay in part in its separation from analysis of other forms of visual culture. In my full context statement I wish to explore limitations in the political, semiotic and psychoanalytic models which I (as did many others) adopted at the time. What I now see as Screen theory's 'blind spots' in relation to issues of sexual orientation and race can be traced back to the problematic of this period. My own subsequent research on gay and lesbian cinema as well as film and television projects on screen acting (Acting Tapes) psychoanalysis (Between Two Worlds) and Frantz Fanon (Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask) came out of dissatisfaction with that earlier project as it was then conceived. The form chosen - the essay and review - reflects the difficulty of thinking through these issues. [James Donald (ed), 'Fantasy and the Cinema', British Film Institute, London 1989] In essence my proposal involves looking back at my work around Dreyer and what one could broadly call my 'film culture' work, and arguing that what was sometimes felt and described as a theory: practice division between these two domains could be more usefully thought of in retrospect in terms of two overlapping modes of theoretical production involving different notions of institution, conjuncture, subject etc. In looking again at the strengths and weaknesses of the work I am submitting here, however, I still expect key terms of subject and history, discourse and institution, to remain in place, modified and nuanced by the substantial range of work in psychoanalysis, cultural studies and queer theory that Screen in part engendered and which my work participated in.

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Fantasy films have been a part of cinema since the very beginnings of the medium. Although fantasy films can be found in every decade of the last century, the genre only became persistently successful from the late 1970s onwards. Perhaps the relatively recent prominence of fantasy goes some way to explain why the genre lacks the academic discourse that other film genres have encouraged. Another reason why fantasy has evaded considerable discussion as a genre could be because of the difficulty in defining it. Fantasy can encompass numerous types of films, and features an array of different thematic and visual styles. Previous studies examining fantasy either fail to consider the mode as a genre, or only consider a limited array of films. Using Tzvetan Todorov’s assessment of The Fantastic as a framework, this thesis examines fantasy films from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. I reassert fantasy’s position as a genre rather than a mode or impulse. Analysing a wide range of films from this period, this thesis outlines the preoccupations of the genre and identifies the various cycles and sub-genres encompassed by the term ‘fantasy’. These categories include those that concern the style of film and those that concern the intended audience. Deconstructing the fantasy genre in these sub-genres makes it more manageable to appraise the genre as a whole. Consistent patterns emerge in the examination of these films, ranging from archetypal characters to a fixation with subversion. The 1980s was a critical time for fantasy cinema as it was the first sustained period of frequent successful films. Fantasy was the most commercially successful genre of the decade; Hollywood’s output in this period still reverberates in today’s industry. Thus, the fantasy genre is most worthy of the critical discussion afforded to other genres.

Scholarship on 1950s American science fiction cinema has tended to explore the relationship between these films and their domestic contexts of production and reception. They are often characterised as reflections of US anxieties about communism and nuclear technology. However, many such films were exported to Britain where these concerns were articulated and understood differently. The ways in which this different national context of reception shaped British interpretations of American science fiction cinema of this era has not yet been accounted for. Similarly, although some research has addressed 1950s British science fiction, this scholarship has been comparatively concise and has left gaps in our knowledge about the domestic reception of these films. Unable to draw on a British reception history of domestic and US 1950s science fiction cinema, debates about the genre have sometimes been underpinned by the presumption that western audiences responded to these films in a uniform manner. This thesis seeks to complicate our understanding of the genre by suggesting the specificity of the British reception history of science fiction cinema during the 1950s. The paucity of documentary evidence of British responses to 1950s science fiction films makes an audience study impossible. Within the intellectual framework of the New Film History, this thesis instead employs a contextually- activated approach to reception. Making extensive use of archival sources, newsreels, newspapers, magazines and other such documentary evidence, it explores some of the different contexts in which 1950s science fiction cinema was received in Britain and suggests how these factors might have shaped the interpretation of the genre. The thesis examines the interplay between American and British 1950s science fiction cinema and the British public understanding of communism, immigration, nuclear technology and scientific advancement. It contributes to our knowledge of these films by demonstrating that Britons did not necessarily understand 1950s science fiction cinema in the same way as Americans because they were party to a differently inflected series of public debates. It exposes the flexibility of the metaphors utilised by the genre during this period and their susceptibility to reinterpretation in different national contexts. This research makes visible, in a more extensive manner than has yet been accomplished, the specificity of the British reception history of 1950s science fiction cinema, and thereby provides a means to resist assumptions about the similarity of western audiences during this decade. Its conclusions call for further research into other national reception histories of these films, so that they too are not overshadowed by the better known American history of the genre, and into the possibility that the British reception history of other genres might similarly have been obscured.