Category: Cinema & Film
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Cahier du cinema: viewing list
Quite often when people find out what I do for a job they ask me what films I’ve seen recently and much of the time I struggle to name a title. I think one of the reasons is that I watch films for several reasons – it may be a matter of teaching preparation, research…
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Afterwords
Afterwords is the latest short film I have made with my friend, Brian Baker. A poetic dystopian narrative fragment, it is a sequel of sorts to the short film University: a New Way of Life, and will be the fourth film in a projected series. Afterwords is set at some point in the near future,…
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Guests, ghosts and migrant histories
On Sunday morning I visited a new installation by Polish artist, Krsysztof Wodiczko in a disused cotton mill in Lancashire. The piece, a work from 2009 called Guests, consists of eight arched windows projected onto a wall, and through the semi-opaque windows we can see the silhouettes of a variety of people talking, standing around in…
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Teaching Transnational Cinema – book review
A recent, pleasingly positive review in the December 2016 edition of the online Film Studies journal, Senses of Cinema, here of Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy, the book I edited with my friend, Katarzyna Marciniak, which deals with issues around teaching and researching transnational cinema.
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University: A new way of life – a documentary fiction
This is a short film I recently made with my friend and colleague, Brian Baker, about the neoliberal assault upon the university system. It is a documentary fiction, and is the product of conversations we have had about our experience of the destructive changes that have taken place within higher education in the UK since the 1980s,…
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Getting on: Takeshi Kitano’s Ryuzo and the Seven Henchmen
I have finally got around to watching Takeshi Kitano’s latest film, Ryuzo and the Seven Henchmen (2015), which was released last year, but, like a number of his recent works, has not been as widely distributed as the films such as Sonatine (1993) and Hana-bi (1997) that established him in the 1990s as an internationally…
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A rogue performer: Bowie on film
Turning on the radio on Monday morning and hearing about David Bowie’s death was probably the first time I have been truly upset to hear about the death of a public figure. I have been listening to his music since I bought a cassette of Let’s Dance when I was 13, and his importance to me and to others was that…
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The cinematic spirit of Christmas
I’ve just written a short piece for the academic blog, The Conversation, on Christmas films. This is a slightly longer edit of the piece: The nightmare of Christmas – five films that capture the real Christmas spirit. ‘It’s like Christmas – except happy’ Christmas, it goes without saying, is a particularly grim time of year. Rolling…
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In-depth and fruitful: a review of my book on Michael Winterbottom
A review of my monograph on the director Michael Winterbottom in the student-led journal, Film Matters, which describes the book as an ‘in-depth investigation’ of his work, and ‘a fruitful examination of a filmmaker who has spent years honing his craft and who still consistently manages to surprise his audiences’: winterbottom%20review
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Revolutionary films: The cinematic history of cycling
I learnt recently that I’ve been awarded a 12-month research fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust to undertake a research project on the history of cycling in cinema, exploring the changing relationship between these parallel industrial technologies. The project begins with the early experiments with cinema during the Victorian period and tracks the development of screen cultures of…
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The Cinema of Michael Bay
I’m very excited to see that a ‘special dossier‘ of critical essays on the Hollywood film-maker Michael Bay that I co-edited for the open-access online Film Studies journal, Senses of Cinema, has just been published. This project emerged from a conversation with a couple of friends at the SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) conference in Boston…
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A review of my book on Michael Winterbottom.
The first review of my book on Michael Winterbottom, published in Media International Australia, no. 154, Feb. 2015. Flatteringly, the reviewer deems it ‘essential reading because it provides an original and individual insight on an unclassifiable British director’. Bennett__Bruce__The_Cinema_of_ Bennett__Bruce__The_Cinema_of_
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Viewing diary
Since the Christmas vacation I’ve found myself so stretched with teaching and admin duties that I’ve been unable to write very much, but have nevertheless continued watching films at every opportunity. This is a crucial aspect of the mundane discipline of film scholarship, and I usually keep a notebook to jot down details and thoughts about films I’ve seen,…
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Another way of seeing, another way of being: Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Introduction to Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) Bruce Bennett (Lancaster University) Dukes Cinema 5th Jan, 2015. (This is the introductory public talk I gave for a screening of this film as part of the current season of SF films distributed by the BFI, ‘Days of Fear and Wonder’). The Man Who Fell…
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Loving the Alien
My new essay on Avatar, ‘Loving the Alien: Indigenous Protest and Neo-colonial Violence in James Cameron’s Avatar’ has just been published in the handsomely produced volume, Immigrant Protest: Politics, Aesthetics and Everyday Dissent (New York; SUNY Press), edited by Imogen Tyler and Katarzyna Marciniak. A pre-publication draft can be found on my academia.edu page here: https://lancaster.academia.edu/BruceBennett
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The heightened look of cinematic history: Excess and costume in Michael Winterbottom’s The Look of Love
The heightened look of cinematic history: Excess and costume in Michael Winterbottom’s The Look of Love Bruce Bennett, Lancaster University UK. 15/3/14 (This paper was delivered at Screening Style: Costume, Cinema and Performance, a symposium on costume design I organised with Dr Catherine Spooner (Dept. of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster). Details about the event can…
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Masculine Intimacies: Michael Winterbottom’s ‘The Trip’
(An extract from my book, The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom: Borders, Intimacy, Terror. London and New York: Wallflower Press pp.56-62, in which I discuss the 2010 comedy TV series, The Trip. The sequel, The Trip to Italy is currently being screened on BBC2). Masculine intimacies Romantic and intimate relationships in Winterbottom’s films are haunted by loss, failure, rejection and…
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Deserting the human race: Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête
Dukes cinema, 27th Jan, 2014 This was the introduction I gave for the screening of a new digital restoration of this film, which was screened within a series of ‘Gothic’ films La Belle et La Bête (Beauty and the Beast) is the second of the six extant films that were directed by the prolific French…
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New Zealand: Like Lord of the Rings
One of the running gags in Flight of the Conchords, the sitcom about the eponymous ‘novelty music’ duo from New Zealand, who are trying to make it in New York, is that the office walls belonging to their manager Murray Hewitt, the deputy cultural attaché at the New Zealand embassy, are decorated with posters diffidently promoting…
Bruce Bennett 