Category: Writing
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Shooting birds
(This is the short introduction I wrote to Murmur (2024) a new edition of a book by Lancaster-based photographer Darren Andrews of strange and beautiful photographs of starling murmurations, some of which are included below) In the late 19th century French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey became preoccupied with the challenge of studying movement, convinced that medical knowledge…
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Music for writing: Top 10
Academic writing can be frustrating, anxious, infuriating and slow – particularly when you are running up against deadlines you agreed to months before, and which you now realise were preposterously optimistic. However, it is also one of the pleasures of the job. I look forward to those days when I can shut myself in my…
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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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Trump’s body
This is a short blog post I wrote for the Sociological Review blog on the satirical coverage of Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign. This is obviously partly influenced by Roland Barthes’s essays in Mythologies – ‘The face of Garbo’, for example – but also by a frustration with the lacklustre and inadequate response by satirists to the rise…
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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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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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Against Aspiration
A short piece on the political rhetoric of aspiration and its appropriation by the left, co-written with Imogen Tyler for the UK think tank, the Centre for Labour and Social Studies. This was included in a report entitled ‘What is Aspiration? How should progressives respond?’, published on 21st August and available here.
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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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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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Transport in the media: commentary
On June the 9th and 10th I attended a two-day symposium on ‘Transport in the Media’ hosted by the Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) at Lancaster University and organised by Rachel Aldred from the University of Westminster. I was asked to give a 10-minute response to the first day’s presentations and discussions on the morning of…
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Digital synecdoche: contemporary Hollywood’s liberal self-representation
This extraordinary photograph says a great deal about contemporary Hollywood. Taken with a phone at the Oscars ceremony when the host Ellen DeGeneres stepped off stage to take a picture of herself with Meryl Streep as a stunt to try to get a record-breaking number of retweets, the photograph has indeed reportedly broken records for…
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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…
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Everyday pleasures: cinema-going
As the term ‘cinema-going’ suggests, one of the historical pleasures of watching films has been visiting the structures in which they are screened. In An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory, Annette Kuhn’s study of people’s memories of cinema-going in the 1930s, she found that for many of the people she interviewed, the cinemas themselves,…
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Perfect and ephemeral: Chaplin as cinematic sign
Driving back and forth past this outhouse on the small island of Waiheke in New Zealand/Aotearoa over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been struck by the incongruity of finding this image of Charlie Chaplin at what feels like, from a Eurocentric perspective, the edge of the world. The figure of Chaplin dressed in the…
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Semiotic ghosts: Dubai’s architectural hallucinations
Travelling from the UK to New Zealand recently we stopped for two days in Dubai in order to make the long journey more manageable. Even allowing for the dislocating effect of flying across time zones and two sleepless nights since the hotel we were staying in was packed with raucous teams competing in the international…
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The War on Welfare: From ‘Social Security’ to ‘Social Insecurity’
This is a new short piece I co-wrote with Imogen Tyler as a blog post for the online journal, New Left Project: blog http://goo.gl/IvFQom
Bruce Bennett 