Plans for the Year(s) to Come

As promised last week, here is an excerpt from my "personal statement" designed to lay out some research plans for the future. Additionally (and because you're such nice people), I'm going to include some extra "deleted" ideas, along with plans for the Blogorium in the coming year:

Intertextuality in film has always fascinated me; following the connective tissue from one film to another - homage, imitation, discursive elements, or direct references – I followed the influences of Fritz Lang on Ridley Scott or of Preston Sturges on Joel and Ethan Coen, developing a lexicon to express trends apparent in my research. Accordingly, I consider furthering the development of intertextuality in film history to be a crucial component in my graduate studies.

I am also interested in pursuing research into theories of authorship, particularly in the “post-auteur” and “anti-auteur” positions taken by filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh and the Coen brothers. The development of the term auteur and its subsequent backlash is a movement within film theory that is fascinating to me, and exploring the usefulness of “director as author” in a contemporary setting - one removed from “auteur” as catch-all phrase in the 1980s – seems to have been largely abandoned in the twenty-first century. Is the auteur theory still valid? Has the term lost all meaning, or has its mutation rendered directors afraid of being “branded” the author of their films? Alternately, there are a number of “authorless” or minimized directorial presences in cinematic “mash-ups” like Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django.

One field of research that appeals to me is the idea of artistic repetition; this is not limited to direct remakes (although the trend towards those merits investigation), but also the presence of virtually identical stories that appear persistently over a period of time – Yojimbo / Fistful of Dollars / The Warrior and the Sorceress / Last Man Standing – and the differences between recurring themes in literature and film compared to direct repetition of title, plot, and marketing. For example, how is does the 2009 remake of The Last House on the Left differ from the intertextual relationship between The Virgin Spring and Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left?

The horror genre, which is often considered a barren field for critical study, remains a point of focus I hope to expand on during my studies. Over the last five years, I made a concerted effort to collect and research the various theoretical approaches to horror, from Carol Clover to David Skal to Robin Wood and Barbara Creed. I am particularly interested in the way that gender and violence are portrayed in horror, from the “slasher” era to the present, with particular focus on the way that “Final Girl” variations are portrayed in French horror films like High Tension, Martyrs, Them, and Frontier(s).

Horror films are often undervalued in critical theory because the volume of low quality releases often overwhelms films with something to say. Does a high profile flop like Cursed overshadow a feminist reinterpretation of werewolves like Ginger Snaps? In order to combat the assertion the genre is “lacking,” I have hosted annual horror festivals in the summer and autumn to expose audiences to films lost in the “white noise” of aggressive marketing for sequels, remakes, and gimmick releases.

With regards to film history as a social movement, I have a long-standing desire to pursue the history of independent cinema from the 1950s to the 1980s through the venue of the Drive-In, where distributors showcased non-studio pictures outside of major cities. Until the advent of home video effectively killed the Drive-In, I suspect one can trace the movement of independent cinema from smaller territories across the U.S. by following Drive-In “culture,” despite James Naremore’s doubts that such a thing ever existed (based on a passage in More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts).

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Meanwhile, as the blogorium moves into year three on Blogspot, I've been making plans to improve on the existing weekly layout. It's becoming increasingly obvious to the Cap'n that I'm running out of "readable" posts for the "From the Vaults" on Tuesdays. Starting in January, I'm planning on replacing that feature with alternating "Four Reasons" and "Five Movies" posts in order to incorporate their presence back into rotation. I'll also open up Tuesdays to what I call "retro reviews," based on films I've seen in the past but never reviewed, or expansions on existing reviews from the Myspace era*.

I'd also like to invite readers to help pick a section tentatively called "Best of the Blogorium," built from your suggestions, votes, and picks for favorite reviews, features, essays, and other random posts. The "Best of the Blogorium" would then appear as a tab on the right side of the screen, allowing new readers to see the Cap'n at his best without being overwhelmed by the sheer number of posts to wade through.

Down the line, I might consider adding direct links to help readers find copies of Thankskilling, Coen brothers text books, and other horror films featured during Horror and Summer Fest, but that's a bit off yet.

That's what I've been working on, and hopefully the first signs of new directions in the Blogorium will appear in the coming months and years. Keep reading, and I'll keep writing.

* It turns out that most of the "reviews" in the old Blogorium were barely a paragraph and only gave the tiniest amount of information possible, something I feel I can adjust.