Shane Meadows : representations of liminality, masculinity and class (2024)

Studies in European Cinema, 2009

Journal of Contemporary European Studies doi/abs/10.1080/14782804.2012.685392, 2012

Following the 2004 extension of the European Union, vast numbers of Polish migrant workers arrived in the United Kingdom. Two British films released in 2008 – Shane Meadows' Somers Town and Steven Sheil's Mum and Dad – were a response to this. This article will explore the way the two films rework and negotiate collective sentiments concerning the UK's changing demographic profile. It will argue that Somers Town and Mum and Dad largely correspond to prevailing discourses on Polishness at large, which are characterised by a measure of ambiguity about the influx of Polish migrants. It will also look at how this representation differs from older portrayals of Poles in British cinema.

Atlantis, 2012

This article argues that popular music in contemporary British hooligan cinema fosters a romanticised and nostalgic portrait of football violence that neutralises the media's earlier stigmatisation of the phenomenon. The epic flavour provided by the films' soundtracks and their warfare connotations contribute to the exorcising of the social fears awakened by hooliganism. I conclude by stating that the films' musical scores aim not only at establishing an accurate, legitimate correlation with British cultural history in the 1980s, but also at revisiting the general desolation that sociologists and historians associate with it.

Williams, M., Godfrey, S. and Fradley, M. (Eds.) Shane Meadows: Critical Essays. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Captivating Criminality 9 conference of the International Crime Fiction Association [ICFA] organised in cooperation with the Gothic in Asia Association [GAA], and the BALAC Programme of the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, 2023

Transgressive Women in Modern Russian and East European Cultures, 2016

In her study of gender and agency in American film and television, Kathleen Rowe argues that film "melodrama and comedy are linked by common ideologies that limit the plots available for narrative representations of female desire" (1995, 14). In melodrama, Rowe writes, the female protagonist can gain temporary agency only via suffering and self-sacrifice. In romantic comedy, the heroine exercises greater control over the narrative, but is eventually tamed by the male lead. Both classical Hollywood genres reassert patriarchal status quo. In contrast to these genres, the female-centered situation comedy, such as I Love Lucy, is a postmodern open-ended genre that spoofs "the tropes of masculinity and patriotism" and threatens the sanctity of social institutions (Rowe 1995, 53). Following Mikhail Bakhtin's study of Francois Rabelais and carnival in early modern Europe and Natalie Zemon Davis's analysis of popular culture and gender in early modern France, 1 Rowe contends that screen formats privileging the female comedian embody the genre memory of the unruly woman tradition and can be traced back to early modern European culture of carnival. Like the unruly woman of street carnival and Renaissance novel, female comedians disrupt ideological and narrative continuity of genres maintaining the patriarchal status quo. In our chapter we argue that the female comedian emerges in Soviet cinema but becomes a true visual icon in post-Soviet television. In particular, we focus on this character's ability to challenge the patriarchal powers that constrain female characters. We do not aspire to write an exhaustive history of the female comedian in Russian screen genres of laughter. Rather, we set out to investigate the growing role of such a character-whom, following Rowe's definition, we call "the spectacle-making unruly woman" (1995, 4)-in late socialist melodrama and the post-Soviet sitcom. Drawing on the works of Bakhtin and Davis, Rowe contends that "the topos of the unruly woman. .. reverberates whenever women disrupt the norms of femininity and the social hierarchy of male over female through excess and outrageousness" (1995, 31). The unruly "woman on top" creates disorder by attempting to dominate men. Her body is excessive and she refuses to control her physical and sexual appetites; she is loud; jokes; mocks men, and laughs at them. The unruly woman's behavior is often perceived by Un/Taming the Unruly Woman

Race, class, and politics in film comedy have been debated in the field of African American culture and aesthetics, with scholars and filmmakers arguing the merits of narrative space without adequately addressing the issue of subversive agency of aesthetic expression by black film comedians. With special attention to the 1980-1989 work of comedian Eddie Murphy, this study will look at the film and television work found in this moment as an incisive cut in traditional Hollywood industry and narrative practices in order to show black comedic agency through aesthetic and cinematic narrative subversion. Through close examination of the film, Beverly Hills Cop (Brest, 1984), this project works to shed new light on the cinematic and standup trickster influences of comedy, and the little recognized existence of the 1980s as a decade that defines a base period for chronicling and inspecting the black aesthetic narrative subversion of American film comedy. INDEX WORDS: Comedy, Eddie Murphy, ...

Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 2009

The collapse of the Communist regimes in 1989 and the 2004 and 2007 extensions of the European Union to include several Eastern European countries changed the Iron Curtain coexistence of West and East into East/West literal encounters in Europe. It is these changes in population, pan-European encounters and a redefined notion of Europe (especially Britain’s place in the ‘New Europe’) that are explored and examined in Last Resort by Paweł Pawlikowski, a Polish-born British director. Although Last Resort avoids overt political engagement, its story of a Russian mail order bride (which clearly metaphorises the East/West relationship of power and privilege) should be read within the contemporary political debate on the changing nature of European identity and more specifically the place of British identity in the redefined social, economic and political situation of the ‘New Europe’.

This thesis examines questions of the continued significance of national cinemas and identities, focussing on the case of Scottish cinema. As a small, devolved nation with relative autonomy from the United Kingdom, Scotland presents an interesting case for how films are labelled with a national identity, as Scottish films can also often be understood in a British, European, and even global context. Rather than attempting to construct a working model of Scottish cinema based on representation or production context, I ask how films have been constructed as Scottish. I approach the concepts of Scotland and Scottish film as sets of meanings that are subject to change over time and in different contexts. This facilitates a perspective which asks in what ways Scotland and Scottishness is constructed in film. I examine how multiple identities are balanced in the filmic construction of Scotland first by considering how Scottish films—both those made in and which are about Scotland—from the ...

Heterosexuality is coded on-screen in many musical films from the last century as a “celebratory ideal.” 1 This thesis explores the queer possibilities of the so-called heterosexual male in three films spanning a decade from 1977 with Badham's Saturday Night Fever and Grease (Kleiser, 1978), to 1987's Dirty Dancing (Ardolino). Each of the films I have examined foreground heterosexual romance. However, by looking at the male body in these films I have argued for the ways in which the male, dancing body works against these films' assertion of a narrative heterosexuality. I have shown how these films can be read as queer by the way they highlight the performativity of the male body, and through their camp aestheticism which complicates normative ideas about desire, sexuality and gender. I interrogate claims emerging from work in musical genre theory, which describes the musical as “the most heterosexist of all the Hollywood filmic forms.”2 By examining existing theory on th...

Essays in Film and the Humanities

Studies in French Cinema, 2018

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2007.

Routledge eBooks, 2016

My dissertation argues that while Thaw cultural producers believed that they had abandoned Stalinist cultural practices, their works continued to generate, in revised form, the major tropes of Stalinist culture: the positive hero, and family and war tropes. Although the cultural Thaw of the 1950s and 60s embraced new values, it merely reworked Stalinist artistic practices. On the basis of literary and cinematic texts, I examine how these two media reinstantiated the fundamental tropes of Russo-Soviet culture.In the first two chapters, I discuss approaches to Thaw literature and film in Western and Soviet scholarship, and my methodology, which is best defined as cultural semiotics. Chapter Three discusses the instantiations of the positive hero in Thaw literature and film. As case studies I adduce Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1957) and Grigorii Kozintsev's film adaptation of Hamlet (1964). The fourth chapter examines how Thaw culture redefines the family and war tropes i...

Kwartalnik Filmowy (Film Quarterly), no. 52, 2005

Film, Fashion & Consumption, 2014

Film Review: When Too Much Spectacle is Not Enough: Costume in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby (edited version) Karen de PerthuisPace was never going to be a problem with Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013) which, by the time I got round to seeing it, had clearly divided opinion. A hit at the box office, the critics had been scathing. David Denby of The New Yorker suggested it was less a film than a music video made with ‘endless resources and a stunning absence of taste’ (2013: 79). The respected fashion writer, Colin McDowell, condemned it ‘as vacuous as the pages of most fashion magazines’ (2013). But ever hopeful that Luhrmann and production designer Catherine Martin could repeat the visually thrilling experience of Romeo+Juliet (Luhrmann, 1996) I was willing to take my chances. I was expecting spectacle – ‘glitz and bling’ as someone else put it. I went for the costumes. I went for the fashion. The film has an excess of both. So why the disappointment?Let’s start with the costume. By chance, I had spent the afternoon at the V&A’s popular ‘Hollywood Costume’ exhibition showing at the Australian Centre for Moving Images (ACMI) in Melbourne, so I did not need to be reminded that costume design involves the creativity and hard work of many talented individuals. In the complex process of getting a script to the screen, nothing is left to chance; everything matters. In this, The Great Gatsby is no exception, and if ACMI (or the V&A) were to put all of the film’s spectacular Academy Award winning costumes on show, I have no doubt that they too would draw murmurs of admiration from the visiting crowds.But at ‘Hollywood Costume’, spectacle is not given pride of place. In the curator notes and in the interviews with designers, actors and directors, the exhibition at ACMI had one take-home message: the most important function of costume design is not to provide spectacle, but to transform the actor into a character we can believe in. In the book Hollywood Costume (2012), published in concert with the exhibition, costume designer and fashion scholar Deborah Nadoolman Landis offers the representative view that costume embodies ‘the psychological, social and emotional condition of the character at a particular moment in the script’ (2012: 52). In this, it is hard not to hear echoes of Edith Head’s so-called ‘storytelling wardrobes’, written about by Jane Gaines in her influential article, ‘Costume and narrative: How dress tells the woman’s story’ (1990: 180). Although Nadoolman Landis emphasizes that ‘costumes are so much more than clothes’ (2012: 52), Gaines’s analysis suggests that it is only when costume ‘disappears’ into ‘clothes’ that it can effectively portray character. In other words, what we are supposed to see on the screen is not an actor dressed in a costume but ‘merely someone wearing clothes’ (Gaines 1990: 192). If we buy into this fiction, then the film can concentrate on the narrative and we can sit back and enjoy the story.Of course, if the actor happens to be playing Elizabeth I, Marie-Antoinette or Daisy Buchanan, a certain degree of spectacle is required. But even costumes that dazzle can serve the narrative by revealing the psychological state of a character – the exterior shell of costume, if you like, is innermost feelings turned inside-out. In her book, Hollywood Catwalk (2010), Tamar Jeffers McDonald offers examples of transformation scenes where a character tries on numerous outfits in an attempt to find one that is ‘just right’ – a Goldilocks- style trope that, often as not, combines fashion spectacle with a final choice that, in costume terms, is the perfect psychological ‘fit’. When it comes to The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald helps out by describing what his characters are wearing: ‘Gatsby, in a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-coloured tie’ ([1926] 1974: 90–91); ‘the grey haze of Daisy’s fur collar’ ([1926] 1974: 115); Myrtle’s ‘spotted dress of dark blue crêpe de chine’ ([1926] 1974: 31). The film cherry-picks these clues and then fills in the gaps.So we get Carey Mulligan’s Daisy, America’s version of an aristocrat, wistful and romantic in pastel confections. At Gatsby’s party, wearing a Prada-designed stole that frames her delicate features in a lilac haze of fur, she is seductively vulnerable – but also trapped prey, an image that reinforces Gatsby’s vision of her as something rare and precious. Gatsby (Leonardo di Caprio) himself is appropriately obsessive about his appearance, everything is hand-finished, everything perfect. His fondness for ‘brands’ (‘My man in England sends things over’), his compulsive expenditure (that extraordinary shirt scene), and his conspicuous display of wealth all betray a character who is both conscious of the symbolic power of clothes and clearly eager to impress.For this viewer, interest starts to wane when it comes to the supporting characters. Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki), with her ‘hard, jaunty body’ (Fitzgerald [1926] 1974: 65) probably makes sense as a fashion-plate; fickle, all surface and ‘incurably dishonest’ ([1926] 1974: 65), she plays into the popular stereotype of fashion and the fashionable as morally bankrupt. Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), dressed as ‘the sporting hero’, successfully conveys the impression of someone who never loses. But tragic Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher), Tom’s low-rent mistress, dolled-up and overdrawn in reds and blacks? And Nick (conveniently played by Fitzgerald lookalike, Tobey McGuire) in a cardigan and bow tie? Surely there are rules against turning nuanced characters into cardboard cutouts?The same broad brushstrokes are applied to the party scenes, those lavish spectacles showing Gatsby ‘dispensing starlight to casual moths’ (Fitzgerald [1926] 1974: 85) that form the backdrop to much of the action. Fitzgerald coined the term ‘The Jazz Age’ and Luhrmann’s film fills the screen with everything we have come to expect of the era, as well as adding a mass of pop culture clichés from our own. The effect is a mash-up of frenzied kineticism. ‘It’s not too much, is it?’ asks Gatsby. Obligingly, Nick shakes his head, ‘No’.But it is. I love this sort of stuff and want these scenes to work. Film is made for such moments and it’s not hard to imagine that Gatsby’s parties were designed to resemble a euphoric explosion from one of those cannon-sized bottles of Moët that keep turning up in the film. Every shimmying guest, kiss-curled dancer and spangled entertainer a gorgeous sparkling droplet, cascading across the screen in a glorious celebration of wealth, beauty and excess. Instead, the spinning dizzyness is nauseating and all the intricate elements of design get lost as they dissolve into a kaleidoscopic vomit of confetti, streamers and glitter.Perhaps I would not have minded so much if Luhrmann had managed to make it all mean something, if he had not made the mistake of confusing excess with decadence, if he had not made it all look like such good, clean fun. Where are the consequences? Where are the torn dresses, the shredded hearts, the angry diamonds and the trainwrecked souls that are scattered throughout the novel? Colin McDowell is right to compare the film to a fashion magazine; youth, sex, money, image – like the glossy pages of Vogue, the film has it all. But he is right for the wrong reasons. Despite the collaboration with Prada and the commercial tie-ins with Tiffany’s, Brooks Brothers, Fogal and so on; despite costumes that could walk straight from the cineplex to the retail store, the problem with the presence of fashion in this film is not that there is too much, but that there is too little.Let me clarify. What fashion can do, what fashion offers a film like The Great Gatsby, is an immediate entrée into a gilt-edged world. Not without reason, fashion has a reputation as obsessively preoccupied with surface and appearance; it is superficial, frivolous and fickle – all traits that play precisely into Fitzgerald’s depiction of hard, cut-glass characters, those ‘careless people’ who casually abandon people and things ([1926] 1974: 186). Instinctively, Luhrmann gets this. But whereas Fitzgerald knows the value of the shadow side of style to the telling of his tale, Luhrmann cannot help turning back towards the light.Darkness and Luhrmann, it has been suggested, ‘don’t really move in the same circles’ (Davies 2013: 40). Fashion is not so squeamish; the best fashion imagery understands that the flip side of glamour is death. In ignoring the dual nature of fashion, by keeping it one-dimensional, or at best a cipher, Luhrmann misses the chance to corral his considerable talent for spectacle into a film that would have been worthy of Fitzgerald’s novel. If Luhrmann had got the costume, spectacle and fashion right, then perhaps he would have also got right Fitzgerald’s depiction of the Janus-faced coin of the American Dream. Where the author gives us a mirror, the filmmaker gives us ... nothing.

This dissertation examines the work of Harmony Korine with a particular focus on his use ofrealism as a disruptive critical tool. My study combines a theoretical and an analytical project. My aim is to defend Korine's works against charges of naIve realism by revealing the limits of a structuralist approach to Korine's realism and arguing, instead, for the adoption of the phenomenologically grounded, realist criticism of Andre Bazin. I use Bazin' s observations about the referential or indexical relationship between the camera and the physical world and his definition of 'phenomenological realism' to argue for a privileged and fruitful relationship between Korine's realism and the physical or affective dimensions of the cinematic image. I supplement this discussion with a critical application of theories of affect forwarded by such theorists as Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks, as well as theories of the grotesque. In addition, my thesis extends the links t...

In Making Paradise: Art, Modernity and the Myth of the Riviera, Kenneth E. Silver remarks that “it was the status conferred on the coast by art ... that transformed the Riviera from a physical space into a site of the imagination.”1Painters, photographers, sculptors and architects “turned geography into myth.”2 This paper extends Silver’s study by considering the way in which cinema has contributed to the mythology of the French Riviera. In this paper, I propose an iconographical study of representations of the French Riviera in a sample of films from French, Hollywood and British cinema, including Varda’s Du côté de la côte (1958), Godard’s Pierrot le fou and Deray’s La Piscine (1969) and I will look at the way cinema reworks motifs associated with the Cote d’Azur in literature, art, photography and mass culture. I alsoconsider how familiar tropes – scenic coastlines, sumptuous villas, swimming pools – persist in cinema today, using the particular example of Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight (2014) and the debt it owes to earlier representations. In a more general sense, this paper examines the way art and culture overdetermine representations and notions of place, creating typical images and associations in the cultural imagination. Cinema draws on these images and associations and it is the task of the iconographer to trace their origins and destination.1. Kenneth E. Silver, Making Paradise: Art, Modernity and the Myth of theRiviera (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2001), 25.2. Kenneth E. Silver, Making Paradise, 25.

East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, 2015

Projections, 2009

Current Musicology, 2009

Midway through the 1986 teen movie Pretty in Pink comes a strikingly memorable scene. The film's main character, Andie (Molly Ringwald), sits nonchalantly in the local record store where she works. Adorned with posters of mid-1980s post-punk groups like New Order and The Smiths, the store represents Andie's strong alternative music identity. In this particular scene, however, Andie's boss places a recording of Otis Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness" on the turntable, instantly transforming the mood. From out of nowhere, Andie's best friend, the overly-dramatic Duckie (Jon Cryer), bursts into the store and for the next two minutes proceeds to lip sync, dance, and gyrate his way through the climactic second half of Redding's 1966 soul classic. It is an enraptured, exuberant performance, almost as if he is physically possessed by the music. Andie, the object of Duckie's affections, however, is clearly unimpressed. Soon after his musical display, t...