Film and Visual Arts
In this group we are working in a number of overlapping thematic areas, where the visual is explored in relation to other arts, as well as in relation to social and political structures.
The areas under investigation include:
- audiences and spectatorship
- authorship
- gender and sexuality
- genre and stardom
- landscape and space
- national cinemas and postcolonial cinemas
- psychoanalytic theory
- the visual and the literary
We work in a wide range of languages, including Chinese, French, German, Spanish, and work on cinema from Europe, East Asia, Latin America and North Africa. The key research aims of staff working in this area relate to the theorising of the image. Members of the group are addressing this via two main approaches to the study of film and the visual arts. The first focuses on images/texts and their production and the second on aspects of the reception of the image.
We have links with colleagues in other parts of the university, especially with the School of English with whom we run the MA Film: Theory and Practice.
Professor Guy Austin is Director of the Centre for Digital Media and Film, opened in 2011 and Dr S Leahy is co-organiser of the North East Regional Film Network (NERFNET), with Dr P Hutchings (Northumbria University).
Staff working in this area are willing to supervise postgraduate research in a wide range of areas including: Chinese-language cinema; French cinema; Spanish cinema; Latin American cinema; Basque cinema; Star studies, Gender and film; Audiences and Spectatorship; Genres (particularly vampire and thriller genres); Auteurism; North African cinema (especially Algerian); cinema and space.
Members of Staff in this Area
Postgraduate Research Students
Eun-Jee Park: Le Jeune cinéma français in the 1990s (supervised by Sarah Leahy)
Louise Anderson: Newsreel Memories – audiences, consumption and identity in 1940s and 1950s Tyneside (supervised by Sarah Leahy and Deborah Chambers, ECLS)
Rebecca Naughten: Spain Made Flesh – Manifestations of the national in contemporary Spanish stardom (1992-2007) (supervised by Ann Davies and Bruce Babington, SELLLS)
Erin Hill-Parks: The Historical Auteur: Reading the Films of Christopher Nolan in a Postmodern Era (supervised by Ann Davies and Sarah Leahy)
Lydia Dan Wu: memory and nostalgia in post-1997 Hong Kong cinema (supervised by Sabrina Yu and Sarah Leahy)
Gary Jenkins: Mediation in Representation and Remembrance. Post-Holocaust Generation Cinema and the Construction of Collective Memory(supervised by Guy Austin and Beate Müller)
Mani Sharpe: Representing Conflict within the French 'Nouvelle Vague' and Algerian 'Cinema moudjahid' (supervised by Guy Austin and Sarah Leahy)