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"Donaldson, Lucy Fife"
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Texture in film
All films have texture. Texture has an important sensory dimension; it expresses the feel of something and thus evokes response. Texture also encompasses broader expressions of quality and nature, relating to the weaving of cloth, a web or a narrative. \"Texture in Film\" considers texture in film as both an aspect of materiality, and in the sense of an overall fabrication. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives of art, literature and music, Donaldson develops a stimulating understanding of a concept that has received little detailed attention in relation to film. \"Texture in Film\" contributes to the increasing body of work aiming to renew attention to sensorial experience in the cinema, through an approach to details of filmic decision-making and evaluations of style and meaning. Case studies include \"Ride Lonesome\", \"The Shooting\", \"Vertigo\", \"Lost Highway\", \"The Haunting\", \"Singin' in the Rain\", and an extended examination of \"Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia\".
Book
Tracing the threads of influence: George Hoyningen-Huene and Les Girls (1957)
The audiovisual essay has become a dynamic format for illuminating people and labor in film, especially those who might have gone unnoticed or unappreciated. To give just a few examples of work in this area, many can look to audiovisual essays by Ian Garwood, John Gibbs & Suzana Reck Miranda, who have brought attention to the background performances of musicians and their critical contributions to particular Hollywood films, while others highlight the contribution of women editors (Pearlman), or steadicam operators, or sound designers, as in Liz Greene's focus on Alan Splet's work on The Elephant Man. Like these examples, this video essay seeks to uncover a background contribution, one that is mixture of visible and invisible, and to argue for their place in an appreciation of visual style.
Journal Article
Epic/everyday : moments in television
This collection explores the presence within television of the epic and the everyday, with reference to a range of fictional television programming, including episodic series and serial dramas, sitcoms, science-fiction, spy dramas, children's TV and detective shows.
Book
THE POLITICS OF CLOSE ANALYSIS: Introduction
The idea for 'The politics of Close Analysis, and its Object' came about in 2020. The late 2010s has a special significance for being a moment when public reflection on the relationship of cultural representation to historical and current power structures that oppress particular peoples and communities gathered pace and prominence. In 2018, the film industry started to acknowledge systemic abuse and misogyny brought to prominence by the 'Times Up!' campaign, in 2019 many declared climate change an emergency, and in 2020 many reckoned with the onset of a global pandemic, alongside protests over the continued brutal killings of black people by police, and historical attachments to slavery and colonialism. Public demand for cinema, television and news media to openly address these issues of social and climate justice have grown over the same period. Interest has grown, too, in the politics of film curation and programming, and in film festivals' responsibility to better curate and present existing and emerging filmmaking that can speak to or reflect these questions.
Journal Article
Reading Space in Cracker
Donaldson examines a key moment in an episode of the television crime drama Cracker to determine how characters within a fictional world respond to a space. The moment from Cracker is at once prominent and compelling, while also procedural and generic, and therefore to some extent representative of the series' interests in balancing the extraordinary with the everyday.
Journal Article
Moments of Texture Introduction
Given this concern with concrete details, a focus on the material constituents of a film's audio-visual style can further enrich discussions not only of the sensuous aspects of film viewing, but also of filmmaking, as in the articles by Martin and Deyo. Ian Banks explores the attention to surface textures in a long take from Death Line (Gary Sherman, 1972), in order to re-evaluate this overlooked British horror film and make an argument for thematic density contained within its audio-visual style. If we regard texture as the evocation of touch and surface, of the materiality of a film's work, it offers a particular way of acknowledging the importance of stylistic decisions to our responsiveness to an aesthetic object's details, patterns, and overall shapes; the density or sparsity of action, the flow or friction of a camera movement or montage sequence.
Journal Article
ReFocus: The Films of Budd Boetticher
One of the most important yet overlooked of Hollywood auteurs, Budd Boetticher was responsible for a number of classic films, including his famous ‘Ranown’ series of westerns starring Randolph Scott. With influential figures like Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood acknowledging Boetticher’s influence, and with growing academic interest in his work, Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer present a vital collection of essays on the director’s long career, from a range of international scholars. Looking at celebrated films like 'Buchanan Rides Alone' (1958) and 'Comanche Station' (1960), as well as at lesser-known works like 'Escape in the Fog' (1945) and 'Behind Locked Doors' (1948), this book also addresses Boetticher’s influential television work on the James Garner series 'Maverick', and Boetticher’s continuing aesthetic influence on contemporary TV classics like 'Breaking Bad'.
eBook
The Ranown Style: Mapping Textual Echoes
A film begins with long shot of a distinctive rocky landscape, made up of huge, rounded boulders sticking up out of the parched earth. Distant snowy peaks appear faintly in the background, under a clear blue sky. Music provides an accompaniment, a minor refrain dominated by brass and backed by a persistent hollow-sounding kettledrum beat. Credits appear, a crudely shaped yellow typeface made to look as though it is fashioned from rock or wood. After a minute or so, a small figure on a horse emerges from among the rocks and the camera pans steadily to trace his movement through the terrain. The figure proceeds to ride across this precarious environment, picking his way through winding paths among the rocks and eventually towards the camera.This description fits the opening moments of not one but two films directed by Budd Boetticher: Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960). Indeed, the similarities of place, style and mood are so close in these first few minutes that they could almost be the same film. Watching the beginning of either film may evoke recognition of the other. Moreover, to watch one with knowledge of the other creates an enriched experience, beyond expectation or the pleasures of familiarity. The openings are formally and narratively spare but acquire density when considered in concert. The contiguity in ways of situating character, signaling relationship to genre, and opening the narrative constitutes not just a parallel but also an overlap. Between them, these films acquire layers that underline or thicken certain qualities, illuminating the shared sensibilities of the films.This chapter will seek to explore how the films’ layering and accumulation, through repetitions and echoes, contribute to the dense texture of the world created in what Jim Kitses termed Budd Boetticher's “Ranown cycle.” The cycle—all collaborations with writer Burt Kennedy, star Randolph Scott and producer Harry Brown—consists of six Westerns directed by Boetticher between 1956 and 1960, four of which were shot in Lone Pine, California: Seven Men from Now (1956), The Tall T (1957), Ride Lonesome, and Comanche Station.
Book Chapter
'The suffering black male body and the threatened white female body': ambiguous bodies in Candyman
Race is not a subject often directly encountered in the horror film, despite the highly charged conflict of black and white constituting a central oppositionary structure in American culture and in its cinema. That this conflict is dramatised in specifically physical terms, as in the threat of miscegenation that permeates the dramatic chase scenes of D. W. Griffith's films, resonates with the emphasis on the body's importance for horror's excesses, so that opposition of black and white bears a suggestive relationship to the poles of monster and victim. Linda Williams, writing on race and melodrama, suggests that there are two key icons which articulate the moral dilemma of race for America: 'the suffering black male body and the threatened white female body'. Williams' articulation of these embodiments as entwined, presents a correspondence between aspects of black and white experience (as well as between male and female) which destabilises the more common impulse to see race as opposed, polarised as the language around black and white suggests.
Journal Article