The Centre for Film and Media Research invites you to a Leverhulme Lecture with:
Professor Vito Zagarrio, Vistiting Professor at the University of Kent and Professor of Cinema and Television at University of Rome 3
Towards a Theory of Mise-en-scène: Analysing Film Direction in Hollywood Cinema
Wednesday 7th February 2018 at 5pm in Keynes Lecture Theatre 2, University of Kent
This lecture will use Hollywood Cinema as a case study to define a theoretical method of film analysis. It will demonstrate how investigating clues in the mise-en-scène allows one to re-interpret the work of a particular director or period of film history, but how contemporary cinema poses a number of challenges for such a methodology. The lecture will start by considering some examples of film rhetoric, such as the single shot sequence and depth of field, in both classical Hollywood cinema and in the New-New Hollywood. It will then move on to consider the rhetoric of the gaze in auteurs such as Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick. Finally, it will demonstrate how the use of intensified cinema in the New Millennium, makes such a traditional shot-by-shot analysis increasingly problematic.
Professor Zagarrio is one of Italy’s leading and most prolific film scholars, the author of a dozen monographs and the editor of over thirty edited collections, including books on Frank Capra and Francis Ford Coppola. He is a recognised expert on Italian cinema; film, history and the representation of Fascism; classical and contemporary Hollywood filmmakers; and film direction and the Italian film industry. He is also an established filmmaker with three feature-length films, nine medium-length/television fiction films and over three dozen documentary and compilation films to his credit. His directorial credits include La donna della luna (1987), Bonus Malus (1993) and Tre giorni d’anarchia (2006). He is currently Professor of Cinema and Television at University of Rome 3, and this term is a Visiting Professor at the University of Kent.
A second Leverhulme Lecture with Prof. Vito Zagarrio will take place on Wednesday 28th March 2018: A Certain Tendency of Italian Cinema: Filming Italy in the New Millennium, further details will follow.
This lecture was made possible by the award of a Visiting Professorship to the University of Kent by the Leverhulme Trust.