Laurence Knapp
I received my Ph.D. in Film Studies from Northwestern University in June 2005, where I taught a wide variety of film and media courses. Those classes included: basic screenwriting and video production; mass media analysis; genre (Y2K cinema), star (Tom Cruise), and authorship studies (Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg); critical race theory (Spike Lee); third-world and post-colonial cinema (Latin American film); film history (comedy from Charlie Chaplin to Jackie Chan); and film/literature adaptation. I have been a visiting instructor at Facets Video and the Gene Siskel Film Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I earned an M.S. in Film Studies from Boston University and a B.A. in History from the University of Virginia.
As a newly accredited scholar I am fascinated by post-classical Hollywood cinema and its influence on genre, authorship, star iconography, and audience comprehension. Unlike older norms, American cinema now communicates and interacts directly with television, the Web, video games, and other electronic media. This affects every facet of filmic expression, from the recent revival of the documentary to the growing sophistication of animated children’s programming. I want to analyze these rapid changes in style, narrative, and culture by using particular authors, stars, or genres as my objects of analysis. Specific figures such as Denzel Washington or Michael Moore serve as springboards for an interdisciplinary view of American cinema in transition and crisis. The sheer volume of media, accelerated by the rise in DVD sales, calls for a teaching strategy that encourages students to develop a historical understanding of older norms (art cinema, Classical Hollywood Cinema, avant-garde/experimental cinema) that have lost their cultural authority or coherence. Film history and aesthetics have become essential tools for a generation defined by visual culture.
My dissertation, titled Brian De Palma: Authorship as Survival , is a reevaluation of how film authorship studies functions as an ongoing theoretical discourse. Rather than accept the presumed demise of the auteur theory as a fait accompli, I argue that in the 1990s prominent film scholars such as David Bordwell, Tom Gunning, Barbara Klinger, James Naremore, and Robin Wood advanced a reconstructed model of authorship studies that incorporated poststructural issues of signification and spectatorship without abandoning neoformalist issues of intentionality and intertextuality. Using six of De Palma’s films (Hi Mom! , Get to Know Your Rabbit , Sisters , The Untouchables , Raising Cain , and Mission: Impossible ), I propose that De Palma addresses historical shifts in technology and culture by making those changes an integral part of his mise-en-scene. De Palma’s allusive reliance on recognizable directors (Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg) and popular film texts calls for a reincarnated model of authorship studies that acknowledges everyone from the author himself to the ideal spectator, who seems to elude De Palma with each film. While De Palma’s work in the 1960s and 1970s can be approached as a coherent textual system, his later work in the 1980s and 1990s—in which he adapted to the conglomeration of the film industry by yielding to the Blockbuster and computer-generated imagery—requires symptomatic models of authorship that include the unconscious, the extra-textual, and the accidental. De Palma's last film, Femme Fatale , represents an audacious return to the kind of auteurism journalists and theorists took for granted in the 1960s and 1970s,
In addition to being the author of Directed by Clint Eastwood (McFarland & Company, 1996) and the editor of Brian De Palma: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2003) and Ridley Scott: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2005), I am assembling a book-length study of Mickey Rourke as a deviant star text. Rourke's star text represents the difficulty of maintaining a celebrity persona as a site of resistance in contemporary Hollywood. He embodies the tyranny of plastic surgery and the steroid-induced hard body, the decline of working-class ethnicity and resentment, the criminalization of aggressive masculinity, and many other latent discourses of gender, race, and sexuality. Rourke’s troubled career, particularly his decision to forgo acting for prize fighting in the 1990s, suggests that open, aggressive resistance to the status quo (personified by James Dean's recklessness, Steve McQueen's disinterested gaze, Marlon Brando's quixotic temper, or Al Pacino's hysterical rage) is increasingly harder to achieve without suffering social ridicule or exile. From Rumble Fish to Sin City , Rourke remains a willfully abject figure of excess and masochistic self-destruction, a bad object Hollywood has struggled to erase and/or redeem. Rourke's commitment to the Method is a poignant attempt to stage a one-man Fight Club and resist the commodification and electronic mediation of self in a time of seemingly deferred and virtual existence. Rourke isn't afraid to get dirty or crazy in his masochistic search for the true masculine self.