Hi, my name is Larry Knapp
and I am a cinephile. Not a film geek. Not a film snob. Just an
unabashed film lover and scholar.
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.
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