Awards

Student Essay Award

Shortlist (all three shortlisted essays will be published by Frames journal)

Hannah Mowat (Cambridge): ‘Nature versus architecture: Navigating the Threshold in Alain Resnais’s  L’Année dernière à Marienbad, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Jessica Hausner’s Hotel’

Steve Presence (University of the West of England): ‘Spectacle and the Melodramatic Rhetoric in Nil by Mouth’

John Trafton (St. Andrews): ‘Things that almost killed me’: Apocalypse Now, The Hurt Locker, and the Influence of 19th Century Spectacle Art’

 

Winner: Steve Presence: ‘An investigation of affect in the cinema: Spectacle and the Melodramatic Rhetoric in Nil By Mouth’

Reason for award:
This is a mature and insightful discussion of affect, spectacle
and melodrama in relation to Nil By Mouth. The awards committee was
impressed by the essay’s breath in terms of demonstrating a bold
intellectual grasp of the intertwined and complex critical, theoretical
and textual issues relating to the power of the cinema to ‘move’
audiences. As a study of the power of melodramatic rhetoric, the essay
demonstrates a sophisticated approach to understanding the viewing
experience.

 

Runner Up (in alphabetic order):

Hannah Mowat : ‘Nature versus architecture: Navigating the threshold in Alain Resnais’s Last Year in Marienbad, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Jessica Hausser’s Hotel’
Reason for Nomination:
The Awards Committee was impressed by the care to textual detail that nimbly negotiated the films’ various configurations of the hotel space as constituting ‘meditations on collective memory’.

John Trafton: ‘Things that almost killed me’: Apocalypse Now, The Hurt Locker, and the influence of 19th Century Spectacle Art’
Reason for Nomination:
The Awards Committee was impressed by the author’s deft deployment of the notion of the ‘phantasmagorial war film’, with reference to some seminal examples. The essay is extremely well-illustrated, demonstrating some convincing historic links between media, encompassed within the notion of the ‘panoramic aesthetic’.

Essay Award

Shortlist

Melanie Bell (Newcastle University): ‘Film Criticism as Women’s Work: The Gendered Economy of Film Criticism in Britain 1945-1965’ (Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 31:2, 2011, pp. 191-209)

Annabelle Honess Roe (University of Surrey): ‘Absence, Excess and Epistemological Expansion: Towards a Framework for the Study of Animated Documentary’ (Animation: An International Journal, 6:3, 2011, pp. 215-230)

Joshua Yumibe (University of St. Andrews): ‘Visual Diplomacy: Projections of Power from the Field in Ethiopia’ (Early Popular Visual Culture 9:4, 2011, pp. 309-323)

 

Winner: Melanie Bell: ‘Film Criticism as Women’s Work: The Gendered Economy of Film Criticism in Britain 1945-1965’ 

Reason for award:
A very well researched, original and innovative historical study of the role of British women film critics in film historiography (and production). The article maps the field of women film critics in Britain and demonstrates and accounts for the ebbs and flows of female input in the field. The article looks at film criticism as a form of women’s work and approaches it as a role for women in the ‘film industry’, understood here in its broadest sense to include production, distribution, exhibition and the myriad forums through which film circulates in the public domain. The article thus opens up a range of possibilities for film history to go beyond authorship models.

 

Runner Up (in alphabetic order):

Bella Honess Roe, ‘Absence, Excess and Epistemological Expansion: Towards a Framework for the Study of Animated Documentary’
Reason for Nomination:
This is a well-researched and original article that contributes to a deeper and more nuanced examination of animated documentary by exploring the theoretical foundations and framework for such work.

Joshua Yumibe: ‘Visual Diplomacy: Projections of Power from the field in Ethiopia’
Reason for Nomination:
This is a very well-researched and sophisticated study of the ethnographic film in the context of salvage anthropology and colonial politics.

 

Book Award

Shortlist 

Lucy Bolton (Queen Mary, University of London): Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

Rosalind Galt (University of Sussex): Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (Columbia University Press 2011)

Andrew Higson (University of York): Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking Since the 1990s (I.B. Tauris, 2011)

David Martin-Jones (University of St. Andrews): Deleuze and World Cinemas (Continuum, 2011)

Peter Stanfield (University of Kent): Maximum Movies: Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson (Rutgers University Press 2011)

 


Winner: Rosalind Galt - Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image


Reason for Award:Arguing against a long-standing trend in film and art theory that equates austerity and the rejection of the decorative as the hallmark of true and politically more valid art, Galt’s book rehabilitates ‘prettiness’ as a serious aesthetic and political project. Engaging with art and film theory as well as philosophy, and touching on postcolonial, feminist, and queer concerns, Galt’s intellectual tour de force takes the reader through a dazzling array of cinematic examples that include Max Ophuls’s Lola Montez, the documentary Soy Cuba, Derek Jarman, and Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge.


Runner Up (in alphabetic order):

Lucy Bolton, Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women

Reason for Nomination:

Offering perceptive readings of films from very different contexts, including The Seven Year Itch (1955), Marnie (1964), and Klute (1971) to contemporary texts such as In The Cut (2003) and Lost in Translation (2003), Bolton focuses on the way female subjectivity and interiority is represented on screen, and makes productive use of Irigaray’s philosophical insights. The resulting readings mark an important departure in feminist film criticism

 

Andrew Higson,  Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking Since the 1990s 

Reason for Nomination:

Continuing his longstanding investigation into the Englishness of British filmmaking, Higson provides a comprehensive picture of various strands of British cinema over the past twenty years, combining meticulous analysis of film policy developments and industrial patterns with a perceptive reading of different genres, such as the heritage film. Authoritative and intellectually probing, the book marks a major intervention into British cinema historiography.

 

David Martin-Jones,  Deleuze and World Cinemas.

Reason for Nomination:

Spanning an impressive range of different historical and cultural contexts, and covering filmic examples from Latin America, India, Hong Kong and South Korea, Martin-Jones makes a forceful and persuasive case for the applicability of Deleuzian analysis to the study of World cinema. In the process the book also challenges common perceptions of Deleuze as a ‘difficult’ and arcane thinker. The clarity of Martin-Jones’s writing is admirable.

 

Peter Stanfield, Maximum Movies: Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson 

Reason for Nomination:

Meticulously researched and elegantly argued, Peter Stanfield’s book revisits post-war cinephilia and film criticism in the UK and the US, the the way in which the reception of literary and cinematic pulp fictions helped paved the way towards establishing popular film as a serious object of study. Featuring a cast that includes Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller, Manny Farber, and Mickey Spillane, Stanfield’s book provides a compelling account of the intersections between intellectual movements and popular culture.