The Disney Aesthetic

Over the course of the more than 80 years in which is has been operation, the Walt Disney Company has practically become synonymous with the medium of hand-drawn animation, to the extent that, for many people, the two are virtually indistinguishable. Because of the specificity of what the Disney brand name means to many, it is unsurprising that the company has become known, according to Janet Wasko, "for products based mostly on a specific formula that was established at the studio while Walt Disney was in charge and has changed little over the years". This perception of a standard aesthetic common to the entirety of the studio's output has undoubtedly played a role in establishing the studio's reputation for providing predictable and reliable family entertainment through its animated feature films, although, as will be argued in this essay, to assume uniform conformity across the spectrum of Disney's films is not only overly simplistic but also somewhat misleading...

Is it possible to identify a Disney "aesthetic"? What would be the main qualities of this aesthetic? Illustrate your answer with reference to no more than three feature length Disney films.

I wrote this essay of around 5,000 words for the Animation component of my Film Studies MLitt.

Giallo and gender: A study of issues of sexuality in 1970s Italian thrillers

In his essay on utopia as a construction of emotion in the Hollywood musical, "Entertainment and Utopia", Richard Dyer argues that this genre is characterised by a split between the narrative, which he argues takes place in a world close to that of reality and in which the plot is advanced, and the musical numbers, which serve as a spectacle and take place in a world of fantasy in which the rules of reality cease to apply and a different range of emotions can be observed.

Although concerned primarily with the musical, Dyer's comments have relevance in the field of textualism as a whole, for this conflict between two contradictory modes can be seen in several genres and movements in cinema history. As shall be argued in this essay, the body of Italian thrillers known as gialli features a similar tension regarding their portrayal of gender and sexuality. This is a complex subject, and would require a study of significantly greater length than this to do it justice. Therefore, I have chosen to limit the scope of my analysis and deal primarily with the representation of women in gialli, paying particular attention to their sexuality and notions of independence. Essentially, my argument is that most gialli betray the fact that their authors have a reactionary attitude towards sexuality, while at the same time exploiting depictions of it...

I wrote this essay of around 3,000 words for the Core Course component of my MLitt. The actual wording of the assignment was a little odd, requiring me to identify the methodological approach of one of the essays I'd studied during the course, which explains why it makes some seemingly irrelevant mentions of Richard Dyer's Entertainment and Utopia article.

Points of View: The camera and subjectivity in Profondo Rosso

Horror has long been regarded as an extremely body-centric genre of cinema, perhaps even the most body-centric. There are a number of reasons for this, ranging from the preponderance of graphic shots showing various anatomical parts being mutilated in extreme close-up, to the very visceral reactions that such images seem to kindle in their audiences. (Carol J. Clover, for example, refers to slasher film audiences' expressions of "uproarious disgust" and "fear", "scream[ing] out at the first slash, and mak[ing] loud noises of revulsion at the sight of the bloody stump".) A long-standing tradition of the genre has been its filmmakers' use of first person perspective, or the 'I-camera', to draw viewers into the narrative and give them a sense of actually inhabiting the bodies of multiple individuals, usually those of the killer and/or his or her victims. The most famous example of such a film is probably John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), which makes the implicit connection between killer and audience, by presenting the entire opening scene, including its graphic murder, through the eyes of its killer.

Of all these works of bodily horror, one of the most visceral is arguably Dario Argento's Profondo Rosso (Deep Red), a film at whose heart voyeurism lies, and which evokes strong physical reactions in its audience by associating depictions of pain with common experiences. Like Halloween, the film also makes considerable use of the I-camera technique, and indeed Chris Gallant describes "psychopathic subjective shots" as "a staple of [Argento's] work". Unlike the traditional American slasher film, however, the camera in Profondo Rosso operates to a far looser set of rules, frequently exploring multiple viewpoints within the same scene, and even allowing the camera to take on a role of its own, offering the audience views which allow them to see things that could not possibly be visible to any of the film's characters. Argento's film, as will be argued, eschews such filmic conventions as spatial continuity in favour of camerawork that gives the strongest visual spectacle, which has the effect - whether intentional or otherwise - of disorienting the viewer with an 'out of body' experience. Despite this emphasis on visual spectacle, what is seen, both by the characters themselves and by the viewer, is not always reliable, further complicating the situation by rendering the audience's strongest bodily link to the events taking place on the screen - sight - unreliable...

I wrote this essay of around 5,000 words for the Screen Bodies component of my Film Studies MLitt.