by Jennifer Coates

Pretty predicatably, I’m kicking off our first round of contributions with a reference to Laura Mulvey’s seminal “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” – bear with me though, I promise I’m aiming at something more zeitgeisty!  (Full disclosure, I’m just back from the third annual London Media Conference on “The Pleasures of the Spectacle” and this post is a teeny bit cannibalised from my paper.)

The theme of this first round of posts is “Senses of Cinema, Functions of Film”.  We’ve asked our contributors to introduce themselves and their research backgrounds by answering the biggest question in film studies; what does film do?

Of course, different films do different things for each of us at different times, but as my own research background is in crisis cinema and as I spent last Tuesday weeping through Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ’45 (2013), I thought I’d take a stab at discussing why we watch what we watch when we’re in the middle of a recession and what we watch is by all accounts pretty depressing. Continue reading Visual pleasure and Crisis Cinema →