Klevan, Andrew (1996) Disclosure of the everyday : the undramatic achievements in narrative film. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

The claim providing the starting point for this thesis is that most narrative films
are in an overtly dramatic, melodramatic or comic idiom. These modes seem most
adept at tapping the visually expressive potentialities of the art and satisfying the needs
of the audience: the narratives of most films are structured around either confrontation,
or colourful events, or crisis, or periods of significant change, and they are expressed
in a demonstrative visual style. This thesis is interested in the way a few films uncover
profundity by structuring narrative around a range of life experiences unavailable to the
melodramatic mode as it has developed in world cinema; life experiences based in the
everyday, that is in the routine or repetitive, in the apparently banal or mundane, the
uneventful.
The first part of the thesis discusses the nature of the achievement of these
undramatic films which address the everyday: how they help us to understand the
medium of film, its possibilities, and how they enhance our ways of viewing and
appreciating narratives. This section also focuses on the work of Stanley Cavell,
exploring the links between the everyday, film melodrama, and scepticism.
The second half of the thesis looks at the specific achievements of four films.
Here, the thesis continues the expressive tradition of film scholarship which analyses
the communication of meaning through the construction of mise-en-scene, exploring
how the themes, ideas, and happenings of a film are served by their stylistic strategies,
while further highlighting how such strategies may reveal significant possibilities of the
medium. In doing so it follows the approach of writers such as Stanley Cavell, V. F.
Perkins and George M. Wilson whilst redirecting this tradition by applying it to less
obviously expressive films.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN1993 Motion Pictures
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Fiction films -- History and criticism, Motion pictures -- Plots, themes, etc., Cavell, Stanley, 1926- -- Criticism and interpretation
Official Date:	October 1996
Dates:	Date Event October 1996 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of Film and Television Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Perkins, V. F., 1936-
Sponsors:	University of Warwick
Extent:	293 p.
Language:	eng

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