My recent research interests include a new project I have begun on Landscape and the American Imaginary, a topic that extends my long-time concentration on the historical film. I have begun exploring the way the representation of landscape in film embeds a wide range of historical and aesthetic references to older structures of belief, identity and national ideology, getting to the core structures of the American imaginary in a way that reframes history as we usually conceive it. I move away from plot, narrative event, causation and agency as dominant features of the historical film to concentrate on geography, the spaces of film, and the myths and beliefs invested in seemingly neutral, background depictions of land and sky, woods and mountains, rivers and other waters. The range of these embedded belief systems, dating from the earliest American settlements to the contemporary period, is surprisingly large. They are expressed in the experiments in scale, from extreme long shots that swallow the human figures in the landscape, to extreme close-ups that seem to leap into the viewer’s private viewing space, in the films The Revenant and The Power of the Dog. The extreme contrasts of scale in these films both articulate and undercut historical myths of white settler dominion over endless vistas – the imaginary power of the gaze — the white settler or explorer as master of all he surveys. The imaginative undercurrents of landscape appear in a very different form in the film Nope, which revives the fascination with extra-planetary alien life that has recurred in American culture over time. Since the 1950’s, this belief system has centered on the Western skies as the preferred habitation for sentient and predatory beings. In Nope, the Western cloudscape, long celebrated by painters and filmmakers, becomes not the keystone of heightened beauty and spiritual aspiration, but rather a benevolent disguise for a threatening, voracious, and bloodthirsty alien other. I read this, in part, as a return of the repressed, a nightmare realization of a historical past filled with near-genocides and animal extinctions, the long, sanguinary past of Western colonization. In the film The Witch, the dark, impenetrable forests that surround the small farmstead of the Puritan family cast out of their community become the locus of deep historical fears and superstitions. The feral landscape of the woods is associated with the female as a vessel of demonic possession and power, with the forests serving as the habitation of a shape-shifting coven.
In my earlier work on history and film, I worked on two main topics, historiography as articulated in films, and the narrative theory of film. These two interests grew out of my first book project, Bertolucci’s 1900, a Narrative and Historical Analysis, in which I brought together the historiographic considerations of Hayden White, Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, and others, with several ideas drawn from writers in narrative theory, such as Fredric Jameson, Mieke Ball, and Marie-Laure Ryan. At various points in my writing career, I have focused exclusively on film narrative theory, developing an original model of cinematic narration in an essay titled “The Cinematic Narrator: The Logic and Pragmatics of Impersonal Narration” (which I’m proud to say was quoted, multiple times, by Christian Metz). I have also written at length on national identity and history in film, embodied in the book Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at US History. I have written several works on a closely related subject — the ways history is represented in US film, an interest that I bring to full audition in The Hollywood Historical Film. In addition, I have considered several of the separate subgenres of the historical film, culminating in The Epic Film in World Culture, which I developed and edited, and The New American War Film, my most recent book. Notable side projects include essays on The War Face in Film, an essay project on the work of the artists Kara Walker, DJ Spooky, and Kehinde Wiley, titled “The Afterlife of Stereotype,” and essays on the films Lincoln and Gainsbourg, which gave me a chance to explore the biopic in a creative way.