Daniel Clarke | The University of Sheffield (original) (raw)
Conference Presentations by Daniel Clarke
Presented at the Game of Thrones international conference, University of Hertfordshire, 6th-7th o... more Presented at the Game of Thrones international conference, University of Hertfordshire, 6th-7th of September 2017.
Presented at Consuming History: identity, culture, and heritage, a one-day conference at the Univ... more Presented at Consuming History: identity, culture, and heritage, a one-day conference at the University of Leeds in September 2016.
This presentation explores some encouraging examples in which producers have departed from the long-standing and problematic model of casting exclusively Caucasian actors in British costume drama under the auspices of ‘historical authenticity’.
‘Heroes and Heroines: performing the trans-continental Joan of Arc’. From the nascence of cinem... more ‘Heroes and Heroines: performing the trans-continental Joan of Arc’.
From the nascence of cinema, Joan of Arc has been a subject of fascination for filmmakers. Her narrative, whilst enigmatic, invites cinematic depictions of melodrama and spectacle. The story of a peasant girl who is chosen by God to lead her country to victory over its oppressors is not only the stuff of legends, but also one that invites trans-national and continental ownerships. This paper explores the construction of the Joan character and her narrative in light of such issues of ownership. I focus on both Cecil B. DeMille’s Joan the Woman (1916), a film that commandeered the Joan narrative in attempt to rally American public support for the impending war effort; and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), a piece of art at the zenith of the silent form, just a couple of years before the rise of the talkies, and which explicates every artistic tool in the silent filmmaker’s toolkit.
I seek to argue that whilst both filmmakers exploit the iconography of Joan for their respective primary aims, they also speak to an essence of trans-Atlantic ownership in the Joan mythology. As Sumiko Higashi argues, the spectacle in DeMille’s piece is born from middle-class practices of pageantry and re-enactment. This leads us to consider whether DeMille targets his artistic pitch at an audience that is already receptive to the historical and the Franco-American common ground of revolutionary liberation. Whilst Dreyer’s film elucidates its pan-European credentials: Dreyer himself is Danish; the cinematography is by Rudolph Maté, an Austro-Hungarian; whilst lead actress Falconetti is French. This pan-continental collaboration was met with such hostility from French nationalists and government censors, that the very nature of the film was re-cut and edited. Consequently, both films were subject to the socio-political and cultural machinations of the societies into which they were released. In this sense, the filmmakers are heroic in their attempts to produce pictures that transcend their respective spatial boundaries: they are performers of pan and trans-continental cinema.
But we must not forget the heroines in this tale. An examination of the two leading ladies acts as the dénouement to my argument. I consider how Geraldine Farrar as a popular American opera singer is liberated to perform the continental heroine through both the conceit of the silent form and DeMille’s artistic techniques; whereas in Dreyer’s film, Falconetti is exploited for her facial performance in Dreyer’s pursuit of perfection through emotive immersion in the historical drama.
Bibliography:
Robert S. Birchard, Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood, (Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2004)
Kevin J. Harty, ‘Jeanne au Cinéma’, in Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc, by Bonnie Wheeler and Charles T. Wood (eds), (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 237-64.
Sumiko Higashi, Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture, (Oakland: University of California Press: 1994)
Gerda Lerner, ‘Joan of Arc: Three Films’ in Mark C. Carnes (ed.) Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), pp. 54-9.
V.I Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting – The Cinematic Writings of V.I. Pudovkin, trans. by Ivor Montagu, 3rd edition (New York: Bonanza, 2009)
Geographies of the ersatz: Authenticity, Adaptation, and the European city in HBO’s Game of Thron... more Geographies of the ersatz: Authenticity, Adaptation, and the European city in HBO’s Game of Thrones
In Screening European Heritage, Rob Stone writes on the interaction between tourists and the filming locations of the popular medieval-set television series Game of Thrones. Stone’s analysis aligns the consumption of text as heritage tourism with medieval tradition by comparing it to acts of religious pilgrimage. By drawing such parallels, his argument reflects a prevalent trend in scholarship, one that considers reinterpretations of the medieval in contemporary society, art and media to be inheritors of progenitor rituals and artefacts from the Middle Ages. In Northern Ireland, the ‘stones and thrones’ tour offers tourists the chance to visit sites of historical or natural heritage, such as The Giant’s Causeway (the stones), alongside shoot locations from the television show (the thrones), which showcases the area’s contemporary culture in the form of its thriving media industry. However, the intellectual problem arises when the latter form of cultural heritage becomes inseparable from the former. Certainly, this is true of the promotion and recreational consumption of heritage tourism derived from a pop-culture phenomenon like Game of Thrones. This paper will examine how such tourist sites operate as cultural palimpsest, whereby geographies of past and present are fused with what Jean Baudrillard calls the hyperreal to create an anti-archive of space and place, one that problematises the notion of filmic space as reliable archive.
Furthermore, this paper will redress some omissions in Stone’s argument, which overlooks the impact of the generic and thematic devices of the television series upon its presentation in heritage tourism. Fundamentally, a tension lies within the interaction, or lack of coherent interaction, between text and tourism as consumption of text. Game of Thrones conforms to a set of generic expectations: showrunner D.B Weiss has described it as ‘The Sopranos in Middle Earth,’ while it constructs the city as dirty and dangerous premodern space. Furthermore, the series evokes elements derived from horror cinema and, congruent with this, it presents an uncivilized wilderness as antithetical to the city space. The territory ‘beyond the wall,’ with its undead ice zombies, subscribes to readings of the Freudian uncanny and the archaic mother that have their literary roots in the gothic tradition. Few of these textual attributes are promoted in tours of the sites. Instead, the focus is on elements of the television series that conform to the ethos of an ‘authentic’ heritage experience, which seamlessly blends real and unreal cultural histories. Therefore, this paper will also argue that heritage tourism is highly selective in its interaction with the film text; it embraces the light and shuns the night. Thus, the tourism that surrounds Game of Thrones conforms to what Alan O’Leary refers to as a ‘post-card style’ of heritage tourism, which is based upon a limited, carefully crafted, and often fragmentary set of iconographic registers.
Speaker’s Bio
Daniel Clarke is a PhD student at the University of Sheffield and Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He is part of the White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership and its network on ‘European history and identity in cinema’, which works across the Universities of Sheffield, Leeds, and York. His thesis, Wearing Historicity, examines the ideological usage of medieval Europe as imagined time and place in Hollywood film and contemporary American television.
Bibliography
Aronstein, Susan, Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and The Politics of Nostalgia, 1st edition (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005).
Finke, Laurie A., and Shichtman, Martin B., Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film, 1st edition (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
Haydock, Nickolas, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages, 1st ed. (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2008).
Higson, Andrew, ‘The period film and the British Past’, in Medieval Film, by Bettina Bernau and Anke Bildhauer (eds.), 1st edition (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009) pp. 203-24, (p. 207).
Larrington, Carolyne, Winter is Coming: The Medieval World of Game of Thrones, 1st edition (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015).
Stone, Rob, ‘Cinematic Pilgrimages: Postmodern Heritage Cinema,’ in Rob Stone and Paul Cooke (eds.) Screening European Heritage, 1stedition (London: Palgrave, 2016), pp. 257-78.
Paper given at the University of York as part of a conference entitled 'Moving Pictures and Photo... more Paper given at the University of York as part of a conference entitled 'Moving Pictures and Photoplays: New Perspectives in Silent Cinema'. This presentation examines the uses of silence in Dreyer's silent film 'Passion of Joan of Arc' (1928) and the sound film from Robert Bresson 'The Trial of Joan of Arc' (1963). In particular, I discuss how silence works to further the themes of entrapment and the styles of camera work that the directors employ: close-up, claustrophobic in the case of Dreyer; aesthetic and distant in Bresson's film.
An examination of the 'transatlantic' in Cecil B. DeMille's silent film Joan the Woman (1916).
Book Reviews by Daniel Clarke
Early Popular Visual Culture, 2020
My review of the monograph ‘Damsels and Divas’, published in the journal Early Popular Visual Cul... more My review of the monograph ‘Damsels and Divas’, published in the journal Early Popular Visual Culture.
Early Popular Visual Culture, 2020
A book review of 'Cinema and the Wealth of Nations Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System' ... more A book review of 'Cinema and the Wealth of Nations Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System' by Lee Grieveson (2017) to be published in Early Popular Visual Culture later in 2020.
Studies in Film-Philosophy, 2020
A book review of 'Out of the Past: Lacan and Film Noir' by Ben Tyrer (2016), to be available as p... more A book review of 'Out of the Past: Lacan and Film Noir' by Ben Tyrer (2016), to be available as publication in Studies in Film-Philosophy later in 2020.
Papers by Daniel Clarke
![Research paper thumbnail of Consuming Heritage: Identity, Culture and Heritage (2016) [Conference]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/85631915/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 2017
An enquiry into constructions of northern British and European identities in HBO's medieval fanta... more An enquiry into constructions of northern British and European identities in HBO's medieval fantasy series Game of Thrones (2011-2019).
Gender, Sexuality, and Queerness in American Horror Story: Critical Essays, ed. by Harriet E.H. Earle., 2019
The introduction to a paper published in the edited collection entitled: Gender, Sexuality, and Q... more The introduction to a paper published in the edited collection entitled: Gender, Sexuality, and Queerness in American Horror Story: Critical Essays, ed. by Harriet E.H. Earle.
The City as Archive: Special Edition of Cinema and Landscape journal, 2020
As a study of the final two episodes of HBO’s epic medieval fantasy television series Game of Thr... more As a study of the final two episodes of HBO’s epic medieval fantasy television series Game of Thrones (2011-19), this article seeks to examine the ways in which formal analysis of the televisual text can offer an insight into how the showrunners Dan Benioff and D.B. Weiss situate their production as an artistic archive. In this paper, I explicate my definition of the artistic archive as one in which the showrunners refer back to previous episodes in the series, as well as cognate Hollywood film genres, in their construction of the series’ dramatic denouement, one that involves the destruction of the show’s primary city setting: King’s Landing. As part of this process, I read the episodes in question as political fantasies in which the medieval fantasy trope of the dragon serves as analogue of the superior weaponry of the Caucasian conqueror that features so prominently in Hollywood’s Vietnam war films, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).
This is a report and critical analysis of a conference organised by Michael Samuel (University of... more This is a report and critical analysis of a conference organised by Michael Samuel (University of Leeds) on behalf of the White Rose Network on European film, heritage, and identity. The event was held at the University of Leeds on 30th of September 2016. Subsequently, this report was published in issue 13 of the Alphaville Journal of Film and Screen Media.
Books by Daniel Clarke
Wearing Historicity: Genre, Stardom, and American Identity in Hollywood's Medieval Films, 1949-1956, 2019
The abstract to my PhD thesis on genre, stardom, and American identity as portrayed through a cyc... more The abstract to my PhD thesis on genre, stardom, and American identity as portrayed through a cycle of Hollywood films set in the middle ages and released between 1949 and 1956.
Presented at the Game of Thrones international conference, University of Hertfordshire, 6th-7th o... more Presented at the Game of Thrones international conference, University of Hertfordshire, 6th-7th of September 2017.
Presented at Consuming History: identity, culture, and heritage, a one-day conference at the Univ... more Presented at Consuming History: identity, culture, and heritage, a one-day conference at the University of Leeds in September 2016.
This presentation explores some encouraging examples in which producers have departed from the long-standing and problematic model of casting exclusively Caucasian actors in British costume drama under the auspices of ‘historical authenticity’.
‘Heroes and Heroines: performing the trans-continental Joan of Arc’. From the nascence of cinem... more ‘Heroes and Heroines: performing the trans-continental Joan of Arc’.
From the nascence of cinema, Joan of Arc has been a subject of fascination for filmmakers. Her narrative, whilst enigmatic, invites cinematic depictions of melodrama and spectacle. The story of a peasant girl who is chosen by God to lead her country to victory over its oppressors is not only the stuff of legends, but also one that invites trans-national and continental ownerships. This paper explores the construction of the Joan character and her narrative in light of such issues of ownership. I focus on both Cecil B. DeMille’s Joan the Woman (1916), a film that commandeered the Joan narrative in attempt to rally American public support for the impending war effort; and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), a piece of art at the zenith of the silent form, just a couple of years before the rise of the talkies, and which explicates every artistic tool in the silent filmmaker’s toolkit.
I seek to argue that whilst both filmmakers exploit the iconography of Joan for their respective primary aims, they also speak to an essence of trans-Atlantic ownership in the Joan mythology. As Sumiko Higashi argues, the spectacle in DeMille’s piece is born from middle-class practices of pageantry and re-enactment. This leads us to consider whether DeMille targets his artistic pitch at an audience that is already receptive to the historical and the Franco-American common ground of revolutionary liberation. Whilst Dreyer’s film elucidates its pan-European credentials: Dreyer himself is Danish; the cinematography is by Rudolph Maté, an Austro-Hungarian; whilst lead actress Falconetti is French. This pan-continental collaboration was met with such hostility from French nationalists and government censors, that the very nature of the film was re-cut and edited. Consequently, both films were subject to the socio-political and cultural machinations of the societies into which they were released. In this sense, the filmmakers are heroic in their attempts to produce pictures that transcend their respective spatial boundaries: they are performers of pan and trans-continental cinema.
But we must not forget the heroines in this tale. An examination of the two leading ladies acts as the dénouement to my argument. I consider how Geraldine Farrar as a popular American opera singer is liberated to perform the continental heroine through both the conceit of the silent form and DeMille’s artistic techniques; whereas in Dreyer’s film, Falconetti is exploited for her facial performance in Dreyer’s pursuit of perfection through emotive immersion in the historical drama.
Bibliography:
Robert S. Birchard, Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood, (Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2004)
Kevin J. Harty, ‘Jeanne au Cinéma’, in Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc, by Bonnie Wheeler and Charles T. Wood (eds), (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 237-64.
Sumiko Higashi, Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture, (Oakland: University of California Press: 1994)
Gerda Lerner, ‘Joan of Arc: Three Films’ in Mark C. Carnes (ed.) Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), pp. 54-9.
V.I Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting – The Cinematic Writings of V.I. Pudovkin, trans. by Ivor Montagu, 3rd edition (New York: Bonanza, 2009)
Geographies of the ersatz: Authenticity, Adaptation, and the European city in HBO’s Game of Thron... more Geographies of the ersatz: Authenticity, Adaptation, and the European city in HBO’s Game of Thrones
In Screening European Heritage, Rob Stone writes on the interaction between tourists and the filming locations of the popular medieval-set television series Game of Thrones. Stone’s analysis aligns the consumption of text as heritage tourism with medieval tradition by comparing it to acts of religious pilgrimage. By drawing such parallels, his argument reflects a prevalent trend in scholarship, one that considers reinterpretations of the medieval in contemporary society, art and media to be inheritors of progenitor rituals and artefacts from the Middle Ages. In Northern Ireland, the ‘stones and thrones’ tour offers tourists the chance to visit sites of historical or natural heritage, such as The Giant’s Causeway (the stones), alongside shoot locations from the television show (the thrones), which showcases the area’s contemporary culture in the form of its thriving media industry. However, the intellectual problem arises when the latter form of cultural heritage becomes inseparable from the former. Certainly, this is true of the promotion and recreational consumption of heritage tourism derived from a pop-culture phenomenon like Game of Thrones. This paper will examine how such tourist sites operate as cultural palimpsest, whereby geographies of past and present are fused with what Jean Baudrillard calls the hyperreal to create an anti-archive of space and place, one that problematises the notion of filmic space as reliable archive.
Furthermore, this paper will redress some omissions in Stone’s argument, which overlooks the impact of the generic and thematic devices of the television series upon its presentation in heritage tourism. Fundamentally, a tension lies within the interaction, or lack of coherent interaction, between text and tourism as consumption of text. Game of Thrones conforms to a set of generic expectations: showrunner D.B Weiss has described it as ‘The Sopranos in Middle Earth,’ while it constructs the city as dirty and dangerous premodern space. Furthermore, the series evokes elements derived from horror cinema and, congruent with this, it presents an uncivilized wilderness as antithetical to the city space. The territory ‘beyond the wall,’ with its undead ice zombies, subscribes to readings of the Freudian uncanny and the archaic mother that have their literary roots in the gothic tradition. Few of these textual attributes are promoted in tours of the sites. Instead, the focus is on elements of the television series that conform to the ethos of an ‘authentic’ heritage experience, which seamlessly blends real and unreal cultural histories. Therefore, this paper will also argue that heritage tourism is highly selective in its interaction with the film text; it embraces the light and shuns the night. Thus, the tourism that surrounds Game of Thrones conforms to what Alan O’Leary refers to as a ‘post-card style’ of heritage tourism, which is based upon a limited, carefully crafted, and often fragmentary set of iconographic registers.
Speaker’s Bio
Daniel Clarke is a PhD student at the University of Sheffield and Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He is part of the White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership and its network on ‘European history and identity in cinema’, which works across the Universities of Sheffield, Leeds, and York. His thesis, Wearing Historicity, examines the ideological usage of medieval Europe as imagined time and place in Hollywood film and contemporary American television.
Bibliography
Aronstein, Susan, Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and The Politics of Nostalgia, 1st edition (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005).
Finke, Laurie A., and Shichtman, Martin B., Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film, 1st edition (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
Haydock, Nickolas, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages, 1st ed. (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2008).
Higson, Andrew, ‘The period film and the British Past’, in Medieval Film, by Bettina Bernau and Anke Bildhauer (eds.), 1st edition (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009) pp. 203-24, (p. 207).
Larrington, Carolyne, Winter is Coming: The Medieval World of Game of Thrones, 1st edition (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015).
Stone, Rob, ‘Cinematic Pilgrimages: Postmodern Heritage Cinema,’ in Rob Stone and Paul Cooke (eds.) Screening European Heritage, 1stedition (London: Palgrave, 2016), pp. 257-78.
Paper given at the University of York as part of a conference entitled 'Moving Pictures and Photo... more Paper given at the University of York as part of a conference entitled 'Moving Pictures and Photoplays: New Perspectives in Silent Cinema'. This presentation examines the uses of silence in Dreyer's silent film 'Passion of Joan of Arc' (1928) and the sound film from Robert Bresson 'The Trial of Joan of Arc' (1963). In particular, I discuss how silence works to further the themes of entrapment and the styles of camera work that the directors employ: close-up, claustrophobic in the case of Dreyer; aesthetic and distant in Bresson's film.
An examination of the 'transatlantic' in Cecil B. DeMille's silent film Joan the Woman (1916).
Early Popular Visual Culture, 2020
My review of the monograph ‘Damsels and Divas’, published in the journal Early Popular Visual Cul... more My review of the monograph ‘Damsels and Divas’, published in the journal Early Popular Visual Culture.
Early Popular Visual Culture, 2020
A book review of 'Cinema and the Wealth of Nations Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System' ... more A book review of 'Cinema and the Wealth of Nations Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System' by Lee Grieveson (2017) to be published in Early Popular Visual Culture later in 2020.
Studies in Film-Philosophy, 2020
A book review of 'Out of the Past: Lacan and Film Noir' by Ben Tyrer (2016), to be available as p... more A book review of 'Out of the Past: Lacan and Film Noir' by Ben Tyrer (2016), to be available as publication in Studies in Film-Philosophy later in 2020.
Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 2017
An enquiry into constructions of northern British and European identities in HBO's medieval fanta... more An enquiry into constructions of northern British and European identities in HBO's medieval fantasy series Game of Thrones (2011-2019).
Gender, Sexuality, and Queerness in American Horror Story: Critical Essays, ed. by Harriet E.H. Earle., 2019
The introduction to a paper published in the edited collection entitled: Gender, Sexuality, and Q... more The introduction to a paper published in the edited collection entitled: Gender, Sexuality, and Queerness in American Horror Story: Critical Essays, ed. by Harriet E.H. Earle.
The City as Archive: Special Edition of Cinema and Landscape journal, 2020
As a study of the final two episodes of HBO’s epic medieval fantasy television series Game of Thr... more As a study of the final two episodes of HBO’s epic medieval fantasy television series Game of Thrones (2011-19), this article seeks to examine the ways in which formal analysis of the televisual text can offer an insight into how the showrunners Dan Benioff and D.B. Weiss situate their production as an artistic archive. In this paper, I explicate my definition of the artistic archive as one in which the showrunners refer back to previous episodes in the series, as well as cognate Hollywood film genres, in their construction of the series’ dramatic denouement, one that involves the destruction of the show’s primary city setting: King’s Landing. As part of this process, I read the episodes in question as political fantasies in which the medieval fantasy trope of the dragon serves as analogue of the superior weaponry of the Caucasian conqueror that features so prominently in Hollywood’s Vietnam war films, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).
This is a report and critical analysis of a conference organised by Michael Samuel (University of... more This is a report and critical analysis of a conference organised by Michael Samuel (University of Leeds) on behalf of the White Rose Network on European film, heritage, and identity. The event was held at the University of Leeds on 30th of September 2016. Subsequently, this report was published in issue 13 of the Alphaville Journal of Film and Screen Media.
Wearing Historicity: Genre, Stardom, and American Identity in Hollywood's Medieval Films, 1949-1956, 2019
The abstract to my PhD thesis on genre, stardom, and American identity as portrayed through a cyc... more The abstract to my PhD thesis on genre, stardom, and American identity as portrayed through a cycle of Hollywood films set in the middle ages and released between 1949 and 1956.