Michael Lawrence | University of Sussex (original) (raw)

Books by Michael Lawrence

Screening Spaces is a series dedicated to showcasing interdisciplinary books that explore the mul... more Screening Spaces is a series dedicated to showcasing interdisciplinary books that explore the multiple and various intersections of space, place, and screen cultures.

Introduction (uncorrected proof)

Journal Articles by Michael Lawrence

This article examines the representation of the natural environment and its non-human inhabitants... more This article examines the representation of the natural environment and its non-human inhabitants in Andrea Arnold's 2011 film version of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Arnold's 'post-heritage' adaptation, I argue, offers a post-humanist distribution of attention that, in its expansive interest in flora and fauna, exceeds the perspectives of its human protagonists, challenges popular ideas about the novel and subverts the conventions of mainstream narrative cinema. The film's intensely ecological and environmental orientation functions not only to divide our attention across human and non-human realms but also to counter nostalgic and ultimately ideological idealisations of 'white' and 'English' natural landscapes and rural lifestyles. Such idealisations have been extrapolated from Brontë's novel, have informed earlier film adaptations and continue to have a material impact on the geographical region popularly known as 'Brontë country'.

This article considers the beginnings of the British actor Roddy McDowall's career as a child sta... more This article considers the beginnings of the British actor Roddy McDowall's career as a child star in Hollywood. Following his relocation to the United States in October 1940 and signing a contract with Twentieth Century-Fox, McDowall quickly became one of Hollywood's most popular juvenile actors. For the duration of the Second World War, McDowall's star image was indissoluble from his status as a war guest: he was 'a British evacuee star'. McDowall thus became an unofficial ambassador for the British nation, much like his fellow evacuees, who were widely recognised for their work improving Anglo-American relations. In the management of McDowall's image, and in his screen performances, there is a discernible effort to substantiate certain attitudes about the character and attributes of the British nation but also to challenge certain prejudices about English sissy boys. McDowall's star text was carefully managed so that the image of the actor presented by the media and the fictional characters he played on screen congealed in a productive way to inspire among American audiences specific sentiments about the British and America's relationship with the British nation during wartime. Analysing the representation of McDowall in American film magazines during the early 1940s, as well as his performances in three war-themed productions -Confirm or Deny (1941), On the Sunny Side (1942) and The White Cliffs of Dover (1944) -I explore the ways McDowall's star text functioned in its geopolitical and bio-political contexts.

Screen, Vol. 53, No. 4, Dec 2012

Adaptation Vol. 3, No. 2, Sep 2011

This article addresses Do Phool (1958), Abdul Rashid Kardar's film adaptation of Johanna Spyri's ... more This article addresses Do Phool (1958), Abdul Rashid Kardar's film adaptation of Johanna Spyri's classic children's novel Heidi (1880). Kadar's film reconfigures Spyri's vision of the Romantic child within the idiom of popular Hindi cinema-with its particular performance traditions and mythological allusions-in order to project an ideological image of the newly independent State. The film therefore exemplifies what Tejaswini Ganti has called (H)Indianization. Attending closely to the work of the child actors presented in the film can reveal the ideological and allegorical use of childhood in 1950s Hindi cinema, as well as the uneven development of childhood as a universal category.

World Picture, No. 4, 2010

Book Chapters by Michael Lawrence

The International Musical, eds. Corey K. Creekmur and Linda Y. Mokdad (Edinburgh University Press, 2012)

On Michael Haneke, eds. John David Rhodes and Brian Price (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010)

The Death of an Animal and the Figuration of the Human I never said all actors are cattle; what I... more The Death of an Animal and the Figuration of the Human I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.