Murray Leeder | University of Alberta (original) (raw)

Books by Murray Leeder

Film Genres series, Bloomsbury

Papers by Murray Leeder

Luma Quarterly, 2021

Leeder, Murray. “Demons and Demonization: Filming the Anti-Dungeons & Dragons Hysteria.” Luma—Fil... more Leeder, Murray. “Demons and Demonization: Filming the Anti-Dungeons & Dragons Hysteria.” Luma—Film & Media Art Quarterly 23 (2021): n.p.

Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire, 2023

Leeder, Murray with André Loiselle. “Canadian Vampires.” Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire. Ed. Si... more Leeder, Murray with André Loiselle. “Canadian Vampires.” Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire. Ed. Simon Bacon. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. n.p.

Nosferatu in the 21st Century: A Critical Study, 2022

Nosferatu in the 21st Century: A Critical Study. Ed. Simon Bacon. University of Liverpool Press, ... more Nosferatu in the 21st Century: A Critical Study. Ed. Simon Bacon. University of Liverpool Press, 2022. 41-53.

Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium, 2022

Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium. Eds. Lee Carruthers and Charles Tepperman. McGill-Queens U... more Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium. Eds. Lee Carruthers and Charles Tepperman. McGill-Queens University Press, 2022. 150-66.

Spoofing the Vampire: Essays on Comedy and Genre in Vampire Films, 2022

Spoofing the Vampire: Essays on Comedy and Genre in Vampire Films. Ed. Simon Bacon. McFarland Pre... more Spoofing the Vampire: Essays on Comedy and Genre in Vampire Films. Ed. Simon Bacon. McFarland Press, 2022. 46-56.

Monstrosity, Identity, and Music: Mediating Uncanny Creatures from Frankenstein to Videogames, 2022

Monstrosity, Identity, and Music: Mediating Uncanny Creatures from Frankenstein to Videogames. Ed... more Monstrosity, Identity, and Music: Mediating Uncanny Creatures from Frankenstein to Videogames. Eds. Alexis Luko and James K. Wright. Bloomsbury, 2022. 186-97.

Prestige Television: Cultural and Artistic Value in Twenty-First-Century America, 2022

Prestige Television: Cultural and Artistic Value in Twenty-First-Century America. Eds. Amanda Kee... more Prestige Television: Cultural and Artistic Value in Twenty-First-Century America. Eds. Amanda Keeler and Seth Friedman. Rutgers University Press, 2022. 55-73.

ReFocus: The Films of Wallace Fox, 2022

ReFocus: The Films of Wallace Fox. Ed. Joanna Hearn and Gary D. Rhodes. Edinburgh University Pres... more ReFocus: The Films of Wallace Fox. Ed. Joanna Hearn and Gary D. Rhodes. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 116-30.

The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek, 2022

The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek. Eds. Leimar Garcia-Siino, Sabrina Mittermeier and Stefan Rab... more The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek. Eds. Leimar Garcia-Siino, Sabrina Mittermeier and Stefan Rabitsch. Routledge, 2022. 122-6.

Giving the Devil His Due: Satan & Cinema, 2021

Giving the Devil His Due: Satan & Cinema. Eds. Regina Hansen and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Fordha... more Giving the Devil His Due: Satan & Cinema. Eds. Regina Hansen and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Fordham University Press, 2021. 120-35.

Twentieth Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion., 2022

Twentieth Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Eds. Bernice M. Murphy and Sorcha Ni Fhlainn. E... more Twentieth Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Eds. Bernice M. Murphy and Sorcha Ni Fhlainn. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 83-98.

The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek, 2022

Horror Franchise Cinema, 2021

Horror Franchise Cinema. Eds. William Proctor and Mark McKenna. Routledge, 2021. 66-80.

The Palgrave Handbook to the Contemporary Gothic. , 2020

The Palgrave Handbook to the Contemporary Gothic. Ed. Clive Bloom. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 765-79.

Film Genres series, Bloomsbury

Luma Quarterly, 2021

Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire, 2023

Nosferatu in the 21st Century: A Critical Study, 2022

Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium, 2022

Spoofing the Vampire: Essays on Comedy and Genre in Vampire Films, 2022

Monstrosity, Identity, and Music: Mediating Uncanny Creatures from Frankenstein to Videogames, 2022

Prestige Television: Cultural and Artistic Value in Twenty-First-Century America, 2022

ReFocus: The Films of Wallace Fox, 2022

The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek, 2022

Giving the Devil His Due: Satan & Cinema, 2021

Twentieth Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion., 2022

The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek, 2022

Horror Franchise Cinema, 2021

Horror Franchise Cinema. Eds. William Proctor and Mark McKenna. Routledge, 2021. 66-80.

The Palgrave Handbook to the Contemporary Gothic. , 2020

The Palgrave Handbook to the Contemporary Gothic. Ed. Clive Bloom. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 765-79.

Monsters: A Companion, 2020

Monsters: A Companion. Ed. Simon Bacon. Peter Lang, 2020. 183-190.

Journal of Communication and Languages , 2020

This article argues for the “lanternic” or “phantasmago- rical” qualities of Charles Dickens’s cl... more This article argues for the “lanternic” or “phantasmago- rical” qualities of Charles Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol, in which the ghosts are figures of authorship and manipulators of images. It further articles that the qual- ities carry over strongly into the story’s silent-era film adaptations, of which four (dated 1901, 1910, 1913 and 1923) are examined for a sense of medium awareness ex- pressed through film form. It ends with remarks on the 2009 Robert Zemeckis adaptation as a digital era-inheri- tor to this reflexive tendency.

Horror: A Companion

Leeder, Murray. “Pessimism and the Limits of Knowledge—It Follows (Mitchell, 2014).” Horror: A Co... more Leeder, Murray. “Pessimism and the Limits of Knowledge—It Follows (Mitchell, 2014).” Horror: A Companion. Ed. Simon Bacon. New York: Peter Lang, 2019. 11-17.

Journal of Asian Studies, 2010

Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 2009

Offscreen, Oct 2014

http://offscreen.com/view/sexcula-rises

On May 12, 1963, Bob Dylan left the set of the Ed Sullivan Show, incensed the producers rejected ... more On May 12, 1963, Bob Dylan left the set of the Ed Sullivan Show, incensed the producers rejected his decision to “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” This non-circulation of his image through television provided valuable publicity and Dylan would boast of “the song they didn’t let me play on TV.” This incident stands at the beginning of an ambivalent and complicated relationship between Dylan’s persona, as expressed through his words and music, and its dissemination through screen media. This has been an uneven process: the documentary Dont Look Back (1967) is a classic of direct cinema and played an important role in broadcasting Dylan’s image, but its planned follow-up, Eat the Document (1972), went a different direction: Dylan insisted on editing it himself, it showed once on television and vanished into obscurity. The editing alone of his self-directed four-hour film Renaldo and Clara (1978) occupied more than a year of Dylan’s career, which should logically qualify it as a major work. Instead it’s little more than a footnote even for Dylan’s most devoted fans, watched by few and liked by fewer; Martin Scorsese’s repurposing of footage in Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (2019) may be Renaldo and Clara’s lone legacy. Masked and Anonymous (2003) was scarcely better received. Though it found some admirers, Dylan himself would express disappointment with it in a 2012 interview with Mikal Gilmore, stating that, “When you want to make a film and you’re using outside money, there’s just too many people you have to listen to.” He even joked that they should have hired Cate Blanchett to play his part, Jack Fate.

Suffice it to say, the road to the Nobel Prize was not paved by Renaldo and Clara and Masked and Anonymous. Yet we need not think of Dylan’s career in such a linear, triumphalist narrative. His forays into cinema, scattered and frustrated though they may be, represent only some of the numerous places his image has been represented on screen, including live television performances (including the Live Aid debacle, with a weak performance and controversial statements), concert films, commercials, music videos and the like. The 21st century has also seen depictions of Dylan by other filmmakers, some semi-authorized (I’m Not There (2007)), others actively opposed under threat of litigation (Factory Girl (2007)). He has also been parodied on shows like The Simpsons (1989-) and King of the Hill (1997-2010), conventionally depicted as rambling incomprehensibly. Dylan has been the subject of countless documentaries, both authorized and unauthorized, his songs are perennial presences in movies and television shows (up to and including “Sign on the Window” on the Season 8 finale of Friends (1994-2004)). When Cory Monteith died of an overdose, the creators of Glee (2009-15) turned to Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love” to capture the sense of loss for the show’s young fans.

This planned collection proposes to wrest Dylan’s screen incarnations from the margins of his career and explore the many ways that they have worked to develop, promote and in some ways hinder his status as a legendary artist. I seek around twelve new essays on Bob Dylan as a presence on the big and small screen, covering a range of critical and disciplinary approaches.

C.P. Lee’s book Like a Bullet of Light: The Films of Bob Dylan (2001) is a useful resource, if now dated.

Possible topics might include:

• Dylan as a multimedia artist (including not only musician and filmmaker but poet, memoirist, painter, sculptor, etc.), but “movie star” status forever eluding him
• Awards and prestige (Dylan and George Bernard Shaw are the only people with both Oscars and Nobel Prizes, but only Dylan has also won Worst Sense of Direction Award from the Stinkers Bad Movie Awards)
• New approaches to Renaldo and Clara (1978) or Masked and Anonymous (2003)
• Documentaries: Dont Look Back (1967), Eat the Document (1972), No Direction Home (2005), The Other Side of the Mirror (2007), 65 Revisited (2007), the slate of fan documentaries in recent decades, etc., plus the playful mixing of fact and fiction in Rolling Thunder Revue (2019)
• Concert films: Festival (1967), Concert for Bangladesh (1972), Hard Rain (1976), The Last Waltz (1978), Live Aid (1985), MTV Unplugged (1994), etc.
• TV appearances: from The Madhouse on Castle Street in 1963 to Quest for CBC in 1964 to The Johnny Cash Show in 1969 to Late Night with David Letterman in 2015, plus performances at award shows (like the infamous version of “Masters of War” during the Grammies in 1991)
• Dylan’s performance for American presidents (Clinton and Obama) and for Pope John Paul II
• Dylan as an actor for others: Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), Hearts of Fire (1987), Backtrack (1990), etc., plus the fact that he was apparently offered the lead in Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
• Dylan’s soundtrack work: Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Wonder Boys (2000), Lucky You (2007), My Own Love Song (2010), etc.
• The use of Dylan songs in movies and television
• Dylan’s cameos, such as on Dharma and Greg in 1999 and Pawn Stars in 2010
• Dylan and commercials – both the use of his music and his personal appearances in ads for Victoria’s Secret, the 2014 Chrysler Superbowl ad, the 2016 IBM ad with Watson
• Dylan’s music videos, from “Jokerman” to “The Night We Called It a Day,” plus the “interactive video” for “Like a Rolling Stone”
• Depictions of Dylan by others: I’m Not There (2007), Factory Girl (2006), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), Urban Myths (2017), etc.
• “The cinematic” in Dylan’s music: “Brownsville Girl,” the many film citations on Empire Burlesque, the evidence of his fondness for Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960) and Carné’s Children of Paradise (1945), etc.
• Anti-fandom: Dylan’s screen projects as a lightning rod for negativity about his career

Please send proposals of 250-300 words to murray.leeder@nucleus.com by June 30, 2020.

Murray Leeder holds a Ph.D. from Carleton University and is a Research Affiliate at the University of Manitoba. He has published on Bob Dylan in Popular Music and Society and the Journal of Popular Film and Television.

CFP: ReFocus: The Films of William Castle William Castle will probably forever be remembered fir... more CFP: ReFocus: The Films of William Castle

William Castle will probably forever be remembered first as “The Master of Gimmicks” and “The Abominable Showman”: the director of exciting gimmick films like Macabre (1958), House on Haunted Hill (1959), The Tingler (1959), 13 Ghosts (1960), Homicidal (1961) and Mr. Sardonicus (1961), and the maestro behind the Emergo, Percepto and Illusion-O, the punishment poll and the life insurance policy against death by fright. But there was much more to his Hollywood career than this cycle, however innovative and indelible it may have been. He directed more than fifty films between 1944 and 1974, and produced both The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968).

I seek abstracts of 100-150 words for ReFocus: The Films of William Castle. Essays may focus on individual films or on themes and topics that pervade his films. Those essays selected will collectively cover the whole range of his career, from a dependable B-movie director for Columbia in the 1940s, to strange mix of comedies, thrillers and children’s films he produced in the 1960s, to Shanks (1974), his dreamlike collaboration with Marcel Marceau. In an attempt to cover the full range of career, I intend this volume to be no more than 50% devoted to Castle’s gimmicks. Topics might include Castle’s influence on directors like Joe Dante and John Waters and the latter-day revival of the Castle “brand” through Dark Castle Pictures and the efforts of his daughter, Terry Castle. Essays might also consider Castle’s dalliances into television (Ghost Story/Circle of Fear) and his book Step Right Up! . . . I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America, an entertaining showbiz memoir that should be taken with a grain (or a pound) of salt.

ReFocus: The Films of William Castle will be among the scholarly editions published by the University of Edinburgh Press in a new series of anthologies examining overlooked American film directors. Series editors are Robert Singer, Ph.D. and Gary D. Rhodes, Ph.D.

Essays included in the refereed anthology will be of approximately 5,000 to 8,000 words, referenced in Chicago endnote style.

Abstracts of 100-150 words should be submitted by May 15, 2016 and should be sent to murray.leeder@nucleus.com.

About the editor: Murray Leeder teaches Film Studies in the Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Halloween (Auteur, 2014) and editor of Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (Bloomsbury, 2015).