Colin Burnett

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Challenging the prevailing notion among cinephiles that the auteur is an isolated genius interested primarily in individualism, Colin Burnett positions Robert Bresson as one whose life's work confronts the cultural forces that helped shape it. Regarded as one of film history's most elusive figures, Bresson (1901–1999) carried himself as an auteur long before cultural magazines, like the famed Cahiers du cinéma, advanced the term to describe such directors as Jacques Tati, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean-Luc Godard. In this groundbreaking study, Burnett combines biography with cultural history to uncover the roots of the auteur in the alternative cultural marketplace of midcentury France.

This article challenges the commonly held view that the James Bond film series is episodic in its plot structure, presenting it as an attenuated, "flexi-narrative" form of series construction that relies on just-noticeable connections among installments. I both contextualize this unique approach by situating the films in a British context in which properly serial structures were perceived as a lowly solution to continuity-building and propose that scholars of media franchises rethink continuity-building itself to account for series that invite viewers to model a "meta-story" but differ from Hollywood's penchant for producing series with bold causal ties in back-to-back releases. A world poetics of the popular film series will explore how series released from other industries pursue different means for constructing series. The article's conclusion argues that narratology is a necessary supplement and even corrective to audience or fan studies of popular series, "re-defamiliarizing" the works themselves so that we may contextualize the selective and oppositional readings of audiences.

Throughout his career, French filmmaker Robert Bresson (1901–1999) endeavored to invent a new medium of moving images and sounds, which he called le cinématographe (writing-in-motion). Designed to draw upon the distinct properties of, but ultimately to supplant, the art of cinema, Bresson’s cinématographe systematically expunged all influences from the live theatre, transforming cinema into a unique rhythmic form that focused on the varieties of duration and movement associated with modern life.

This essay, written for a February 2017 exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum (St. Louis), explores early French cinema as a precarious amusement attraction whose pleasures depended on what Tom Gunning calls "curiositas," a lust of the eyes. The piece culminates with an analysis of the life rhythms and social commentary in the Lumière masterpiece, Laveuses sur la rivière/Washerwomen on the River (1897).

When 007 parodies first became a hot item in the 1960s, they played out in ways that the official film series simply could not: they introduced the idea of the demise or even death of the iconic British spy. So common was the device of “007’s shocking end” across media, in parodic films, comics, novels, and short stories, that it became an opportunity for competitive oneupmanship in the cultural market. Who could do in Bond in the cleverest or most embarrassing fashion?

This paper, originally written as a blog entry, traces the many curious forms of ignominious end 007 has encountered over the decades in parodies.

Of his mentor Roger Leenhardt, André Bazin once stated, 'There is in all phenomena a primary level, that of basic understanding. There is a second level, where the subtleties lay. And the third level, that belongs to Roger Leenhardt' (cited in Roger Leenhardt ou le dernier des humanistes, André Labarthe, 1965). Though the influence of Leenhardt's realist film theory on the Cahiers du cinéma generation of filmmakers and theorists is widely acknowledged, the contexts that served to germinate his ideas about cinematic realism remain understudied. This article links Leenhardt's theories pertaining to film's indirect or understated interpretation of reality, first articulated in his pioneering 'Petite école du spectateur' (1935-1936) series, to his search for a subtle approach to ethics, politics and colonial documentary within the same era. If scholars have tended to account for sparse cinema in France by turning to aesthetic traditions, Leenhardt's 1930s career reveals that the conceptualisation and reinvention of cinema as a medium of subtle suggestion also arose within a political setting, namely nonconformist, Popular Front-era thought, which encouraged Leenhardt to embrace a Personalist-humanist stance towards the 'other'. His film L'Orient qui vient (Roger Leenhardt and René Zuber, 1937) puts these ideas into practice, endeavouring to restrain the excesses of pro-colonial ideology and media.

How does the She-Ra franchise hang together as a narrative? This blog post for the journal Animation Studies 2.0 proposes that She-Ra is an instance of "threaded media storytelling," which in contrast to transmedia storytelling creates distinct continuities within distinct media.

Late in his career, filmmaker and theorist Roger Leenhardt (1903–1985) published two enigmatic statements that suggest that he was increasingly sceptical of the idea, which he himself had defended in the 1930s, that film’s realist potential depended on the medium’s photochemical capacity to create faithful imprints of reality. In previously unexamined passages from his essay ‘Cinéma et les arts plastiques’ (1964) and his interview-based memoir Les Yeux ouverts (1979), he argued that animated shorts, along with the film sur l’art, were opening onto new vistas of exploration in realist aesthetics. This article addresses the conditions that led to, and the implications of, this seemingly paradoxical ‘lost development’ in French realist thought. By situating Leenhardt’s late theory in its proper context, namely his brief collaboration with painter Robert Lapoujade on the abstract animation Trois portraits d’un oiseau qui n’existe pas (Robert Lapoujade, 1963), we not only uncover the theory’s social and conceptual roots, but discover a fresh approach to a paradox that continues to grip film theorists: whether cinema can continue to be a means for making discoveries about reality in an age where new media grants filmmakers the power to manipulate every aspect of the image.

Worlds, whether in movies, comics, TV shows or theme parks, don’t just appear fully formed. If they did, franchise products would hold much less interest for us. No: fictional worlds are told. They are recited. We experience them in time, as sequences of cues. In this essay, posted to my website Moving Patterns in 2018, I argue that AVATAR: FLIGHT OF PASSAGE (2017)--a four-and-a-half-minute, 4D simulated flying experience (3D plus olfactory and bodily stimuli)--is more than a "ride." It culminates The Valley of Mo’ara world, which not only “remediates” James Cameron’s AVATAR (2009), translating the spaces of the movie as physical environments one can freely interact with, but acts as a sequel to the feature film, recounting story events and a changed world only guests of the theme park can experience directly.

In this chapter of The Invention of Robert Bresson: The Auteur and His Market (2017), I explore Bresson's relationship to the concepts of rhythm circulating in French discourse throughout the 20th century. These discourses formed the foundation of his experiments with rhythm at the level of plot structure and editing as he moved from Apollonian toward increasingly Dionysian notions of durational order.

The scholarly literature on the ciné-club Objectif 49 (1948–50) tends to fo- cus on its institutional history. For this reason, historians have yet to account for the devel- opment of its aesthetic outlook. Objectif 49 attempted to launch a nouvelle avant-garde, and at its signature event, the Festival du Film Maudit of 1949, Jean Cocteau, one of the club’s copresidents, stated that in today’s avant-garde, “boldness” presents itself “under the auspices of simplicity.” Using previously unexamined materials, I argue that the club’s aesthetics owe much to the critic and filmmaker Roger Leenhardt, whose postwar career has never been exposed to systematic study. In the essays he published between 1945 and 1949 and in his debut feature, Les dernières vacances (The Last Vacation, 1948), he showed how French cinema could overcome a crisis of content and “aestheticized” style. Not only did this new realism position him as a leading figure in the club, it also sheds light on his role in the founding of Cahiers du cinéma.

View this video lecture: https://colinatthemovies.wordpress.com/2019/09/02/video-lecture-theorizing-threaded-media-or-why-james-bond-isnt-just-a-failed-attempt-at-star-wars/

In today’s media industry, transmedia storytelling is all the craze. With integral elements of their stories dispersed across various media, franchises such as Star Wars now create media-savvy consumers invested in piecing together a unified serial arc from diverse entertainment experiences. But is transmedia storytelling as dominant as many have claimed? In this talk, I show that several alternatives, no less committed to a broad media presence, exist in today’s franchising scene. In order to account for the positive contributions these alternatives have made, and thereby put transmedia in its proper context—as one multimedia storytelling option among many—I propose a whole new approach, focusing on one such alternative, which I call threaded media storytelling. Properties like James Bond differ from Star Wars by showing a preference for intermedial multiplicity over unity, providing consumers with numerous serial continuities to “thread” between in distinct media. For decades, this multi-continuity strategy, one that sacrifices transmedial unity, has proven to be a reliable one for franchise storytellers, at times resulting in some rather intricate experiments in multimedia serial plotting.