British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship - The Conception of Space in the 1950s Politique des auteurs Movement in Film Criticism

The British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship has been awarded to Dr Marco Grosoli as the fellow, and Professor Murray Smith as the host and mentor. Marco will join the School of Arts in October to take up his position, and will spend the first three months of the fellowship undertaking research in Paris. This is a notoriously hard fellowship to obtain, with the success rate for this year being just 5%. The University of Kent has not held this type of fellowship since 2002, so this is a fantastic achievement for the Film department within the School of Arts.  

The Conception of Space in the 1950s Politique des auteurs Movement in Film Criticism

'My project will be a revisionist exploration of the Politique des auteurs, a 1950s tendency in French film criticism (mainly developed in the journal Cahiers du Cinéma) aiming to establish the film director as 'auteur,' the veritable pivot of cinematic creation. Far from being a simple, reactionary form of nostalgia for 'the artist as genius,' the Politique des auteurs, with its emphasis on mise en scène (the process of cinematic staging, of placing bodies and objects in front of the camera), seems rather to point at what would eventually be labeled as the postmodern preponderance of space over time. Consequently, my research will focus in particular on the conception of space specifically implied by the Politique des auteurs. The large number of texts written by its members (Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, François Truffaut) will be carefully analyzed from an historical, philological and especially theoretical point of view. Some of the films they directed once they became filmmakers will be closely analyzed as well.'