Claire Perkins
- B.A (Hons.) (Monash)
- Assistant Lecturer
- Contact details
- Full Curriculum Vitae
(PDF)
Background
Claire Perkins has a background in cultural studies and cinema studies. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Monash and is currently finalising a PhD in the Centre for Comparative Literature on the American ‘smart’ film. Claire has done sessional teaching in Visual Culture and Film and Television Studies at Monash since 2005. Her work has appeared in Senses of Cinema and is forthcoming in The Velvet Light Trap and Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel.
Research Interests
One of my key research interests concerns the field of American commercial-independent film production that has sprung from institutions such as the Sundance Film Festival and the rise of “mini-major” studios such as Miramax and Fox Searchlight. Some of the contemporary auteurs I have focused on include Hal Hartley, Wes Anderson, Whit Stillman and Paul Thomas Anderson. These directors all have a formal taste for ironic, stylised expression and take a thematic interest in issues of the family and popular culture. In both of these areas I am especially interested in the way these films reference and remake American cinematic discourses such as 1950s melodrama, the New Hollywood wave of 1967-1975 and the 1980s teen film. This specific concern with questions of repetition indicates my larger research interest in issues of film serialisation. This interest is reflected in my forthcoming contribution to the book Second Takes as well as in my current investigation into a project on the film trilogy. My research projects have developed out of an early interest in Gilles Deleuze’s work and are informed by a broad Deleuzian aesthetic theory that draws on the Cinema books but also the writing on music and painting, and on particular concepts such as minority, humour and performativity. The specific concerns of the cycle of films described above have also opened up broad research interests in suburbia, cinematic utopias and music in film.
Selected Publications
“Sequelizing Hollywood: The American ‘Smart’ Film” in Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel”, Constantine Verevis and Carolyn Jess-Cooke (eds), State University of New York Press, 2009.
This article seeks to understand the American “smart” or “Sundance” film as a moment that sequelizes the New Hollywood era of the late 1960s and early 70s. Many film theorists have made connections between the earlier moment and the idea of the time-image as it is elaborated by Deleuze in relation to European art cinema after WWII. Taking its cue from much recent work that identifies a link between these two periods of unusually innovative commercial American filmmaking, this article argues that the crisis of the action-image identified in the earlier films can also be found in the contemporary films, but as a reversed model.
“Remaking and the Film Trilogy: Whit Stillman’s Authorial Triptych”, The Velvet Light Trap, Issue 61, Spring 2008.
This article considers the film trilogy as an example of serialisation that can be understood in terms of the issues of disguise, transformation and difference that characterise recent work on film remaking. The field of “international art cinema” is one area where film practice and discourse imaginatively engages the trilogy as a form traditionally associated with authorial remaking and auteurism. Through a discussion of Whit Stillman’s films Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998), the article discusses this engagement as a dimension of these directors’ highly aware authorial images. It suggests that the ways in which authorial remaking is staged by Stillman can demonstrate new directions for both serialisation and auteurism.
“Cinéphilia and Monstrosity: The Problem of Cinema in Deleuze’s Cinema Books” Senses of Cinema, Issue 8, July-August 2000.