Dr Warren Buckland

“The authorship of Citizen Kane has become one of film history’s major controversies. And the question of who did what and how much opens up an extraordinary subdrama of jostling egos” wrote the journalist Richard Meryman in 1978. It is Orson Welles’s co-writer credit accompanying Herman J. Mankiewicz’s name on the Citizen Kane screenplay that continues to generate such an extraordinary subdrama of bitter infighting – a drama David Fincher recently re-enacted in his film Mank (2020).

In his new book Who Wrote Citizen Kane? Statistical Analysis of Disputed Co-Authorship Warren Buckland (Reader in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University) bypasses this infighting and instead employs statistics to quantify the stylistic “fingerprints” of Welles and Mankiewicz. He then identifies those scenes in the Citizen Kane screenplay where Welles’s stylistic fingerprint dominates and where Mankiewicz’s stylistic fingerprint dominates.

The rhetoric seen in the contested authorship of Citizen Kane has now become a common feature of many current public disputes, which are driven by partisan interests and the vilification of opponents. As a corrective to this rhetoric, Buckland turns to straightforward statistical methods to generate robust and reliable knowledge to solve one of film history’s major controversies.

From mainstream blockbusters to art house cinema, narrative and narration are the driving forces that organize a film. Yet attempts to explain these forces are often mired in notoriously complex terminology and dense theory. Warren Buckland provides a clear and accessible introduction that explains how narrative and narration work using straightforward language.

Narrative and Narration distills the basic components of cinematic storytelling into a set of core concepts: narrative structure, processes of narration, and narrative agents. The book opens with a discussion of the emergence of narrative and narration in early cinema and proceeds to illustrate key ideas through numerous case studies. Each chapter guides readers through different methods that they can use to analyze cinematic storytelling. Buckland also discusses how departures from traditional modes, such as feminist narratives, art cinema, and unreliable narrators, can complicate and corroborate the book’s understanding of narrative and narration. Examples include mainstream films, both classic and contemporary; art house films of every stripe; and two relatively new styles of cinematic storytelling: the puzzle film and those driven by a narrative logic derived from video games. Narrative and Narration is a concise introduction that provides readers with fundamental tools to understand cinematic storytelling. -- Supplied by publisher.

Wes Anderson’s Symbolic Storyworld presents a theoretical investigation of what makes the films of Wes Anderson distinctive. Chapter by chapter, it relentlessly pulls apart each of Anderson’s narratives to pursue the proposition that they all share the same deep underlying symbolic values – a common symbolic storyworld. Taking the polemical strategy of outlining and employing Claude Lévi-Strauss’s distinguished (and notorious) work on myth and kinship to analyze eight of Anderson’s films, Warren Buckland unearths the peculiar symbolic structure of each film, plus the circuits of exchange, tangible and intangible gift giving, and unusual kinship systems that govern the lives of Anderson’s characters. He also provides an analysis of Wes Anderson’s visual and aural style, identifying several distinctive traits of Anderson’s mise en scène.--Provided by publisher.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory is an international reference work representing the essential ideas and concepts at the centre of film theory from the beginning of the twentieth century, to the beginning of the twenty-first. 

When first encountering film theory, students are often confronted with a dense, interlocking set of texts full of arcane terminology, inexact formulations, sliding definitions, and abstract generalities. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory challenges these first impressions by aiming to make film theory accessible and open to new readers. 

Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland have commissioned over 50 scholars from around the globe to address the difficult formulations and propositions in each theory by reducing these difficult formulations to straightforward propositions. 

The result is a highly accessible volume that clearly defines, and analyzes step by step, many of the fundamental concepts in film theory, ranging from familiar concepts such as ‘Apparatus’, ‘Gaze’, ‘Genre’, and ‘Identification’, to less well-known and understood, but equally important concepts, such as Alain Badiou’s ‘Inaesthetics’, Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Time-Image’, and Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘Evidence’.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory is an ideal reference book for undergraduates of film studies, as well as graduate students new to the discipline. -- Provided by publisher.

How does it select its objects of study and its methods of inquiry?

How does it make discoveries and explain filmic phenomena? And,

How does it formulate and solve theoretical problems?

He asks these questions of film theory through a rational reconstruction and a classical commentary. Both frameworks clarify and reformulate vague and inexact expressions, redefine obscure concepts, and examine the underlying logic of film theory arguments. This not only subjects film theory to rigorous examination; it also teaches students how to write theory, by enabling them to question and critically interrogate the logic of previous film theory arguments.

The book consists of nine chapters that closely examine a series of canonical film books and essays in great detail, by Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey, Thomas Elsaesser, Stephen Heath, and Slavoj Žižek, among others.

The continued relevance of film semiotics as a pedagogical tool lies in the demystification of its methods of analysis. Students ask, how do we actually carry out a semiotic analysis? This chapter begins to answer this question by examining the methods film semioticians employ in their textual analyses of film. It reveals the operational procedures implicit in film semiotics, making it more accessible and relevant to a large group of university students who are studying film for the first time.

Christopher Nolan’s understanding of and control over cinematic storytelling has contributed to the formation of the puzzle film – films that embrace nonlinearity and time loops, that blur the boundaries between different levels of reality, that are riddled with gaps, deception, labyrinthine structures, ambiguity, and overt coincidences. In this chapter I examine and evaluate Nolan’s first feature, the British art house film Following (1998), in terms of its system of formal and storytelling conventions (film style, narration, narrative structure) and implicit viewing procedures (especially viewer expectations). Nolan of course is renowned for his innovative puzzle film storytelling techniques, which are prominently displayed in his second feature film, Memento (2000). In this chapter I return to Nolan’s first film to identify its more implicit and indirect storytelling innovations.

Thomas Elsaesser’s idea of the mind-game film crystallized in written form in 2006. Thomas emphasized in this 2006 paper that the mind-game film covers mainstream, independent, and avant-garde films from across the globe with similar aspects of style, narrative, and character-interaction. In this early formulation, he thought of mind-game films as complex hybrids of horror, science fiction, teen film, and film noir, in which fragments of these prior filmmaking trends interact with each other and are incorporated into the mind-game film. A few years after completing this extraordinary essay on Philip K. Dick, Thomas began rethinking his conception of the mind-game film. The concepts are key to Thomas’s discussion of mind-game films, but what is most important is that he discusses them in terms of his central concept of “productive pathologies”. Mind-game films “work through” paradoxes of representation and paradoxes of time.

This chapter examines the editing in Jaws from technical and perceptual standpoints, in order to determine the significance of continuity editing in the final chase sequence.