Talks on Cinema

To mark the 50th anniversary of the first moon landings I gave a workshop on films about the moon in 2019. I traced the history of ‘moon films’ from the very earliest A Trip to the Moon (made in 1902) to 1950s B-movies such as Cat-Women of the Moon, to The First Men on the Moon to the much more recent First Man (2018). Along the way, I discussed the ‘behind-the-scenes’ films such as The Dish (2000) and Hidden Figures (2016), as well as films in which the moon plays a different, more poetic role - including the classic rom-com Moonstruck (1987).

There is a remarkable number of films depicting nuns and convent life over the decades – from the contemplative The Nun’s Story (1959) to the controversial La Religieuse (1966), from the sentimental The Bells of St Mary’s (1945) to the comedic Sister Act (1992), and from the horrifying The Magdalene Sisters (2002) to the gloriously melodramatic Black Narcissus (1947). And of course the most famous of all: The Sound of Music (1965). This talk explores how convent life and religion is depicted in a wide ranging list of films, and consider how these celluloid sisters both conform to and radically differ from conventional representations of women in cinema.

Fathers and father figures in English-speaking cinema offer us a wide range of masculinities – patriarchal, tender, protective, flawed. Fathers are often required to represent some kind of ideal, either living up to it, or causing devastation by failing to. In Films and Fatherhood I look at numerous examples of fathering, how the role of ‘Dad’ plays out across all the generic forms, and how ‘ideals’ of fatherhood are championed or challenged. Films to be discussed include two Anthony Hopkin films, The Father (2020) and The Good Father (1985), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), The Descendants (2011), The Godfather (1972) and many, many more.