Warren Buckland
Reader in Film Studies, Oxford Brookes University

My career as a film scholar took off soon after I was awarded a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Film Studies in 1994 (the first of its kind in film studies). This basically gave me some free time to carry out research. I edited an anthology, The Film Spectator (1995), and wrote a monograph, The Cognitive Semiotics of Film (2000). I spent much of this time at the University of Amsterdam teaching on their MA in film studies, with Thomas Elsaesser. This resulted in another book - Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis (2002). Here we extracted methods from about a dozen film theories and applied them to our favourite movies. I obviously had too much time on my hands, because I also decided to write a short guide to film (Teach Yourself Film Studies). The book will be going into its third edition in 2008, and has been translated into Korean and Japanese.

After co-writing Studying Contemporary American Film, I discovered the limitations of using only the standard film theories to analyze films. I felt the need to supplement these theories with the information contained in well-known filmmaking manuals. In Directed by Steven Spielberg (2006) [www.FilmsOfSpielberg.com], I analyze Spielberg's blockbusters using standard theories of film in combination with filmmaking manuals.

I've just finished editing a book called Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (2008). This volume examines the recent trend in contemporary filmmaking to structure film plots as puzzles (those films you end up watching two or three times just to find out what's going on in them!).

Editor, The New Review of Film and Television Studies:

The New Review of Film and Television Studies promotes current research making a central contribution to film and television studies. Rather than endorse a particular doctrine or fixed agenda, the journal publishes research dedicated to clearly formulated, reliable methods of analysis, well posed questions examining resolvable problems, and focused deliberation on those problems. The journal is driven by the belief that intellectually rigorous research in the humanities is both possible and necessary. In-depth stand-alone essays or extracts from major research projects in progress are particularly welcome.
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/17400309.asp

Coming Soon:

(ed.) Film Theory & Contemporary Hollywood Movies (Routledge, 2009).