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). This book went 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.

Film Theory & Contemporary Hollywood Movies is the latest book I've edited. In this volume, contributors explore recent popular movies through the lens of film theory, beginning with industrial-economic analysis before moving into a predominately aesthetic and interpretive framework. The Hollywood films discussed cover a wide range from 300 to Fifty First Dates, from Brokeback Mountain to Lord of the Rings, from Spider-Man 3 to Fahrenheit 9/11 and Saw.

I edited a book called Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (2009). 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!).