This seminar is a hybrid event, available to join in person or online via Zoom.
Matthew Hart (Columbia University), “Gamma Films Presents, I Met a Murderer”: Experiments in Film and Life
“Gamma Films Presents, I Met a Murderer”analyzes a little-known movie from an undistinguished moment in British film history. I Met a Murderer was made in the summer of 1938 by Gamma Films, an independent production company formed by the actor James Mason; his lover, the actor and author Pamela Kellino; and her husband, the cameraman and director Roy Kellino.
Filmed during one of the British film industry’s regular production crises, I Met a Murderer is mostly remembered now as a minor curiosity in its star’s long career, which would go on to include films such as The Seventh Veil (1945), A Star is Born (1954), North by Northwest (1959), and Lolita (1961).
Far more than a curiosity, I Met a Murderer is a key early example of Mason’s career-long struggle to establish what Sarah Thomas calls “semi-freelance status” in a period dominated by vertically-integrated movie corporations that controlled the means of production, distribution, and exhibition. Made on a shoestring budget, this moodily noirish film is at once profoundly innovative and consciously derivative of silent-movie melodramas. Its innovations are, most obviously, social: a bid for freedom in an era of monopoly capitalism. But its novelties are also, for all its sometimes-shaky production values, aesthetic and technical, with Roy Kellino developing techniques of exterior cinematography that later proved essential to his work in the 1940s for Ealing Studios, home to a celebrated semi-documentary style.
Finally, as the central artistic product of a notorious “Baker Street love triangle,” I Met a Murderer—the plot of which evokes its makers’ own tangled sexual relations—must also be seen as an experiment in living: bohemian, polyamorous, possibly bisexual, and dominated by a feminine intelligence at once deeply desired and terribly feared.
Short Bio
Matthew Hart is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Nations of Nothing But Poetry (OUP, 2013) and Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction (Columbia UP, 2020). His new book project, Deadwater, examines twentieth-century British and American cultural history via the story of the Kellino family of music hall artists, filmmakers, actors, and authors. Matt is co-editor, with David James and Rebecca L. Walkowitz of the Literature Now book series at Columbia UP. He is a former president of the Modernist Studies Association and ASAP: the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.
Sam Waterman (Northeastern University London) ‘Gothic Adventure from Rider Haggard to Elizabeth Bowen’
While Bowen’s attachment to the gothic has until now been explored largely in relation to her Second World War short stories, this paper will consider how she engaged and transformed the genre of gothic adventure in her 1932 novel, To the North. Using Bowen’s 1947 radio broadcast about Rider Haggard as a frame, this paper will explore how Bowen turned to gothic adventure to represent the aspirations and anxieties of a new generation of female workers performing emotional labor in emerging service sectors such as travel and tourism. Bookending the modernist era – and positioned at opposing ends of its aesthetic spectrum – Haggard and Bowen nonetheless become unlikely interlocutors in this reading of gothic adventure, gender and work.
Short bio
Sam Waterman is Assistant Professor in English at Northeastern University London. His research covers nineteenth-century to contemporary literature; gender, sexuality and affect studies; and materialist modes of literary criticism. He has published work in Textual Practice, Modernism/Modernity, and Contemporary Literature and is currently working on a book project which traces the narrative legacies of adventure fiction from the late Victorian through the modernist period, providing an alternative literary history of gender and work.
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