Lisa Coulthard
Cinema and Media Studies Professor Lisa Coulthard has received a three year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Grant (SSHRC) for this project: “Between blood and data: anatomy of the post-millennial Hollywood fight sequence”. Lindsay Steenberg of Oxford Brookes University will be a collaborator on this project.
Description:
The fight scene is crucial to Hollywood cinema — to its style, popularity, cultural currency, and audience attractions. However, although audiences and consumers know what such a scene entails, there is a lack of research on the fight scene as an identifiable category. “Blood and Data” (“BaD”) responds to this dualistic populist appreciation and academic lack by taking the cinematic fight scene seriously as an object of scholarly study. Approaching the fight scene as a cinematic object across and outside of isolated film texts, “BaD” will collect and categorize a large database of fight scenes (1000 scenes from 1999-2019), analyze and map the characterizing features that define fight scenes, and investigate the circulation and remediation of fight scenes through social media and web platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube. Considering the fight in this isolated way and analyzing its digital cultures, this project interrogates the interplay among digital cinema, digital “special” effects, the body, the real and the hyperreal as they relate to the spectacle of media violence in the twenty-first century.
Learn more about Lisa: https://theatrefilm.ubc.ca/persons/lisa-coulthard/
