Output details

Figuring the Past : Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic

30% (approximately) of the material included in Vidal's output #1, has been previously published in article form. Two thirds of this previously published material have undergone extensive rewriting for its inclusion in the monograph. An early version of material included in Chapter Two of the monograph appeared in the article ‘Classic Adaptations, Modern Reinventions: Reading the Image in the Contemporary Literary Film,’ Screen, vol. 43, no. 1 (2002); sections of Chapter Three (case studies on Artemisia and The Governess) were published as ‘Feminist Historiographies and the Woman Artist’s Biopic: The Case of Artemisia,’ in Screen, vol. 48, no. 1 (2007) and as ‘Playing in a Minor Key: the Literary Past through the Feminist Imagination,’ in Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship, edited by Mireia Aragay (Rodopi, 2005). Work that formed the basis of the case study on Onegin included in Chapter Four was published as ‘Labyrinths of Loss: The Letter as Figure of Desire and Deferral in the Literary Film,’ in Journal of European Studies, vol. 36, no. 4 (2006).

This monograph (105,400 words) is the culmination of a seven-year project on the period film. The book departs from consolidated debates on film genre and adaptation, proposing a complex original thesis about mannerism in cinema. It brings together debates in film historiography (classicism and the post-new waves quality film), art history (mannerism as an intermedial concept) and philosophy, introducing Jean-François Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure into the study of the cinematic text for the first time to develop a novel notion of film writing. The book studies a corpus of 200 films and French-language sources rarely brought into dialogue with Anglo-American debates.