Professor Andrew Klevan

Film aesthetics; the close analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of film form and style; film performance; the history, philosophy, and practice of film criticism; the methodology and pedagogy of film study.

My work is interested in exploring films through the close examination of their form and presentation. It practises the close analysis of film; examines it as a technique through meta-criticism; and advocates it as an advantageous method within film studies and its pedagogy. 

My first monograph Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film looked at the relationship between the film medium, narrative, and drama. It explores the different possibilities for undramatic form within narrative contexts to express life experiences based in the ordinary, the routine, the repetitive, the in-between, the uneventful, and in the apparently banal and mundane. It also began a long-standing interest in aspects of films that do not demonstratively declare their significance, even if they are demonstrative in other respects.

I have written two monographs exploring film performance. Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation examines the ways in which performers’ behaviour, for example, their postures, gestures and expressions, synthesise with other aspects of a film’s form. A monograph on Barbara Stanwyck shifts the emphasis to concentrate on how one skilled performer achieves qualitative variety through their presence and craft. Both monographs aim to show how attention to the performer, as distinct say to a director, can adjust and even transform our understanding and appreciation of films.

The monograph Aesthetic evaluation and film is a guide to aesthetic philosophy as it relates to evaluative criticism in general and to film in particular. Organised through the explanation of key concepts, it illuminates connections between the work of philosophers, theorists, and critics. It shows how aesthetic evaluation need not privilege or a particular type of film or style but be rooted in a type of investigation and discourse, flexibly informed by a cluster of concerns including medium, convention, prominence, pattern and relation.

I have been interested in the language with which we discuss and describe films, the translation of a medium that is visual, aural, and moving into words.  Such meta-critical concerns are specifically addressed in an edited collection (with Dr Alex Clayton, University of Bristol) entitled The Language and Style of Film Criticism. Relatedly, I have drawn on 'ordinary language philosophy' to explain an approach to film study that while philosophically informed is non-theoretical (in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s understanding). Entitled ‘Ordinary Language Film Studies’, it can be found in Aesthetic Investigations Vol 3. No. 2 2020 (Special dossier: Philosophy of film without theory) and a longer version, which includes more extensive reference and commentary in notes, can be found at my academia.edu page. Two recent follow up essays explore problems with the theoretical approach: the first discussing an example of contemporary analytic film philosophy and the second the cursory treatment of the individual film by Gilles Deleuze in the cinema books. Another related essay, prompted by the film criticism of V.F. Perkins, makes the case for a philosophy of art that operates through criticism. I am currently exploring the ways in which we can characterise films (in ways that are not simply equivalent to analysing, interpreting, contextualising, or explaining them).