Dr. Alan Wright
Postgraduate Coordinator
Qualifications
- BA (Hons) (Victoria)
- MA, PhD (Florida)
Contact Details
Phone: +64 3 364 2987
Internal Phone: 7291
alan.wright@canterbury.ac.nz
Postal address:
Cinema Studies
School of Humanities
University of Canterbury
Private Bag 4800
Christchurch, New Zealand
Physical address:
Room 316, English/Education Building
Office Hours:
Tuesdays, 1-2pm
Research
Cinema is a kind of time machine. I have written about films that explore a dislocated experience of time and space where the past haunts the present or the foreign inhabits the familiar. I am currently planning a book to be called Magic, Modernity and the Films of Kenneth Anger.
Recent Publications
"Seeing Red in 1949 and 1995," (forthcoming 2011) in Making Film and Television Histories: Australia and New Zealand, Eds. James Bennett and Rebecca Beirne. London: I.B. Tauris.
"Vigilante Fury: Ritchie Venus Vs Sam Neill," Illusions, Winter 2010.
"Of Fish and Film". Rouge 12 (2008)
Film: Scuppered (2005). International Documentary Film Festival CRONOGRAF, Republic of Moldova, May 31, 2006.
"Alexander Kluge". Encyclopedia of Documentary Film. Ed. Ian Aitken. London: Routledge, 2006.
"Annie Goldson". Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. Ed. Ian Aitken. London: Routledge 2006.
"Andre Bazin". Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought. Ed. Chris Murray. London: Routledge, 2004.
"Torture in the Name of Cinema: Bazin, Rossellini, Godard". Terror and Text: Representing Political Violence in Literature and the Visual Arts. Eds. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Mark Williams. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2002, p. 273-287.
"Elizabeth Taylor at Auschwitz: JLG and the Real Object of Montage". The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard, 1985-2000. Eds. Michael Temple and James S. Williams. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000, p. 51-61.
"Sentence Fragments: Elements of Style, Postcolonial Edition". Journal of Composition Studies, Jan 1998.
"A Wrinkle in Time: The Child, Memory and The Mirror ". Wide Angle 18, 1 (January 1996), p. 47-68.
"I Wanna See Some History: The Border, Identity, Writing". DisClosure 4 (1995), p. 141-158.
Teaching
I will be contributing to most of the Cinema Studies classes and will be the course convenor for CINE 102 World Cinema in the 21st Century, CINE 202 Film and Theory, CINE 302 Documentary: From the Margins to the Mainstream and CINE 402 The Essay Film.
Background
I am the “local boy” in the programme. I moved to Christchurch with my family in 1970 from Belfast, Northern Ireland. I went to school and university here. I studied in the States and received a PhD from the University of Florida in 1998. I returned to my hometown to teach at the University of Canterbury.