Hanna & Paige: Richard Dyer- Case Study Theory

</div>

Richard W. Dyer was born in 1945 in Leeds and his career is mainly based as an English academic whom specialising in cinema. In 2006 he became the Professor of Film Studies at King's College London. After studying at the University of Warwick he took on his career from learnt techniques and skills, and went on, now his work is well known and described as "emphasising the aesthetic and historical specificity of cultural texts". At University Dyer majored in French however this was not at the University of Warwick but the University of St Andrew's and worked in the theatre before studying for a PhD in English at the University of Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Being an active and influential figure in the English Gay Liberation Front and regularly contributed to the journal Gay Left. Dyer’s wrote an article ‘In Defence of Disco’ in Gay Left in 1979, and was one of the first to take disco seriously as an expression of the new gay consciousness. The first gay cinema event at the National Film Theatre was organised by Dyer in 1977.<sup> </sup>The event was accompanied by the publication of Gays and Film, a collection of essays edited by him. Stars in 1979 was Dyer's first full-length book. In it he developed the idea that the viewers' perception of a film is heavily influenced by the perception of its stars, and that publicity materials and reviews determine the way that audiences experience the film. With this thesis in mind, Dyer analysed critics' writing, magazines, and advertising and the films themselves, to explore the significance of stardom. In 1993 the British Film Institute commissioned Dyer to write a book about the 1945 film Brief Encounter as part of its BFI Modern Classics series. He emphasised the gay sensibility of the film, analysing the source of this impression in a way that reached beyond the popular assumption that this flowed from the film's association with Noël Coward as its scriptwriter. In 1999 the British Film Institute commissioned Dyer to write a book about David Fincher's 1995 film Seven as part of its BFI Modern Classics series. Dyer adopted the conceit of breaking his analysis into seven S-titled sections: sin, story, structure, seriality, sound, sight, and salvation. He explored the film's use of the seven deadly sins, its own conscious structure and the nature of serial killing in earlier films. Despite this focus on sin and death, Dyer responded to the film on an entirely experiential level, making no comment on its relevance to the viewers morality. In 1995 he contributed his opinions to the television documentary The Celluloid Closet, a history of depictions of lesbians and gay men in American films, which was first screened in the UK on Channel 4 on the 5th of September in 1996. Five years later when the documentary was released on DVD, unused material was edited together to form a one-hour show entitled Rescued From the Closet. Although Dyer's academic specialism is film, he has a wider interest in culture and in the way that people are categorised. His 2001 book The Culture of Queers was a general history of the culture of gay men. He had explored aspects of this — like the origins of the application of the word 'gay' to this culture — in earlier essays. In the book he looked at the more general issue of a sexual grouping having an identifiable culture and at the relatively small set of stereotypes associated with that culture as portrayed in its arts and media. Specifically, he uses "queer culture" to indicate the values of that grouping before "gay culture" took hold, and the book explores the ways in which these two cultures differ. In 2007, Dyer was the recipient of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies' lifetime achievement award.

<strong>His Theory:</strong>

Hanna & Paige

Wednesday, 28 September 2011

Richard Dyer- Case Study Theory

No comments:

Post a Comment