Faculty
Paul Coates
Associate Faculty
Department of Film Studies
Email
Education: BA, Cambridge; MA, Sussex; Ph.D. Warsaw
Research Interests
To some extent, my research interests can be gauged from my book titles, as almost all the interests signaled by them are to some extent active, seeing me return to different facets of these subjects at different times. The most relevant ones are: The Story of the Lost Reflection: The Alienation of the Image in Western and Polish Cinema (1985); Words After Speech: A Comparative Study of Romanticism and Symbolism (1986); The Double and the Other: Identity as Ideology in Post-Romantic Fiction (1989);The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism and the Image of Horror (1991); Lucid Dreams: the Films of Krzysztof Kieślowski (ed.) (1999); Cinema, Religion and the Romantic Legacy (2003); The Red and the White: The Cinema of People's Poland (2005); Cinema and Colour: The Saturated Image (2010); Screening the Face (2012).
The leitmotif linking them, particularly the ones published since 1999, is an investigation of aspects of the work of Kieślowski. Indeed, even the earlier interest in Expressionism can be linked to him as A Short Film About Killing might be called ‘expressionistic’. This is true also of my ongoing work on issues of closeness and distance in cinema – an expansion of a sub-theme of Screening the Face –, as its concern with the haptic, 3-D, and the close-up also takes in the zoom lens, which is discussed at one point in Kieślowski’s Camera Buff. Such subjects as religion, colour and the face are of obvious relevance to his work, testifying to its unusually rich, multi-layered quality.
