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David Fleming
Lecturer in Film, Media and Communications,
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Expertise Summary
My first degree in English and Film Studies gave me a solid foundation in traditional critical, linguistic and psychoanalytic approaches to audio visual media and texts. My MA dissertation was entitled 'Dialogues in Darkness (and Light): The Films of David Fincher Through an Auteur Paradigm.' I later undertook an AHRB-funded project at post-graduate level whilst studying in Visual Culture, submitting a MLitt research dissertation under the direction of Professor Paul Coates. This focused on the projection and reception of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and I explored the complex network of processes and relations that inter-connect the site and context of cinematic exhibition, the psychological positioning of a cinematic spectator, and the role of an active and affective cinematic narrator/aesthetic story-teller. This degree broadened my theoretical range and introduced me to interdisciplinary Visual Culture approaches alongside the canonical works of flâneurs and theorists like Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer amongst others. Receiving a scholarship at the University of St Andrews thereafter allowed me to research a doctoral thesis entitled 'Drugs, Danger, Delusions (and Deleuzians?): Extreme film-philosophy journeys into and beyond the parallel body and mind.' In this project, supervised by Dr. David Martin-Jones, I argued that cinema can be understood as a protean (scientific/artistic) mode of thought and force of aesthetic affect, capable of expressing and transmitting radical concepts and thought-images relevant to its time. Latterly philosophy, nomadology, and neuroscience inspire me in their ability to open up new frontiers for reading and understanding cinema and its powers of affect/effect. I also embrace new film-philosophy trends explored by contemporary scholars like Anna Powell, Daniel Frampton, David Martin-Jones, William Brown, Elena Del Rio, Laura Marks, et al.