Lisa Purse

University of Reading, Film, Theatre, and Television, Faculty Member

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I am Associate Professor of Film and Head of Department at the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading. My research is broadly concerned with the relationships between aesthetics and the politics of representation in cinema. I am particularly interested in constructions of the body and physicality in post-studio US cinema, in relation to gender, ethnicity, sexuality and nationality, and to power, trauma and conflict. A second strand of my research explores popular cinema's interactions with digital technologies, including Digital 3D and digital visual effects. Current projects explore the spatial rhetoric of digital cinema, conflict representation in the so-called 'war on terror,' and the digital long take.

I welcome enquiries from prospective postgraduate students to work on any aspect of post-classical US cinema (independent or mainstream), including film style, digital imaging technologies and special effects, the representation of gender, ethnicity or sexuality, and conflict representation post-9/11.

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Books by Lisa Purse

Disappearing War: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cinema and Erasure in the Post-9/11 World (2017), Edinburgh University Press

The battles fought in the name of the ‘war on terror’ have re-ignited questions about the changin... more The battles fought in the name of the ‘war on terror’ have re-ignited questions about the changing nature of war, and the experience of war for those geographically distant from its real world consequences. What is missing from our highly mediated experience of war? What are the intentional and unintentional processes of erasure through which the distortion happens? What are their consequences?
Cinema is a key site at which questions about our highly mediated experience of war can be addressed or, more significantly, elided. Looking at a range of films that have provoked debate, from award-winning features like Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper, to documentaries like Kill List and Dirty Wars, as well as at the work of visual artists like Harun Farocki and Omer Fast, this book examines the practices of erasure in the cinematic representation of recent military interventions. Drawing on representations of war-related death, dying and bodily damage, this provocative collection addresses ‘what’s missing’ in existing scholarly responses to modern warfare; in film studies, as well as in politics and international relations.

Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema (2013), Edinburgh University Press

Contemporary Action Cinema (2011), Edinburgh University Press

Action cinema is a popular and familiar form which reflects the cultural, industrial and historic... more Action cinema is a popular and familiar form which reflects the cultural, industrial and historical landscape from which it emerges. Lisa Purse analyses the genre's pleasures and complexities in the light of both its cinematic history and the latest critical debates. Focussing on action cinema of the 2000s, this book explores issues of visual style, narrative, representation and the various contexts of production through a diverse series of case studies including Avatar (2009), Casino Royale (2006), The Hurt Locker (2008) and Banlieue 13 (2004). Providing a groundbreaking account of the way that the spectator engages with the action body and the action narrative, and including analyses of areas of representation that have seldom received sustained attention in the past, this comprehensive study is the perfect companion to modern action cinema. Key Features * Provides wide-ranging analyses and interpretation of action cinema * Discusses representations of heroism, gender and ethnicity * Explores the spectator's embodied engagement with the action film * Examines the effect of 9/11 and changes in US foreign policy

Papers by Lisa Purse

Authenticating Female Physical Action in Contemporary Cinema

A woman lies on her back in lush grass, eyes half-closed, panting gently – hair slightly mussed, ... more A woman lies on her back in lush grass, eyes half-closed, panting gently – hair slightly mussed, but make-up perfect. This assemblage of signifiers speaks more of conventional cinematic representations of female sexual abandon than other kinds of physical activity. And yet this is a shot from the end of a busy action sequence in Aeon Flux (2005), in which the woman in question – after a running shoot-out in which she incapacitates scores of enemy guards – has just blown up a zeppelin, then been swept hundreds of metres through the air suspended from the exploding structure, finally throwing herself at the ground as the zeppelin ditches into a wall in front of her. The woman is Aeon (Charlize Theron), the heroine of the title, and this is the final action sequence of the film. Despite this, Aeon does not display any biological traces of her recent dramatic and extended physical exertion, such as a flushed face, perspiration, heavily laboured breathing, or the facial scrapes and dirt ...

Rotational aesthetics: Michael Bay and contemporary cinema’s machine movement

Digital imaging technologies enable a mastery of the visual that in recent mainstream cinema freq... more Digital imaging technologies enable a mastery of the visual that in recent mainstream cinema frequently manifests as certain kinds of spatial reach, orientation and motion. In such a context Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise can be framed as a digital re-tooling of a familiar fantasy of vehicular propulsion, US car culture writ large in digitally crafted spectacles of diegetic speed, the vehicular chase film ‘2.0’. Movement is central to these films, calling up Scott Bukatman’s observation that in spectacular visual media ‘movement has become more than a tool of bodily knowledge; it has become an end in itself’ (2003: 125). Not all movements and not all instances of vehicular propulsion are the same however. How might we evaluate what is at stake in a film’s assertion of movement as an end in itself, and the form that assertion takes, its articulations of diegetic velocity, corporeality, and spatial penetration? Deploying an attentiveness towards the specificity of aesthetic deta...

Gestures and postures of mastery: CGI and contemporary action cinema's expressive tendencies

Ambiguity, ambivalence and absence in Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s 2013 film about the ten year hunt for Osama bin Laden, has pr... more Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s 2013 film about the ten year hunt for Osama bin Laden, has provoked competing accusations: that it is either anti-war or pro-war, anti-torture or pro-torture, and left wing or right wing in its political convictions. The heat of the assertions on either side of the debate (Naomi Wolf (2013) famously accused Bigelow of being ‘torture’s handmaiden’) illustrates the extent to which the film’s subject matter — the post-9/11 counter-terrorism strategies deployed by the US Military and government agencies — itself continues to provoke vociferous political and cultural discussion. Not for the first (or last) time in American cinema history, a film becomes the site at which a nationally felt ambivalence — in this case, about US actions carried out in the name of the so-called ‘war on terror’ — is explored. Zero Dark Thirty has caused controversy not only because of its subject matter, but because of its ambiguity. The debates around the film have focused ...

Introduction: film and the epistemology of war

Knowing war: moving images and the politics of erasure in the post 9/11 world

This article seeks to provoke reflection on the extent to which certain peoples’ lived experience... more This article seeks to provoke reflection on the extent to which certain peoples’ lived experience of war is erased and elided in Western media culture, and the consequences for a reduction of intercultural awareness, empathy, and accountability. Reflecting particularly on the post-9/11 period, the article argues for the ethical imperative to question how knowledge of war is produced, and to do so as a critically reflective endeavour both within and across disciplines.

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Disappearing war: interdisciplinary perspectives on cinema and erasure in the post-9/11 world

Confronting the impossibility of impossible bodies: Tom Cruise and the ageing male action hero movie

<p>This chapter discusses ageing action stardom by examining the physical performance of a ... more <p>This chapter discusses ageing action stardom by examining the physical performance of a range of ageing male action stars in post-2000 action films with a focus on Tom Cruise. In the context of a film franchise predicated on the achievement of the impossible, it analyses how Cruise confronts his own encroaching inability to perform the impossible. The chapter suggests an intense cultural negotiation over the ageing male body and makes the differentiation between Cruise who defies the age-related decline narrative and other stars who do not.</p>

The New Dominance

A Companion to the Action Film, 2019

Drawing on case studies including the Marvel and D.C. Cinematic Universes, and specifically Aveng... more Drawing on case studies including the Marvel and D.C. Cinematic Universes, and specifically Avengers: Age of Ultron (Joss Whedon, 2015) and Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016), this chapter will focus on action cinema’s turn towards the fantastical in the 2000s. The chapter will explore the technological, aesthetic, and economic factors that led to this turn, including the globalization of film markets and the expanding proliferation and sophistication of digital visual effects technologies. In particular, it will argue that two stylistic tendencies are particularly noticeable: the long take as action sequence, and a persistent logic of expansion that digital visual effects enable. The chapter will also set these films in broader cultural and political contexts, asking how these films reflect on recent geopolitical crises and the increasing digital mediation of our lived experience, and how they speak to related cultural concerns around representation and corpore...

Between phonographic perfection and resistance: Titãs – life even looks like a party

This essay focuses on an under-examined strand of Brazil's recent music documentaries; those ... more This essay focuses on an under-examined strand of Brazil's recent music documentaries; those focused on Brazilian Rock music. In particular, it analyses in detail one example, Titas – Life Even Looks Like a Party, noting how the film's formal characteristics animate aspects of the 1980s Brazilian Rock scene, the socio-political context of Brazilian Rock, and the trajectory of the band Titas itself. In doing so, the essay enables a re-evaluation of the political capacity of this under appreciated chapter of Brazilian music.

10. The New Hollywood, 1981–1999: Special/Visual Effects

The emergence and development of digital imaging technologies and their impact on mainstream film... more The emergence and development of digital imaging technologies and their impact on mainstream filmmaking is perhaps the most familiar special effects narrative associated with the years 1981-1999. This is in part because some of the questions raised by the rise of the digital still concern us now, but also because key milestone films showcasing advancements in digital imaging technologies appear in this period, including Tron (1982) and its computer generated image elements, the digital morphing in The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), computer animation in Jurassic Park (1993) and Toy Story (1995), digital extras in Titanic (1997), and ‘bullet time’ in The Matrix (1999). As a result it is tempting to characterize 1981-1999 as a ‘transitional period’ in which digital imaging processes grow in prominence and technical sophistication, and what we might call ‘analogue’ special effects processes correspondingly become less common. But such a narrative risks eliding the ...

Digital Heroes in Contemporary Hollywood: Exertion, Identification, and the Virtual Action Body

Film Criticism, 2007

Working Space: Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón 2013) and the Digital Long Take

The digital long take has been celebrated as an expression of the artistic and technical virtuosi... more The digital long take has been celebrated as an expression of the artistic and technical virtuosity of today’s auteur directors, and derided as a betrayal of the Bazinian long take’s capacity for realism. This chapter will interrogate both perspectives, examining the digital long take’s highly mobile camera movement, and its relationship to questions of labour, aesthetics, and narrative, in a comparative analysis of two key long takes from Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity (2013). It will suggest that Gravity’s characterisation of movement through space as laborious, and its gradual subversion of normative notions of vision and technology as superior forms of knowledge, construct a platform from which Gravity can explore alternative ways of negotiating the world of the film, and the digitally mediated world beyond it.

Activist, Mother, Filmmaker: Competing Transgressions in the Syrian War Documentary

Mediating War and Identity

This chapter examines the ways in which the Syrian War documentary has depicted and reflected upo... more This chapter examines the ways in which the Syrian War documentary has depicted and reflected upon the figure of the activist mother, and the competing concepts of personal and political transgression that cluster around her as she occupies fraught zones of conflict and its witnessing, mortal danger and forced migration. Through two case study films, A Syrian Love Story (Sean McAllister, UK, 2015), a British filmmaker’s account of the family of political prisoner Raghda Hasan as they negotiate living under Bashar al-Assad’s regime and eventually flee it; and For Sama (Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts, UK/Syria, 2019), a first person account of a Syrian activist journalist, Waad, who gives birth to and raises her child during the siege of Aleppo, the chapter explores the ethical and representational questions raised in this centring of the activist mother and her potential status as a transgressor of political and social norms. It also situates these activist mother films in the wider...

Square-jawed strength

Science Fiction Film & Television

When the astronaut is a woman