Brittany Utley: What sparked your interest in wanting to investigate Romanticism and its connection to film?
Will Kitchen: Pretty much all the work I’ve done since I started my film studies back in 2011 has been driven by a desire to connect existing interests. Romanticism, for me, came about primarily through an existing interest in music. I’ve always loved Romantic music, including Liszt and Beethoven, and I thought: “Is there a way I can connect that to the study of film? Pushing the idea of film as an interdisciplinary subject, can it be the ultimate synthesis of all the arts? And is there a way to connect these preexisting interests into some new contribution.” That initially took the direction of looking at representation – looking at the ways creative labor is represented in films through biopics, films about performing musicians, creativity, and genius – virtuosity, in a broad sense. But it also includes how classical music has a symbolic content. We go to see a film, for example, and the villain always loves classical music – that sort of thing. So I began to think about those very broad connections and how they become repeated and develop meanings that can expand, be communicated, and used. Of course, that leads to the idea of language more broadly, more “hardcore” film theory, and the theory of audiovisual explanation. My interests grew from exploring these various threads that lead off from this central, nebulous idea of Romanticism. It’s an area that’s leading to all kinds of fascinating topics, which I’ve explored across two books now, and there’s still a lot more work to be done.
BU: What further projects would you like to tackle to explore film and its relation to Romanticism?
WK: I’ve nearly finished a third book, and that’s all about the representation of creative labor more generally. So, I’m moving on from Romanticism and themes of freedom and philosophy toward politics, and the way that work and its values are represented in a host of different media. Not just looking at films, but also TV programs, literature, and historical discourse. Again, pushing that sense of interdisciplinarity, but still keeping that central narrative about the representation of “cultures of creative practice” – how people work, how people give value to the activities we do to see us through the day, or how we relate to the values that give direction to our lives: goals such as “wealth,” “success,” “fame,” “community” – all those various interconnected ideas, and how they are represented by modern media.
BU: Over the past year alone, there have been several TV shows and films that center on the topic of wealth and culture and what it does to a family dynamic, which is pretty integral to the capitalist world we live in.
WK: Absolutely. One of the themes I am exploring in the new book is this idea of “the Lesson of the Master.” It is derived from a Henry James short story, and it’s basically the idea that representations of people who are wealthy, successful, privileged in some way . . . how they are Othered, and shown to be living lives that are not that great, whatever it may be. They are either morally damaged or living through personal problems. Various things that make life not so wonderful for the 1 percent, after all. Media products that give us a window into that sort of world perform a double effect, where they not only allow us an opportunity to feel superior to them or to “carnivalize” the values that orchestrate their position at the top of the hierarchy, but also provide an opportunity for us to feel comfortable by not having achieved that kind of success for ourselves. It demythologizes the values of wealth. The book then explores how this Lesson is a kind of ideological mystification, and how the idea of a “carnivalesque” inversion may not be so positive a political effect, after all. That’s something I’m working on for the third book, though.
BU: What do you find that studying Romanticism offers to those who often study neorealism or other depictions of the “real?”
WK: There’s a distinction between form and content, which is quite useful here. I think of Romanticism as a formal thing, primarily. It does not necessarily deal with content in terms of realism or expressionism, tropes of death and nature, but the formal negation of historical categories of art and representation. Whatever the culture seems to be pushing, whether it be a realist aesthetic or an expressionist aesthetic, the alternative is that you negate that dominant idea and look for something different. So, it doesn’t matter if it’s new or old, as long as it’s different. Realism can be Romantic or anti-Romantic. Expressionism can be Romantic, it can be anti-Romantic. It all depends on the context of the historical representation of that concept. How it’s applied – the conflict between the individual and society, the universal and the particular – and how it manifests in a specific context.
It is very hard to pin down Romanticism to any kind of definition, but that’s the interpretation that makes the most sense to me. People apply it in so many different ways, too, and some of them have validity and allow us to approach interesting topics in new ways.
BU: Romanticism and Film examines a few composer biopics to explore audiovisual connections. Would you consider melodrama to be a place worth analyzing the connection between Romanticism and film?
WK: I don’t have much experience with melodrama, but I would imagine it is possible. If what I’ve said is correct, then you can find relevant themes wherever you look and they will raise different questions. I’ve examined films that are in some sense socially critical of things relating to the values of capitalism, work, and labor, and they’ve raised certain themes and topics related to genres such as satire. Melodrama will probably raise a different range of ideas depending on the interests a particular interpreter will bring to that genre.
BU: When you set out to write Romanticism and Film, did you hope to achieve something in particular?
WK: I tend not to be too directed by research questions. I like to write and read about things, follow a guiding interest, and see what happens. That’s why I’m not terribly good at getting research funding! Because what you do at the start is very different from what you get at the end. The planning doesn’t really matter. You’ve just got to get going and read, think, and write, and what you are talking about will develop itself over time. [For Romanticism and Film] there were no particular guiding questions except for a broad interest in the representation of classical music. What I ended up doing was something completely different from that. You’ve got to respect themes that emerge as you go and see how they connect. And also be open to the idea of completely changing what you are doing.
The first book I wrote was based on my PhD thesis. After three years, I had a clear title: “Franz Liszt and the Cinema.” Almost the last thing I did before submission was change the title, though, because that’s not what it was about anymore. That’s quite a good illustration of letting the work go where it needs to go, giving it the time and space it needs to develop, and answering the questions it has raised along the way.
I’m a big believer in the objectivity of the text. It’s not about what we are doing, as writers. We’re not just expressing ourselves. We are discovering something that’s growing independently of us – it lives beyond us. Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, has a “three-world theory”: there’s (1) the real world, (2) the subject, and (3) the world of objective knowledge – theories, books, ideas – that are created by the first two worlds interacting. There are consequences of people’s theories that the creators are not aware of. You can interpret something independently of all intention because the book is its own living thing which has its own truth, and the author may not even be aware of its full potential of meaning.
BU: Your latest book, Film, Negation and Freedom: Capitalism and Romantic Critique is out now from Bloomsbury. How did the work you accomplished with Romanticism and Film prepare you for its research?
WK: It was basically a change of focus from interpretation and discourse – from a method of textual analysis to questions of morality, politics, and philosophy. Film, Negation and Freedom – I love a pretentious title! – I wanted to write something that was dealing with big questions people tend to avoid if they’re not really engaged with them. Lindsay Anderson, one of the case studies in the book, was always writing about topics like “freedom,” “justice,” and “revolution.” In a sense, Romanticism is driven by those big concepts that connect everything: science, philosophy, religion, politics. The book adopts some quite specific case studies in Lindsay Anderson and Arthur Penn, looking at their similarities, their critique of capitalism, a lack of faith in revolutionary praxis, the historical context (the 1960s counterculture), and links to the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Having that shared context as a grounding mechanism holds the book’s themes together. Then I explore some of the connections that appeared in the first book about Romanticism and critical philosophy – the connection between the critique of capitalism in Frankfurt School critical theory and Jacques Rancière. A lot of these connections were coming up whilst writing the first book, and I wanted to devote a specific project to exploring them historically.
One of the book’s aims is a short history of what I call “critical philosophy,” running from Kant through Popper, the critical theorists, up to Neo-Marxism and Post-Althusserian Marxism. It’s also an interpretation of freedom under capitalism and the doctrine of action – exploring how all representation is a kind of compromise with objective truth – something that is rooted in Kantian realism. There we see that it also looks at Kantian philosophy not as an “idealism,” but as a “realism.” The imposition of the will on objective reality, subject and object – all this connects back to the theory of film developed from Rancière. My work is based very firmly on his ideas.
“If all films are Romantic at the level implied by Rancière’s theory of film, then can we find a way of saying that some films are more Romantic than others? Does that still hold water as an approach?” Then, moving on to look at those individual case studies, which explore the questions raised in more detail: “How does the representative regime impose narrative and order on these stories? Will it always come back to thwart the images of freedom we discover (in those films by Penn and Anderson) – the inappropriate interruptions being subsumed, once again, into the explanations provided by the stories themselves?”
It was quite a different approach, but one still very much grounded in continental philosophy. It was an experiment that seemed necessary in order to do justice to some of the ideas that continually come up when thinking about Romanticism. Romanticism is not a terribly attractive topic, so finding ways to make it accessible and relevant today is important. The current academic culture presents a big challenge, and I’m interested in not only meeting that through film and philosophy, but also political economy and sociology. There are a number of different areas I’m exploring at the moment for future books which will extend these themes, including religion, labor, and class – many possibilities that I find very exciting!
Romanticism and Film: Franz Liszt and Audio-Visual Explanation and Film, Negation and Freedom: Capitalism and Romantic Critique are now available from Bloomsbury.
Author Biography
Brittany Utley, an assistant editor for Film Matters, is a current Film Studies graduate student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington; she received her undergraduate degree in English from Bridgewater College in 2017.
