Alan O’Leary

Alan O’Leary is Professor in Film and Cultural Studies in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds. He has written or co-edited several books and many articles on Italian and other cinemas and is a published videoessayist. He is currently collaborating with Danish dance artist Marie Hallager Andersen on practice-research project ‘Parameters & Practice’.

Classif. & Me (Laird’s Constraint)

VIDEO-ESSAY. ‘Classif. & Me’ analyses the opening montage from The Big Short (Adam McKay, 2015) and is modelled on the analysis performed by Colleen Laird of Helter Skelter (Ninagawa Mika, 2012) in her virtuoso 2023 video essay ‘Eye-Camera-Ninagawa’. Riffing on Laird’s work allows Alan O’Leary to protest and playfully satirize certain scientific aspirations in videographic criticism.

169 Seconds: 2008 – A Crisis Glossary

169 SECONDS. Alan O’Leary’s 169 Seconds: 2008 – A Crisis Glossary deals with two films on the 2008 financial crash, Too Big To Fail (2011) and The Big Short (2015). The video essay ambivalently foregrounds the pleasure that the films provide by granting access to a masculine world of jargon and capital. Financial terms are combined alphabetically for an absurd experience that perhaps makes a nonsense of its subject.

No Voiding Time: A Deformative Videoessay

VIDEO-ESSAY. Deformative criticism is a playful approach to film analysis that creates a new aesthetic object from the film being analysed. In ‘No Voiding Time’, Alan O’Leary divides Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice into its individual component shots on four screens and treats the sound for musicality rather than sense. The result is an absurdist artefact that celebrates an already perplexing film.