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.
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