Skip to main content

Nathan Holmes

SUNY: Purchase College, Cinema Studies, Associate Professor

Followers

163

Following

103

Co-authors

2

Public Views

I received my PhD in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, then moved on to become a post-doctoral researcher with the Michigan-Mellon Project on Egalitarianism and the Metropolis at the University of Michigan. I have taught classes in film, media, and cultural studies at the University of Iowa, Loyola University, University of New Brunswick, and Baruch College. I am currently an editor at Mediapolis: The Journal of Cities and Culture.

less

Andrew Pendakis

Brock University

Sovet Sadyrsson

Yokohama National University

Hunter College

Vitor Fernandes

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

David Scott Diffrient

Colorado State University

Claire Sisco King

Vanderbilt University

Mikki Kressbach

Loyola Marymount University

Katarzyna Paszkiewicz

Universitat de les Illes Balears

InterestsView All (16)

Uploads

Papers by Nathan Holmes

The Mise-en-scène of a Decade: Visualizing the 70s

The copyright for each article belongs to the author and has been published in this journal under... more The copyright for each article belongs to the author and has been published in this journal under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives 3.0 license that allows others to share for non-commercial purposes the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. The content of this article represents the author's original work and any third-party content, either image or text, has been included under the Fair Dealing exception in the Canadian Copyright Act, or the author has provided the required publication permissions.

Highways through the void: chase sequences and the built environment

New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2022

This essay offers an account of the persistence of the chase sequence. Tracing the histories and ... more This essay offers an account of the persistence of the chase sequence. Tracing the histories and theories of the chase as a cine-genre and analyzing its recurrence within Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film, I argue that the chase sequence's continued appeal is rooted in its unique connection to the built environment, and can be seen as a generic form for cinema's staging of the interplay between the abstract forces that produce this environment and the concrete experiences of a physical world that is overwritten by these forces.

Towards a catalogue of cine-genres

New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2022

We all know a genre when we see one.

The Limits and Possibilities of Suburban Iconoclasm: Surburbicon and 99 Homes

Race and the Suburbs in American Film , 2021

Highways through the void: chase sequences and the built environment

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Towards a catalogue of cine-genres

New Review of Film and Television Studies

9. Rudolf Arnheim: Cinema and Partial Illusion

Deep Backgrounds: Landscapes of Labor in All the President’s Men

Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies/revue d'études interculturelle de l'image

Publication details, including open access policy and instructions for contributors: The Mise-en-... more

8. Curtiz at Sea: Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, The Sea Wolf, and The Breaking Point

The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz

Welcome to fear city: crime film, crisis and the urban imagination

Revista ECO-Pós

O livro Welcome to fear city: crime film, crisis and the urban imagination apresenta uma análise ... more O livro Welcome to fear city: crime film, crisis and the urban imagination apresenta uma análise histórica e estética de filmes policiais de locação produzidos na década de 1970 nos Estados Unidos da América. Ao discorrer sobre crises urbanas do período, refletidas em novas paisagens arquitetônicas, destaques da imprensa e movimentos sociopolíticos, Nathan Holmes argumenta que os filmes de crime, em sua diversidade, tocaram os espaços públicos de maneira contundente, inclusive contrastando a vivacidade e desordem dos centros urbanos com a gradativa homogeneização suburbana.

Linda Williams. On “The Wire.” Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. 280 pp

Critical Inquiry, 2016

Pleasures of the Big Sleep

Cineaction, Mar 22, 2005

Perhaps the most remarked upon aspect of Howard Hawks' 1946 film The Big Sleep is its labyrin... more Perhaps the most remarked upon aspect of Howard Hawks' 1946 film The Big Sleep is its labyrinthine storyline. The oft quoted tale is that it was asked on set one day who was supposed to have killed Owen Taylor, the Sternwood family's chauffeur: neither Faulkner, the scriptwriter at the time, nor Hawks, nor Raymond Chandler, the author of the book upon which the film is based, is said to have known the answer. On one level this is just the sort of trivia--the sort that is brought up impishly in interviews or placed in little nuggets on the back of DVD reissues--that seems to pass these days for Hollywood "lore." On a distinctly different level, however, this little anecdote seems to be a very specific way of dealing with the difficulties presented by this film--not just the difficulty of making precise connections between characters or between the cause and effect of events but the difficulty of watching a film which seems to make few concessions to the reasoning spectator while being at the same time--to the same reasoning spectator--so pleasurable to watch. It is perhaps the case for some that The Big Sleep frustrates more than it pleases. But it is a common misconception that there are questions left unresolved at the end of the film. Owen Taylor's murderer is in fact named, as is Arthur Geiger's and Sean Regan's. Knowing these facts does not in itself provide resolution however--at least not the sort of resolution that we commonly expect from popular cinema. By the end of the film Philip Marlowe (Bogart) and Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) are together and, for the time being, questions have been dealt with and danger has subsided. But if we accept that narratives and stories generally take us through observations in order to go somewhere, where exactly have we gone? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Big Sleep provides a singular cinematic experience, one which is both familiar and very strange. It is familiar because we see recognizable figures (a private investigator [Bogart] and a rich young woman [Bacall]) moving within a mise-en-scene established by commonly understood cinematic codes (medium, eye-level shots and shot-reverse shots for conversations) and taken into interiors and exteriors set at Warner Bros. studios. Even the story--which, it seems, is the problematic object to be reckoned with here--moves forward in a logical enough fashion: things happen for specific reasons and cause other things to happen. As Annette Kuhn writes, "a close study of the plot of the film shows that the renowned confusion may well be more apparent than real: or rather that it may reside in a relation of reader and text more than solely within the internal dynamic of the text" (4). Our confusion then, might be said to stem from a cinematic encounter that fails to provide the embrace to which we've become accustomed in popular narratives: the familiar rhythms and the facile expositions that guide us through our pleasurable excursions. It is here, though, that the story itself is roughly equivalent to the atmosphere in which these scenes take place. The darkness and cynicism which seems to inflect the film--through both tone and dialogue--produces a sort of nightmarish quality and is refracted into a storyline wherein moving forward is not necessarily progression and where questions increase exponentially even as their answers seem to draw closer. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In what follows, I would like to address these ideas more closely and meditate on what it might mean for a film to adopt a narrative structure that resists an immediate coherence. While it is true that viewers may resolve confusions stemming from the story by retracing their way through it, to do so is not necessarily to watch the film anymore. As Leigh Brackett, one of the film's primary scriptwriters, has commented on Chandler's book: "It's a confusing book if you sit down and tear it apart. When you read it from page to page it moves so beautifully that you don't care, but if you start tearing it apart to see what makes it tick it becomes unglued" (McCarthy 381). …

Deep Backgrounds: Landscapes of Labour in ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN

by Nathan Holmes and Colin Williamson

Although commonly understood as journalistic thriller tied to the historical realities of the Wat... more Although commonly understood as journalistic
thriller tied to the historical realities of the Watergate investigation, Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men is deeply imbricated in contemporaneous ideas about office design and white collar labor. Drawing on the film’s production history, as well as discourses around knowledge work, office furnishings, and the changing role of paper in office work, this essay places All the President’s Men along a different historical trajectory, one in which Hollywood cinema elaborates, expressively re-stages,
and fantasizes the white-collar workspace.

Rudolf Arnheim: Cinema and Partial Illusion

From Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice, eds. Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer, ... more

Curtiz at Sea: CAPTAIN BLOOD, THE SEA HAWK, THE SEA WOLF, and THE BREAKING POINT

...At sea, the boat is physically distant from the homes of its passengers, yet it is also called... more ...At sea, the boat is physically distant from the homes of its passengers, yet it is also called on to represent the identity and values of the home territory through flags, protocols, and missions. This distance, however, also produces distortion and atrophy. Clung to through tokens and protocols, the outside world becomes inverted, contested, and re-formed. Thus, while the boat is a microcosm of nation, civilization, inhabitation, and culture, it is also where these categories begin to shift, and, seen from an external point-of-view that is always “outside of all places,” is understood in new ways...

Review of ON THE WIRE by Linda Williams (Critical Inquiry, 2015)

Review of HOLLYWOOD'S LAST GOLDEN AGE by Jonathan Kirshner (Journal of American Studies, 48.1, February 2014)

Playing House: Screen Teens and the Dreamworld of Suburbia

Other by Nathan Holmes

The Mise-en-scène of a Decade: Visualizing the 70s (Special Issue)

by Andrew Pendakis and Nathan Holmes

Imaginations , 2018

CFP - The Mise-en-scène of a Decade: Visualizing the 1970s | Imaginations Journal

by Nathan Holmes and Andrew Pendakis

The Mise-en-scène of a Decade: Visualizing the 70s

The copyright for each article belongs to the author and has been published in this journal under... more The copyright for each article belongs to the author and has been published in this journal under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives 3.0 license that allows others to share for non-commercial purposes the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. The content of this article represents the author's original work and any third-party content, either image or text, has been included under the Fair Dealing exception in the Canadian Copyright Act, or the author has provided the required publication permissions.

Highways through the void: chase sequences and the built environment

New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2022

This essay offers an account of the persistence of the chase sequence. Tracing the histories and ... more This essay offers an account of the persistence of the chase sequence. Tracing the histories and theories of the chase as a cine-genre and analyzing its recurrence within Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film, I argue that the chase sequence's continued appeal is rooted in its unique connection to the built environment, and can be seen as a generic form for cinema's staging of the interplay between the abstract forces that produce this environment and the concrete experiences of a physical world that is overwritten by these forces.

Towards a catalogue of cine-genres

New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2022

We all know a genre when we see one.

The Limits and Possibilities of Suburban Iconoclasm: Surburbicon and 99 Homes

Race and the Suburbs in American Film , 2021

Highways through the void: chase sequences and the built environment

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Towards a catalogue of cine-genres

New Review of Film and Television Studies

9. Rudolf Arnheim: Cinema and Partial Illusion

Deep Backgrounds: Landscapes of Labor in All the President’s Men

Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies/revue d'études interculturelle de l'image

Publication details, including open access policy and instructions for contributors: The Mise-en-... more

8. Curtiz at Sea: Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, The Sea Wolf, and The Breaking Point

The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz

Welcome to fear city: crime film, crisis and the urban imagination

Revista ECO-Pós

O livro Welcome to fear city: crime film, crisis and the urban imagination apresenta uma análise ... more O livro Welcome to fear city: crime film, crisis and the urban imagination apresenta uma análise histórica e estética de filmes policiais de locação produzidos na década de 1970 nos Estados Unidos da América. Ao discorrer sobre crises urbanas do período, refletidas em novas paisagens arquitetônicas, destaques da imprensa e movimentos sociopolíticos, Nathan Holmes argumenta que os filmes de crime, em sua diversidade, tocaram os espaços públicos de maneira contundente, inclusive contrastando a vivacidade e desordem dos centros urbanos com a gradativa homogeneização suburbana.

Linda Williams. On “The Wire.” Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. 280 pp

Critical Inquiry, 2016

Pleasures of the Big Sleep

Cineaction, Mar 22, 2005

Perhaps the most remarked upon aspect of Howard Hawks' 1946 film The Big Sleep is its labyrin... more Perhaps the most remarked upon aspect of Howard Hawks' 1946 film The Big Sleep is its labyrinthine storyline. The oft quoted tale is that it was asked on set one day who was supposed to have killed Owen Taylor, the Sternwood family's chauffeur: neither Faulkner, the scriptwriter at the time, nor Hawks, nor Raymond Chandler, the author of the book upon which the film is based, is said to have known the answer. On one level this is just the sort of trivia--the sort that is brought up impishly in interviews or placed in little nuggets on the back of DVD reissues--that seems to pass these days for Hollywood "lore." On a distinctly different level, however, this little anecdote seems to be a very specific way of dealing with the difficulties presented by this film--not just the difficulty of making precise connections between characters or between the cause and effect of events but the difficulty of watching a film which seems to make few concessions to the reasoning spectator while being at the same time--to the same reasoning spectator--so pleasurable to watch. It is perhaps the case for some that The Big Sleep frustrates more than it pleases. But it is a common misconception that there are questions left unresolved at the end of the film. Owen Taylor's murderer is in fact named, as is Arthur Geiger's and Sean Regan's. Knowing these facts does not in itself provide resolution however--at least not the sort of resolution that we commonly expect from popular cinema. By the end of the film Philip Marlowe (Bogart) and Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) are together and, for the time being, questions have been dealt with and danger has subsided. But if we accept that narratives and stories generally take us through observations in order to go somewhere, where exactly have we gone? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Big Sleep provides a singular cinematic experience, one which is both familiar and very strange. It is familiar because we see recognizable figures (a private investigator [Bogart] and a rich young woman [Bacall]) moving within a mise-en-scene established by commonly understood cinematic codes (medium, eye-level shots and shot-reverse shots for conversations) and taken into interiors and exteriors set at Warner Bros. studios. Even the story--which, it seems, is the problematic object to be reckoned with here--moves forward in a logical enough fashion: things happen for specific reasons and cause other things to happen. As Annette Kuhn writes, "a close study of the plot of the film shows that the renowned confusion may well be more apparent than real: or rather that it may reside in a relation of reader and text more than solely within the internal dynamic of the text" (4). Our confusion then, might be said to stem from a cinematic encounter that fails to provide the embrace to which we've become accustomed in popular narratives: the familiar rhythms and the facile expositions that guide us through our pleasurable excursions. It is here, though, that the story itself is roughly equivalent to the atmosphere in which these scenes take place. The darkness and cynicism which seems to inflect the film--through both tone and dialogue--produces a sort of nightmarish quality and is refracted into a storyline wherein moving forward is not necessarily progression and where questions increase exponentially even as their answers seem to draw closer. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In what follows, I would like to address these ideas more closely and meditate on what it might mean for a film to adopt a narrative structure that resists an immediate coherence. While it is true that viewers may resolve confusions stemming from the story by retracing their way through it, to do so is not necessarily to watch the film anymore. As Leigh Brackett, one of the film's primary scriptwriters, has commented on Chandler's book: "It's a confusing book if you sit down and tear it apart. When you read it from page to page it moves so beautifully that you don't care, but if you start tearing it apart to see what makes it tick it becomes unglued" (McCarthy 381). …

Deep Backgrounds: Landscapes of Labour in ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN

by Nathan Holmes and Colin Williamson

Although commonly understood as journalistic thriller tied to the historical realities of the Wat... more Although commonly understood as journalistic
thriller tied to the historical realities of the Watergate investigation, Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men is deeply imbricated in contemporaneous ideas about office design and white collar labor. Drawing on the film’s production history, as well as discourses around knowledge work, office furnishings, and the changing role of paper in office work, this essay places All the President’s Men along a different historical trajectory, one in which Hollywood cinema elaborates, expressively re-stages,
and fantasizes the white-collar workspace.

Rudolf Arnheim: Cinema and Partial Illusion

From Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice, eds. Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer, ... more

Curtiz at Sea: CAPTAIN BLOOD, THE SEA HAWK, THE SEA WOLF, and THE BREAKING POINT

...At sea, the boat is physically distant from the homes of its passengers, yet it is also called... more ...At sea, the boat is physically distant from the homes of its passengers, yet it is also called on to represent the identity and values of the home territory through flags, protocols, and missions. This distance, however, also produces distortion and atrophy. Clung to through tokens and protocols, the outside world becomes inverted, contested, and re-formed. Thus, while the boat is a microcosm of nation, civilization, inhabitation, and culture, it is also where these categories begin to shift, and, seen from an external point-of-view that is always “outside of all places,” is understood in new ways...

Review of ON THE WIRE by Linda Williams (Critical Inquiry, 2015)

Review of HOLLYWOOD'S LAST GOLDEN AGE by Jonathan Kirshner (Journal of American Studies, 48.1, February 2014)

Playing House: Screen Teens and the Dreamworld of Suburbia

The Mise-en-scène of a Decade: Visualizing the 70s (Special Issue)

by Andrew Pendakis and Nathan Holmes

Imaginations , 2018

CFP - The Mise-en-scène of a Decade: Visualizing the 1970s | Imaginations Journal

by Nathan Holmes and Andrew Pendakis

Welcome to Fear City: Crime Film, Crisis, and the Urban Imagination (forthcoming from SUNY Press 2018)