Seminar: The Elephant Man

In this seminar, we will discuss The Elephant Man, David Lynch's dark ode to spoiled identity and the grotesque. 

In Lynch's most dignified and mannered work, we see the director harnessing all the beautifying resources of studio filmmaking to craft a celebration of ugliness and the state of being screwed up. We will discuss the film's production as well as its textured visual and sound design to better understand how one of the most original filmmakers of his generation reimagined the life and story of Joseph Merrick.

ABOUT JONATHAN FOLTZ 

Jonathan Foltz is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Cinema & Media Studies Program at Boston University. He is the author of The Novel After Film (Oxford University Press, 2018), and studies the intertwined histories of film and literary modernism, as well as the poetics of contemporary cinema. He has published work on the experimental novels of Virginia Woolf; the “mistakist” cinema of Harmony Korine; the rise of film novelizations in the silent period; the contorted poetry of Charlie Chaplin; W. H. Auden’s lyrical documentary work; and the films of Carlos Reygadas, among other topics.  At BU, he offers courses on a range of topics, including film noir, avant-garde literature and film, the films of Terrence Malick, modernist literature, and film and media theory.  He is also a not-so-secret Lynch fanatic, who teaches a bizarro seminar on Twin Peaks once in a blue moon. You can read his take on Twin Peaks: The Return here.