Action Jackson
Now that I’m finally getting under way with my PhD, I thought I’d create a category dedicated to the subject. I hope to give frequent reports on my progress, partly to prevent myself from going insane and partly prove (to myself as much as anyone else) that I’m actually doing something.
This afternoon, I had my first actual meeting to discuss the project. As I previously mentioned, both of the supervisors to whom I had been assigned are currently on leave, which left me in the rather unfortunate position of not really having any idea of what I was going to do. Today, however, I sat down with the post-graduate convenor, who has offered to be my main supervisor for the first year of my research, and one of my original intended supervisors, who was good enough to come along despite being on leave, and we hashed out my road map for the coming weeks and months.
For the moment, the plan, in a manner of speaking, is to forget about the films themselves and concentrate on shoring up my knowledge of Italian cinema history and also Italy in the period in question (the late 60s and early 70s). By Christmas, I am to have made some definite decisions on my area of focus and research questions, but for the time being, I’m free to toss around any ideas that come to me during the course of my reading, and also watching films for my Giallo Project (sorry there haven’t been any reviews for that since One on Top of the Other - I’ve been a bit sidetracked). The two main things to decide on, as far as I can tell, is how I’m going to structure the thesis (my original proposal suggested a star-oriented approach, but two other possibilities that we kicked about today were to organise the project by directors or time periods), and which films I’m going to refer to. Obviously, the former is going to influence the latter a great deal: am I, for example, going to compare the output of a couple of directors, or a couple of stars, or two (or more) different periods in the giallo’s history?
Anyway, my supervisor has arranged a series of fortnightly meetings between myself and him, during which I’ll essentially provide a progress report and flag up any difficulties into which I’ve been running. That’s all for now.
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