Today I want to share an interview with Mark Henrie on film director Whit Stillman’s approach to comedy and the overcoming of irony.
Mark C. Henrie is Senior Vice President and Chief Academic Officer at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. He is the editor of the Intercollegiate Review and executive editor of Modern Age and the Political Science Reviewer. Mark is the author of A Student’s Guide to the Core Curriculum and editor of Doomed Bourgeois in Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman and of Arguing Conservatism: Four Decades of the Intercollegiate Review. Here is a list of publications. He holds a PhD in political theory from Harvard and a graduate degree from Cambridge University.
Whit Stillman (b.1952) is an American writer-director who has filmed three comedies of manners comedies of manners (or “comedies of mannerlessness”): Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998); he also published a novel based on the last of these films. His Manhattan-based, mannerist comedies influenced the films of Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach.
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Anna M Blanch is founder of Goannatree, and a PhD student in the Institute of Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews, Scotland.