Peter Verstraten is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

More information about Peter Verstraten

Fields of interest

• (Film) Narratology
• Modernism and postmodernism
• Psychoanalysis (and film)
• Questions of medium-specificity / word-image relations
• Dutch narrative cinema

Research

My three latest monographs are dedicated to Dutch fiction films. In 2022 I published a study (written in Dutch) about the ten films that Alex van Warmerdam made between 1986 and 2021. In my opinion he is the most prolific Dutch filmmaker in the last couple of decades, with such grandiose films such as Abel, De Noorderlingen and Borgman; the latter title was selected for the main competition at the Cannes film festival. I focused among others on his fondness for role-playing and I discussed his films in a sort of dialogue with other (international) pictures: Under the Skin, Teorema, Boudu sauvé des eaux, to name a few, but key is his affinity with the work of Luis Buňuel, which I already hinted at with the title of my study: Spookbeeld van de vrijheid can be translated as The Phantom of Liberty.
            The book on Van Warmerdam had been a follow-up to a lengthy study (in English), published at Amsterdam University Press in 2021: Dutch Post-war Fiction Films through a Lens of Psycho-analysis (526 pages). Actually, I call this study a ‘sequel’, for in it I examine a great number of titles (such as Soldaat van Oranje, Spoorloos, Antonia, De vliegende Hollander) that I could not include in my earlier book on Dutch cinema from 2016: Humour and Irony in Dutch Post-war Fiction Film (476 pages). Dutch cinema as an object of study has been largely overlooked in the academic arena, and my research over the last ten years can be taken as a (modest) attempt to fill that gap.
            I have regularly contributed to the online film journal Senses of Cinema (with articles on German cinema, on Belgian cinema), but some of these publications address Dutch cinema as well: on Koolhoven’s Brimstone, on Dutch films set in the East Indies, on work by Paul Verhoeven. In addition to that I also wrote an article on the ‘(un)ethical cinema’ of Cyrus Frisch for sabzian.be.
            As regards academic publications I have written on a great variety of films: on Kuba Mikurda’s experimental Solaris, Mon Amour (for Widok); on ‘code unknown’ cinema inspired by Dea Kulumbeghasvili’s Beginning (for EuropeNow); on both Paul Verhoeven’s De vierde man and Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch (for Journal of Dutch Literature); on Paul Schrader’s First Reformed; on the poetic cinema of Terrence Malick, and on the novelization of Fons Rademakers’ De dans van de reiger (all three for Image & Narrative).
            Eight noteworthy contributions to volumes (in English) comprise: a chapter on Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth; a chapter on the pros and cons of digitalization in cinema (with Giovanna Fossati); a chapter on multicultural Dutch comedies; a chapter on European remakes; a chapter on Godard’s Pierrot le fou; a chapter on Jonze’s Adaptation, a chapter on the short films in Varda’s Cléo, de 5 à 7 and Almodóvar’s Hable con ella, and a chapter on the melodrama of the unknown woman with reference to Trier’s Thelma. For the online journal Relief I wrote on Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927) and on early film fairy tales. In the past I wrote several articles for the Belgian journal rekto:verso (the latest one was dedicated to the Dutch film De oost from 2021), and I published essays in Dutch on Bergman’s Persona versus Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, on Kramer’s Ja zuster, nee zuster and Paul Verhoeven’s biography of Jesus.
            Moreover, since the summer of 2023 I write weekly columns (some 1300 words) for the website ugenda.nl, usually taking new releases as a starting-point.
           
Despite all this, many will perhaps consider my study Film Narratology as my key publication. An English edition was published by University of Toronto Press in 2009. The original Dutch version was published by Vantilt (in Nijmegen) in 2006 with a second revised and extended edition in 2008. Starting from Mieke Bal´s Narratology (1997), this study aims to apply her well-established method, originally developed within literary studies, to the field of film studies, keeping in mind that, to paraphrase Seymour Chatman, ‘there are certain things that novels can do and films cannot – and vice versa.’

Another publication that warrants mention is the volume  Shooting Time: Conservations on Cinematography (Rotterdam: Post Editions) in november 2012, which I edited with two directors of photography, Richard van Oosterhout and Maarten van Rossem. Hence, this book is a unique cooperation between an academic scholar and those who practice the craft of filmmaking. The general aim of the volume is to consider how (recent) technological developments affect the work of directors of photography. In addition to a foreword, focusing upon the debate of analog and digital cinema, the volume also features a lengthy essay I wrote on the history of style in art cinema. I consider this essay as some sort of position piece on what the study of film in Leiden entails. Other publications examine the relation between modernism and postmodernism, like the book  Celluloid echo’s (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2004).

Kernthema’s in de filmwetenschap is a book-length study with the aim to give an overview of tendencies within film studies from its nascent years in the 1960s until the present (2008, Amsterdam: Boom). This book contains a chapter on ‘psychoanalysis and film’, a subject to which I dedicated some essays for the series Psychoanalyse en Cultuur. I have been a co-editor to a number of volumes. Moreover, I am a moderator in a film theatre in Utrecht since 2014. I make a selection of six films that are discussed with the audience after the screening of the film. This initiative has become quite popular over the years.
 
Last but not least, I have a keen interest in genre cinema. My dissertation was on westerns,  Screening Cowboys (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 1999). Over the years I have published on science fiction, on disaster movies, on screwball comedies, on melodramas, among other about Douglas Sirk’s  Imitation of Life (in 2000), on postmodern romances, on James Bond (as a Tamagotchi). I have also contributed essays to the book-series Dit wil je weten, published by Maven, that had as one of its aims to communicate science to large audiences. For this series each and every time 100 people were contacted (artists, politicians, academics) to answer one particular question. I was chosen five times (out of five).
 

Curriculum Vitae

I am Assistant Professor as well as chair of Film and Literary Studies in Leiden. I am head of the programme of Film and Photographic Studies since 2010. When I came to Leiden in 2000, I also started working as a film lecturer in Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam until May 2003. I also taught courses at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (2010) and at the Emerson College, an auxiliary branch of a private University from Boston, located in a castle in Well (Limburg) in 2003. After the conferral of my doctorate at the University of Amsterdam in 1999, I worked as a quiz-editor for the IdTV television station for the programmes ‘Stop de Tijd’ (NCRV) and ‘Triviant’ (TROS)

Teaching activities

I teach among others:

• Theories of Film (MA Film and Photographic Studies)
• Literature and film
• Film history
• Approaches to Film
• Methodological Concepts in Literature and Art History (ResMa, with Anja Novak)

Publications

• Film Narratology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009) [translation of  Handboek filmnarratologie (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2008)
• Shooting Time: Conversation on Cinematography (Rotterdam: Post Editions, november 2012), co-edited with Richard van Oosterhout and Maarten van Rossem
• Kernthema’s in de filmwetenschap (Amsterdam: Boom, 2009)
• ‘A Cinema of Modernist Poetic Prose: On Antonioni and Malick,’  Image & Narrative 13 (2): pp. 117-132.
• Celluloid echo's: cinema kruist postmodernisme (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2004)