Charles O'Brien

Associate Professor, Film Studies

School for Studies in Art and Culture
434 St. Patrick’s Building
Carleton University
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6

Tel: (613) 520-2600 x 8319
Fax: (613) 520-3575
Email: charles_obrien@carleton.ca

Charles O’Brien came to Carleton in 1994, after receiving his Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Iowa in 1992.  He is currently (Sept.-Dec. 2007) teaching Introduction to Film Studies and a graduate seminar on Cinema and Modernism.  Courses scheduled for Jan.-April 2008 include a second-year Film Authors course on Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd.

Since arriving at Carleton O’Brien has been awarded a Chateaubriand Fellowship;  a residential fellowship at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France;  and three research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.   In 2006 O’Brien was appointed Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., where he spent the 2006-2007 academic year.

O’Brien’s publications include Cinema’s Conversion to Sound:  Technology and Film Style in France and the United States (Indiana U. Press, 2005), as well as articles and book chapters on various topics, including:  film colour before WWI;  French and German film versions of Weill-Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper;  the statistical analysis of film style;  film noir’s beginnings in 1930s France;  the film-theoretical implications of Susan Sontag’s film criticism;  voice-dubbing practices;  the reception of Hollywood musicals in 1930s France;  French films of the German occupation;  film and electrification in Europe and North America prior to WWI;  and films set in the French colonies.  His translations include Francesco Casetti’s Inside the Gaze (1996). 

Forthcoming publications include:   an article on the pre-World War I sound-film systems of Oskar Messter, Léon Gaumont, and Thomas Edison, presented at the Domitor conference on early cinema at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in June 2006;  and an article on the dubbed French version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Waltzes from Vienna (1934), based on research presented in March 2007 at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Chicago and in September at the conference on Anglo-French film relations at the University of Southampton.  

O’Brien is now working on a new book, “Musical Films across the Atlantic,” which examines the work of American and European filmmakers devoted to making musical films for export, and how these filmmakers solved formal problems stemming from the commercial demand during the early 1930s to interpolate recorded pop songs into narrative films.   The book draws on a filmography comprised of 400 films made in Britain, France, Germany and the U.S. during 1928-1933.

Addressed to the non-specialist public are two recent works:  an 18-minute “bonus feature” devoted to the French and German versions of Pabst’s The Threepenny Opera (1931), on the recent dvd release from the Criterion Collection (September 2007);  and a talk titled “Edward Hopper Goes to the Movies:  Silence and Sound in Painting and Film,” delivered on 4 November at the National Gallery of Art, as part of the “Auditorium lecture Series” and in connection with the Gallery’s Edward Hopper exhibition.  An additional project at the National Gallery of Art, scheduled for June 2009, concerns film color before 1915.

Upcoming conference talks include presentations in March 2008 at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Philadelphia, on song sequences in The Blue Angel (1930), and in June 2008 at the Domitor conference in Perpignan (pending acceptance by the conference committee), on cinematography and lighting in D. W. Griffith’s shorts relative to regional patterns of electrification.    

Recent publications:

“Pathécolor in North America, 1907-1914.”  in Frank Kessler and Nanna Verhoeff , eds. 
Networks of Entertainment:  Early Film Distribution, 1895-1915.  London:  John Libby Ltd., 2007.  31-38.

 “Susan Sontag’s Erotics of Film Style:  Between Meaning and Presence” 
In Post-Script 26, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 2007):  41-51.  

 “Za komparativní histororiografii:  rozhlas, film a gramophone v meziválečné Británii,
Německu a Francii”  [“Radio, Film and Gramophone in Interwar Britain, Germany, and France.”]  In Illuminace 3, no. 3 (2006):  55-67.   [Illuminace is the quarterly journal of the Czech Film Archive in Prague.] 

“Versionen, Radio und Grammophon:  Die 3-Groschen-Oper and L’opéra de
quat’ sous.”  in FilmEuropa Babylon:  Mehrsprachenversionen der 1930er Jahre in Europa.  Jan Distelmeyer, ed..   Munich:  text + kritik, 2006.  123-132.