Tyler Parks

Dr. Tyler Munroe Parks is a Lecturer in Film Studies and has been at the University of St Andrews since 2018. His research and teaching interests include environmental film history and theory, global art cinema, and East Asian cinemas, especially Japanese and Taiwanese.

His research on film and the environment is oriented around two topics. The first is the increasing number of ecologically minded landscape films produced since the final decades of the 20^th-century. This work is especially concerned with moving image works that employ text and image in ways that position them somewhere between documentary and experimental film, while requiring viewers to negotiate information about places viewed in ways that make them reflect on the cultural input on their supposedly natural responses to landscape.  

The other topic relates to environmental film history, focusing on the production and promotional use of films by institutions that have worked to both alter and preserve landscapes. His research in this vein is focused on films made by the US Department of the Interior, especially those about water projects (such as dams) by the US Bureau of Reclamation, and those made by and for the National Park Service about the parks of the American West.

As concerns global art cinema, Dr Parks is currently completing a monograph for Edinburgh University Press called Unnatural Experiences: Subject Style in 2000s Art Cinema. It examines the changing uses, interpretations, and valuations of of subjective style in art films during the first decade of the 21st-century. The monograph builds its arguments through examing work by filmmakers such as Lucrecia Martel, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Lynne Ramsay, and Wong Kar-wai, as well as its critical reception.  

Finally, Dr Parks also researches and teaches on topics related to Japanese and Taiwanese cinemas, with particular interests being the negotiation of various filmmakers with processes of modernisation and legacies of (neo)-colonialism, and the atmospheric shaping of sense of place. 

He teaches on all of these topics and a number of others, such as Cinema and Travel, Film Theory, Sensory Cinema, and Political Cinemas. 

Environmental Film History and Theory; Global Art Cinema; East Asian Cinemas

cinema and place; environmental film history; global art cinema; East Asian cinema (especially Japanese and Taiwanese); atmosphere and landscape studies; experimental documentary and educational film