Lost cinema: writing film and memoir in creative nonfiction

• Main Author: Slater, Benjamin
• Other Authors: Barrie Wayne Sherwood
• Format: Thesis-Doctor of Philosophy
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2025
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities; Cinema literature memoir nonfiction
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/182746
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

LOST CINEMA is an exploration of how a personal obsession with cinema and a sense of loss is expressed through Creative Nonfiction that combines film history, history, criticism, journalism and memoir. The creative work is a hybrid memoir which tracks my cinephilia (from childhood onwards) in relation to a variety of losses that are linked to or arise from cinema. This takes the form of a set of connected personal essays that encompass lost places, lost eras of film-going, lost formats of film, lost careers, lost friends, the loss of a parent, and the loss of films themselves. These narratives accumulate in ways that attempt to unravel the power of cinema and our relationship to it. The critical exegesis contextualises this work by investigating how Creative Nonfiction can be deployed to articulate cultural obsessions in juxtaposition to the author’s life. It identifies strategies for achieving this, then goes on to analyse a number of relevant CNF works, before reflecting on my own writing process and objectives. Integral to both the creative work and exegesis is the relationship between our losses, cinema and lost films in particular.