David Hare as screenwriter: The playwright and genre film.

My dissertation examines David Hare's television and feature films. Although Hare is recognized as one of England's eminent contemporary playwrights, his screenplays are usually described as extensions of his stage work. These films represent important examples of Hare's artistic flexibility, however, for they exploit the archetypcal structures of American genre films to expand his vision of personal despair beyond contemporary England. Hare's plays are known for their scathing attacks on post-World War II Britain's moral and political decline. The primary challenge he has set for himself throughout his career is to present the effects of this decline on the personal lives of his characters, while maintaining his social critique. His films also explore this decline through classic film genres, in order to arouse and then subvert his audience's expectations about the closure and resolution of his films. His feature film Wetherby, for instance, is structured like a mystery thriller, but finally rejects this genre's assumptions about society's ability to cleanse itself. Wetherby becomes a more powerful critique because of its implicit comparison with a form which ends with social reformation. Hare's other films exploit the stylistic and structural conventions of genre film in a similar fashion. Although Hare's films are worth studying in their own right, they are most important for the role they play in Hare's entire body of work. The film camera allows him to explore social issues on more intimate levels, while his genre form recalls a larger, generic, world. Increasingly in the last seven years, Hare has recreated this intimacy onstage through a number of techniques, including the rich and evocative language of characters speaking directly to the audience. Hare once said that "an idea must find its own shape." In his search for the best shapes for his ideas, Hare continues to explore ways his work in film can enrich his plays.PhDEnglish Language and LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/103391/1/9319513.pdfDescription of 9319513.pdf : Restricted to UM users only