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I am deeply honoured to have been invited to speak at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in April of this year. My guest lecture to the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, entitled “Go West, Comrade! Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western”, will take place on Monday 16th April. The abstract is below:
A heavily-armed battalion of communist students, led … Continue reading Go West, Comrade… to Tennessee! I’ll be addressing the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) annual conference in Boston, Massachusetts, which runs from March 21st-25th at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel and Towers. My paper is entitled “Italian Americanisms: Popular Italian Cinema in the Light of the Transnational”, and the abstract is as follows: Defining the “popular” cinematic product has always been a fraught … Continue reading Italian Americanisms @ SCMS I’ll be presenting a paper to the annual conference of the UK’s Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) at the University of Bedfordshire in January. My paper is entitled ‘Il cinema all’americana? Defining the Transnational “Popular”‘. It seeks to recalibrate the discourse surrounding popular Italian cinema by suggesting that, in the socio-cultural climate of 1960s Italy’s rapid transition … Continue reading “Il cinema all’americana” @ MeCCSA I have written a short taster article for my forthcoming book, Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema. The article addresses the confused political agenda at the heart of Sergio Sollima’s Faccia a faccia (1967), and is up on the IB Tauris website, should you be interested. Read it here: Radical Frontiers – Faccia a faccia
Continue reading Radical Frontiers Taster Article Online I shall be giving a talk examining Giulio Petroni’s Tepepa (1969) as a site of contested cultural memory to the 2011 Society for Italian Studies Biennial Conference, at the University of St. Andrews (6-9 July). The abstract is below.
La resistenza popolare: Transcultural Memory in Giulio Petroni’s Tepepa That memories of the partisan movement played an important role in the … Continue reading “La resistenza popolare” @ SIS, St Andrews I shall be giving a talk on the cult cachet of Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966) to the fifth annual “Cine Excess” conference in May 2011, and Django himself will be in attendance! Guests of honour and veritable giants of cult Italian cinema Franco Nero and Ruggero Deodato will be the main attractions amidst leading cult film scholars and critics. The … Continue reading “A Cult Called Django” @ Cine Excess My latest article, ‘Go West, Comrade: Unearthing Politics in the Spaghetti Western’, has been published on the world’s foremost Euro Western fan site: the Spaghetti Western Database. I suggest therein that the political significance of the leftist Spaghettis that emerged in and around the era of protest (1966-1970) lies in their propensity towards ideological over-simplification, which directly reflects an equivalent outlook … Continue reading Go West, Comrade… on the Spaghetti Western Database! Though I had rather forgotten the fact, my Masters dissertation – “Sergio Leone and the Western Myth: Reading the Ritual” – is online for all to peruse. I wrote it almost ten years ago and much of it makes me cringe these days (I very much hope that my writing has improved since then!), but in the interests of open … Continue reading “Sergio Leone and the Western Myth” My article, “Out West, Down South: Gazing at America in Reverse Shot through Damiano Damiani’s Quien sabe?” (The Italianist, (30:2) 2010) is now available for all to read and download free of charge, should you so wish. You can download the article in pdf format here, or just read it here:
Continue reading “Out West, Down South” – Open Access My latest article, on the cinematographic nuances of Damiano Damiani’s political Italian Western Quien sabe? (1966), appears in this summer’s edition of The Italianist. This publication has become established as one of the leading international journals of Italian Studies. The annual Film Issue provides an outlet for research into an aspect of the discipline that has increasingly occupied scholars … Continue reading “Out West, Down South” in The Italianist. “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME Sergio Martino’s Mannaja / A Man Called Blade (1977) is about as entertaining a death-rattle as one might hope to encounter, but a terminal gurgle it remains. The Italian Western phenomenon had persisted, in … Continue reading Mannaja: A Spaghetti Valediction I am currently editing the “Spaghetti Westerns” chapter of Intellect Books’ forthcoming Directory of World Cinema: Italy. I am therefore on the lookout for scholarly submissions for consideration in this exciting new project, which will be published both as a printed volume and an open-access database of articles and film reviews. Submission Guidelines: If you are interested in submitting reviews, please email … Continue reading Call For Papers – Spaghetti Western Reviews Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, edited by Iain Robert Smith, is now online. This exciting new eBook of original scholarship on processes of adaptation in film, television and new media is a special edition of the peer-reviewed journal Scope: an Online Journal of Film and TV Studies. It includes my own article “A Marxist’s Gotta Do What a … Continue reading “A Marxist’s Gotta Do What a Marxist’s Gotta Do” “Society”, opines Reinhard Kolldehoff’s gleefully shady lawyer, “has many ways of defending itself: red tape, prison bars and the revolver”. His line serves a dual purpose. On a narrative level, it suggests to the key protagonist Vito Cipriani (Oliver Reed) the futility of resistance against the state apparatus facing him. Additionally, it provides an extra-diegetic platform upon which director Sergio Sollima … Continue reading Raging Against La Macchina: Transatlantic Dietrologia in Sergio Sollima’s “Revolver” |
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