I research, write, and teach on European and American cinema, with a strong focus on Italian cinema and avant garde/experimental cinemas. My most recent book is Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), which brings together film history, film theory and architectural history. My interest in cinema’s intersection with architecture, place, and the built environment is also in evidence in my first book, Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and two edited collections: Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and Antonioni: Centenary Essays (BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Other publications include Meshes of the Afternoon (BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and an edited a collection of essays on Michael Haneke: On Michael Haneke (Wayne State University Press, 2010). I am currently working on a book on the prop in cinema, which I am writing with Elena Gorfinkel, and several other projects that are concerned, variously, with style and labour, the history of Rome in cinema, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. I am a founding co-editor of the online film, visual and literary theory journal World Picture.
Contact details:
Corpus Christi College
Trumpington Street
University of Cambridge
CB2 1RH
Published works:
Books
- Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
- Meshes of the Afternoon (BFI Film Classics/British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) [New edition, with foreword (BFI Film Classics/Bloomsbury, 2020)].
- Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (University of Minnesota Press, 2007)
Books – Edited Collections
- Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image, co-edited with Elena Gorfinkel (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
- Michelangelo Antonioni: Centenary Essays, co-edited with Laura Rascaroli (British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
- On Michael Haneke, co-edited with Brian Price (Wayne State University Press, 2010)
Articles – Book Chapters
- ‘Passing Through: The Black Maid in the Cinematic Suburbs, 1948-1949’. Race and the Suburbs in American Film, Merrill Schleier, ed. Albany: SUNY Press, 2021. 31-52.
- ‘Dante on Screen’. The Oxford Handbook of Dante, Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 619-33.
- ‘Architectures of Ubiquity: The Colonial Revival in Film and Television’. Film and Domestic Space: Architectures, Representations, Dispositif, Stefano Baschiera and Miriam De Rosa, eds. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.16-36.
- ‘L’avventura’. Italian Cinema from the Silent Screen to the Digital Image, Joseph Luzzi, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. 329-334.
- ‘D’Errico’s Stramilano’. The City Symphony Phenomenon, Steven Jacobs, Anthony Klinik and Eva Hielscher, eds. New York and London: Routledge and the American Film Institute, 2019), 96-105.
- ‘Abstraction and the Geopolitical: Lessons from Antonioni’s Trip to China’. World Cinemas, Global Networks, Elena Gorfinkel and Tami Williams, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. 53-76. [English translation of 2015 publication]
- ‘Watching Italians Turn Around: Gender, Looking, and Roman/Cinematic Modernity’, A Companion to Italian Cinema, Frank Burke, ed. (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2017), 408-426
- ‘Geopolitica e astrazione: la Cina di Michelangelo Antonioni’, Alberto Boschi and Francesco Di Chiara, eds. Michelangelo Antonioni. prospettive, culture, politiche, spazi (Milan: Il Castoro, 2015), 184-203
- ‘Topophilia and other Roman Perversions’, Rome: Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape, Dom Holdaway and Filippp Trenti, eds. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 79-100
- ‘“Our beautiful and glorious art lives”: The rhetoric of nationalism in early Italian film periodicals’, Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader, Giorgio Bertellini, ed. (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2013), 263-74 [reprinted from Film History 12 (Fall 2000)—see below]
- ‘Fassbinder’s Work: Style, Sirk, and Queer Labor’, A Companion to Fassbinder, Brigitte Peucker, ed. (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), 181-203
- ‘The Matter of Places’ (with Elena Gorfinkel), Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image. John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), vii-xxv
- ‘The Eclipse of Place: Rome’s EUR, from Rossellini to Antonioni’, Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image. John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 31-54
- ‘Interstitial, Pretentious, Alienated, Dead: Antonioni at 100’ (with Laura Rascaroli), Antonioni: Centenary Essays. Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, eds. (London: British Film Institute/Palgrave, 2011), 1-17
- ‘Antonioni and the Development of Style’, Antonioni: Centenary Essays. Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, eds. (London: British Film Institute/Palgrave, 2011), 276-300
- ‘Pasolini’s Exquisite Flowers: “The ‘Cinema of Poetry’” as a Theory of Art Cinema’, Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Practices. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 142-163
- ‘The Spectacle of Skepticism: Haneke’s Long Takes’, On Michael Haneke. Brian Price and John David Rhodes, eds. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 87-102
- ‘Allegory, mise-en-scène, AIDS: Interpreting Safe’, The Cinema of Todd Haynes. James Morrison, ed. (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 68-78
- ‘Divorzio all’italiana’, The Cinema of Italy. Giorgio Bertellini, ed. (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 113-121 [9 pages]
Articles – Journals
- ‘Temporary Accommodation: Joanna Hogg’s Cinema of Dispossession’. Film Quarterly 73, no. 3 (Spring 2020): 12-20.
- ‘Art Cinema’s Immaterial Labors’. Diacritics 46, no. 4, (2018): 96-116.
- ‘Visual Pleasure at 40’ (dossier), edited with introduction, Screen 56:4 (Winter 2015), 471-485
- ‘This Was Not Cinema: Judgment, Action, and Barbara Hammer’, Film Criticism 39:2 (Winter 2014-15), 115-136
- ‘From Ruin to Ritual’, Screen 55:4 (Winter 2014), 494-99
- ‘Peggy Ahwesh dossier Introduction’, Screen 55:4 (Winter 2014), 490-93 (co-written with Elena Gorfinkel, co-editor of dossier)
- ‘The Spectacle of Property’, The Third Rail, Issue 3 (Spring 2014), 49-51
- ‘Watchable bodies: Salò’s young non-actors’, Screen 53:4 (Winter 2012), 453-58
- ‘Belabored: The Work of Style’, Framework 53:1 (Spring 2012), 47-64
- ‘Notes on Cinematic Desire (For Louis)’, World Picture 4 (Spring 2010)
- ‘Collective Anxiety: Corviale, Rome, and the Legacy of ’68’, Log 13/14 (Fall 2008), 75-86
- ‘Talking Ugly’, World Picture 1 (spring 2008)
- ‘White Christmas, or Modernism’, Modernism/Modernity 13: 2 (April 2006) 292-308
- ‘“Concentrated Ground”: Grey Gardens and the Cinema of the Domestic’, Framework 47:1 (spring 2006), 83-105
- ‘“Scandalous Desecration”: Accattone Against the Neorealist City’, Framework 45:1 (spring 2004), 7-33
- ‘Peggy Ahwesh’, Great Directors Database, Senses of Cinema (first published in vol. 29, November/December 2003).
- ‘“Our beautiful and glorious art lives”: The rhetoric of nationalism in early Italian film periodicals’, Film History 12 (Fall 2000), 308-321
