The Spaghetti Cinema event is just around the corner (Thursday 11th – Saturday 13th April 2013). So, to whet your appetites, here is the full Spaghetti Cinema Programme in PDF format. This covers both the film festival and the academic conference. Don’t forget to book your tickets through the Luton Culture website.

Thanks to my employers at the University of Bedfordshire, I have the privilege to be organising a Spaghetti Western film festival and related academic conference. The event will take place at the Library Theatre, Luton for three days between Thursday 11th and Saturday 13th April 2013.
We are deeply honoured to …

Having admired the pedagogical innovativeness of Film Studies for Free (and the various resources linked therefrom) for many a year, it is high time I tried my hand at the burgeoning format of the video essay. So, here’s my first attempt at such a thing, on The Searchers (John Ford, 1956). …

Spaghetti Westerns in Transit: an International Film Conference on Transculturation and Liminality
Luton, UK, Friday 12th April 2013.
In association with the University of Bedfordshire and the inaugural ‘Spaghetti Cinema’ Annual Film Festival: @spaghetticinema
Keynote speaker: Professor Sir Christopher Frayling.
The hundreds of films that make up the Italian (or ‘Spaghetti’) Western genre offer heterogeneous documents …

This article was originally published on the Spaghetti Western Database in February 2011.
One can fully sympathise with Yodlaf Peterson when, trying to blast Professor Xantos free from prison, he is faced with stubborn resistance and a lecture on the merits of pacifism from the po-faced captive. ‘Give me one single …

I’ll be addressing the launch conference for the “Media Across Borders” scholarly network, at the University of Roehampton, London on Saturday June 9th 2012. This international conference will address processes of media localisation and contemplate the broader significance of cultural translation within the creative industries. More information about this fascinating …

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 …

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 …

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 …

I shall be addressing the Irish Film Institute in Dublin before and after the screening of Damiano Damiani’s A Bullet for the General / Quién sabe?, on Saturday August 27th 2011. The film is being shown as part of the IFI’s “Meanwhile, Back at the Revolution…” season, and I will be both …

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 …