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. I …

Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) is, from a multitude of perspectives, a book-end. If Owen Wister is said to have spawned the Western genre (in fact a slightly spurious claim, given the multifarious incarnations of the myth in popular culture prior to The Virginian), Cimino is widely credited as its …

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 …

“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. …

Fade in. A lone bounty hunter occupies centre-frame of a long shot amidst an arid Andalucían desert landscape, his recently-slain human quarry sprawled limply over the saddle of a spare horse. As the camera pulls out to reveal Glenn Garvin waiting in the near foreground, the inevitability of a stylised confrontation …

At first sight, Grant Heslov’s latest offering The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009) resides alongside the whimsical fantasia of an earlier McGregor outing, Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003): the picaresque adventures of a little guy in a mysterious dream world. There is, however, more to this film than such a …

Hello. Welcome to my new website.
My name is Austin Fisher, and I am a freelance writer, editor and academic. I have recently completed a PhD in Italian cinema at Royal Holloway, University of London, and am disseminating my research to the wider academic community using various media – including this …