When Jean Baudrillard visited the USA, he wrote: ‘I was here in my imagination long before I actually came here’ (1988: 72). His words evoke an uncanny rendering of the culturally familiar, through the eyes of a European who has walked onto the world’s biggest movie set. Such a secondary experience of America was …

Intellect Books’ Directory of World Cinema: Italy, edited by Louis Bayman, is now available for pre-order. This exciting new volume is a scholarly yet accessible collection of writing from some of the world’s leading experts in Italian cinema. I was honoured to be asked to compile the book’s Spaghetti Westerns …

“HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.”
(T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land).
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 …