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 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 …

Below are my lecture notes (hastily tidied up into more-or-less grammatical sentences for the benefit of the reader) and slides from a talk I have just this morning given at the international conference Film and Media 2011, at the Institute of Education, London. This is very much work in progress, …

I shall be addressing the inaugural annual London Film and Media conference – Film and Media 2011 – in July, giving a talk about Robert Rodriguez’s latest film Machete (2010). The abstract is below, and I shall post more details forthwith.

Spaghetti Lefties: Postmodern Politics in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete
The confrontational political tone …

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 …

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 …

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. …