Though I had rather forgotten the fact, my Masters dissertation – “Sergio Leone and the Western Myth: Reading the Ritual” – is online for all to peruse. I wrote it almost ten years ago and much of it makes me cringe these days (I very much hope that my writing …

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 …

My article, “Out West, Down South: Gazing at America in Reverse Shot through Damiano Damiani’s Quien sabe?” (The Italianist, (30:2) 2010) is now available for all to read and download free of charge, should you so wish. You can download the article in pdf format here, or just read it here:

My latest article, on the cinematographic nuances of Damiano Damiani’s political Italian Western Quien sabe? (1966), appears in this summer’s edition of The Italianist. This publication has become established as one of the leading international journals of Italian Studies. The annual Film Issue provides an outlet for research into an aspect …

“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 …

If, like me, you struggle to keep up with the plethora of Spaghetti Western-related material floating around this here interweb, then the chaps over at the invaluable Spaghetti Western Database have a treat in store. Planet Spaghetti Western is a new syndicator, which pulls content from throughout the Spaghetti blogosphere …

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.
Submission Guidelines:
If …

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 …