Film | Digital Media

“Joshua Oppenheimer’s Cold War Between Thought and Expression.” Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Meeting. March 31-April 3, 2022. Chicago. Panel on “New Global Perspectives on the Cold War and Political Violence.” Fabrizio Cilento (Messiah University); Chair & Organizer. Massimiliano Delfino (Northwestern University); Co-Chair. —-. Film Area Session. Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Annual Meeting. April 13-16, 2022. Organizers: Fabrizio Cilento (Messiah University) and Anna Weinstein (Kennesaw University). Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentaries The Act of Killing (2012)

“Too Strange to Believe: Magical Realism and Cold War Politics in Narcos.” Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas (2022). Eds Ana M. López and Dolores Tierney. ABSTRACT: The first episode of Narcos, the Netflix TV series inspired by the life of Pablo Escobar, begins with the programmatic intertitle: “Magical realism is defined as what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe. There is a reason why magical realism was

I look forward to seeing this exhibition, which presents many of the events discussed in my book and covers the same period, 1960 – 2016 (see featured clip) Exhibition Overview: “For the last fifty years, artists have explored the hidden operations of power and the symbiotic suspicion between the government and its citizens that haunts Western democracies. Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy is the first major exhibition to tackle this perennially provocative topic. It

The promotional poster for my book launch at Columbia University From the Heyman Center for the Humanities website: “On this occasion, Fabrizio Cilento (Messiah College) will present his most recent book, published by Palgrave Macmillan in Fall 2018 and titled An Investigative Cinema: Politics and Modernization in Italian, French, and American Film. After Cilento’s presentation, Elizabeth Leake (Columbia, Italian), Giancarlo Lombardi (CUNY, Comparative Lit.), and Richard Peña (Columbia, Film and Media) will act as respondents.

    Offers a new approach that blends and expands upon national cinema studies, the author theory, and genre theory Analyzes films and television series across European and American traditions, such as The Battle of Algiers, Even the Rain to Homeland, No, and The Parallax View, Gomorrah Explores the careers of actors Gian Maria Volonté and Gael García Bernal in the light of transnational stardom theory Examines the centrality of investigative cinema in relation to the historical

I’ll be presenting this paper at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference. March 22-26, 2016. Chicago, Illinois. ABSTRACT: The career path of Gael García Bernal is inextricably linked to the alternative fortunes of Latin American cinema and questions of regional imaginary. In this paper I problematize the clichés attached to his fame by taking into account national, regional, and global sources in the light of transnational stardom theory. After the production crisis

An Investigative Cinema: Politics and Modernization in Italian, French, and American Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. My monograph traces the development of a previously unrecognized category I call “investigative cinema,” whose main characteristic lies in reconstructing actual events, political crises and conspiracies. Concerned with the intersection between politics and form, the films under consideration are rarely discussed by scholars, especially from a comparative perspective. Nor do they fall into commonly recognized film genres or

I’ll be presenting on “The Evolution of the Comedy Italian Style” at the International Symposium at Casa Artom in Venice on The Cinema of Ettore Scola; organized by Wake Forest University.                            

I will deliver an invited talk called “Just Imagine: Genre and the Logic of Movie Posters” in conjunction with the exhibition Now Showing: An American Century at the Movies, 1917-2017. September 29, 2016. Zimmerman Recital Hall. Sponsored by the Suzanne H. Arnold Gallery. Lebanon Valley College (PA).

   This call is to solicit essays – from undergraduate scholars – for a Film Matters dossier on recent (post-1989) science fiction cinema, to be published in issue 8.3 (winter 2017).  We are looking for papers that engage with the following questions concerning the science fiction genre.   While criticizing the present, science fiction explores and stages alternative worlds and ways of organizing society. How does science fiction address the nature of the sociopolitical tensions