Film | Digital Media

“Evening Rituals: Marco Ferreri’s Dillinger is Dead.” Presented at Intersections: Crossing Italian Borders in Music, Art, Literature, Theater, and Cinema. June 2-5, 2016. Kent State University, Gonzaga University, and California State University Programs. Florence, Italy. ABSTRACT: Focusing on Dillinger is Dead, this study explores how the geopolitical changes brought by the economic miracle and the early RAI television images impacted the so-called “battle of sexes” of the 1960s. Constructed around a few uncut sequences, the

My new article “The Aesthetics of the Procedural in Post-9/11 Cinema” will be available in the next issue of Cinema Journal 55.3 (2016). Section “In Focus: Post 9/11 Media Studies.” Ed. Anna Froula. University of Texas Press. Article presented at the War on Terror Cinema Session. Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference. March 30-April 3, 2016. Atlanta, Georgia. Presiding: Shakti Jaising. The convergence of the 9/11 attacks with the rapid technological changes of the

My book chapter on “The Moro Affair in the Movies of Gian Maria Volonté” is available in The Moro Affair: Memories and Narrations.  Massa: Transeuropa, 2016. Eds. Ugo Perolino and Leonardo Casalino. The book is available here. I also presented it at the 45th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA) on April 3-6, 2014. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and  delivered an invited talk at the Università “G. D’Annunzio” Chieti-Pescara on December 15, 2015. ABSTRACT: This essay furnishes an original way of thinking about

Book chapter in Pier Paolo Pasolini: American Perspectives. Ed. Fulvio Orsitto and Federico Pacchioni. Pesaro: Metauro, 2015. Pasolini’s irrevocable, moralistic condemnation of television seems to provide the perfect case against it. Like most European scholars writing about popular culture in the 1960s, the director seems both to take television very seriously and react with anguish to what he sees. What exactly is it about television culture that Pasolini fears so much? And, more importantly, what

IN COMEDY STUDIES, SPECIAL ISSUE ON “LAUGHTER IN THE DIGITAL AGE.” PETER C. KUNZE, ED. FALL 2015. READ THE ARTICLE HERE ABSTRACT Through a case study of Julian Smith, this essay investigates what makes YouTube comedians/entrepreneurs successful. In order to understand the channel juliansmith87 and its connections to social media platforms, I adopt two strategies: focusing on a specific video from the channel called 25 Things I Hate About Facebook; and discussing the channel on

I’ll be presenting this paper at the conference Italian Cinema in the Present Tense: New Narrative Practices from Adaptation to Transmedia and Transnational Cinema. A Seminar in Honor of Millicent Marcus. Friday, Nov. 13 and Sat., Nov. 14, 2015. Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA. “Genova illuminata, / notturna, umida, alzata” (Giorgio Caproni,“Litania”). The communicational experience of the 2001 Genoa G8 protests created an interrogation about the ability of the image to reveal the nature

Published on Seismopolite (Vol. 10, May 2015). I have also presented this paper at the PCA/ACA Annual Meeting. Latin American Film & Media Session.April 1-4, 2014, New Orleans, Louisiana.   Pablo Larraín’s No (2012) is a Janus-faced film, documentation and interpretation. The movie reconstructs the events surrounding the 1988 Chilean referendum through the perspective of René Saavedra (Gael García Bernal), an advertising executive hired to run a television campaign to end General Augusto Pinochet’s rule. By

  Abstract This essay provides a conceptual map of the relationship 
between One Hundred Steps (2000), its precursors and contemporaries, and in doing so
 analyzes the innovative nature of Marco Tullio Giordana’s authorship. Giordana brought
 his crew on location and established a relationship with the citizens of
 Cinisi, Peppino’s friends, mother and brother, interviewing witnesses to
 the events and modifying the screenplay accordingly. In this sense, his film
 displays the legacy of early neorealism (particularly The 
Earth Trembles,

Albert Maysles, the legendary documentarian who directed  Salesmen (1969) and Gimme Shelter (1970), died  at his home in Manhattan. He was 88. This is a conversation I had with him when I was living in Seattle.

  They were the underachievers, self-centered and impractical. Throughout the 1990s, indie filmmakers such as Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater gave voice to the overeducated (but often unemployed) sons of fractured families, paralyzed by social problems. An alternative cinema required alternative stars, and some of the early roles played by Julianne Moore, Patricia Arquette, Edward Norton, Ethan Hawke, Reese Witherspoon, Mark Ruffalo and Laura Dern captured the essence of the era’s anti-traditional bent. When Birdman