About
Both as a teacher and a researcher my interests revolve around the question: what makes Film and Television moving? I seek to explore the artistic dimension of this question and its social and cultural contexts. This question has brought me to study a range of different types of film, returning repeatedly to melodrama and to horror as well as to nostalgia and to retro. Throughout, my concentration on the artistry of feeling is accompanied by commentary upon its political meaning.
I have written extensively on Italian cinema and wrote my first book on melodrama, as a popularly accessibly combination of Italy's operatic and realist traditions. I have since begun to write more generally about film and the contemporary. I am currently developing the ideas I have proposed on retro and nostalgia into a broader analysis of time in cinema. More than anything, I am interested in how the cinematic treatment of time is both an aesthetic and a political quality; a method of intelligibility and of sensibility. I want to explore what contemporary cinema can demonstrate about a certain feeling of being lost within time, or within history, that seems to characterise much current political debate.
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