Co-Curricular Studies

In this Perspective article, I consider ways in which the contemporary arts and sciences can interact with each other, and I outline the current opportunities for funding in the United Kingdom. I examine the view that, in an art-science collaboration, it is the artist who benefits most, and I cautiously suggest that this is an oversimplification. Evidence from interviews with scientists who have been involved in these collaborations shows that artistic experience and skills are of value in the scientific research process.

In this piece, I ascribe the crisis of (the national ethics of) Italian neorealism to the emergence of a transnational, pan European art-cinema whose aesthetic and thematic conventions Italian neorealism had paradoxically contributed to establish, via the absorption of key neorealist preoccupations by the directors of the French Nouvelle Vague and the critics of the Cahiers du Cinéma from the late 1950s onward. Full-text of article coming soon!

This article came out of a conference presentation at the eleventh meeting of Socine, the Brazilian Society for Cinema and Audiovisual Studies, in Rio de Janeiro in October 2007. In the piece, I use the theoretical writings of Pier Paolo Pasolini to discuss a dilemma that in the late 1960s would go on to concern not just the realm of Italian political cinema, but all film artists animated by political aspirations: whether the politically engaged filmmaker should discard the allegedly democratising effect of a realism of authorial self-effacement in favour of a more deconstructive, and therefore creationist and manipulative, approach.

This article appeared in Sinekultura Fim Journal, a newly established  Philippine journal founded by a small community of international film scholars who, at the University of San Carlos in Cebu, have recently also launched the first MA program in Cinema Studies in the Philippines. The piece is the analysis of a film most representative of the emergence of an aesthetically idiosyncratic, intra-national cinema in the Philippine island of Cebu, where a new generation of young filmmakers is trying to emancipate itself from the trite preoccupations of the Manila-based national film industry.

In this article, I present the Italian war documentary Giorni di gloria (collectively directed in 1945 by Luchino Visconti, Giuseppe De Santis, Marcello Pagliero and Mario Serandrei) as a detailed meditation on the trajectory of violent reversals that defined the relationship between Italian fascists and antifascists before and after the liberation. By presenting such serially occurring acts of reciprocal retaliation as collectively witnessed events, the film ultimately treats the recourse to political violence as unavoidable nation-building tool, the necessary stage in the process of the nation’s self-determination and identity formation. The film’s emphasis is on the hagiographic presentation of the partisan movement’s capacity to simultaneously endure martyrdom and retaliate against the enemy with comparable ferocity. With great attention to dramaturgy and collective spectatorial impact, the film basks into the shock value, graphicness, and incendiary potentials of a material whose arrangement has largely to do with making a certain vision of death a source of arousal. Yet, the film does not attempt to merely narrate, glorify, or justify the recourse to political violence and the excesses of postwar vindictiveness, nor does it artfully lie about the degree of active popular participation. Rather, the rhetorical tropes of film serve the filmmakers to valorize in epic-mythical terms the choice of those who did fight, manufacturing post facto a visceral bond, both human and ideological, between the few who fought and the many who simply witnessed the combat, so as to ultimately elevate the prise de conscience of the former camp as unquestionably representative of a whole nation’s political aspirations.