About

Tiago de Luca holds a BA in Communication Studies from the State University of São Paulo (UNESP), an MA in Film Studies from UCL and a PhD in World Cinemas from the University of Leeds. He is on the editorial board of the Contemporary Cinema book series and is the editor, with Lúcia Nagib, of the Film Thinks book series (Bloomsbury).

Research Interests

My main research interests are: the global and the planetary in film and media; world cinema; cinematic realism; slow cinema; Brazilian and Latin American cinemas. I welcome PhD projects related to all of these areas.

My new single-authored book, Planetary Cinema: Film, Media and the Earth (Amsterdam University Press, 2022) explores the ways in which the Earth has been imaged and imagined in cinema and related media at the turns of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book is the main output of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, which I was awarded in 2018-19. Planetary Cinema proposes that an exploration of nineteenth-century media culture (and beyond) can help us understand contemporary planetary imaginaries in times of environmental collapse. Engaging with a variety of media, genres and texts, the book sits at the intersection of film/media history and theory/ philosophy, and it claims that we need this combined approach and expansive textual focus in order to understand the way we see the world.

My first book, Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality, examines current forms of realism in world cinema by looking at the work of Carlos Reygadas, Tsai Ming-liang and Gus Van Sant. This book explores how their films reconfigure realist filmmaking through a sensory mode of address premised upon the hyperbolic application of the long take. I am also the editor, with Nuno Barradas Jorge, of Slow Cinema: the first anthology to provide an examination of this concept in film studies, focusing on slowness both as a trend in contemporary global cinema and in terms of its previous manifestations in film history.

Teaching and Supervision

I teach across many areas related to global cinema, slow cinema, world cinema and transnational film history, including Brazilian and Latin American cinemas. I am interested in supervising postgraduate projects related to all of these areas.

Selected Publications

Single-Authored Books

• Planetary Cinema: Film, Media and the Earth (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022), open-access: download the book here.
• Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014)

Edited Books

• Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema (co-edited with Lúcia Nagib and Luciana Corrêa de Araújo) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh: University Press, 2022). Winner Edited Collection of the Year MeCCSA 2023.
• Slow Cinema (co-edited with Nuno Barradas Jorge) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), read the introduction here.

Special Issue Journals

• Elemental World Cinema (guest editor, with Matilda Mroz, 2023), Studies in World Cinema 3:1-2, Part I: Earth & FireLink opens in a new window and Part II: Water & Air.Link opens in a new window
• Dossier on 'Long Duration', Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image, 4:2 (2017), guest-editor.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

• ‘On Roma's Monumentality’, in Interfaces, special issue on ‘Re-scale’ (2023), open-access.
• ‘Nebulous Cinema’, Studies in World Cinema 3: 2 (2023), pp. 242-264, pre-published version available here.
• ‘Quality Time: On Resisting What’s Next, or Staying with the Credits’, in Julian Hanich & Martin Roussow (eds), What Film is Good For: The Ethics of Spectatorship (University of California Press, 2023), pp. 326-336.
• ‘Panoramic Views, Planetary Visions: An Intermedial Analysis of Medium Earth and Walden’ in Lúcia Nagib & Stefan Solomon (eds) The Moving Form of Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 113-128.
• ‘Photographs of the Invisible: Intermedial Figurations of Social Exclusion in Babás and Aquarius’, Lúcia Nagib, Luciana Correa de Araujo & Tiago de Luca (eds) Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), pp. 71-93.
• ‘Putting the World Back into World Cinema’, Studies in World Cinema, 1:1, pp. 47-52 (2021).
• The End of the World Viewed, or the Wind in the Things: On Nikolaus Geyrhalter's Homo Sapiens', in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 41:1 (Winter 2019)
• 'Earth Networks: The Human Surge and Cognitive Mapping' in NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, #Mapping issue, Autumn 2018.
• 'Global Visions: Around-the-World Travel and Visual Culture in Early Modernity’ in Louis Bayman and Natalia Pinazza (eds) Journeys on Screen: Theory, Ethics and Aesthetics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018) 
• ‘Watching Cinema Disappear: Intermediality and Aesthetic Experience in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003) and Stray Dogs (2013)' in John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (eds) Critical Approaches to the Long Take (London: Palgrave, 2017).
•  'On Length: A Short History of Long Cinema', Dossier: Long Duration, Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image, 4:2 (2017)
•  ‘“Casa Grande & Senzala”: Domestic Space and Class Conflict in Casa Grande and Que horas ela volta?’ in Mariana Cunha & Antonio M. da Silva (eds) Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema (London: Palgrave, 2017).
• ‘Figuring a Global Humanity: Cinematic Universalism and the Multi-Narrative Film’, Screen 58:1, Spring 2017.
• 'Sitting in the Dark among Anonymous Strangers', Afterthoughts and Postscripts Cinema Journal 56.1 (Fall 2016).
• ‘Slow Time, Visible Cinema: Duration, Experience and Spectatorship’, Cinema Journal 56.1 (Winter 2016).
• ‘From Slow Cinema to Slow Cinemas’ in Tiago de Luca & Nuno Barradas Jorge (eds) Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: EUP, 2016).
  
• ‘Natural Views: Animal, Contingency and Death in Carlos Reygadas’s Japón and Lisandro Alonso’s Los Muertos’ in Tiago de Luca & Nuno Barradas Jorge (eds), Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: EUP, 2016).
• ‘Personal Images, Collective Journeys: Media and Memory in I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 12.1-2 (2014).
• ‘The Geography of Segregation: Violence and Class Division in Contemporary São Paulo Cinema’ in Natália Pinazza & Louis Bayman (eds) World Cinema Location Series: São Paulo (London: Intellect, 2013).
• ‘Gus Van Sant’s Gerry and Visionary Realism’, Cinephile 7.2 (2012).
• ‘Realism of the Senses: A Tendency in Contemporary World Cinema’ in Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam & Rajinder Dudrah (eds) Theorizing World Cinema ( London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016), reprinted and translated into Portuguese in Cecília Mello (ed) Realismo Fantasmagórico (São Paulo, Cinusp, 2016)
• ‘Sensory Everyday: Space, Materiality and the Body in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5.2 (2011).
• ‘Carnal Spirituality: the Films of Carlos Reygadas’, Senses of Cinema 55 (2010).

 

Reviews

• Stefan Solomon's Still Brazil (video essay), [in] Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, 3.3 (2016)
• David Martin Jones's Deleuze and World Cinemas and David Deamer's Deleuze, Japanese Cinema and the Atom Bomb, Screen 57:3 (2016)
• Lutz Koepnick’s On Slowness in Cinema Journal 54.2, In Focus dossier: ‘On Cinematic Speed’ (2016).
• ‘Book Review: David Lynch: Interviews’ in New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 8. 1 (2010)

 

Others

• ‘Elephant: A Matter of Pace’ (article + video essay), In Media Res (2016)
• ‘Loneliness is Freedom’: an interview with Tsai Ming-liang in Close-up + short essay (2014).