The Dept. would like to congratulate Dr. Greg Frame on the nomination of his book The American President in Film and Television: Myth, Politics and Representation (Peter Lang, 2014) for Best Monograph by the organisation BAFTSS. Find out mor about the competition here: http://baftss.org/awards/awards-2016/ and about Greg's book here: http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?event=cmp.ccc.seitenstruktur.detailseiten&seitentyp=produkt&pk=72950&concordeid=430951

PRODUCERS AND PRODUCTION PRACTICES IN THE HISTORY OF ITALIAN CINEMA, 1949-1975

Principal investigator: Stephen Gundle (Warwick)

Co-Investigators: Karl Schoonover (Warwick), Stefano Baschiera (Queens, Belfast), Christopher Wagstaff (formerly Reading)

AHRC Major Research Project. Grant received £718,500

To run March 2016 - February 2019

The project will bring together a core group of researchers with established expertise in different aspects of the film industry to examine the way Italian producers shaped global film production and distribution between the late 1940s and the mid 1970s. It will do this by exploring a wide range of business practices and the domestic and international contexts in which these developed. The practices in question played a crucial role in building international markets for Italian films and creating production and distribution strategies which turned Italian cinema into a global force. They set a vital precedent for other emerging national cinemas in Europe and the world. The importance of producers has not been recognised in conventional scholarship and therefore the activities of these key players have been inadequately investigated and analysed. Project research will establish what their goals were, how they operated to achieve those goals, and what conditioning factors framed their activities. The papers of several major producers from the most successful period of the Italian cinema and of the main industry association have recently become available for study, providing a unique opportunity to investigate hitherto obscure practices and to research a particular production culture in unprecedented depth. The project will produce a range of outputs that will reinterpret the history of postwar Italian cinema and benefit both present and future scholars and those interested in Italian and international film culture more generally, as well as sectors of the cinema industry itself.

Dr Karl Schoonover will deliver the lecture ‘Can Objects Die?: Max Ophüls and Accumulation in America’ as part of the Cambridge Film and Screen Studies Research Seminars. This lecture comes from Schoonover's larger research project on how mid-twentieth-century American films captured modern culture's abiding apprehension towards a world dominated by waste and its toxicity.

The lecture will happen on Wednesday, the 17th of February at 5.15pm, English Faculty Building, GR05, at the University of Cambridge. For more details, follow this link:

http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/film/research/seminars

Edited by Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, Slow Cinema is a new anthology that 'Situates, theorises and maps out cinematic slowness within contemporary global film production and across world cinema history'. Published by Edinburgh University Press , it features Dr. Schoonover's important article "Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema’s Labouring Body, The Political Spectator, and the Queer", which was originally published in Framework Vol 53, No.1 (Spring 2012).

More information about the new volume here

Dr. Rachel Moseley spoke to Trish Adudu and Jo Tidman about her new book 'Handmade Television: Stop-Frame Animation for Children in Britain, 1961-1974' on Trish and Jo at Breakfast on BBC Radio Conventry and Warwickshire on December 28, 2015