Showcase of past publications
Single author
Alan O’Leary, Fenomenologia del cinepanettone, Rubbettino, 2013.
The first study of the critically despised Italian Christmas film, this monograph contains a variety of approaches to the genre, including an analysis in terms of the 'carnivalesque', the results of questionnaire about its consumption, and a long collage of interviews with fans, critics and filmmakers.
Paul Cooke, Contemporary German Cinema, Manchester University Press, 2012.
Professor Paul Cooke's Contemporary German Cinema examines the success of recent film production in its wider industrial, cultural and political context, blending broad overviews of recent trends with detailed examinations of key case studies. As a starting point, it explores the German film funding system and the economic place of the German industry within global film production. Subsequent chapters then look at the impact of this system on filmmakers' aesthetic choices, be it the role of realism in contemporary cinema, or the rediscovery of the Heimatfilm as a popular film genre.
This is complemented by discussion of the dominant issues these films explore, from the legacies of Germany's Nazi past and post-war division, to the nation's increasingly multicultural make up, the changing age and gender demographic of cinema audiences as well as the nation's shifting relationship with the United States as both a 'real' and 'imagined' space. Cooke looks at many of the most successful films of the last two decades, including Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run, Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye, Lenin!, Hans Weingartner's The Edukators, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarchk's The Lives of Others and Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall.
Duncan Wheeler, Golden Age Drama in Contemporary Spain: The Comedia on Page, Stage and Screen, University of Wales Press, 2012.
Duncan Wheeler's Golden Age Drama in Contemporary Spain is the first monograph on the performance and reception of sixteenth and seventeenth-century national drama in contemporary Spain. The book, which attempts to remedy the traditional absence of performance-based approaches in Golden Age studies, contextualises the socio-historical background to the modern-day performance of the country's three major Spanish baroque playwrights (Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina), whilst also providing detailed aesthetic analyses of individual stage and screen adaptations.
Alan O'Leary, Tragedia all'Italiana: Italian Cinema and Italian Terrorisms, 1970-2010, Peter Lang, 2011.
Cinema has played a key role in articulating the impact and legacies of the so-called anni di piombo in Italy, the years of intra-national political terrorism that lasted from 1969 until well into the 1980s. Alan O'Leary's Tragedia all'italiana offers an analytical exploration of Italian cinema's representation and refraction of those years, showing how a substantial and still growing corpus of films has shaped the ways in which Italians have assimilated and remembered the events of this period.
This is the first monograph in English on terrorism and film in Italy, a topic that is attracting the interest of a wide range of scholars of film, cultural studies and critical terrorism studies. It provides novel analytical categories for an intriguing corpus of films and offers careful accounts of works and genres as diverse as La meglio gioventu, Buongiorno, notte, the poliziottesco (cop film) and the commedia all'italiana.
O'Leary argues that fiction film can provide an effective frame for the elaboration of historical experience but that the cinema is symptomatic both of its time and of the codes of the medium itself - in terms of its elisions, omissions and evasions as well as its emphases. The book is a study of a body of films that has elaborated the experience of terrorism as a fascinating and even essential part of the heritage of modern Italy.
Paul Melo e Castro. Shades of Grey: 1960s Lisbon in Novel, Film and Photography, London: MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 2011.
How is 1960s Lisbon represented? How, indeed, can the experience of any city be embodied in the artistic media? This book examines three case studies: Jose Cardoso Pires' novel Balada da Praia dos Caes, Eduardo Gageiro's photobook Lisboa no Cais da Memoria, and Fernando Lopes' film Belarmino.
Co-authored volumes
Thea Pitman and Claire Taylor. Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production. Routledge, 2013.
This volume provides an innovative and timely approach to a fast growing, yet still under-studied field in Latin American cultural production: digital online culture. It focuses on the transformations or continuations that cultural products and practices such as hypermedia fictions, net.art and online performance art, as well as blogs, films, databases and other genre-defying web-based projects, perform with respect to Latin American(ist) discourses, as well as their often contestatory positioning with respect to Western hegemonic discourses as they circulate online. The intellectual rationale for the volume is located at the crossroads of two, equally important, theoretical strands: theories of digital culture, in their majority the product of the anglophone academy; and contemporary debates on Latin American identity and culture.
The volumes has been described by one reviewer as ‘a sine qua non reading for scholars interested in e-literatures and digital art forms in contemporary Latin America.’ (Hilda Chacón, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 49:1)
Edited volumes
Mariana Liz, Mary Harrod and Alissa Timoshkina, eds, The Europeanness of European Cinema: Identity, Meaning, Globalization, I.B. Tauris, 2014.
From The Artist to The White Ribbon, from Oscar to Palme d'Or-winning productions, European filmmaking is more prominent, world-wide, than ever before. This book identifies the distinctive character of European cinema, both in films and as a critical concept, asking: what place does European cinema have in an increasingly globalized world? Including in-depth analyses of production and reception contexts, as well as original readings of key European films from leading experts in the field, it re-negotiates traditional categories such as auteurism, art cinema and national cinemas. As the first publication to explore 'Europeanness' in cinema, this book refocuses and updates historically significant areas of study in relation to this term. Leading scholars in European cinema - including Thomas Elsaesser, Tim Bergfelder, Anne Jackel, Lucy Mazdon and Ginette Vincendeau - acknowledge the transnational character of European filmmaking whilst also exploring the oppositions between European and Hollywood filmmaking, considering the value of the 'European' label in the circulation of films within and beyond the continent.
The Europeanness of European Cinema makes a lively, timely intervention in the fields of European and transnational film studies.
Duncan Wheeler and Fernando Canet, eds, (Re)viewing Creative, Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema, Intellect, 2014.
Formulated around a number of key thematic concerns - including new creative trends; the politics and practices of memory; auteurship, genre, and stardom in a transnational age - this reassessment of contemporary Spanish cinema from 1992 to 2012 brings leading academics from a broad range of disciplinary and geographical backgrounds into dialogue with critically and commercially successful practitioners to suggest the need to redefine the parameters of one of the world’s most creative national cinemas. This volume will appeal not only to students and scholars of Spanish films, but also to anyone with an interest in contemporary world cinema.
Stephanie Dennison, ed., World Cinema: As Novas Cartografias do Cinema Mundial, Papirus, 2013.
O conceito de world cinema, ou cinema mundial, foi ganhando contornos mais definidos no Brasil ao longo da última década, graças, em parte, a algumas importantes pesquisas e coletâneas sobre o assunto. Contudo, diferentemente destas, o presente volume não procura apresentar um panorama abrangente da produção cinematográfica do mundo. Em vez disso, foi feito um recorte com capítulos que procuram demonstrar os progressos obtidos na teorização do conceito de world cinema em anos recentes, fazendo uso de abordagens consagradas, a fim de expandir o cânone, revisitar e revisar a história cinematográfica. Tanto autores brasileiros e estrangeiros baseados no Brasil (como Esther Hamburger e Carolin Overhoff Ferreira) quanto pesquisadores brasileiros e estrangeiros radicados no exterior (Lucia Nagib e Dudley Andrew, entre outros) discutem ou ilustram tal intercâmbio - de ideias, de olhares etc. - tão central a esse conceito. O próprio livro é fruto de um intercâmbio entre a Socine, agora uma das maiores associações de estudos de cinema do mundo, e o Centre for World Cinemas de Leeds, Inglaterra, o primeiro centro dedicado ao estudo de cinema mundial.
Stephanie Dennison, ed., Contemporary Hispanic Cinema: Interrogating the Transnational in Spanish and Latin American Film, Támesis, 2013.
This book focuses on the cross-currents and points of contact in film production among so-called Hispanic countries (Spain, Portugal and Latin America), and in particular the impact that co-production and supranational funding initiatives are having on both the film industries and the films of Latin America in the twenty-first century. Together with chapters that discuss and further develop transnational approaches to reading films in the Hispanic and Latin American context, the volume includes chapters that focus on funding initiatives, such as IBERMEDIA, that are aimed at Spain, Portugal and Latin America. An analysis of such initiatives facilitates a nuanced discussion of the range of meanings afforded to the term transnationalism: from the workings of those driven by economic imperatives, such as co-productions and 'Hispanic' film festivals, to the cultural, for example the invention of a marketable 'Latinamericaness' in Spain, or a 'Hispanic aesthetic' elsewhere.
Paul Cooke, ed., "The Lives of Others" and Contemporary German Film: A Companion, de Gruyter, 2013.
"The Lives of Others" and Contemporary German Film: A Companion offers the first book-length academic investigation of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others (2006). The aim of this edited collection is twofold. On the one hand, it offers new insight into one of the most successful German films of the past two decades, placing The Lives of Others within its wider historical, political, aesthetic and industrial context. On the other, it offers this group of scholars, which includes many of the leading international figures in the field, opportunity to make a series of interventions on the state of contemporary German film and German film studies.
Alan O'Leary, Ruth Glynn and Giancarlo Lombardi, eds, Terrorism, Italian Style: Representations of Political Violence in Contemporary Italian Cinema, IGRS, University of London, 2012.
The legacy of Italy's experience of political violence and terrorism in the anni di piombo ('years of lead', c. 1969-83) continues to exercise the Italian imagination to an extraordinary degree. Cinema has played a particularly prominent role in articulating the ongoing impact of the anni di piombo and in defining the ways in which Italians remember and work through the atrocities and traumas of those years.
Terrorism, Italian Style brings together some of the most important scholars contributing to the study of cinematic representations of the anni di piombo. Drawing on a comparative approach and a broad range of critical perspectives (including genre theory, family and gender issues, trauma theory and ethics), the book addresses an extensive range of films produced between the 1970s and the present and articulates their significance and relevance to contemporary Italian society and culture.
Paul Cooke and Chris Homewood, eds, New Directions in German Cinema, I.B. Tauris, 2011.
German cinema has been undergoing a remarkable resurgence since the beginning of the new millennium. German language films have been receiving Oscar nominations, the likes of Downfall and The Lives of Others have been winning Oscars, and major international festivals have been showcasing these films. German language cinema is again attracting attention at home and this volume explores its developments since 2000.
An international group of specialists on German film, society, culture, and politics together provide a wide-ranging study of this remarkable turn of fortunes. They examine just what German language film now has to offer, from the evolution of the so-called 'heritage films' which now dominate the country's mainstream and which examine Germany's problematic pasts - the Nazi, East German and terrorist legacies - to those which focus on the contemporary social reality of the Berlin Republic.
Vlad Strukov and Helena Goscilo, eds, Celebrity and Glamour in Contemporary Russia: Shocking Chic, Routledge, 2010.
Vlad Strukov and Helena Goscilo's edited collection is the first book to explore the phenomenon of glamour and celebrity in contemporary Russian culture, ranging across media forms, disciplinary boundaries and modes of inquiry, with particular emphasis on the media personality.
Strukov and Goscilo's book demonstrates how the process of ‘celebrification’ in Russia coincides with the dizzying pace of social change and economic transformation, the latter enabling an unprecedented fascination with glamour and its requisite extravagance; how in the 1990s and 2000s, celebrities - such as film or television stars - moved away from their home medium to become celebrities straddling various media; and how celebrity is a symbol manipulated by the dominant culture and embraced by the masses. It examines the primacy of the visual in celebrity construction and its dominance over the verbal, alongside the interdisciplinary, cross-media, post-Soviet landscape of today’s fame culture.
Taking into account both general tendencies and individual celebrities, including pop-diva Alla Pugacheva and ex-President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the book analyses the internal dynamics of the institutions involved in the production, marketing, and maintenance of celebrities, as well as the larger cultural context and the imperatives that drive Russian society’s romance with glamour and celebrity.
For details concerning older publications and more recent journal articles, please consult the Centre's staff profile pages
CWCDC also edits the Intellect journal New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film. The journal provides a platform for the study of new forms of cinematic practice and fresh approaches to cinemas hitherto neglected in Western scholarship.
Professors Cooke and Dennison also edit the major Routledge series Remapping World Cinemas: Regional Tensions and Global Transformations.