This essay examines the parallels between Frank Capra’s MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON and the televised Oliver North hearings 40 years later.

This article examines the theoretical aspects of point of view and narrative voice in CITIZEN KANE’s Thatcher Sequence, with an eye to untangling the thorny aspects of subjectivity in that reticular film. In addition, there are larger implications that pertain to ALL narrative cinema in terms of who or what generates film images and sounds.

This essay explores the use of understated modernist performance tropes in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film BLOW-UP. The filmmaker relies on directorial prerogatives such as camera angles, lighting mise-en-scene, editing. subtle gestures and facial expressions, and other minimalist cinematic techniques to convey meaning and mood — rather than overt…[Read more]

This article investigates the mixed ideology of Vittorio DeSica’s classic neorealist film, BICYCLE THIEVES (1948) from a cinematic and political perspective.

This essay investigates the possibility that APOCALYPSE NOW presents “mixed messages” about the Vietnam War to a divided U.S. audience.

This essay explores the use of architecture in the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni.

This essay analyzes the process of adaptation from Susan Orlean’s book THE ORCHID THIEF to the motion picture ADAPTATION (directed by Spike Jonze)

This chapter traces the social and aesthetic implications of the five Academy Award contenders for Best Picture in America’s Bicentennial year, 1976.

This essay uses a psychoanalytic and Marxist methodology to analyze the appeal of Classical Hollywood Cinema.

“‘The Underlying Gesture’. Towards the Notion of Gesture in Jean d’Udine and Sergei Eisenstein”. In: Rossella Catanese, Francesca Scotto Lavina, Valentina Valente (eds.), From Sensation to Synaesthesia in Film and New Media. Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2019, 102-115.

The recent surge of interest in Afrofuturism has resulted in some groundbreaking work looking at the ways technology and race intersect in film, fashion, music and literature, as is evidenced by the important collection of essays “Afrofuturism 2.0” (2016), edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones. However there has not yet been an aca…[Read more]

A series of derivative verses from the late-third century has pride of place in one of the foundational collections of Chinese poetry. These verses, “Filling out the Missing Odes” by Shu Xi, can be found at the beginning of the lyric-poetry (shi 詩) section of the Wenxuan. This essay seeks to understand why such blatantly imitative pieces may have…[Read more]

Asian directors leverage Shakespeare’s own propensity to undermine dominant ideologies of gender—notably through the Ophelia figure—in their effort to renew Asian performance traditions. How do Shakespeare and modern directors talk to each other across cultural and historical divides? How does Ophelia become “unbound” through supraling…[Read more]

This essay explores how Pierre Nora’s sites of memory work a specific cultural function through what Melvin Dixon refers to as “a memory that ultimately rewrites history.” I look at two of the most well-known poems of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and Countee Cullen’s “Heritage,” one of which reveals a…[Read more]

This essay recovers, describes, and analyzes the theatrical tradition emerging from New Orleans’s free people of color during the antebellum period. I will start out by tracing the presence of free people of color in the francophone theatres of New Orleans, teasing out their impact on the early formations of a francophone theatrical culture in the…[Read more]

On January 1, 1824, the English-speaking population of New Orleans celebrated the grand opening of the American Theatre, lauding
the advent of “Bards our own” and the rise of “our Drama” in the Crescent City (qtd. in Smither 41). For the city’s francophone residents, this event marked a new stage in the ongoing battle for cultural survival.…[Read more]

Moving from France to the Caribbean to the American continent, Creole Drama follows the people that created, shaped, and sustained French theatre culture in New Orleans from its inception in 1792 until the beginning of the Civil War. In doing so, it draws upon the neglected archive of francophone drama native to Louisiana, as well as a range of…[Read more]