Industry guests
Antonio Bido is a director and screenwriter. His films Watch Me When I Kill and The Bloodstained Shadow are among the finest examples of giallo cinema.
Ruggero Deodato is a director and screenwriter who contributed to a variety of popular film cycles. He is most famous for his controversial Cannibal Holocaust, but also was responsible for the giallo Phantom of Death.
Ernesto Gastaldi is the most prolific screenwriter of Italian genre cinema, who has written more than 120 screenplays during his illustrious career. Having directed the early giallo gem Libido, he is responsible for the script of The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and many other thrillers such as So Sweet, So Perverse, Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion and Death Walks on High Heels.
George Hilton is one of the most renowned actors of Italian genre cinema. He is the leading man of The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and has played major roles in many other gialli such as The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail and The Case of the Bloody Iris.
Federica Martino is an award-winning director and screenwriter. Currently, she is preparing her giallo project Girl Hunt.
Sergio Martino has directed more than 60 films. He is one of central creative forces of Italian genre cinema, contributing to a wide variety of genres and launching his career with a series of highly influential gialli such as The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key and Torso.
Nora Orlandi is a singer and composer who created many influential film soundtracks. She composed the music of The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and other gialli such as The Sweet Body of Deborah and Double Face.
Speakers
Dr. Stefano Baschiera is Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. His work on European cinema and film industries has been published in a variety of edited collections and journals including Film International, Bianco e Nero, Italian Studies and The New Review of Film and Television Studies. He is writing a monograph on Bertolucci’s cinema for Berghahn Books and he is the co-editor with Russ Hunter of the book Italian Horror Cinema in preparation with Edinburgh University Press.
Dr. Louis Bayman is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Film & Television Studies, University of Warwick. His research specialisms include popular cinema and Italian studies, focusing especially on questions of emotion and aesthetics, and he has published on topics including realism, comedy, gender, serial killers, and comedy and Hollywood horror in the cinema. His monograph The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama (2014) is published by Edinburgh University Press.
Dr. Oliver Carter is a lecturer in media and cultural theory and a member of the Centre for Media and Cultural Research at Birmingham City University. His research focuses on alternative economies of media production, particularly fan enterprise. He has published work discussing cult cinema fan practices that appears in Murders and Acquisitions: Representations of the Serial Killer in Popular Culture (A MacDonald, Ed.) and The Piracy Effect (R. Braga and G. Caruso, Eds.) and is the author of the forthcoming monograph Making European Cult Cinema: Fan Enterprise in an Alternative Economy, published by Amsterdam University Press. He is currently co-editing a book about British media censorship with John Mercer (Birmingham City University) and Mark McKenna (University of Sunderland).
Professor Richard Dyer teaches Film Studies at King’s College London and St. Andrews University. His books include Stars, White, Only Entertainment, Seven, The Matter of Images, Pastiche, Nino Rota and (forthcoming) Lethal Repetition: The Serial Killer in European Cinema. He is currently preparing a book on La dolce vita.
Andreas Ehrenreich gained a MA in German Philology and a MA in Theatre, Film and Media Studies from the University of Vienna. He was a research associate at the Institute of Media and Communication Studies of the University of Mannheim and is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities at Sheffield Hallam University.
Dr. Massimiliano Gaudiosi is Lecturer of “Film Induced Tourism” at the University Suor Orsola Benincasa (Naples). He obtained a PhD in Comparative Studies (Literature, Theatre, Cinema) at the University of Siena, with a thesis on the image of Naples in film. His research interests include film theory and analysis, film/memory relations and the cinematic representation of landscape. He is co-author of Analizzare i film (Venice, Marsilio, 2007) and he published essays in film journals and edited collections. Fields of research: post-war Italian film history; film analysis; film and popular culture; film and the city; media and memory; cinema and tourism.
Dr. Mauro Giori is a post-doc researcher at Università degli Studi di Milano. His research in film history focuses on the representation of sexuality and gender, the cultural history of Italian cinema and film philology. His publications include Alfred Hitchcock. Psyco (2009), Poetica e prassi della trasgressione in Luchino Visconti. 1935–1962 (2011), Luchino Visconti. Rocco e i suoi fratelli (2011), Scandalo e banalità. Rappresentazioni dell’eros nel cinema di Luchino Visconti (1963–1976) (2012) and Nell’ombra di Hitchcock. Amore, morte e malattia nell’eredità di «Psycho» (forthcoming 2015). He also edited the Italian translation of Parker Tyler’s The Hollywood Hallucination (2015).
Dr. Leon Hunt is a Senior Lecturer in Film and TV Studies at Brunel University. He is the author of British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation, Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger, the BFI TV Classics monograph on The League of Gentlemen, and Cult British TV Comedy: From Reeves and Mortimer to Psychoville, as well as co-editor of East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film and Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and Television. He is editor of Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media.
Dr. Russ Hunter is a Senior Lecturer in Film & Television at Northumbria University. His research is focused upon Italian genre cinema, critical reception, and European horror cinema. He is currently preparing an edited collection (with Stefano Baschiera) entitled Italian Horror Cinema for Edinburgh University Press and is writing a monograph entitled A History of European Horror Cinema, also forEdinburgh University Press.
Dr. Mikel J. Koven is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Worcester. He is the author of La Dolce Morte: Vernacular cinema and the Italian Giallo film (2006), Film, Folklore and Urban Legends (2008) and Blaxploitation Films (2010). He contributed “The Giallo and the Spaghetti Nightmare Film” to the BFI’s Italian Cinema Book and his essays have appeared in journals and edited collections around the world. When not thinking about the giallo, he’s thinking about zombies. Doctors are concerned.
Dr. Christine Lötscher is a research associate at the Institute of Popular Culture Studies at the University of Zurich. Her current research focuses on the theory of nonsense and materiality. In 2014, she published her dissertation on magic books in fantasy “Das Zauberbuch als Denkfigur”. She also works as a literary and film critic.
Dr. Giovanni Memola is a researcher affiliated with the University of Winchester. He has recently gained a PhD with a thesis based on a historical and cultural analysis of popular film cycles of 1970s in Italy such as the giallo and the poliziottesco. The social and cultural implications of film production and consumption in Italy are his main areas of research. Over the last five years, Giovanni has spoken at several conferences held in the UK, as well as curating and promoting seminars on Italian genres and filoni in Italy. In 2014, he contributed with a chapter to Il cinema di Domenico Paolella (Edizioni Dal Sud). He is currently working on a collaborative book project on director Fernando Di Leo.
Dr. Xavier Mendik is an Associate Head of School for Art, Design and Media at the University of Brighton, from where he runs the Cine-Excess International Film Festival. He has written extensively on cult and horror film traditions, and his publications (as author/editor/co-editor) include Bodies of Desire and Bodies in Distress: The Golden Age of Italian Cult Film 1970–1985 (2015), Peep Shows: Cult Film and the Cine-Erotic (2012), 100 Cult Films (with Ernest Mathijs, 2011), The Cult Film Reader (with Ernest Mathijs, 2008), Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 (with Ernest Mathijs, 2004), Shocking Cinema of the Seventies (2004), Underground USA: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon (2002), Dario Argento’s Tenebrae (2000) and Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and its Critics (2000).He is currently preparing the new feature-length documentary That’s La Morte: Italian Sex and Death Cinema of the 1970s.
Dr. John Mercer is Reader in Gender and Sexuality at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. His research interests include film and television genres, celebrity and stardom, the pornography debate, the sexualisation of contemporary media culture and contemporary cultural theory. He is the author of Rock Hudson (BFI 2015) and Melodrama: Genre Style Sensibility (with Martin Shingler). He is currently writing a book about gay pornography for I. B. Tauris. John is co-editor of the Journal of Gender Studies, one of the editorial founders of Porn Studies and reviews editor for this new journal. He is also a member of the editorial board of Cine-Excess (and the guest editor of the inaugural issue) and of Sexualities and Celebrity Studies.
Dr. Emiliano Morreale is a reasearcher at Università di Torino and conservator of Cineteca Nazionale. He is a film critic for the weekly L’Espresso and contributes to newspapers and magazines such as La Repubblica, Il sole 24 ore and Cahiers du Cinéma. He worked as selector for the film festivals of Turin and Venice. His publications include Mario Soldati. Le carriere di un libertino (2006), L’invenzione della nostalgia. Il vintage nel cinema italiano e dintorni (2009), Cinema d’autore anni sessanta (2010) and Così piangevano. Il cinema mélo nell’Italia degli anni ’50 (2011).
Prof. Dr. Florian Mundhenke is an Associate Professor for Media Hybridity (Juniorprofessor für Mediale Hybride) at the University of Leipzig. Speaker of the DFG-research network “Cinema as an experience space”: www.erfahrungsraum-kino.de. His PhD dissertation is on the phenomenon of chance in film in 2008. He is currently researching the evolution and consolidation of genre hybridisation. Other fields of research include: cultural and social questions of media, contemporary media theories, narration and aesthetics of contemporary world cinema, media art.
Dr. Paolo Noto is a fixed-term lecturer at the University of Bologna. With Francesco Pitassio, he published a reader on neorealism, Il cinema neorealista. In his book Dal bozzetto ai generi he has challenged the most authoritative theories of genre cinema by setting them against the Italian production of the early 1950s. An article on the female bodily performances in genre cinema, “Che credeva, che fossi Cenerentola!”, is forthcoming for Italian Studies and a chapter on the domestic reception of Italian horror cinema of the 1970s will be published in a collection edited by Stefano Baschiera and Russ Hunter for Edinburgh University Press.
Dr. Marlene Peinhopf has studied Law at the University of Graz as well as Italian and English at the Institute for Theoretical and Applied Translation of Graz. She is currently working as a research associate at the Department of Roman Law, Ancient Legal History and History of Private Law of the University of Graz. While writing her doctoral thesis (“Adultera, venefica, meretrix. Women between Law and Rhetoric”), she has done research at the Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca as well as at the Università degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’. Her main research areas are Roman law, ancient legal history, criminal law, gender and rhetoric.
Sarah Reininghaus studied literature, philosophy and linguistics. Currently, she is a member of research staff at the Faculty of Cultural Studies at TU Dortmund University. In her dissertation project she analyses the representation of places of transit in literature and film by using theories of space. Further fields of research are discourse analysis, theories of normalism, representations of deviance, body genres and literature/film of remembrance.
Prof. Dr. Ivo Ritzer is junior professor for Media Studies and African Studies at the University of Bayreuth. He has worked as assistant professor in the media department at the University of Siegen and the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, as an external reviewer for theatre, film and television studies at the University of Glasgow, as well as a lecturer for media and cultural theory at the University of Zurich and at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz. His publications include multiple essays just as several monographs and edited books, with topics such as representations of the body in the media, media and genre theory, or film and philosophy. He has given talks at conferences all around the world and is editor of the series “New Perspectives on Media Aesthetics” (Springer VS, Wiesbaden). Current research interests focus on media aesthetics, media archaeology and media anthropology, media and cultural globalization, film and television theory, world cinema and transnational cinema.
Janet S. Robinson teaches for the Film Studies Department and the Libby Arts Residential Academic Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. In 2012, her chapter on David Cronenberg’s Crash was published in The Dark Side of Love: From Euro-Horror to American Cinema (2012) and her chapter on Elizabeth Bathory was published in Dracula’s Daughters: The Female Vampire in Film (2013). She is currently working on her dissertation concentrating on the issues of censorship and the representation of gender and sexuality in cinema as a Ph.D. candidate at the Philips University of Marburg, Germany.
Dr. Peter Scheinpflug is currently teaching at the Department for Media Culture and Theatre at the University of Cologne. In October 2013, he earned his PhD in Theatre, Film and Television Studies with a doctoral thesis about the giallo as a prime example for discussing crucial questions and desiderata of genre theory. His research focuses mostly upon genre studies, comic studies and media studies as he has published essays about genres across different media, superhero comic books, the giallo and a variety of different topics such as weeping cyborgs. Peter is also the author of the two books Formelkino. Medienwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf die Genre-Theorie und den Giallo and Genre-Theorie. Eine Einführung.
Adrian Smith is a PhD candidate with the University of Sussex. He has studied film and television history with a focus on independent production and distribution in the 1960s and 1970s. He is co-author of the forthcoming biography on the film director Norman J. Warren. His current research interests are in the distribution of international cinema in British cinemas in the 1960s by independent distributors, with emphasis on popular and exploitation cinema. Publications include Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media, Blu-ray essays for Arrow Video and the BFI, and articles for specialist film magazines Screem, Diabolique and Cinema Retro.
Dr. Marcus Stiglegger teaches film studies at the German universities of Mainz, Regensburg, and Mannheim. He was visiting professor at Clemson University, SC, USA, and Wroclaw, Poland. In 1999, he published his PhD thesis on the subject of politics and sexuality in Italian cinema (“SadicoNazista”’) and has edited several books on film history and film aesthetics. His publications include books on the seduction theory of film (2006), western (2003, co-ed.), war films (2006, co-ed.), pop and cinema (2004, co-ed.), terror-cinema (2010), David Cronenberg (2011, ed.), Dario Argento (2013, co-ed.) and global bodies in the media (2012, co-ed.). He regularly contributes to international conferences and magazines like Kinoeye (USA), Paradoxa (USA), and Eyeball (UK). Recently he has written a book on Akira Kurosawa (2014). His research interests are: body theory of media, transgressive philosophy and cinema, media mythology, performativity of cinema, and the Holocaust in narrative media. Stiglegger regularly produces audio and video bonus material for DVD and BD releases of genre films, especially from Italy (e. g. films by Argento, Fulci, Martino, Lizzani). In 2015 he received the James Monaco Honorary Award at the University of Siegen for his achievements in film studies.