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Mark Shiel
researcher, professor, author, consultant on media and urban affairs
researcher, professor, author, consultant on media and urban affairs
2019 Co-organizer and panel chair, “London, Gateway to Cinema and Media” symposium, Society for Cinema and Media Studies/University of Notre Dame/King’s College London, 18-20 July
2018 “1968 and its legacies”, lead organizer, a series of six workshops, film screenings, and a three-day symposium, King’s College London, with the British Film Institute, BFI Southbank, 8 May-17 June 2018
Co-organized and chaired an audience with filmmaker and photographer William Klein, with a screening of his Grands soirs et petits matins (1978), BFI Southbank, 8 May
Co-organized and chaired an audience with filmmaker Allan Siegel, with a screening of New York Newsreel films from 1968, BFI Southbank, 15 June
Co-organized and chaired keynote addresses by, and roundtable discussions with, activists and artists Tariq Ali, Kathleen Cleaver, Jochen Gerz, Bernadette Mcaliskey, Anne Querrien, Mark Rudd, Helke Sander, Bush House Auditorium, King’s College London, 15-17 June
2018 “Protest footage from 1968”, seminar convener and chair, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Toronto, 14-18 March
2017 “Mapping in Humanities Research”, two one-day workshops and a one-day symposium, King’s College London/University College London, 14-27 June
2014 “Geography, Film, and Visual Culture”, symposium, King’s College London, 30 April
2014 Respondent, “Urban Traffic” panel, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Seattle, 19-23 March
2013 “Public Media 2.0: A Conversation on the Future of Urban Documentary”, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 8 March
2013 “From Chicago to L.A.: Research Paradigms for Cinematic Cities”, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago, 7 March
2012 Chair and co-organizer of guest lecture by Marsha Orgeron and Devin Orgeron (Film Studies, North Carolina State University), “The Facts behind Nonfiction: Educational Film and the Documentary Canon”, University College London, 7 March
2008 Chair and organizer of the panel “Architectures of Revolt: The Cinematic City circa 1968”, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Philadelphia, 6-9 March
2005 Convener of the Film Studies Research Seminar series, Department of Film Studies, King’s College London, also 2008
2002 Panel moderator at two sessions on Irish cinema in the digital age, at Keeping It Real: Irish Film for the Twenty-first Century, University College Dublin, 19-21 April
2000 Panel moderator at session on Cognitivism and Film, at the annual Screen conference, University of Glasgow, 30 June-2 July
1999 Co-organizer of the Cinema and the City conference, with Tony Fitzmaurice, Centre for Film Studies, University College Dublin, 12-14 March
1997 Chair and organizer of the Film Studies Research Seminar series, Centre for Film Studies, University College Dublin/Film Institute of Ireland
2018 Introduction to a screening of the film A Campaign of Their Own – The 2016 Presidential Campaign of Bernie Sanders (Lionel Rupp dir., 2016) and q&a with the producer, Michael David Mitchell, Department of Geography, King’s College London, 17 October
2018 Introduction to a screening of the film El Grito (Leopoldo Lopez Aretche, Mexico, 1968), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/King’s College London, 9 October
2017 “‘Religion, even more than God’: Edgar Morin in Southern California circa 1969”, Theology & Religious Studies Associate of King’s College London lecture, 2 February
2017 “Visualizing Venice, California: A place-specific film and media history, circa 1972”, Department of Film Studies Research Seminar, King’s College London, 15 February
2016 “Henri Lefebvre’s attitudes to cinema and TV”, Department of Geography, King’s College London, 23 November
2012 “Cities, Maps, and Signs”, Language, Media, and Communications workshop, King’s Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Doctoral Training Centre, 12 March
2011 “The Rise of Freeways and the Decline of the Hollywood Studio System, 1945-1965”, Cities Group, Department of Geography, King’s College London, 3 February
2005 “Banal and Magnificent Space in Electra Glide in Blue (1973)”, Centre for American Studies, King’s College London, November
2002 “Dead Time: Art and Attention in the Films of Michelangelo Antonioni”, Faculty of Humanities Public Lecture, University of Leicester, 5 December
2000 “Geography and Film Studies: Mapping the Space of the City”, Department of Geography, University College Dublin, 22 February
1998 “Visions of Skinhead and Football Violence in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange”, Philosophical Society, University College Dublin, February
King’s College London
2018- Head of the Department of Film Studies
2015-18 Research Lead, Department of Film Studies, and Member of the Arts & Humanities Faculty Research Committee
2011-15 Convener of ‘Urbanization, Globalization, and Social Change’ research group for the King’s Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Doctoral Training Centre (KISS-DTC)
2009-11 Project leader, MA Urban Cultures, development of new degree program
2009-11 Member of the School of Arts & Humanities Learning and Teaching Committee
2011-15 Member of the Cities Group, and of the Institute of North American Studies
2009-11 Admissions Tutor for the BA Film Studies
2009- Mentoring junior faculty and teaching assistants in the annual Peer Review of Teaching scheme
2007- Membership of seven hiring committees in Film Studies and one in Digital Humanities
2004-09 Director of the MA Film Studies (on research leave 2006-07)
2004-09 Director of the PhD in Film Studies program
2004- Personal tutor (pastoral support) to about 15-20 BA and MA students each year
University of Leicester
2001-03 Director of the BA Film and Visual Arts
Hollywood Cinema (BA, 2nd year core, 80-90 students)
Film and Architecture (30 BA final year students, special option)
Cinema and the City (20 MA students, special option)
Supervision of 6-8 dissertations per year for the BA and MA Film Studies
I have supervised six PhDs to completion, including recent theses on the cinematic representation of Texas, media and the East End of London, and London’s Soho as a film location and film industry hub. Three earlier theses have been revised and published as research monographs:
2012 Martha Shearer, New York City and the Hollywood Musical, 1941-1963 (published with the same title by Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016)
2011 Lawrence Webb, Cinematic space and the built environment in the 1970s (published as The Cinema of Urban Crisis by Amsterdam University Press, 2015)
2010 Maurizio Cinquegrani, Edwardian British cities and cinema (published as Of Empire and the City, by Peter Lang, 2014)
I am currently co-supervising a PhD on the cinematic representation of Seoul.
University of Cambridge, University of Exeter, University of Melbourne, University of Southampton, University of Warwick, Thames Valley University, University of Texas Austin, Architectural Association, Royal Holloway University of London, University College London
King’s College London
Italian Neorealism (BA, 2nd year option, 20-40 students)
Film and Nationalism: Cinematic Relationships of Europe and the United States (BA, 3rd year, option, 20 students)
Film Noir (BA, 3rd year, option, 20 students)
History of Postwar Cinema, 1945-1975 (BA, 2nd year, core, 50 students)
Introduction to Film Studies: Forms and Contexts (BA, 1st year, core, 150-200 students)
London Film Cultures (MA Film Studies, option, 15-20 students)
Research Methodologies (MA Film Studies, core, 20-30 students)
University of Leicester, 2001-04
(undergraduate) Realism and the Cinema; American Film and Visual Culture; The American West; The American City
Sheffield Hallam University, 2000-01
(undergraduate) Cinema and the Modern World; Popular Genres in Film and Literature; Alternative Cinemas; (postgraduate) Film Textual Analysis
University College Dublin, 1997-2000
(undergraduate) Realism and Cinema; Science Fiction Film; Contemporary Hollywood Cinema; (postgraduate) American Cinema and Politics since WWII
University of Warwick, Department of Film and Television Studies, 2010 and 2008
École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, Paris, 2006
Princeton University, Department of French and Italian, 2006
London School of Economics, Cities Programme, MSc Urban Design, 2005
Book and journal article manuscripts: University of Minnesota Press, Palgrave-Macmillan, Oxford University Press, Rutgers University Press, Bloomsbury, International Journal of Communication, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, Cinema Journal, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, Journal of American Studies, and the International Journal of Cultural Studies
Research funding applications: University of British Columbia, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), the Leverhulme Trust, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada/Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada, and the Wiener Wissenschafts-, Forschungs- und Technologiefonds (Vienna Science and Technology Fund WWTF)
Tenure committee, external reviewer: Department of English, North Carolina State University; Department of History of Art, Rice University
2018- American Association of Geographers
2017- Society of Architectural Historians
1996- Society for Cinema and Media Studies
2016-19 Member of the Public Policy Committee
2016 Member of the Conference Program Committee, Atlanta conference
2014 Member of the Conference Program Committee, Seattle conference
2015- Member of the advisory board of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture online journal
2012-15 Co-chair of the Urban Studies Scholarly Interest Group, SCMS
2008-11 Member of the Nominating Committee
2021 “F.T.A. (Fun, Travel, and Adventure, aka F*** the Army, 1972)”, short essay for the DVD, streaming, and theatrical restoration and re-release of the film, Kino Lorber
2019 “Tom Bradley, Mayor of Los Angeles, in the KTLA News Collection”, commissioned interpretive essay for digital portal, KTLA Newsfilm Collection, UCLA Film and Television Archive [https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/blogs/archive-blog/tom-bradley-mayor-los-angeles]
2017 “Edward Soja”, Mediapolis, 30 October [https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2017/10/edward-soja/]
“Sous les paves, la plage! [Under the paving stones, the beach!]”, Mediapolis, 13 February [https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2017/02/paving-stones-beach/]
“Do not adjust your set: Recalibrating urban cinema and media studies under Donald Trump”, Mediapolis, 7 January [https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2017/01/adjust-set-urban-trump/]
2016 “Let’s Build a Dublin that We Would Like to See On Screen”, Irish Times, 1 August [link]
2015 Consultant to Lucas Armati, Télérama magazine, Paris, for his article “À Los Angeles, les films ne seront plus jamais noir”, August
2012 “Q&A with film scholar Mark Shiel, author of Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles”, Daily Bruin newspaper, University of California Los Angeles, 30 May
2009 “Rossellini and the City” – a documentary and interview with Mark Shiel, filmed in New York, 24 July, Disc 2 DVD extra, 25 minutes, on the DVD Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy (Rome Open City; 1945 Paisà, 1946 Germany Year Zero, 1947), Criterion Collection, New York
2007 “Life as it is” – a documentary and interview with Mark Shiel, filmed in New York, 27 September, DVD extra, 40 mins, on the DVD Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948), Criterion Collection, New York, 2007
2006 Consultant to BBC Radio 3 arts program Night Waves, on Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975), June
2004 Odyssey, Chicago Public Radio, Mark Shiel and Giuliana Bruno interviewed on “Cinema and the City” by Gretchen Helfrich, 60 mins, 20 August
1999 The Arts Show, RTE Radio One, interview on the “Cinema and the City” conference at University College Dublin, by Mike Murphy, 10 mins, 10 March
I am researching and writing a second monograph on cinema and television in Los Angeles in the 1960s. This will be a sort of sequel to my 2012 monograph Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles, which focused on the 1900s-1950s.
The new book’s chapters are organized geographically around a range of Los Angeles districts in which there was a particularly strong interaction between media, society, and the built environment – Venice, Century City, the Sunset Strip, Hollywood, Downtown, Watts, and East LA.
The 1960s was an era of exceptional growth for Los Angeles, in which it became one of the seven largest cities in the world, and one of the most globally connected, but the era also saw exceptional social division and violence, in which the Hollywood film industry was also in crisis. The book examines these contradictions through a variety of famous and lesser known feature films (e.g. Night Tide, The Graduate, Play It As It Lays), political and corporate documentaries, and current affairs programming on Los Angeles television (e.g. KNXT’s Ralph Story’s Los Angeles [LINK], KCET’s Citywatchers [LINK]).
In this project, a journal article, I recognize the RTÉ Television Centre, headquarters of Ireland’s national broadcaster, as an exemplar of high modernist architecture, and one of the first such buildings in Dublin, where it played a key role in the modernity and suburbanization of the city in the 1960s. This utopian characterization of the Centre is fairly well known in Ireland, though it has yet to be documented in detail. I seek to broaden understanding of the site and its importance by locating it in international trends after World War Two. On the one hand, I interpret the Centre in light of what Reinhold Martin identifies as “the organizational complex”, a new blend of architecture, media, and corporate space for a postindustrial society “immersed in and constructed by data flows.” On the other, drawing on the work of Lynn Spigel, I compare and contrast the Centre with the earlier and even more famous paradigm of modernist media architecture, CBS Television City in Los Angeles.
Architectures of Revolt: The Cinematic City circa 1968
(Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2018)
Edited by Mark Shiel
“The concept for this volume is brilliant, and Shiel’s execution is stunning. Architectures of Revolt comprises essays that address the relationship between cinema, the city, and architecture in the pivotal year 1968. Paris, Milan, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Tokyo are all examined through this lens. What makes this collection work so well is the editor’s guiding hand. Shiel (film studies and urbanism, King’s College London, UK) made sure that the essays all speak to each other rather than simply adhere to a rough theme (as in so many edited works).” – Choice, American Libraries Association, January 17th, 2019
“Mark Shiel has skillfully assembled a variety of essays, which collectively explore the urban-based political events of the time and the accompanying changes in the cinematic art form…. (T)he anthology as a whole is an excellent chronicle of the rebellious spirit of youth in the late 1960s and their protests in urban spaces and the accompanying changes in the art of cinema…. Architectures of Revolt is a stimulating tour of protest at a pivotal point in the 20th century and the filmic reactions to it on four continents…. The book makes one think, which, in the end, is what one hopes from an anthology of this type. Mark Shiel delivers.” — Journal of Urban Affairs, March 2019
Click here to read an excerpt or buy the book from the publisher’s website.
” Mark Shiel has produced the first volume of its kind and, indeed, Architectures of Revolt is a must-read book on film and architecture that maps a fascinating journey into the intertwining paths between political revolution and revolutionary cinematic practices.”
—Richard Koeck, University of Liverpool, Director of the Centre for Architecture and Visual Arts
“ Exploring a range of global cities through the lens of film theory, urban studies, architecture, and theories of everyday life, this book is a brilliant intervention into cinema’s role in the history of urban rebellions. Organized around the volatile events in and around 1968, the essays offer important new insights into how filmmakers both depicted and organized urban protests. What makes this volume especially unique is its emphasis on the city’s role in shaping the space of cinema itself as a vehicle for imagining social change. Timely in every way, Architectures of Revolt resonates with urgent concerns about social movements, media activism, and the networked landscapes of contemporary cities.”
— Lynn Spigel, Frances E. Willard Professor of Screen Cultures at Northwestern University, and author of TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television
Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City
(Wallflower Press, London/Columbia University Press, New York, 2006)
‘The brief lifespan and relatively small output of this cinematic movement makes it perfectly suited to Wallflower’s Short Cuts series, and this volume is the best yet among some fine competition. Mark Shiel concisely and unpretentiously provides everything you could need to know about the cornerstones of the genre, from its sudden birth following Mussolini’s time in power, through seven key works, to a brief concluding look at its legacy. An excellent introduction to one of the often mentioned but lesser understood forms of world cinema, this achieves exactly what it sets out to, and delivers cinema-lit and its most comfortably digestible. *****’
Empire, April 2006
‘Mark Shiel’s survey of Italian Neorealism is a well-written, well-researched and interesting book. His focus on the role of urban spaces in neorealist classics is particularly illuminating, and the discussions of the films in question are always based upon very intelligent and sensitive analyses of the many dimensions of these works (aesthetic, social, ideological, political) that make them so fascinating. Highly recommended.’
Peter Bondanella, Indiana University
‘A highly engaging introduction to Italy’s most celebrated cinematic movement, its crucial relationship to modernist art cinemas, its privileging focus on the city and ontological truths, and its meaning in the films of five major auteurs – Visconti, Rossellini, De Sica, Antonioni, and Fellini. Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City is a solid study of neorealist aesthetics, a book marked by a critical understanding of Italian cinema and culture, a valuable addition to a field crowded with specialized volumes.’
Gaetana Marrone, Princeton University
Click here to read an excerpt or buy the book at the publisher’s website.
“One of the chief achievements of Mark Shiel in Italian Neorealism. Rebuilding the Cinematic City is that with this book he manages to offer us an elegant introduction to Italian neorealism in general and, at the same time, a reading of this movement from a particular hermeneutic angle, that is, from the standpoint of its various approaches to the city. This makes Shiel’s book perform a somehow paradoxical task: one the one hand, the book speaks to a relatively unspecialized audience – and does so generously, in a jargon-free and highly readable manner – and, on the other hand, it offers the specialist reader a series of insights into the complex relationship between Italian neorealism and the wide repertoire of topics associated with (the construction of) the urban space: urban/rural distinction, urban destruction and reconstruction, ruins, housing crises, industrialization, symbolism of space, architectural styles and city planning.” – Costica Bradatan, Film-Philosophy, December 2007
Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles
(Reaktion Books, London, distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2012)
Winner of the 2014 Urban Communication Foundation Jane Jacobs Award [LINK]
‘Mark Shiel’s brilliant book provides a sweeping vision of the ways in which the film industry provided viewers a means of conceiving of the urban built environment, and particularly that of Los Angeles. But, what is even more innovative is the ways in which he integrates that discussion with a related consideration of how that industry actually rebuilt the city. This study is a landmark synthesis of film and cultural history.’ – Stanley Corkin, University of Cincinnati, author of Starring New York: Filming the Grime and Glamour of the Long 1970s
‘The history of film and the history of Los Angeles have been richly explored in all stages and varieties of their development. Yet never before have they been so deftly analyzed as an integrated phenomenon. Mark Shiel’s excellent study is a significant contribution to urban and cinematic cultural history.’ – Thomas Hines, University of California Los Angeles, author of Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism, 1900-1970
‘Los Angeles engages landscapes of a geographic, geologic, cultural, economic, and political kind. It is a place one finds on a map and on the big screen . . . a sprawling American place captured complexly and completely here in Mark Shiel’s suitably sprawling cultural history. Focusing on a century of interactions and disjunctures between the city and the cinema produced there, Shiel introduces something of a new urban ecology of the movies, one in which the landscape and built-environment resonate with enduring American dreams of space and place, of life, leisure and a setting (a location) on which to act it all out.’ – Jon Lewis, Oregon State University, author of Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry and American Film
Click here to read more about the book, or buy a copy, at the University of Chicago Press website.
Click here to read more about the book, or buy a copy, at the Reaktion Books website.
“The strength of Shiel’s study is its range and breadth: his knowledge of the films featuring Los Angeles is staggering. . . . As a work of inter-disciplinary scholarship, it is impressive, mastering not just film history, but also the sociological study of urban development, while integrating both within a broader conception of American history. It is ambitious, wide-ranging and intelligent, full of interesting facts and figures. . . . It will be indispensable to students of American film history and representations of Los Angeles.” – New Statesman
“Throughout his study, Shiel displays a capacious understanding of his subject. . . . His sharp analysis, buttressed by illuminating frame enlargements, period photographs, statistical charts, graphs and other sources, reveals the vast extent to which city officials, local boosters, studio moguls, and the players themselves helped to create the potent and enduring mythology of ‘Hollywoodland.’” – Times Literary Supplement
“Who can make sense of Los Angeles? The title of Mark Shiel’s new book points to the contradictions and tensions that give the region its unique character—the mythical Hollywood motion picture industry versus the actual, inhabited city. Shiel attempts to see both sides of the same coin in this welcome addition to the expanding body of work on cinema and urban spaces.” – Film Comment
“Beautifully researched, carefully theorized, and supplemented with plentiful illustrations and useful maps and charts, Shiel’s book is cultural history at its finest. Essential.” – Choice
“Shiel is to be commended for his impressive scholarship. He ranges widely in his choice of supporting materials, relying not merely upon close analysis of film stills but invoking as well contemporary photographs, maps, advertisements, brochures, and internal film industry memos. . . . The author’s prose is clear, direct, almost nostalgic for a Los Angeles that will never return and perhaps never was.” – Film & History
Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context
(Blackwell Publishing, Oxford and New Malden, MA, 2001)
Edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice
“..recommended to those who are exploring the exciting reciprocity between the city and the cinema…” James A. Clapp, Journal of Urban Technology
“Cinema and the City is an exceptional reader that interrogates a range of issues linking cities, film, and globalization. With essays of exceptionally high quality this is an intriguing, engaging and informed work that should be accessible to an array of disciplines and students.” Leo Zonn, Annals of the Association of American Geographers
“Stitching together the complex and multiple intersections between film, cities, urban cultures and globalisation is no simple task, as any number of very good single-authored works will demonstrate. Despite these difficulties, Shiel and Fitzmaurice’s excellent anthology rises to the occasion and, in the process, pushes film studies beyond its usual terrain of textual, audience and production analyses to relocate the subject matter within urban sociology […] As the relationship between film and the city continue to develop as a focus of critical inquiry, Cinema and the City stands as one of the more accessible and innovative entry-points into the issues […] a welcome addition to the reading-lists of graduate and undergraduate courses in film studies and urban studies/sociology” Joe Austin, Urban Studies
Read an excerpt or buy the book at the publisher’s website: click here.
Screening the City
(Verso, London and New York, 2003)
Edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice
‘…the book features several excellent essays which follow its guiding principle – juxtaposing city and cinema and using each to look at the other. The best essays not only bring the city into the analysis of a film, but also use the film and the conditions of its production to shed new light on social, political, and economic concerns of its historical place and time.’ Mariana Mogilevich, Film Quarterly
‘Collaboratively edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, Screening The City is an eye-opening collection of essays concerning the motif of urban life and experiences as depicted by and reflected in, twentieth-century filmmaking. Literate and thought-provoking, with an eye for changes in cities as seen film since the dramatic worldwide upheaval of World War II, Screening The City is an erudite and recommended addition to cinematic studies reading lists and reference collections.’ Midwest Book Review
Click here for Verso publisher’s website
“The American New Wave, 1965-70” and “The American New Wave, 1970-1975”
in Michael Hammond and Linda Ruth Williams (eds), American Cinema Since World War Two, McGraw-Hill, 2006, pp. 12-28 and pp. 124-50
Mark Shiel, “Banal and Magnificent Space in Electra Glide in Blue (1973), or An Allegory of the Nixon Era”, Cinema Journal, vol. 46, no. 2, Winter 2007, pp. 89-114
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4137183
I am working on a journal article on William Klein’s Grands soirs et petits matins (1978), arguably the best documentary film representation of the events of May 1968 in Paris. I interviewed Klein in public at the British Film Institute’s National Film Theatre in London in May 2018, on the occasion of a screening of his film.
That event was part of the 1968 and its legacies series of workshops, film screenings, and three-day symposium, which I co-organized with colleagues at King’s College London. For details, please visit: 1968.kcl.ac.uk
My work on Klein also relates closely to my recent edited book, Architectures of Revolt: The Cinematic City circa 1968 (Temple University Press, 2018): http://tupress.temple.edu/book/0921
I am a member of a three-person research team which is collaborating with the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles on the digitization and interpretation of the famous streets photographs of Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard made by the legendary LA-based photographer Ed Ruscha. My colleagues on this team are Alyce Mahon, Reader in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Cambridge, and Amy Murphy, Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Southern California.
http://www.getty.edu/research/scholars/digital_art_history/ruscha/index.html
Our team is focusing on the question of Ruscha’s photographic technique, its relationship to motion pictures, fine art, and the built environment. Other teams involved in the project are based at Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, and Humboldt University, and the whole project is led by the Digital Art History Unit at the GRI. Expected outputs will be a large-scale digital repository of Ruscha’s street photographs, various online interpretive materials and texts, a series of journal article publications, and an edited book.
The famous French philosopher, sociologist and geographer is well known for his work on the ‘critique of everyday life’, the ‘right to the city’, and the ‘production of space’, but less well known is his commentary on cinema and television. The latter was never a major aspect of his work – it can be found sporadically throughout his books, articles and public statements – but it still reveals a lot about the relationship between the social sciences and the arts, intellectual life and mass culture, and cities and their visualization. I am writing a journal article which will document Lefebvre’s thinking on cinema and television, especially in France from the 1940s through the 1970s, but also in the present-day as well, not least because Lefebvre remains so influential.
“Daniel Bell, Post-industrial Society, and Los Angeles Cinema, circa 1967-1972”
in Lawrence Webb and Johan Andersson (eds), The City in American Cinema: Film and Postindustrial Culture, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 43-82
“Hollywood, the New Left, and F*T*A*”
in Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield (eds), Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, Rutgers University Press, 2007, pp. 210-24
“Starring Los Angeles: The Southland on Screen”
in Kevin McNamara (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 145-156
“A Regional Geography of Film noir: Urban Dystopias On- and Off-screen”
in Gyan Prakash (ed.), Noir Urbanisms, Princeton University Press, 2010, pp. 75-103
“Branding the Modernist Metropolis: Geographies of Rome and Paris in Postwar Film”
in Stephanie Donald, Catherine Kevin, and Eleonore Kofman (eds), Branding Cities and Cultural Borders, Routledge, 2009, pp. 105-22
“Imagined and Built Spaces in the Rome of Neorealism”
in Richard Wrigley (ed.), Cinematic Rome, Troubadour, 2008, pp. 27-42
“Cityscapes and Cinematic Spaces”
in Peter Bondanella (ed.), The Italian Cinema Book, British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 84-91
“Classical Hollywood, 1928-1946”
in Lucy Fischer (ed.), Art Direction and Production Design, Rutgers University Press, 2014, pp. 48-72
“Los Angeles and Hollywood in Film and French Theory: Agnès Varda’s Lions Love (1969) and Edgar Morin’s California Journal (1970)”
in François Penz (ed.), Cinematic Urban Geographies, Palgrave Macmillan, Screening Spaces series, 2017, pp. 245-68
2018- Head of the Department of Film Studies, King’s College London
2013- Reader in Film Studies and Urbanism, Department of Film Studies, King’s College London
2007-13 Senior Lecturer, Department of Film Studies, King’s College London
2004-07 Lecturer, Film Studies Program, King’s College London
2001-04 Lecturer in Film Studies, Department of History of Art, University of Leicester
2000-01 Lecturer in Film Studies, School of Cultural Studies, Sheffield Hallam University
1997-2000 Faculty of Arts Fellow, Centre for Film Studies, University College Dublin
1999 PhD in Film Studies, “Radical Agendas and the Politics of Space in American Cinema, 1968-1974”, Birkbeck College/British Film Institute, University of London
1994 BA Hons in English Literature and Drama Studies, Trinity College Dublin
2006-07 Davis Center Research Fellow, Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University
2003-04 Visiting Scholar, Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media, University of California, Los Angeles, non-stipendiary
2003-04 Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship
2019 “Democratic Capitalism and Los Angeles’s Visual Culture”, School of Architecture, University of Southern California, 16 January
2019 “Surface and Seriality: The Street Photographs of Ed Ruscha”, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 18 January
2015 “‘Century City Makes Magic Where Film Studio Used to Spin Fantasy’: A site-specific analysis of urban restructuring in Los Angeles, 1961-1972”, School of Planning, Architecture, and Civil Engineering/Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities, Queen’s University Belfast, 11 March
2015 as above, Charles Phelps Taft Research Center, University of Cincinnati, 20 February
2014 as above, Centre for Metropolitan Studies, Technische Universität Berlin, 12 December
2014 “From Paris to L.A.: Cinematic and philosophical reflections on the City of Angels around 1968”, American University in Paris, 28 January
2013 “Los Angeles, Hollywood, and French Theory”, Cinematic Urban Geographies, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, University of Cambridge, 3-4 October
2012 “Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles”, Hammer Museum, University of California Los Angeles, 30 May
2011 “Hollywood and the Freeway”, Screen Media Research Seminar, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, University of Cambridge, 21 February
2010 “The Pacific Wall: Cinematic Visions of Los Angeles after 1968”, City Seminar, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, University of Cambridge, 12 January
2009 “Cinematic Visions of Los Angeles circa 1968”, National College of Art & Design, Dublin, 19 January
2008 “Mapping Early Hollywood”, Cinema Studies Colloquium, University of Pennsylvania, 19 March
2008 “Imprisoned in its Own Beatitude: Los Angeles and the Emergence of Postmodernism after 1968”, Globalization and Violence conference, University of London Institute, Paris, 10-12 January
2007 “A Regional Geography of film noir”, Urban Dystopias conference, Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University, 18-19 May
2007 “The Real Los Angeles: Hollywood, Cinema and the City of Angels”, Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University, 15 March
2006 “The City as Trace and Symbol from Visconti’s Bellissima (1951) to Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1954)”, Traces and Symbols in Italian Neorealism conference, Center for Italian Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2 December
2006 “Italian Neorealism”, public lecture at the British-Italian Society, London, 25 January
2005 “A Tale of Two Cities: Antonioni’s Cronaca di un amore (1950) and Zabriskie Point (1969)”, plenary paper at the Visualising the City conference, University of Manchester, 26-28 June
2005 “Michelangelo Antonioni”, a public lecture to open the Michelangelo Antonioni retrospective, National Film Theatre, London, 2 June
2005 “Le Cinéma et la ville”, Une histoire visuelle de la ville, École des hautes études en sciences sociales/Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, 23 May
2005 “‘The Wild Bunch’: American Cinema, 1967-80”, six weekly public seminars, National Film Theatre, London, 18 January-22 February
2003 “Cinema and the City”, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, in association with the 2003 City of Bristol Cities Festival, 29 March
2002 “The Limits of Modernism: German Film Theory and Contemporary American Cinema”, Wadham College, University of Oxford, 8 March
2001 “A Nostalgia for Modernity: Thoughts on American Cinema since the 1960s”, Screening the City conference, Queen’s University, Belfast, 1 December
2000 “Urban Spaces and Film Studies: A Challenge to the Discipline?”, plenary paper at the Screen conference, Department of Film Studies, University of Glasgow, 30 June-2 July
2019 “Post-industrial society and the Cinematic Landscape of Los Angeles in the Long 1960s”, in Lawrence Webb and Johan Andersson (eds), The City in American Cinema: Film and Postindustrial Culture, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 43-82
2018 “Introduction: Cinema, Architecture, and Cities circa 1968” and “‘It’s a Big Garage. Cinematic Images of Los Angeles circa 1968”, in Architectures of Revolt: The Cinematic City circa 1968, Mark Shiel (ed.), Temple University Press, pp. 1-34 and 164-88
2017 “Los Angeles and Hollywood in Film and French Theory: Agnès Varda’s Lions Love (1969) and Edgar Morin’s California Journal (1970)”, in François Penz (ed.), Cinematic Urban Geographies, Palgrave Macmillan, Screening Spaces series, pp. 245-68
2014 “Classical Hollywood, 1928-1946”, in Lucy Fischer (ed.), Behind the Silver Screen: Art Direction and Production Design, Rutgers Univ. Press, pp. 48-72
2013 “Cityscapes and Cinematic Spaces”, in Peter Bondanella (ed.), The Italian Cinema Book, British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 84-91
2010 “A Regional Geography of Film noir: Urban Dystopias On- and Off-screen”, in Gyan Prakash (ed.), Noir Urbanisms, Princeton Univ. Press, pp. 75-103
2010 “Starring Los Angeles: The Southland on Screen”, in Kevin McNamara (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles, Cambridge Univ. Press, pp. 145-156
2009 “Branding the Modernist Metropolis: Geographies of Rome and Paris in Postwar Film”, in Stephanie Donald, Catherine Kevin, and Eleonore Kofman (eds), Branding Cities and Cultural Borders, Routledge, pp. 105-22
2008 “Imagined and Built Spaces in the Rome of Neorealism”, in Richard Wrigley (ed.), Cinematic Rome, Troubadour, pp. 27-42
2007 “Hollywood, the New Left, and F*T*A*”, in Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield (eds), Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, Rutgers Univ. Press, pp. 210-24
2006 “The American New Wave”, in Michael Hammond and Linda Ruth Williams (eds), American Cinema Since World War Two, McGraw-Hill, pp. 12-28 and pp. 124-50
2003 “A Nostalgia for Modernity: New York, Los Angeles, and American Cinema in the 1970s”, in Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds), Screening the City, Verso, pp. 160-79
2001 “Cinema and the City in History and Theory”, in Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds), Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, Blackwell, pp. 1-18
2007 “Banal and Magnificent Space in Electra Glide in Blue (1973), or an Allegory of the Nixon Era”, Cinema Journal, vol. 46, no. 2, Winter, pp. 89-114
2003 “Why Call them ‘Cult Movies’? American Independent Filmmaking and the Counterculture in the 1960s”, in Scope: Online Film Studies Journal, Institute of Film Studies, University of Nottingham, no. 8
2002 “Multiple Times and Multiples Spaces: The Experiential Effects of Location Filming in Dublin City”, in Tracings, University College Dublin School of Architecture, vol. 2, pp. 100-107
2020 Rapid Zoom: Los Angeles Film in the Freeway Age, 90,000-word research monograph, Rutgers University Press
2021 “‘You can change nothing while it passes before you on the screen’: On the importance of Henri Lefebvre’s commentaries on cinema and TV”, journal article in preparation for submission to Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
2022 “‘Le pouvoir est dans la rue!’ The image of Paris in William Klein’s Grands soirs et petits matins (1969)”, journal article in preparation for submission to Studies in French Cinema
2012 Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles, Reaktion Books/Univ. of Chicago Press
2006 Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City, Wallflower/Columbia Univ. Press
2018 Architectures of Revolt: The Cinematic City circa 1968, Mark Shiel (ed.), Temple University Press
2003 Screening the City, Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds), Verso
2001 Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds), Blackwell Publishing
2018 “‘Le pouvoir est dans la rue!’ The image of Paris in William Klein’s Grands soirs et petits matins (1969)”, Mai ’68 at 50: Appropriations, Translations, Legacies, one-day symposium, King’s College London/Université de Paris Diderot (Paris 7), 24 April
2017 “‘Ornamentation of buildings is un-functional… if not un-American…’: TV news and current affairs reporting on Los Angeles architecture and urban renewal in the 1960s”, panel paper, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago, 22-26 March
2016 “‘A Free-thinking environment’: Beatniks, hippies, and the cinematic landscape of Venice, California in the 1960s”, panel, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Atlanta, 30 March-2 April
2016 “New Directions and Methods in Urban Studies and Film”, workshop presentation, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Atlanta, 30 March – 2 April
2015 “Contested Representations: Filming Century City, 1967-1972”, This is the City conference, Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum, University of California Los Angeles, 13-14 November
2015 “Not A Star is Born: Data visualization in 1930s traffic study films of Los Angeles”, panel paper, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Montreal, 25-29 March
2014 “Cinema, media, and Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Right to the City’”, workshop presentation, Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, Seattle, 19-23 March
2013 “Some unnatural stillness: Los Angeles and Hollywood in transition in The Christian Licorice Store (1971) and Play it as it Lays (1972)”, panel paper, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago, 6-10 March
2012 “Post-industrialism and the Cinematic Landscape of Los Angeles: The Case of Century City”, panel paper, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Boston, 21-25 March
2012 “Maps and Los Angeles Film History”, workshop presentation, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Boston, 21-25 March
2011 “Towards an Urban Approach to Cinema and Media Studies”, workshop presentation, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, New Orleans, 10-13 March
2008 “Revolution and Postmodern Decline: Cinematic Representations of Los Angeles circa 1968”, panel paper, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Philadelphia, 6-9 March
2006 “Branding the Modernist Metropolis”, Branding Cities and Urban Borders: Cosmopolitanisms and Parochialisms in Europe and Asia-Pacific, University of Technology Sydney / Menzies Centre, Kings College London, 12-14 January
2005 “Imagined and Built Spaces in the Rome of Neorealism”, Cinematic Rome, Department of Art History, University of Nottingham, 17-18 September
2005 “The City as Object-To-Be-Looked-At”, Visual Pleasure’ Thirty Years On: The Work of Laura Mulvey, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 18 June
2004 “The Cinematic City of Michelangelo Antonioni: Cronaca di un amore (1950) and Zabriskie Point (1969)”, The Art of Comparison, European Sociological Association Research Network for the Sociology of the Arts, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 3-5 November
2001 “‘A Filthy Anti-American Flag-Desecrating Film’: Zabriskie Point and the Black Panther Party”, Society for Cinema Studies conference, Washington, DC, 24-27 May
2000 “Why Call them ‘Cult Movies’? American Independent Filmmaking and the Counterculture in the 1960s”, Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste, Institute of Film Studies, University of Nottingham, 17-19 November
1999 “Banal and Magnificent Space in Electra Glide in Blue”, Society for Cinema Studies conference, West Palm Beach, Florida, 15-18 April
1997 “American Radical Poster Art and the Vietnam War”, Irish Association of Art Historians, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, April
1996 “Ostensible Revolutionaries: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point”, Assault: Radical Aesthetics and Politics, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, 8-11 November
1995 “Pathos in Godard’s Pierrot le fou”, Patheticism, Trinity College Dublin, 18-19 August
1994 “Photorealism and Hollywood”, Irish Association of Art Historians, University College Dublin, May