Dr Alex Marlow-Mann BA, MA, PhD

Department of Film and Creative Writing
Honorary Research Fellow

Contact details

Dr Alex Marlow-Mann is a specialist on European (and particularly Italian) cinema with strong interests in regional cinemas, the politics of popular genre cinema, cognitive theory, film and emotion, and film preservation. He is the author of The New Neapolitan Cinema (EUP, 2011), the editor of Archival Film Festivals (StAFS, 2013) and has written numerous articles on cinema from the silent era to the present day. He is also one of the founding members of the British Association for Film, Television and Screen Studies and sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies and Cine-Excess.

Qualifications

  • BA (Film Studies and Italian)
  • MA (Film Studies and Film Archiving)
  • PhD (Italian film)

Biography

After graduating in Film Studies and Italian from the University of Kent I spent a year teaching English in Naples before taking an MA in Film Archiving at the University of East Anglia and working for the BFI’s National Film and Television Archive. I then returned to full-time academia to complete a PhD on Neapolitan Cinema at the University of Reading.

I worked briefly in the Department of Italian at the University of Leeds and the BFI’s Filmographic Department before taking up a post as Research Coordinator at the Centre for Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. At the CFS I was responsible for the day-to-day running of StAFS publishing and for organising conferences and lecture series. I also helped to set up the British Association of Film Television and Screen Studies.

From 2012-2014 I was Lecturer in European Cinema at the University of Birmingham and Acting Director of B-Film: The Birmingham Centre for Film Studies for Rob Stone during his Leverhulme Fellowship.

Teaching

I have taught widely on European Cinema and on such modules as ‘The Political Thriller’ and ‘The Art of the Moving Image’, as well as a variety of other subjects.

Research

I specialise in European cinema, with particular expertise in the cinema of Italy, and have published extensively on a wide-range of under-studied genres (musicals, crime thrillers, historical epics, gothic horror) and contemporary filmmakers (Mario Martone, Antonio Capuano, Paolo Sorrentino).

More broadly I am concerned with the problematics around distinctions between national/ transnational/ regional cinema and ‘popular’/ ‘art’ cinema – and the areas of intersection between these concepts.

These interests are no being developed in a major new book series for Routledge, of which I am co-editor, with Prof. Rob Stone (University of Birmingham), Prof. Paul Cooke (University of Leeds) and Dr. Stepahnie (University of Leeds) entitled Remapping World Cinema: Regional Tensions and Global Transformations. The series will kick-off with a 40-chapter volume entitled The Routledge Companion to World Cinema, which I will be co-editing with the other series editors, and for which I will be contributing a chapter on ‘Regional Cinemas’

More recently I have been exploring cognitive theory and in particular cognitive analyses of the role of emotion in film and this research will provide the theoretical basis for my next monograph. The first book-length study of an important but curiously neglected genre, The Political Thriller in Film - Genre, Ideology and Emotion, will provide a historical and critical study of the interplay between emotion and politics in a wide range of examples of the genre from around the globe.

Having previously worked for the BFI, the BFI National Film Archive and an independent arthouse cinema, I have also a long-standing interest in the cultural institutions of cinema, and in particular film archives and film festivals, most obviously manifest in my recent edited collection, Archival Film Festivals (StAFS, 2013). 

Other activities

  • I am one of the founding members of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies and I currently serve on the Executive Committee.
  • I am a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Italian and Media Studies and the e-journal Cine-Excess.
  • I recently organised the conference Cine Excess VII: European Erotic Cinema: Identity, Desire and Disgust.

Publications

Books

  • Il nuovo cinema napoletano (revised and translated edition of The New Neapolitan Cinema), Iupiter Edizioni, forthcoming 2015.
  • The New Neapolitan Cinema, Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Edited books

  • The Routledge Companion to World Cinema(co-edited with Rob Stone, Paul Cooke and Stephanie Dennison), Routledge, forthcoming 2016.
  • European Erotic Excess: Identity, Desire and Disgust, special issue of the Cine-Excesse-journal, 1:2, forthcoming 2015.
  • Archival Film Festivals, St Andrews Film Studies, 2013.

Chapters in edited books

  • ‘Regional Cinemas and Local Film Industries’ in R.Stone, P.Cook, S.Dennison & A.Marlow-Mann (eds), The Routledge Companion to World Cinema, Routledge, forthcoming 2016.
  • ‘Whose Heritage?: Noi credevamoand the National, Regional and Transnational Dynamics of the Risorgimento Film’ in P. Cooke and R. Stone (eds) Screening European Heritage, Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming 2016.
  • Subjectivity and the Ethnographic Gaze in Antonio Capuano’s Vito e gli altri’ in D. Hipkins & R. Pitt (eds), Re-envisioning the Child in Italian Film, Peter Lang, 2014, pp. 267-284.’
  • 'Out of the Past: An Exploration of the Varied World of Archival Film Festivals', BIFF Forum 2013, Busan International Film Festival, 2013, pp. 128-143. (Also published in Korean.)
  • ‘Archival Film Festivals at the Crossroads’ in Alex Marlow-Mann (ed.) Archival Film Festivals, St Andrews Film Studies, 2013, pp. 3-20.
  • ‘Strategies of Tension: Towards a Re-interpretation of The Big Racket and the Italian Crime Film’ in Sergio Rigoletto and Louis Bayman (eds), Italian Popular Cinema, Palgrave MacMillan, 2013, pp. 133-146.
  • 'Italy' in Corey Creekmur and Linda Mokdad (eds), The International Film Musical, University of Edinburgh Press, 2012, pp. 80-91.
  • ‘Gothic Horror’ in Louis Bayman (ed.), Directory of World Cinema: Italy, Intellect, 2011, pp. 154-175.
  • 'Character Engagement and Alienation in the Cinema of Paolo Sorrentino' in William Hope (ed.), Italian Film Directors in the New Millennium, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, pp. 161-173.
  • 'Un cinema di nicchia: le fortune in Gran Bretagna' [A Niche Cinema: the Fortunes of Italian Cinema in Great Britain] in Vito Zagarrio (ed.), Il nuovo-nuovo cinema italiano, Marsilio, 2006, pp. 292-296.
  • 'British Series and Serials in the Silent Era' in Andrew Higson (ed.), Young and Innocent: Cinema and Britain 1896-1930,University of Exeter Press, 2002, pp. 147-161.

Journal articles

  • ‘Beyond Post-realism: A Response to Millicent Marcus’, The Italianist, 30:2, 2010, pp. 263-268.
  • 'The Tears of Naples' Daughters: Re-Interpreting the Sceneggiatain Mario Martone's L'amore molesto', The Italianist, 29:2, 2009, pp. 199-213.
  • 'Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei or the Evolution of the Italian Historical Epic (1908-1926)' in La Valle dell'Eden, 6, 2001, pp. 67-78.

Reviews, encyclopedia and web entries

  • 'Blow-Out', Viewfinder, May 2013.
  • 'Female Prisoner Scorpion Trilogy', Viewfinder, 75, June 2009, p. 25.
  • 'Bellissima', Viewfinder, 68, October 2007, p. 24.
  • Entries on various Italian émigré actors in Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), Journeys of Desire: European Actors in Hollywood, BFI, 2006.
  • 'Sydney Gottleib (ed.), Roberto Rossellini's Rome Open City(Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)', Viewfinder, 2005.
  • 'The Exploits of Three-Fingered Kate (1912)', Screenonline.
  • 'Lieutenant Daring and the Plans of the Mine Fields (1912)', Screenonline.