This is the syllabus I’ve designed for my Fall 2019 undergraduate-level Introduction to Film course. I focused the course as a genre study of American horror films. I want my students to be able to consider the socio-political contexts of popular films and to detect and explain the arguments and worldviews produced by film.

From the 2007 remake of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games to Adam Robitel’s Escape Room (2019), the survival game has become a recurring sub-genre of American horror cinema in the last twenty years; however, its haunting presence has yet to be fully analyzed.

The American survival game horror film is uniquely able to render neoliberal con…[Read more]

This essay explores Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Avventura” from a Marxist perspective, including its depiction of the Italian bourgeoisie of “il boom” era of the 1950s and 1960s. Numerous frame enlargements are used to substantiate the claim that even the film’s style contributes to its representations of socioeconomic class.

This article investigates the representation of Italian Americans in classical and contemporary Hollywood cinema, expanding the research originally conducted by noted scholar Mirella Affron.

This article compares and contrasts two films that take place in Japan but that were directed by French and American directors. Their “outsider perspective” is explored in terms of their respective films’ themes, characters, and cinematic styles.

This is a review/analysis of the Antonioni film IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN (1982), occasioned by its DVD release by the Criterion Collection.

This essay uses Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Monomyth to analyze both the mythic and contemporary implications of a “popcorn” movie that has numerous social and political subtexts for the Reaganite era.

This essay compares After Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW and Michelangelo Antonioni’s BLOW-UP in terms of their similarities in narrative, characters, and cinematic style.

This essay uses the work of Wilhelm Reich to analyze the “mass psychology of fascism” in Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous Nazi propaganda film, TRIUMPH OF THE WILL.

This article examines the parallels between the space alien in Spielberg’s “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” and the New Testament account of the life of Jesus Christ.

This book chapter analyzes Steven Spielberg’s supposedly anti-war SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1992) as a pro-war, pro-military, and pro-America movie.

This book chapter analyzes the numerous responses to the famous videotape of Los Angeles motorist Rodney King at the hands of the L.A. Police Department.

This essay describes and analyzes the anthology film EROS (2004), which consists of three short films by major directors: Wong Kar-wei, Steven Soderbergh, and Michelangelo Antonioni. The focus is on the cinematic depiction of sexuality as it pertains to the national origins of the three shorts: Hong Kong, United States, and Italy.

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s EL TOPO set off a trend for midnight movies that brought numerous esoteric films to an insomniac audience. This essay analyzes the surreal movie and its position as an early exemplar of independent cinema exhibited outside the mainstream patterns.

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.