Stefano will be discussing traditional academic approaches to the Italian genre factory of the 1960s and 1970s

The lecture will be recorded and published online after the event.

Stefano Baschiera was appointed Professor in Film and Screen Industries in 2022. His research on cinematic spaces, European cinema, and screen industries has been published in various edited collections and journals, including Bianco e Nero, Studies in European Cinema and The New Review of Film and Television Studies. Recently, he co-edited Italian Horror Cinema (2016), Film and Domestic Space: Architectures, Representations, Dispositif (2020), World Cinema on Demand (2022)

His most recent work, Domestic Space in Italian New Wave Cinema, 1961-1972, is forthcoming for EUP in 2024.

This lecture challenges traditional academic approaches to the Italian genre factory of the 1960s and 1970s, typically dominated by questions of auteurism, national cinema, and genre theory, to reflect on the role of popular cinema within a transnational context. After engaging with the ‘cinema of imitation’ and the definition of the Italian sub-genres (the so-called filoni), the lecture focuses on the cinema of the period in terms of its production system and its ability to exploit cultural trends while maximising scarce resources. The result is a reflection on the concepts of recycling and sustainability applied to the film industry and the lessons that can be applied to the contemporary production landscape.