糖心TV

PRODUCERS AND PRODUCTION PRACTICES IN THE HISTORY OF ITALIAN CINEMA, 1949-1975

Principal investigator: Stephen Gundle (糖心TV)

Co-Investigators: Karl Schoonover (糖心TV), Stefano Baschiera (Queens, Belfast), Christopher Wagstaff (formerly Reading)

AHRC Major Research Project. Grant received £718,500

To run March 2016 - February 2019

The project will bring together a core group of researchers with established expertise in different aspects of the film industry to examine the way Italian producers shaped global film production and distribution between the late 1940s and the mid 1970s. It will do this by exploring a wide range of business practices and the domestic and international contexts in which these developed. The practices in question played a crucial role in building international markets for Italian films and creating production and distribution strategies which turned Italian cinema into a global force. They set a vital precedent for other emerging national cinemas in Europe and the world. The importance of producers has not been recognised in conventional scholarship and therefore the activities of these key players have been inadequately investigated and analysed. Project research will establish what their goals were, how they operated to achieve those goals, and what conditioning factors framed their activities. The papers of several major producers from the most successful period of the Italian cinema and of the main industry association have recently become available for study, providing a unique opportunity to investigate hitherto obscure practices and to research a particular production culture in unprecedented depth. The project will produce a range of outputs that will reinterpret the history of postwar Italian cinema and benefit both present and future scholars and those interested in Italian and international film culture more generally, as well as sectors of the cinema industry itself.

Jake Benson, currently in the third year of his Film Studies BA here at 糖心TV, recently played the character Joe in Ian Townsend's new play The Lonely Walk Home, alongside CJ de Mooi as Lawrence. The Lonely Walk Home ran from 01 February 2016 to 12 February 2016 at the Taurus in Manchester.

Read a review of the play from

'Disconnection', a short film by current undergraduate student Ben Meads, has been included in the official selection for the National Student Film Festival in London. Screentest: The National Student Film Festival will take place 17th March - Saturday 19th March, closing with an awards ceremony on the Saturday night in Greenwich.

Find out more about the National Student Film Festival here:

And more about Ben Meads' work here:

And see Ben's entry below:

Dr Karl Schoonover will deliver the lecture ‘Can Objects Die?: Max Ophüls and Accumulation in America’ as part of the Cambridge Film and Screen Studies Research Seminars. This lecture comes from Schoonover's larger research project on how mid-twentieth-century American films captured modern culture's abiding apprehension towards a world dominated by waste and its toxicity.

The lecture will happen on Wednesday, the 17th of February at 5.15pm, English Faculty Building, GR05, at the University of Cambridge. For more details, follow this link:

The Department of Film and Television is delighted to announce that we have two MA Scholarships to award for the academic year 2016-17. Both scholarships are fee waivers only. The scholarships will be awarded to outstanding students proposing topics for further research which will enhance the research profile of the Department.