Capital and Popular Cinema

Valentina Vitali is Reader in Film Studies at the University of East London

‘Capital and Popular Cinema … makes a convincing case for a more politically engaged form of film studies: For the study of films cannot be reduced to the chronicling of films and cinema. It emerged as a radical, intellectual endeavour to figure out how, precisely, industrial cultural artefacts condition our everyday lives, and, with that aesthetic understanding, to arrive at a clearer sense of where we may want to be heading. (p. 167)The comparative model at the heart of the book also responds to the acknowledged need to reshape national film historiography in order to interrogate the impact of transnational flows and exchanges. Given the importance of the distinct national contexts of Italy, Mexico and India within Vitali’s model, however, this is not an approach to the transnational that downplays the importance of the nation state but rather positions the national within a comparative framework. Indeed, the book concludes with a discussion of possible future case studies on Spain, Germany, Turkey and Nigeria so it is clear that this is a project that takes seriously Paul Willemen’s call for a truly comparative film studies, and has considerable potential for further development beyond this initial monograph.’The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

• Introduction: National cinema and unstable genres1. The time of popular cinema2. The exclusion of giallo films from the history of Italian cinema3. Mexico: the cinema of Fernando Méndez4. The Hindi horror films of the Ramsay brothersConclusionNotesBibliographyFilmographyIndex