Angelo Restivo
Emeritus Professor- Education
Ph.D. School of Cinema-TV. University of Southern California. 1997.
M.A. Program for Writers. University of Illinois, Chicago.
B.A. University of Chicago.
- Biography
My work centers on aesthetics and political affect. Specifically, I look at how, at the macro level, the moving-image work is expressive of larger social and economic shifts, while at the micro level, it registers and calibrates our affective relationship to everyday life. The moving-image objects I study range from postwar and contemporary art cinemas, to postwar auteurs, to contemporary television.
In my first book, The Cinema of Economic Miracles, I proposed a new way of looking at the Italian art cinema of the 1960s, in light of both the profound spatial changes wrought by the economic miracle and the emergence of new social subjects. In ‘Breaking Bad’ and Cinematic Television, I perform a granular analysis of the series’ visual style in order to explore the ways in which it opens up to an allegorical examination of everyday life in neoliberal America. In the early 2000’s, I coauthored, with Richard Cante, a series of essays on gay pornography, which used the films to track the evolution of the post-Stonewall gay male subject in the wake of urban decay and renewal, globalization, and the rise of neoliberalism.
Currently, I’m beginning to explore the video essay (as critical intervention): I’ve just completed my first video essays, one of which is an accompaniment to my book on Breaking Bad. (In the 1980s, I was actively engaged in short-form 16mm film production.) I’m also currently exploring the genre of “creative critical writing,” which amalgamates academic, personal, and belles-lettristic styles.
- Publications
(book) The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film. Duke UP. 2002.
(book) Breaking Bad and Cinematic Television. Duke UP. 2019.
“The Optics of the Virtual.” A Companion to Wong Kar-Wai. Ed. Martha Nochimson. Blackwell, 2016
“Revisiting Zabriskie Point.” Antonioni: Centenary Essays. Ed. John David Rhodes, Laura Ricasoli. British Film Institute. 2011.
“Hitchcock and the Postmodern,” in A Companion to Hitchcock Studies. Ed. Leland Pogue, Thomas Leitch. Blackwell. 2011.
“From Index to Figure in the European Art Film: the Case of The Conformist”, in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories. Ed. Rosalind Galt, Karl Schoonover. Oxford UP. 2010.
“The Silence of The Birds: Sound Aesthetics and Public Space in Later Hitchcock.” Hitchcock Past and Future. Ed. Richard Allen, Sam Ishii-Gonzales. Routledge. 2004.
(with Richard C. Cante) “The ‘World’ of All-Male Pornography: On the Public Place of Moving Image Sex in the Era of Pornographic Transnationalism.” In More Dirty Looks. Ed. Pamela Church Gibson. British Film Institute. 2004.
“Into the Breach: Between the Movement-image and the Time-image.” in The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Ed. Gregory Flaxman. U Minnesota P. 2000.