Associate Professor (Reader) in Film Studies

Contact Details

Research Profile

Alastair Phillips’ research interests lie in the fields of international film history, culture and aesthetics with special emphasis on French and Japanese filmmaking; histories of exile and emigration within Europe and between Europe and Hollywood and the representation of place and landscape in historical and contemporary world cinemas.

He is an editor of Screen and also serves on the editorial advisory boards of the BFI Film Classics series; the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, and Studies in French Cinema. He is also series editor of the forthcoming BFI series on world cinema directors, Cinema Two.

Forthcoming research projects include work on:

Paris in the cinema

Landscape in the films of Shimizu Hiroshi

The representation of the everyday in the films of Jacques Becker

Landscapes of contemporary world cinema

Julien Duvivier in Hollywood

Publications

Books

A Companion to Jean Renoir (co-edited with Ginette Vincendeau) (Hoboken and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)

Rififi (French Film Guide) (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009)

100 Film Noirs (co-authored with Jim Hillier) (London: British Film Institute, 2008)

Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts (co-edited with Julian Stringer) (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).

Journeys of Desire. European Actors in Hollywood (co-edited with Ginette Vincendeau) (London: British Film Institute, 2006) 

City of Darkness, City of Light. Émigré Filmmakers in Paris 1929-1939 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press)

Selected Articles

‘Cinematic Boundaries. Alexander Sokurov’s The Sun (2005) as Liminal Biopic’ in Tom Brown and Belen Vidal (eds.), The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2012)

‘Criss Crossed. Film Noir and the Politics of Mobility and Exchange’ in Helen Hanson and Andrew Spicer (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Film Noir (Hoboken and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)

‘Fractured Landscapes: Detection, Location and History in Uchida Tomu’s Fugitive From the Past (1965), Screen Vol. 52 no. 1 (Summer 2011)

‘Placing French Film History’ in Will Higbee and Sarah Leahy (eds.) Studies in French Cinema: UK Perspectives 1985-2010 (Bristol: Intellect Press, 2011)

‘Pictures of the Past in the Present. Modernity and Femininity in the Post-War Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro’ in Catherine Grant and Annette Kuhn (eds.) Screen Reader in World Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

‘The 400 Blows. Youth and Entrapment in the French New Wave’ in Jeffrey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky (eds.) Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005)

‘Exile and Emigration in Classic French Cinema 1930-1950’ in Michael Temple and Mike Witt (eds.) The French Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 2004)

‘Changing Bodies / Changing Voices. Success and Failure in Hollywood in the Early Sound Era’ in Screen Vol. 43 no. 2 (Summer 2002)

‘Performing Paris. Myths of the City in Robert Siodmak's Émigré Musical La Vie Parisienne’ in Screen Vol. 40 no. 3 (Autumn 1999)

Teaching and Supervision

Alastair Phillips has taught across many areas of international film history, culture and aesthetics including French and Japanese cinema; film noir in its transnational dimensions; contemporary world cinema; early cinema; and mainstream and avant garde European cinemas of the 1920s and 1930s.

In 2011-12, he is teaching Basic Film Criticism; National Cinemas I: The French New Wave in Its Contexts; and Issues of Representation: The Cinematic City (on the Taught MA).

Recently supervised PhD topics include ‘The Lubitsch Touch’; the representation of Kyoto in cinema; Henri Langlois and the archive; Ozu Yasujiro and the representation of the everyday; exilic filmmaking and displaced national identity in Kurdish, Armenian and Palestinian cinema; Suzuki Seijun and the aesthetics of negativity, and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz: novel, film and television adaptation.

Alastair is especially interested in supervising postgraduate projects related to international film history; contemporary world cinemas; and general issues of film historiography and aesthetics.