Assistant Professor of Film & Television Studies

Contact Details

Department of Film and Television Studies
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL UK

Tel: +44 24 7615 0684
Fax:+44 24 7652 4757
Email: k.schoonover@warwick.ac.uk

Karl Schoonover’s research explores the relationship of cinema aesthetics to political change. He is interested in the history of film theory, particularly its engagement with questions of realism, obscenity, medium specificity, and the photographic image.

His recent work interrogates how the idea of ‘world cinema’ emerges from particular institutions (arthouses, film festivals, tax structures, NGOs, piracy practices, etc.). In his book Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema, Schoonover argues that Neorealist films used images of suffering to reconstitute the idea of the human, to recalibrate the scale of human community, and to endorse a foreign spectator as a necessary moral onlooker. The ‘brutal humanism’ of these films, he argues, provided an affective bolster to the socio-economic bonds of the North Atlantic community and to a new culture of transnational humanitarian aid. With Rosalind Galt, Schoonover also edited the anthology Global Art Cinema. In addition to these books, he has published articles on topics such as stardom in the 1970s, recent “slow cinema” debates, and spirit photography in journals including Framework, Senses of Cinema, and Art Journal.

His new book project looks at cinema as a medium defined by its relationship to waste. The book not only examines various forms of waste that haunt films, including textual excess, aesthetic surplus, affective overages, cultural detritus, and garbage. It also suggests how films turn to trash as a means of refashioning the broader politics of cultural production and value. Combining eco-criticism, classical film theory, queer theory, and research in production archives, the book argues that cinema operated as an alternate system of waste management across the twentieth century, one that refused to disappear commodity culture’s dirty secrets and instead reveled in its non-reproductivity and exuberant expenditures.

Publications

Books

Brutal Humanism: The Neorealist Body and Global Spectators. (University of Minnesota Press, 2012.)

Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories. An anthology co-edited with Rosalind Galt. (Oxford University Press, 2010.)

Selected Articles

‘Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema’s Laboring Body, the Political Spectator, and the Queer’ Framework. 53.1 (Forthcoming, Spring 2012).

‘Antonioni’s Waste Management’ in Michelangelo Antonioni. Ed. John David Rhodes and Laura Rascaroli. Palgrave/British Film Institute. (2011): 235-253.

‘Divine: Towards an “Imperfect” Stardom’ in Screen Stars of the 1970s. Ed. James Morrison. Rutgers UP (2010): 158-181.

‘The Comfort of Carnage: Realism and America’s World Understanding’ in Convergence Media History. Ed. Janet Staiger and Sabine Hake. Routledge Press (2009): 127-138.

‘Neorealism at a Distance’ in European Film Theory. Ed. Temenuga Trifonova. Routledge Press, AFI Film Readers Series (2008): 301-318.

‘I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket)’ Senses of Cinema (Summer 2006).www.sensesofcinema.com/2006/cteq/fists-in-the-pocket/

‘Ectoplasms, Evanescence, and Photography’ Art Journal. 62.2 (Fall 2003): 30-41. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3558519

Teaching

Karl Schoonover is currently teaches the first year module Theories of the Moving Image.