Professor John David Rhodes
- MMLL Faculty Co-Chair
- Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture
Contact
Location
- Corpus Christi
- Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, CB2 1RH
About
John David Rhodes is interested in what might be called, in an expanded sense, cinema’s materiality. His works on cinema, cities, and architecture include a recently completed book manuscript entitled “Disemboweled Vision: How to Look at Modern Rome”, as well as two monographs Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film (2017), Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini's Rome (2007), and the collection Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (2011), a book he edited with Elena Gorfinkel.
With Elena Gorfinkel he wrote The Prop (2025), the first book devoted to the cinematic prop. The book proposes the unsung centrality of the prop to filmmaking and film theory, but in a reading that emphasises not the prop’s “agency” but rather cinema’s relentless instrumentality, of which the prop is a vivid victim and index. This book inspired Joanna Hogg’s short film Autobiografia di una borsetta, in which a prop version of the book itself can be glimpsed.
Research
His varied interests in both the avant-garde and art cinema have borne fruit in a variety of works, including a book on Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (2011, reprinted 2020), Antonioni: Centenary Essays ( co-edited with Laura Rascaroli, 2011), and On Michael Haneke (coedited with Brian Price, 2010). He has also written on experimental filmmakers Peggy Ahwesh and Barbara Hammer, and on the film theorist (and his PhD supervisor) Annette Michelson.
Professor Rhodes is currently at work on a number of projects: an essay on the extra (which he is co-writing with Xin Peng), a second book on Pasolini, and an ongoing project on style and labour.
Professor Rhodes offers supervision across a range of topics in Italian, European, American, and international cinema; aesthetic theory; queer theory; the history and theory of modernism in film, literature and the other arts; cinema and the built environment, as well as in other (often interdisciplinary) topics and areas.
Professor Rhodes welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research interests relevant to his interests.
Selected Publications:
Books
- The Prop (with Elena Gorfinkel, Fordham University Press, 2025)
- Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
- Meshes of the Afternoon (BFI Film Classics/British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) [New edition, with foreword (BFI Film Classics/Bloomsbury, 2020)].
- Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini's Rome (University of Minnesota Press, 2007)
Books - Edited Collections
- Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image, co-edited with Elena Gorfinkel (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
- Michelangelo Antonioni: Centenary Essays, co-edited with Laura Rascaroli (British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
- On Michael Haneke, co-edited with Brian Price (Wayne State University Press, 2010)
Recent articles
- ‘Intimate disclosure: Below Sea Level and documentary humanism’. Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 10:3 (2022): 421-33.
- ‘Lands – seas – bodies: On the cinema of Gianfranco Rosi’. Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 10:3 (2022): 399-406. [Introduction to guest-edited issue of the journal, co-authored and co-edited with Rhiannon Harries]
- ‘Those Who Have: The Impersonality of Film Theory’. The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory, Kyle Stevens, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 609-25
- ‘Temporary Accommodation: Joanna Hogg’s Cinema of Dispossession’. Film Quarterly 73, no. 3 (Spring 2020): 12-20.
- ‘Dante on Screen’. The Oxford Handbook of Dante, Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden, eds. Oxford University Press 2021. 619-32.
- ‘Architectures of Ubiquity: The Colonial Revival in Film and Television’. Film and Domestic Space: Architectures, Representations, Dispositif, Stefano Baschiera and Miriam De Rosa, eds. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.16-36.
- ‘Art Cinema’s Immaterial Labors’. Diacritics 46, no. 4, (2018): 96-116.