King's College London - Homepage

BA (1986) and MA (1994) in English Literature, University of Manitoba (Canada)

MA (1994) and PhD (1999) in Film Studies, University of Rochester (USA)

Previously Film Programmer for the George Eastman House (Rochester, NY, 1995-98) and Assistant Professor in Film/Media Studies at the University of Alberta (Canada, 1999-2001)

Visiting Professorship, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India (2011)

• postwar European cinema (especially the art cinemas of France and Italy) 
• non-Western political and art cinemas (especially Third cinema and East Asian cinemas) 
• transnational cinemas 
• exploitation cinemas 
• film theory and historiography 
• the history of film studies 
• the archive  

Selected Publications

“Beyond Europe: On Parametric Transcendence,” in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories , ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (Oxford University Press, 2010), 31-48

“In Focus: Cinephilia,” Editor (with Introduction), Cinema Journal

 49, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 130-166

Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping Art Cinema

 (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) (350 pp.)

“Little Books,” in Inventing Film Studies , ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Duke University Press, 2008), 319-349

“The Cinema of Tsai Ming-liang: A Modernist Genealogy,” in Reading Chinese Transnationalisms: Society, Literature, Film , ed. Maria N. Ng and Philip Holden (University of Hong Kong Press, 2006), 161-172

“Art, Exploitation, Underground,” in Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste, ed. Mark Jancovich et al. (University of Manchester Press, 2003), 202-222

“Film History, Film Genre, and Their Discontents: The Case of the Omnibus Film,” The Moving Image: Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists  1, no. 2 (fall 2001): 56-87

“The Name Above the (Sub)Title: Internationalism, Coproduction, and Polyglot European Art Cinema,” Camera Obscura 46 (16, no. 1) (2001): 1-44

Conferences and Seminars

Mark has spoken at more than thirty conferences to date. Most recently he gave the closing plenary at the 21st International Screen Studies Conference, University of Glasgow (July 2011)

 

Research

Mark Betz's major research interests are in postwar European cinema—especially the art cinemas of France and Italy—exploitation cinema (America and Europe), and the history of Film Studies as a discipline as well as in film culture outside the academy. He teaches and writes on these subjects, as well as nationalism and transnationalism, non-Western political and art cinemas (especially Third cinema and East Asian cinemas), the relation between film theory and historiography, and the archive. He is currently working on a monograph on Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) and is conducting research for another book provisionally entitled The Art of Exploitation: Distributing and Marketing Foreign Films in America, a study of the history and practices of foreign film consumption in North America from the immediate post-World War II period until the early 1980s.

Teaching

At King’s Mark has taught undergraduate courses on the history of postwar cinema, Asian popular cinemas, world cinema, film and nationalism, Third cinema, and film theory and historiography, as well as the following postgraduate courses: Art Cinema; Exploitation Cinema; History of Film Exhibition and the Archive; The Director’s Cinema

 

Research Supervision

Mark Betz has supervised PhD theses on several topics, and welcomes applications for projects in any of his research areas.

Previous PhD students

David Wood, now at the Universidad Autónoma de Mexico, Mexico City; thesis on political and indigenous cinema in Bolivia and Colombia (lead supervisor Catherine Boyle) 

Robert Robertson, whose thesis quickly became a book that was awarded the Kraszna Krausz Foundation’s And/Or Award for Best Moving Image Book of 2009; thesis on Sergei Eisenstein and the audiovisual 

Markos Hadjioannou, now Assistant Professor in Film Theory at Duke University; thesis on the transition from celluloid to the digital (lead supervisor Sarah Cooper)

Current PhD students

Karen Smith: thesis on repertory cinema exhibition in London, 1976-1994 

Keith B. Wagner: thesis on neoliberalism, the service industry and city life in cinema from Beijing, Seoul, and Johannesburg (co-supervisor Alex Callinicos) 

Elena Woolley: thesis on the spectatorship of death in cinema

 

Member, Editorial Board for Cinema Journal

Member, Editorial Advisory Board for the Contemporary Cinema series, Rodopi (Amsterdam) and for Scope: An On-line Journal of Film Studies

Reader for BFI Publishing/Palgrave Macmillan, Open University Press/McGraw-Hill, University of Minnesota Press, University of Manchester Press