Portrait by Michael Marsland

PhD 1995, New York University

My research and teaching engage with cultures and aesthetics of the cinematic image through specific historical intersections.  I have special interest in the workings of location in postwar cinema (especially Italian), and in the human visage as privileged site of representation.  I am currently working on a book, focusing on post-classical, largely French and American cases that reflect on the sense of belatedness and loss (imagined or real) vis-à-vis the plenitude of the face.  My work in all its aspects is informed by a continued engagement with questions of realism and modernism, and with cinema’s relationship to traditional and modern arts and mediums.  While I explore the historical, material, and social experience of cinema, and how it partakes in cultures of the everyday, I am also unapologetically committed to the study of film as an art, in reciprocity with pictorial modes and with poetic tropes.  I have a long-standing interest in allegory across visual and verbal forms.  I always like to see theoretical considerations breathe through close analysis of films, and through archival research. 

Before joining the faculty of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago I was faculty member at Yale University.  I advanced my studies and research with the support of fellowships and awards including the Fulbright, the Getty Post-Doctoral Grant, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Rome Prize.

The Face on Film;  Cinematic Landscapes after 1945;  Questions of Realism in Cinema;  Tropes of Film Theory;  Neorealism: Space, Culture, History;  From La Dolce Vita to the Murder of Pasolini;  Classical French Cinema;  Surrealism & Cinema;  The Musical Film;  Screening Shakespeare.

• Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema.  University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
  
• “On Some Minor Films, incl. interview with Carlo di Carlo.”  Anthology on Michelangelo Antonioni, ed. John David Rhodes. University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2011.
  
• “Inarticulate Spasms and the Dignity of Signs.” Opening Bazin, ed. Dudley Andrew.  NY: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2010.
  
• “The Cinecittà Refugee Camp, 1944-1950.”  October 128, Spring 2009.  Italian version in two parts: Bianco e nero 560 (no.1, 2008) and 561/562 (no.2-3, 2008).
  
• “Ages of the Face: Barthes, Godard, Warhol.”  The Ages of Cinema, eds. Enrico Biasin et. al. Udine, Italy: Forum, 2008.
  
• “What the Clerk Saw: Face to Face with The Wrong Man.”  Framework Journal of Cinema and Media 48.2, Fall 2007.
  
• “Visuality and Viscera.”  The Five Senses of Cinema, eds. Alice Autelitano et. al. Udine, Italy: Forum, 2005.
  
• “Padre Padrone / Father and Master.”  The Cinema of Italy, ed. Giorgio Bertellini. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2004.

• On the Face of Film.  [Book project]
• “Allegory, Flesh, and Blood of the Beasts.” [Essay]
• “Diary/Apparatus: David Perlov’s First Person.”  [Essay]

Noa Steimatsky
Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies
The University of Chicago
Walker Museum 504
1115 East 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel. (773) 702-5596
Fax. (773) 702-9042
email: steimatsky@uchicago.edu