Since 2015, The Cinematologists has forged a unique space in the film podcasting landscape. Described as “consistently one of the finest film podcasts around” by Sight and Sound, the show, founded and hosted by Dr. Dario Llinares and Prof. Neil Fox, has developed partnerships with BFI, MUBI and others, through its singular blend of academic, critic, fan and practitioner discussion of cinema culture, history and industry.
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Over 100 episodes and 18 seasons (as of spring 2024), the podcast has hosted conversations and talks by illustrious guests from all areas of film culture including filmmakers such as Peter Bogdanovich and Steve McQueen, critics such as B.Ruby Rich and Pamela Hutchinson, academics such as Richard Dyer and those who fall in between the cracks such as Mark Cousins and Laura Mulvey.
The podcast’s form is as flexible as its critical tones. It started life as a live event screening show, with wrap-around contextual chat. Early screenings including Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984), Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson (2008), Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962), Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy (2006) and Elaine May’s A New Leaf (1971). From there, there were invitations to screen and discuss films all over the country.
The podcast has headed to UWE in Bristol for Dead of Night (1945) at the invitation of Auteur Publishing, Curzon Bloomsbury for Almodovar’s Broken Embraces (2009), HOME in Manchester for Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976) [with filmmaker Caroline Catz], The Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle for Plan 75 (2022) with the Dead Good Film Club. The podcast has collaborated with the BFI on several occasions; for their national seasons on Comedy and Musicals, for the 2022 edition of the Greatest Films of All Time poll, and for their extensive season dedicated to Akira Kurosawa, for which co-curator Asif Kapadia came on the show.
Nowadays, the podcast is just as likely to be an in-depth, rigorously researched academic output such as Dario’s Demons of the Mind episode, produced as part of the AHRC funded project of the same name, as it is an intimate conversation between Neil and Dario about recent releases of note. The podcast remains deeply rooted in conversation, curiosity and criticality, seeking always to cultivate a space for what Dario has defined as the ‘audio-cinematic’ imagination. There have been articles for MUBI Notebook, festival coverage from Berlinale, London and Cannes, and the gamut of films under the spotlight range from the experimental and underground; John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010), Scott Barley’s Sleep Has Her House (2017), to the mainstream of the mainstream; Speed (1994), Clueless (1995), and all points in between.
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A little bit about Dario and Neil
Dr Dario Llinares
Dario Llinares is Associate Professor and Course Leader in Digital Film Production at Ravensbourne University, London. He has published research in various areas of film and media studies including, on the status and practice of cinema-going in the digital age, the aesthetics of postmodernism, representations of masculinity, and podcasting as a media technology and social practice. Along with Neil and Richard Berry he edited Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media, and with Prof. Lori Beckstead he edited the forthcoming Podcast Studies: Practice into Theory.
Prof Neil Fox
Neil Fox is professor of film practice and pedagogy at Falmouth University, where he is the research and strategy lead for the university’s award-winning pedagogy and research project, the Sound/Image Cinema Lab. For the Lab he has been an associate producer on Enys Men (Jenkin, 2022) and A Year in a Field (Morris, 2023) amongst other films. His first monograph, Music Films (BFI/Bloomsbury) is out May 2024 and his debut feature film as screenwriter, ‘Wilderness’ (John Doherty, 2017), was released globally by Sparky Pictures in April 2021.