The Cinematologists

The Cinematologists podcast was started in March 2015 by film scholars Dr Neil Fox and Dr Dario Llinares as a labour of love, combining the singular pleasure of watching films with a passion for debate about cinema as an art-form.

Their aim was to try and combine the live, almost tactile electricity of the film experience with the intimacy of heated post-film social debate, contextualised with an accessible yet scholarly incisiveness.

The podcast is often based on a live event film screening where contributions from the hosts and audience members are recorded and edited together with related interviews and contextual chat from Neil and Dario, but there are also long form interview episodes with academics and filmmakers.

The podcast blends together scholarship, enthusiasm, and fandom and, as such, attracts an audience of academic critics and filmmakers who gravitate towards it as a place that talks about film in a way that nowhere else does.

The podcast episodes are produced bi-monthly, usually focused around a cinema screening where Neil and Dario record an introduction to the film as well as the post-screening audience discussion. These 'live' sections are complimented with guest interviews featuring filmmakers, academics, actors and critics all of whom bring unique and fascinating insights to the specific films and questions of cinema culture.

Alongside recording the podcast, the project has been a vehicle for Neil and Dario to explore how podcasting can be used for academic research, which evolved in them publishing the first ever book on academic podcasting in 2018, leading them to being seen as the pioneers of podcast studies.

Plans for the future are to keep growing the podcast and establish more partnerships. In terms of podcasting itself, Neil and Dario want to continue exploring what academic podcasting is and set up a network of academic podcasters. They believe podcasting has the potential to make academia and knowledge sharing more accessible alongside curating different voices and giving them a platform where they can be heard.

Associated published research:

• Fox, Neil (2018) Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media. Palgrave Macmillan, palgrave.com/gb/book/9783319900551. ISBN 978-3-319-90055-1
• Neil Fox, Dario Llinares, Cinematologists: Knowing Sounds (2018)
• Neil Fox, Dario Llinares, and Kingsley Marshall, The Cinematologists (2015)