Roel Meuleman

About the researcher

Roel Meuleman is a Belgian researcher currently enrolled in the PhD programme at Falmouth University. During his under- and postgraduate studies, he has written several pieces on film representations of Cornwall within British popular culture, and the cinematic construction and othering of the Mezzogiorno in the giallo subgenre. 

His current research concerns the contemporary cinematic representations of rural regions by local directors, more specifically Mark Jenkin and Michelangelo Frammartino, and how they attempt to renegotiate the cultural constructions that have historically served to other them. 

Research interests

  • Peripheral cinema 
  • Regional cinema 
  • Cornish cinema 
  • Giallo 
  • The Mezzogiorno 
  • Calabrian cinema 
  • Psychoanalysis 
  • Postmodernism 

Roel Meuleman

PhD abstract

Thesis title

Cinematic Dialogues from the European Subaltern: The Renegotiation of Place-Images in Mark Jenkin’s Cornwall and Michelangelo Frammartino’s Calabria

Abstract

This PhD concerns the cultural construction of rural regions within Europe’s periphery, more specifically Cornwall and Calabria, and the manner in which films by contemporary filmmakers from those regions attempt to renegotiate the dominant images that have historically served to essentialise and ‘other’ them. This study argues that Calabrian filmmaker Michelangelo Frammartino’s filmography and the films by Cornish director Mark Jenkin construct an explicit dialogue between the past and the present, where place-images and myths are actively recontextualised and renegotiated. 

Qualifications

Year Qualification Awarding body
2023 MA Film & Television (Distinction)  Falmouth University 
2022 BA(Hons) Film (Distinction)  Falmouth University 

Contributions

Conferences: 

  • Cornwall as a Bank of Otherness in Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men (2022):  The Block Universe Theory and the Return of the Repressed, 2023, Haunted Landscapes: Nature, Super-Nature, and Global Environments Conference. 
  • Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men (2022): the cinematic (re-)construction of Cornish Iconography in a Timeless Landscape, 2025, British Popular Culture(s) Conference. 
  • Haunting pasts and spectral modernities in Michelangelo Frammartino’s Il Dono (2003), 2025, Haunted Modernities, Present Pasts and Spectral Futures Conference. 

Publications: 

  • A Conversation: Denzil Monk and Roel Meuleman on Enys Men and Block Universe Theory, 2025, Aspier 1(1), 59–82.