Rob King

Assistant Professor
Cinema Studies Institute and Department of History

Office: Room 325, Innis College
Phone: 416-978-8839
Email: rob.king@utoronto.ca

 

Research and Teaching:

Rob King’s research examines popular cinematic forms in relation to the history of twentieth-century mass culture and social formation.  Much of this work has been on film comedy. His award-winning book, The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (University of California Press, 2009), examined the pioneering role Keystone’s filmmakers played in reformulating traditions inherited from working-class comic theater to create a new “mass” or cross-class slapstick style for moviegoers of the 1910s.   At the graduate level, Professor King has most recently offered courses in Film Historiography, the Emergence of American Mass Culture, and British Social Realism. He also regularly teaches Film Cultures I, covering the history and theory of cinema until 1960, as well as a range of undergraduate courses examining aspects of popular or “low” culture in film (e.g., slapstick comedy, cult cinema, “B” movies).

 

Select Publications:

The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture. University of California Press, 2009 (Special Jury Prize, Richard Wall Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association)

Slapstick Comedy. Co-edited with Tom Paulus. Routledge, 2010.

Early Cinema and the “National.” Co-edited with Richard Abel and Giorgio Bertellini. John Libbey Publishing. 2008.

“The Art of Diddling: Slapstick, Science, and Anti-Modernism in the Films of Charley Bowers.” In Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood. Eds. Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil. University of California Press, forthcoming.

“The Discourses of Art in Early Cinema, or Why Not Rancière?” In The Blackwell Companion to Early Cinema. Ed. André Gaudreault. Blackwell, forthcoming.

“Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle: Comedy’s Starring Scapegoat.” In Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s. Ed. Jennifer Bean. Rutgers University Press, forthcoming.

“Stultification and Sensation: The Impact of Sound on the American Slapstick Tradition.” In The Blackwell Companion to Film Comedy. Ed. Andy Horton and Joanna Rapf. Blackwell, forthcoming. 

“1914: Movies and Cultural Hierarchy.” In American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes and Variations. Eds. Charlie Keil and Ben Singer. Rutgers University Press, 2009, pp. 115-138.

“‘A Purely American Product’: Tramp Comedy and White Working-Class Formation in the 1910s.” In Early Cinema and the “National.” Eds. Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini, and Rob King. John Libbey Publishing, 2008, pp. 236-247.

“Slapstick and Mis-Remembrance: Buster Keaton’s Columbia Shorts.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 5.3 (December 2007): 333-351.

“‘Uproarious Inventions’: The Keystone Film Company, Modernity, and the Art of the Motor.” Film History 19.3 (Fall 2007): 271-291.

“‘Made for the Masses with an Appeal to the Classes’: The Triangle Film Corporation and the Failure of Highbrow Film Culture.” Cinema Journal 44.2 (Winter 2005): 3-33