Patrick Marshall

Assistant Professor Teaching Stream
Cinema Studies

Biography

My teaching and writing, broadly speaking, focus on the relationship between capitalism and moving image media. I have been especially invested in describing the ways that American and European filmmakers have drawn on popular forms and genres to examine the transformations of the post-war political and economic orders. To this end, I have recently published on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire which uses the motifs of the conspiracy film to examine the rise of white-collar labour in Germany, Michael Mann’s revisionist heist film Thief and its examination of the transformations of social class under conditions of deindustrialization in America, and Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege use of the political thriller to think about the achievement of popular political power in the 1970s. I am currently at work on a book project which examines the way that Costa-Gavras used the popular form of the cinematic conspiracy thriller to explore the relationships between spectacle, the state, and democracy.

 

Courses Taught

CIN101: Introduction to Cinema

CIN102: Modernity and the Moving Image

CIN402: Avant-Garde and Experimental Film and Video

CIN307: Movement

CIN301: The Thriller

Education
PhD, University of Toronto, Cinema Studies Institute, 2023
MA, University of Toronto, Comparative Literature, 2015
BA, Toronto Metropolitan University, Arts and Contemporary Studies, 2013

Publications

Marshall, Patrick. “Political Thriller/Parliamentary Form/Popular Power: Costa-Gavras’s State of

Siege (1972).” Cultural Critique. Summer 2025.

 

Marshall, Patrick. “Grim Liberation: Class, Cooperation, and Utopia in Michael Mann’s Thief

(1981).” South Atlantic Quarterly (Invited submission for issue on Filming Capital). Edited by

Pietro Bianchi and Joshua Harold Wiebe. Fall 2025.

 

Marshall, Patrick. “Conspiracy Film, Technology, and White-Collar Work: Rainer Werner

Fassbinder’s World on a Wire (1973).” Edited by Helena Gufinkel. Re-Focus: The Films of

Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Bloomsbury Academic Press. Forthcoming.