Professor Mattias Frey

Overview

Prof Mattias Frey is Head of the Department of Media, Culture and Creative Industries at City, University of London. He is a film and media industries scholar.

Professor Frey takes a critical media industries approach to film (esp. distribution, regulation, exhibition); media audiences; promotional media and cultural intermediation (esp. film marketing, criticism); and digital culture (e.g. algorithmic recommender systems and media platforms). His current work examines streaming services such as Netflix and MUBI as well as the audiences of these platforms.

Professor Frey’s most recent monograph is Netflix Recommends: Algorithms, Film Choice, and the History of Taste (University of California Press, 2021).

His seven other books include MUBI and the Curation Model of Video on Demand (Palgrave, 2021); Extreme Cinema: The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today’s Art Film Culture (Rutgers UP, 2016); The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism: The Anxiety of Authority (Amsterdam UP, 2015); and Film Criticism in the Digital Age (Rutgers UP, 2015; co-edited with Cecilia Sayad).

From 2015 to 2018, he received the Philip Leverhulme Prize, which awards ‘the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising’. He is also recipient of an AHRC Early Career Fellowship in 2013-2014 and the BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant in 2022-2024. His book Extreme Cinema received the 2017 BAFTSS (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies) Best Monograph Award Honourable Mention. Another, The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism, was a shortlisted finalist for the 2016 BAFTSS Best Monograph Award.

Before arriving at City, Professor Frey taught for many years at the University of Kent. In the academic year 2014-2015 Professor Frey served as invited Visiting Professor of Art and New Media at the Universitaet Bremen, where he took part in a research cluster funded through the Exzellenzinitiative. In 2011, he was invited guest researcher at the Humboldt Universitaet zu Berlin for a project on cross-cultural film criticism.



Research & Media
Professor Frey’s current projects include a study of how streaming services like Netflix affect the diversity of audiences’ media consumption as well as a study of how audiences respond to ethnic diversity in film casting.

Over his career, research endeavours have included analyses of specific film genres and production trends (period/historical film and series; arthouse extreme cinema) and media institutions (film and other arts criticism; video on demand platforms such as Netflix). These publications, informed by media industries, sociology of art, political economy and cultural studies perspectives, demonstrate the productivity of triangulating methods first developed in seemingly distant areas of the humanities and social sciences. Professor Frey would welcome serving as a postgraduate supervisor in these and related subjects.

Professor Frey has served as a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Review College, on several award-granting committees of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), the Steering Committee of the German Screen Studies Network (GSSN), the Advisory Board of the journal Alphaville, the Advisory Board of the Journal Research in Film and History and in numerous other validation and examining roles.

Professor Frey appears regularly as a commentator in the news media on topics such as Netflix, streaming services and wider issues of film and media culture.

Publications by category