Yearly Archive for: ‘2015’

Michael Ingham, Johnnie To Kei-fung’s PTU. Hong University Press, Hong Kong, 2009 ISBN: 978-962-209-919-7 HKD135.00 (pb) 149pp (Review copy supplied by Hong Kong University Press hkupress@hkucc.hku.hk) It has become something of a commonplace to observe that, by the time cinema studies discovers a film movement, it is generally over. For the past couple of years, even as the books have …

Joe McElhaney (ed.), Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment. Detroit: Wayne State University, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-8143-3307-5 US$29.95 (pb) 472pp (Review copy supplied by Wayne State University Press http://wsupress.wayne.edu/) For a discipline which frequently stresses the importance of a historical perspective, film studies has rarely reflected on its own history. Last year we were reading Deleuze, this year we are “doing” …

Catherine Russell, The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-8223-4312-7 US$47.95 (pb) 465pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the great breakthrough for film historians was the increased availability of films made before 1910. In the new century, the availability …

Note: here is the fourth instalment of what has already turned out to be a long review. It is late and longer than ever. In this section the last of the second group of films which I think sort of “belong together” are discussed. That second group begins with Born Reckless (1930) and ends with The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936). There are eight …

Mark James Russell, Pop Goes Korea: Behind the Revolution in Movies, Music, and Internet Culture. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2008 ISBN: 978 1 933330 68 6 US$19.95 (pb) 224pp (Review copy supplied by Stone Bridge Press) Pop Goes Korea opens pondering what factors have made South Korea uniquely successful in terms of popular culture in recent decades, and abruptly closes concluding …

Ford At Fox Part Two (a) A Brief(er) Introduction Born Reckless (1930) – Addendum: Cast and Character Issues Up The River (1930)   What would you think of an architect who arrived at his building wondering where to put the staircase? You don’t ‘compose’ a film on the set, you put a predesigned composition on film. It is wrong to liken a director …

Lisa French and Mark Poole, Shining a Light: 50 Years of the Australian Film Institute. The Moving Image, no.9, ATOM 2009 AU$39.95 252pp Dr George Miller, doyen of the Australian film industry and director of key films from Mad Max (Australia 1997) to Happy Feet (Australia/USA 2006), declares on the cover of this book that the AFI is where you can “identify the Australian …

Paul Meehan, Tech-Noir: The Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2008 ISBN: 978 0 7864 3325 4 US$55.00 (hb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by McFarland & Co.) The similarities between the popular family comedy Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (USA 1988) and 1930s mad scientist movies such as Doctor X (USA 1932) and The Raven (USA 1935) may not be instantly …

Kenneth E. Hall, John Woo’s The Killer. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-962-209-956-2 HKD135.00 (pb) 125pp (Review copy supplied by Hong Kong University Press) Fifteen books in Hong Kong University’s reasonably priced New Hong Kong Cinema series have been published to date. Each interprets an individual film from the fragrant harbour according to each author’s critical preferences, much …

Lisa Downing and Sue Harris, eds., From Perversion to Purity: The Stardom of Catherine Deneuve. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-7190-7338-0 Au$152.00 (hb) 188pp (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press. Available from Footprint Books) I have a cherished memory of Paris from what I suppose must have been the winter of 1998. Turning a corner one …

Yvette Biro, Turbulence and Flow in Film: The Rhythmic Design (Translated by Paul Salamon). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21965-7 US$22.95 (pb) 269pp (Review copy supplied by Indiana University Press) Yvette Biro’s new book, Turbulence and Flow in Film, is an excellent, well-written and very timely contribution to film scholarship. Biro, who is an esteemed emeritus film professor, screenwriter …

Geneviève Sellier, Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema (trans Kristin Ross). Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-0822341925 US$22.95 (pb) 280pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Anyone interested in the French cinema will want to own this book. It offers a radical and provocative account of the New Wave and its immediate precursors from a feminist perspective. …

Robert Burgoyne, The Hollywood Historical Film. Malden MA, Blackwell Publishing, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-1405146036 US$31.95 (pb) 192pp (Review copy supplied by Blackwell Publishing) The task of encompassing historical cinema into a singular generic category is a slippery one at best. A seemingly endless series of sub-genres need to be accounted for, from the biopic to the war film, each of which …

Michel Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Colour (trans Jody Gladding). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-691-13930-2 US$35.00 (hb) 216pp (Review copy supplied by Princeton University Press) Every colour has its history, but few more so than black, and there are few so well placed to describe its trajectory through Western civilisation as Michel Pastoureau, mediaevalist, scholar of color history …

Janet Harbord, Chris Marker: La Jetée. Afterall Books, London, 2009 ISBN: 978-1-84638-048-8 UK£9.95 (pb) 112pp (Review copy supplied by Afterall Books) Janet Harbord’s elegantly written and structured monograph Chris Marker: La Jetée is an early and distinguished entry in Afterall Books’ “One Work” series, a collection of single-authored books devoted to contemporary (or at least post-1940s) art. It currently sits alongside monographs devoted …

James Herrick, Scientific Mythologies: How Science and Science Fiction Forge New Religious Beliefs. InterVarsityPress Academic, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-0830825882 US$23.00 (pb) 288pp (Review copy supplied by IVP Academic) It was perhaps inevitable that at some point in the process of trading religion for science as our window on the universe, science would become religious. We thus find ourselves with new mythologies …

Stephen Chibnall and Brian McFarlane, The British ‘B’ Film. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-84457-319-6 US$30.00 (pb) 256pp (Review copy supplied by BFI/Palgrave Macmillan) Let me say right off that this is an excellent book on a topic that certainly deserves attention; the low-budget British feature film, as produced from the 1930s through the late 1960s (roughly), and released mostly …

Elizabeth Legge, Wavelength. London: Afterall Books, 2009 ISBN-10: 1-846380-56-1 US$16.00 (pb) 112pp (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) Michael Snow’s Wavelength (US 1966) is a groundbreaking film in every sense of the word, for it marked the end of an era in experimental cinema, and the beginning of the structuralist movement. Elizabeth Legge, one of the latter day champions of the film, …

Adrian Martin, “What is Modern Cinema?”. Santiago: Uqbar, 2008 ISBN: 9 78999568 601256 $18900 Chile Pesos (pb) 278pp This book Que es el cine moderno?, I see it as a kind of Ruizian maleta. Strange things come out of it – strange objects, strange films, strange bodies – for our strange new modern world.[1] (Adrian Martin) A new book by Adrian …

Lucas Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009 ISBN: 978 0 8223 4376 9 US$24.95 (pb) 320pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) In his introduction to Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright, Lucas Hilderbrand (Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC-Irvine) writes that he was inspired to …

Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-231-12988-6 US$45.00 (hb) 392pp (Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press) Alison Griffiths’ very handsome new book Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View aims to “explore an expanded paradigm of spectatorship, beyond the seated spectator in the darkened auditorium” …

Harriet Margolis, Sean Cubitt, Barry King and Thierry Jutel, Studying the Event Film: The Lord of the Rings. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-07190-7198-0 UK£55 (hb) 358pp (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press) The Lord of the Rings trilogy is in many ways unique, particularly the grand scale and complexity of its production and its immense popular …

Louis Kaplan, The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 ISBN: 978 0 8166 5156 6 US$24.95 (pb) 264pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer uses primary source documents – including prints of original photographs – to tell the fascinating story of a Boston jewel …

Karla Oeler, A Grammar of Murder: Violent Scenes and Film Form. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-226-61795-5 US$30.00 (pb) 304pp (Review copy supplied by University of Chicago Press http://www.press.uchicago.edu) The logic upon which Karla Oeler’s critical union of montage and the murder scene hinges is contained within the violence of the word ‘cut’ itself. A Grammar of Murder: Violent …

Joram ten Brink (ed), Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch (Preface by Michael Renov). London: Wallflower Press, 2007 ISBN: 978-1-905674-47-3 US$29.50 (pb) 324pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) The film returns to past people and places, but in fact it does not seem to be a film in search of the past. … Is it Rouch’s way of refusing …

Joan Simon (ed.), Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-300-15250-0 US$40.00 (hb) 148pp (Review copy supplied by Yale University Press) Historians now agree that Alice Guy Blaché is the most important woman director of the early 20th century, but her film career was virtually …

Richard Allen, Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-231-13575-7 US$24.50 (pb) 295pp (Review copy supplied by Footprint Books) Looking over the history of film theory and criticism during the past fifty years, one cannot help being struck by the way nearly every methodology, from auteurism to psychoanalysis to feminism to industrial history, has found the films …

Tom McSorley, Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster. University of Toronto Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-1-4426-1048-4 US$16.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of Toronto Press) To his credit, Atom Egoyan has achieved some commercial success and considerable international acclaim without fully capitulating to standard audience expectations. His films are difficult. There is both a stylistic continuity and thematic consistency in them. The question …

Joanna Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present. Virago Press, 2007 ISBN-13: 978 184408154 7 UK£12.99 (pb) 576pp In the introduction to her exhaustive Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present (2007), history professor and self-defined “socialist feminist”[1]  Joanna Bourke presents statistics that chillingly demonstrate just how pervasive the reality of rape is. She cites evidence claiming approximately 47,000 …

Rick Altman, A Theory of Narrative. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-231-14429-2 US$27.50 (pb) 392pp (Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press) It’s nothing new to say that telling stories is a way of imagining the world differently and possibly changing it. One of the things that Rick Altman does in A Theory of Narrative is to point out that …

Jennifer Fay, Theatres of Occupation. Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany. London / Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4744-6 US$22.50 (pb) 228pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) The history of German film culture in the immediate post-World War II period, when the defeated nation was occupied by American, British, French, and Soviet armed …

Dianne F. Sadoff, Victorian Vogue: British Novels on the Screen. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis & London, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-8166-6092-6 US$25.00 (pb) 329pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) I have read this book from beginning to end, and I expect to be in a minority of one in that respect. Maverick at last? I shall return to …

Stephen J. Nichols, Jesus: Made in America. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-8308-2849-4 US$20.00 (pb) 237pp (Review copy supplied by InterVarsity Press) From the rise of the Christian Right in the 1970s and 1980s to the Bush administration and the Passion of the Christ (USA 2004) phenomenon in the 2000s, so-called “culture wars” between evangelical Christianity and secular liberalism have …

Jason Wood, Talking Movies: Contemporary World Filmmakers in Interview. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-1904764908 US$25.00 (pb) 224pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) Like other interview-based compendiums released in the last two decades, Jason Wood’s anthology Talking Movies, is perhaps most usefully understood within a context of ‘post-auteurism’, a theory only just coming to prominence. The way …

Linda Williams, Screening Sex. A John Hope Franklin Book, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-8223-4285-4 US$25.00 (pb) 412pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Linda Williams is Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. She is known for her breakthrough 1989 book, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the …

Marguerite H. Rippy, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2009 US$35.00 (pb) 223pp (Review copy supplied by Southern Illinois University Press) Marguerite H. Rippy’s book on Orson Welles offers a provocative, ground-breaking, and occasionally scattered exploration of Welles’s construction as a ‘star director’ and the significance of this cultural-textual project to a …

Gerd Gemünden, A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder’s American Films. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008 ISBN: 978-1-84545-419-7 US$27.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Berghahn Books) When asked about the meaning of one of his paintings, Picasso reportedly shrugged, “Don’t ask me. I’m the artist.” I thought of this quote when pondering Gerd Gemünden’s book on Billy Wilder. Gemünden says his premise …

Alistair Phillips and Julian Stringer (eds.), Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts. Oxford: Routledge, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-415-32848-7 US$35.95 (pb) 363pp (Review copy supplied by Routledge) The study of Japanese cinema has typically held a high place among national cinema studies for a couple of reasons. The first is, of course, the quality of the films, but beyond this, there has always …

  Introduction When it is completed, Part Three will be the fifth instalment of a review of the lesser John Ford films contained in the gigantic Ford At Fox box set. It will cover most of the movies Ford directed at Twentieth-Century Fox from 1937 until he enlisted in the United States Navy after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. This segment, Part …

Jackie Stacey, The Cinematic Life of the Gene. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010 ISBN-13: 978-0822345077 US$23.95 (pb) 328pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Jackie Stacey’s book forms part of a new wave of cinema criticism which investigates the representation of medical imaging technology and scientific discourse in popular and avant-garde production. It is a fascinating area …

James Chapman and Nicolas Cull, Projecting Empire: Imperialism and Popular Cinema. London New York: I.B. Tauris 2009 ISBN: 978 1 84511 940 9 UK£15.99 240pp (Review copy supplied by I.B. Tauris) The release of historical epics such as The Young Victoria (UK/USA 2009) and recent revivals of imperial adventures on the small screen with the fourth adaptation of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps (UK …

David Welky, The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-0801890444 US$45.00 (pb) 448pp (Review copy supplied by John Hopkins University Press) This is a superb book, smoothly written, skillfully designed and researched, and is easily the text on the subject of the Hollywood studios’ reaction in the …

Steven M. Sanders, Miami Vice (TV Milestones series). Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-8143-3419-5 US$14.95 (pb) 128pp (Review copy supplied by Wayne State University Press) “Why does Miami Vice matter?” is at once historical, sociological, aesthetic and philosophical. (p. 85) The Wayne State University Press books in the TV Milestone series remind me of the great BFI books on single …

Chris Fujiwara, Jerry Lewis (Contemporary Film Directors). University of Illinois Press, 2009 ISBN-13: 978-0252076794 US$19.95 (pb) 176pp (Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press) This brief but pithy volume increases the count of English language books about the films of Jerry Lewis to One. Lewis’ own books The Total Filmmaker(1971), and his memoirs Jerry Lewis: In Person (1982) and Dean and Me (A Love …

The Story of the Kelly Gang DVD and Ina Bertrand and William D. Routt, “The Picture That Will Live Forever”: The Story of the Kelly Gang. National Film & Sound Archive, 2007. The Moving Image 8 ISBN: 1 876467 16 9 AUD$34.94 200pp (Review copy supplied by National Film & Sound Archive) The first thing to note about this ambitious DVD-Book project …

Warren Buckland (ed.), Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies. New York: Routledge, 2009 ISBN: 978 0 415 96262 9 US$26.96 (pb) 358pp (Review copy supplied by Routledge) How can we map out a topos, by which scholars of contemporary Hollywood cinema with contesting agendas may reach some form of mutual understanding, or, as Thomas Elsaesser proposes, constructive mutual interferences?[1]  This is …

Steve Macek, Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic over the City. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis & London, 2006. ISBN: 0 8166 4361 X US$22.95 (pb) 360pp (Review copy supplied by the University of Minnesota Press) Contemplating ‘urban nightmares’ while residing in a small New Zealand city seems to be a contradiction in terms. Certainly, the …

Dina Iordanova and Ruby Cheung (eds), Film Festivals and Imagined Communities. Dundee: St Andrews Film Studies, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-9563730-1-4 AU$37.00 (pb) 286pp (Review copy supplied by St Andrews Film Studies) The second edition of the Film Festival Yearbook series is another vital contribution to the developing field of film festivals studies. Published by St Andrews Film Studies and edited by …

Graeme Turner, Ending the Affair: The Decline of Television Current Affairs in Australia. University of New South Wales Press, 2005. ISBN: 9 780 86840864 4 AUD$34.95 (pb) 184pp (Review copy supplied by University of New South Wales Press) Affairs to Remember The first thing that should be said about Graeme Turner’s latest contribution to Australian media and television studies appropriately …

Charles Maland, City Lights (BFI Film Classics). London: BFI Publishing, 2007 ISBN-13: 978-1844571758 US$14.95 (pb) 128pp (Review copy supplied by Macmillan) Charles Maland’s Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image (1989) studies the rise of Chaplin both as an actor and an icon, as well as his decline in popularity later in his career. His study of Chaplin’s City Lights (USA 1931) …

Dudley Andrew (ed.) André Bazin’s New Media University of California Press, 2014. ISBN: 9780520283572 US$29.95(pb) 352pp André Bazin plays a central role in the history of film and media studies. Initially praised by modernist filmmakers and proponents of French film criticism of the 1950s, Bazin shortly after became one of the most denounced thinkers in an academic film studies informed …

Daniel J. Leab, Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 271 02987 8 US$55.00 (hb) 232pp (Review copy supplied by Pennsylvania State University Press) It is a truism of film theory nowadays that a book and a film are separate entities, and that one cannot legitimately be judged in terms …

Jerad Walters and Marco Lanzagorta (eds), Studies in the Horror Film: Night of the Living Dead. Lakewood: Centipede Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-1-933618-32-6 US$125 (hb) 368pp (Review copy supplied by Centipede Press) Centipede Press’ Studies in the Horror Film series shows little signs of losing the momentum propelling its rigorous dedication to the genre with the release of this volume on George A. …

Dominique Nasta, Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle. London: Wallflower Press, 2013 ISBN: 9780231167451 US$26 (pb) 256pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) With her latest book Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle, Dominique Nasta joins a circle of prominent thinkers from Yvette Bíró to Dina Iordanova in the serious study of Eastern European …

Elana Levine, Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television. Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 082 233919 9 US$22.95 (pb) 320pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) In 1977 an ‘anonymous TV executive’ described American television as ‘wallowing in sex’ (4), an evocative description of seventies network programming that inspired the title of …

Heide Schlüpmann, The Uncanny Gaze: The Drama of Early German Cinema. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010 ISBN: 3-87877-373-0 US$30.00 (pb) 273pp Mark Garrett Cooper, Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-252-07700-5 US$25.00 (pb) 230pp (Review Copies supplied by University of Illinois Press) ‘Women and Film History International’ is a …

Rachel Moore, Hollis Frampton (nostalgia). London: Afterall Books, 2006. ISBN: 978 1 84638 001 3 US$16.00 (pb) 88pp (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia), or, ‘Lower case, with parentheses’ Rachel Moore’s eloquent and insightful close-reading of Frampton’s most well-known 1971 film, (nostalgia), is timely given the current status of this seminal American artist and writer who has, during the …

Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker and Ezra Winton (eds), Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010 ISBN 9780773536630 CA$34.95 (pb) 574pp (Review copy supplied by McGill-Queen’s University Press) One indication of the inordinate influence the National Film Board of Canada has had on documentary film is the number of units or …

McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 674 02519 6 US$19.95 (hb) 240pp (Review copy supplied by Harvard University Press) In Montevideo, a child explains : ‘I never want to die, because I want to play forever.’ Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces (1992). McKenzie Wark’s new book, Gamer Theory, is a highly inventive, reflexive, refreshingly …

Roger Hallas, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image. Duke University Press, 2009 ISBN 978-0-8223-4601-2 US$24.95 (pb) 336pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) As HIV/AIDS reaches its third decade, the once-flourishing field of AIDS cultural criticism, an interdisciplinary amalgam of gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, film and media studies, memory and trauma studies – …

Mark Glancy, Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain: From the 1920s to the Present London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2014 ISBN: 978-1-84885-407-9 UK £62.00 (hb) 340pp (Review copy supplied by I.B.Tauris Those who read Mark Glancy’s 1999 study, When Hollywood Loved Britain, will be eager to come to grips with his newest chronicling of how the ‘special relationship’ has …

Nicole Brenez, Abel Ferrara (translated from the French by Adrian Martin). Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 252 07411 0 AUD$37.95 (pb) 240pp (Review copy supplied by UniReps) Like many of the colleagues whose work informs Brenez’s – such as Raymond Bellour, Alain Bergala and Charles Tesson – theoretical reflections arise from the work and pleasure …

Giorgio Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape and the Picturesque. Indiana University Press, 2009 ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22128-5 US$24.95 (pb) 464pp (Review copy supplied by Indiana University Press) “Southernism: The answer to the Southern Question?” Giorgio Bertellini’s Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape and the Picturesque fills a much needed void in our understanding of the role that Italians and Italian …

Scott Balcerzak, Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8143-3965-7 US$29.95 (pb) 280pp (Review copy supplied by Wayne State University Press) Scott Balcerzak’s Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity continues the tradition of queer scholarship committed to re-reading mainstream cultural texts. As his book title suggests, his study focuses …

James Morrison (ed.), The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows. London; New York: Wallflower Press, 2006. ISBN: 978 1 904764 77 9 US$25.00 (pb) 224pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) Ordinarily a book of theoretically-besotted essays on the cinema offers little more than a long dull slog through the painfully obvious. You don’t have to have read …

Robin Wood, Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998 ISBN: 0-231-07605-3 352pp $US22.50 (pb) Uploaded 1 July 1999 This book has two authors: a clever, worm-catching Robin and a very thick Wood. Robin is a shrewd analyst of other critics’ logic and an attentive, informed observer of a wide range of films. Wood …

Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner (eds), Cinema and Landscape. Bristol: Intellect, 2010 ISBN: 978-1-84150-309-7 US$25.00 (pb) 315pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect) Presumably anyone interested in reading Cinema and Landscape, an anthology of eighteen essays edited by Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner, is interested in considering landscape and cinema in tandem in order to practice a reading strategy that will reveal …

Robert Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 520 25122 9 US$24.95 (pb) 190pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) In the Introduction to Uncanny Bodies, Robert Spadoni (Assistant Professor, English, Case Western University) claims to have published what amounts to the …

David Lascelles, Celluloid Creams: A Century of Film in New Zealand. Wellington: IPL Books. 1997 ISBN 0 908876 96 3. 144 pp. NZ$39.95 within New Zealand or $45 overseas (Pb) Fax 64-4-499-3032. David Lascelles, 80 Turbulent Years: The Paramount Theatre Wellington 1917-1997. Wellington: Millwood Press. 1997 ISBN 0-908582-80-3. 90 pp. NZ $39.95 (Pb) Uploaded 1 July 1999 Both Celluloid Dreams: A Century …

Giorgio Bertellini, Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader John Libbey Publishing, 2013 ISBN: 9780-86196-670-7 US$40 (pb) 401pp (Review copy supplied by John Libbey Publishing) Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader, edited by Giorgio Bertellini (Associate Professor at the University of Michigan), is a complex, ample and exhaustive volume, composed of thirty articles by Italian and non-Italian scholars, with around 150 images, three …

Brian McFarlane and Deane Williams, Michael Winterbottom (British Film Makers). Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-7190-7422 6 AU$89 (hb) 152pp (Review copy supplied by Footprint Books) Michael Winterbottom has good reason to feel like an unsung figure of contemporary British cinema. Despite his prolific output (eighteen films in the last fifteen years), eclectic use of genre and …

Christine L. Marran, Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0816647279 US$22.50 (pb) 264pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) This book adopts a Cultural Studies approach to Japanese studies It examines the representation of the female criminal in Japan over the last 130 years – from early Meiji …

Scott MacDonald, Adventures of Perception: Cinema as Exploration. University of California Press, 2009 ISBN: 9780520258563 US$29.95 (pb) 440pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) Scott MacDonald’s Adventures of Perception: Cinema as Exploration is a category defying collection of eight essays and eight interviews produced between 1983 and 2009. It unfolds as a series of pairings exploring independent and avant-garde cinema …

Andrew Klevan, Barbara Stanwyck (Film Stars series) London: British Film Institute, 2013 ISBN: 9781844576487 UK £14.99 (pb) 152pp (Review copy supplied by Palgrave MacMillan) Virginia Wilson, The Life and Times of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Simon & Schuster, 2013 ISBN: 978-068431688 US$30 (hb) 1056pp (Review copy supplied by Simon & Schuster) In her review of The Life and Times of …

Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction. The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 520 24962 2 US$24.95 (pb) 416pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) This reviewer entered the field of academic film studies in the 1970s, when, at least in the United States, film education was not yet …

Tom De Haven, Our Hero: Superman on Earth (Icons of America). Yale University Press, 2010 ISBN: 9780300118179 US$24.00 (hb) 240pp (Review copy supplied by Yale University Press) The final chapter of Tom De Haven’s 2005 novel, It’s Superman, begins like this: “And here, at last, is the point where our version of the story merges with all of the others…” (p. 424) …

Tony Barta (editor), Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History. Westport Ct: Praeger. 1998 ISBN 0-275-95402-1 279pp $59.95(hb) Uploaded 1 July 1999 The essays in Tony Barta’s collection focus on the relationship between film and history – on the ‘many ways in which the past is “screened” ‘; an attempt to ‘integrate the academic culture of historians….with the …

Steven Bach, Leni, The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 375 40400 9 US$30.00 (hb) 386pp Gerd Gemunden and Mary R. Desjardins (eds.), Dietrich Icon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 8223 3819 2 US$25.00 (pb) 420pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) 1967. New York City. …

Note: this is the third tranche of a multi-tranche review. It deals with some of the films made by John Ford at the Fox Studios in the first half of the 1930s. One context for these films is provided in the Brief(er) Introduction to Part Two (a), which deals with the first two of Ford’s sound features included in the Ford At …

Barbara Creed, Darwin’s Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema. Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-522-85709-2 AU$49.99 232pp (Review copy supplied by Melbourne University Press) In the century and a half since the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, interpretations of Darwin’s ideas have informed, shaped, and, in some cases, tragically distorted …

Linda S. Kauffman, Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. University of California Press, California, 1998. ISBN 0-520-21032-8 324pp $18.95 US (pb) Uploaded 16 April 1999 Although we’re gravitating closer to the unfleshed dimensions of cyberspace it seems to me that our obsessions with the body are just as delirious as they’ve always been. The 90’s …

Melanie J. Wright, Religion and Film: An Introduction. I.B.Tauris, 2007. ISBN: 978 1 85043 886 1 US$26.95 (pb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by I.B.Tauris) The subtitle of Melanie Wright’s study of the treatment of religion in film suggests a textbook, but although Religion and Film has pedantic stretches, it is a mostly thoughtful and often insightful consideration of how film has …

Catherine Lumby, Alvin Purple. Australian Screen Classics series Currency Press/AFC/NFSA, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-86819-844-6 Au$16.95 (pb) 80pp Henry Reynolds, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Australian Screen Classics series Currency Press/AFC/NFSA, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-86819-824-8 Au$16.95 80pp (Review copies supplied by Currency Press) I vividly remember being told many years ago, by people who should know, that it was a waste of time researching …

Jeffrey Ruoff (ed.), Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals. St Andrews, Scotland: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012. ISBN: 978-1-908437-02-0 UK£19.99 (pb) 274pp (Review copy supplied by St Andrews Film Studies publishing house) Reduced to their most basic level, film festivals are about programming. Not only encompassing the selection and scheduling of films, the programming of film …

Gail Jones, The Piano. Sydney: Currency Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 86819 799 9 AUD$16.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Currency Press) Flagrant poetics: rendering Jane Campion’s The Piano new Gail Jones’ monograph on Jane Campion’s The Piano is the next in the Australian Screen Classics series published jointly by The AFC/National Film and Sound Archive and Currency Press. Others in the series include a …

A Whole Account of a Great Soul Lorraine Mortimer, Terror and Joy. The Films of Dusan Makavejev. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-8166-4887-0 US$25.00 (pb) 336pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) It is not a small appreciation to say about a book that it fortunately managed to bring the character of its versatile ”hero”, the …

D. N. Rodowick (ed.), Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 ISBN: 978 0 8166 5007 1 US$27.50 (pb) 396pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) In Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (1997), one of D.N. Rodowick’s primary aims was to reposition Deleuze’s cinema books from the margins to the centre of both film theory and …

Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet : The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers. Walker Publishing Company. 1998 ISBN 0 8027 1342 4 240pp US $22.00 Uploaded 1 July 1999 We live in an age where knowledge of the past has all but disappeared from everyday thinking. The managerial ethic which assumes that an MBA is all …

Marc Blake and Sara Bailey, Writing the Horror Movie. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013. ISBN 9781441196187 US $18.99 (hb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by Bloomsbury Publishing) The front cover of Writing the Horror Movie reminded this reader of Roy Ward Baker’s horror-comedy The Monster Club (1980). Specifically, I recalled the undead family tree that appeared as a backdrop throughout …

Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 226 31606 2 US$30.00 (hb) 419pp (Review copy supplied by the University of Chicago Press) One of my first experiences of photography as something to be looked at in itself was, as …

Michael Deeley and Matthew Field, Blade Runner, Deer Hunters & Blowing The Bloody Doors Off: My Life in Cult Movies. London: Faber & Faber, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-571-23919-1 Au$49.95 (hb) 304pp (Review copy supplied by Faber & Faber) After a period of neglect, recent years have seen the publication of a number of books dedicated to British cinema of the 1970s. …

Joan Grossman, Blackout: On Memory and Catastrophe. New York and Dresden: Atropos Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-9819972-3-0 US$16.95 (pb) 112pp (Review copy supplied by Atropos Press) Philosophers from Aristotle to Jacques Derrida have attempted to theorize how individuals and communities recall and represent important events. In her book, Blackout: On Memory and Catastrophe, Joan Grossman builds on the work of classic and …

Marie-Laure Ryan, Avatars of Story. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ISBN: 978 081664686 9 US$20 (pb) 296pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Marie Laure-Ryan has written and edited a number of books on the subject of narrative theory in new media and interactive media, and her body of work has had some degree of influence; within the …

Peter Gidal, Andy Warhol’s Blow Job. London: Afterall Books, 2008. ISBN: 1-846380-41-3 US$16.00 (pb) 112pp (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) During its most influential “Silver” period, Andy Warhol’s factory churned out a torrent of paintings, sculptures, and films – films that pretty much reinvented the cinema from the ground up. In this short book, filmmaker and critic Peter Gidal …

CineBlitz, Love and Longing in Hindi Cinema. VJM Media: Mumbai, 2009 ISBN: 978-81-908829-0-5 US$40 (hb) 206pp (Review copy supplied by D.K.Agencies) Love and Longing in Hindi Cinema (hereafter LLHC) is a glossy coffee table book comprising a fabulous collection of stills from a variety of Hindi films over a period of time, a selection of quotes on the topics of love, lust …

Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 520 25128 1 US$39.95 (hb) 358pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism is the forty-first title in the …

Brian McFarlane, Screen Adaptations: Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations: The Relationship Between Text and Film. London: Methuen Publishing Ltd. 2008 ISBN: 978-0713679093 US$19.95 (pb) 224pp The cover of this book features a near naked man and woman kissing passionately in the rain. If this rather startling modern depiction of Pip and Estella in Great Expectations (USA 1998) seems incongruous, it’s partly because the …

Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-8223-4411-7 US$25.95 (pb) 372pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Mourning the Nation is an important and timely book that seeks to explore the impact of the 1947 partition of British India on Indian filmmaking. In order to grasp the …

James Chapman, Mark Glancy & Sue Harper (eds.), The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ISBN: 978 023000169 5 US$85.00 (hb) 288pp (Review copy supplied by Palgrave) The New Film History is an accessible and wide-ranging account of the methods, sources and approaches used by modern film historians. This compilation of essays, drawn together from some of British …

Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN: 9 780 74863408 8 UK£16.99 (pb) 256pp (Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press) Holy Land Trust; Taayush; International Solidarity Movement; Neve shalom/Wahat al-salam (Oasis of Peace) village; and Alternative Information Center are all non-profit peace organizations, grassroots movements, situated in either Israel …

Steven Mintz and Randy W. Roberts (eds.), Hollywood’s America: Twentieth Century America Through Film (Fourth Edition). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 ISBN: 978-1-4051-9003-9 AU$47.95 (pb) 370pp (Review copy supplied by Wiley-Blackwell publishers) “Anyone who wishes to know about the twentieth-century United States would do well to go to the movies”. So begins the first line in the Preface of this very readable …

Rick Altman, Silent film sound, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0 231 11662 4 462pp US$50 (hb) (Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press) There’s a seeming simplicity to the title of Rick Altman’s majestic book – Silent fiilm sound with no academicizing subtitle to qualify it – but the apparent straightforwardness is quickly belied by a dazzling performance in …

Gene D. Phillips, Beyond the Epic: The Life & Films of David Lean. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 8131 2415 8 US$39.95 (hb) 545pp (Review copy supplied by University of Kentucky Press) What is David Lean’s standing now, I wonder? Filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg claim to revere his later works; he has attracted a couple of …

Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (eds), Inventing Film Studies. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2008 ISBN: 978 0 8223 4289-2 US$27.95 (pb) 446pp (Review Copy supplied by Duke University Press) In 1969, when I was a freshman in college, I could not have told you who John Ford or G.W. Pabst were, although I did experience my first taste …

Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009 (first published 2002) ISBN 1 86064 749 9 UK£18.99 (pb) 296pp (Review copy supplied by I.B. Tauris) All the action here is after the colon. The label “An Introduction” should alert you to the ambitions and purpose of this book. Do not look here for new primary research or …

Tom Cohen, Hitchcock’s cryptonymies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. (In two volumes) Vol. I, Secret Agents, 284pp, ISBN: 0 8166 4206 0 (pb) US$25 Vol. II, War Machines, 300pp, ISBN: 0 8166 4171 4 (pb) US$25 (Review copies supplied by University of Minnesota Press) “Blinded” or Blinded It happened in October of 1999 that I was unable to attend a certain …

Laraine Porter and Bryony Dixon (eds.), Picture Perfect: Landscape, Place and Travel in British Cinema before 1930. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007-09-12. ISBN: 1 905 81601 4 £14.99 (pb) 160pp (Review copy supplied by University of Exeter Press) One of the most heartening and, indeed, exciting revelations of film studies in recent years has been the bringing to light …

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia. Edinburgh University Press, 2009 ISBN: 978 0 7486 2400 3 £18.99 (pb) 208pp Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press. Most film people, I believe, think of film noir as a phenomenon that emerged in the late 1930s, blossomed in the next two decades, then slowly subsided, generating the occasional …

Rebecca M. Schreiber, Cold War Exiles in Mexico: US Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-8166-4308-0 US$22.50 (pb) 320pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) McCarthyism and the American Blacklist (or “Inquisition” as Cedric Belfrage so aptly termed it decades ago) had a devastating effect on progressive ideals in the …

Warren Buckland, Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006. ISBN: 0 8264 1691 8 242pp US$19.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Continuum) Within the last eight years or so, the body of scholarship on contemporary Hollywood cinema has grown exponentially. Prior to this, a few key works, like Timothy Corrigan’s 1991 A cinema …

Alan Cholodenko (ed.), The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation. Sydney: Power Publications, 2007. ISBN: 9 78 0909952 34 1 AUD$59.95 (pb) 576pp (Review copy supplied by Power Publications) In the anthology The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation, Alan Cholodenko has brought together an eclectic array of scholarly approaches to animation. Conceiving of animation as a …

Esther Romeyn, Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York 1880-1924. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-081664522 0 US$25.00 (pb) 320pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) We seem to have acquired a class of individuals whose so-called sense of humor takes the form of uncouth flippancy, a type of mind that stares blankly in the …

John Berra (ed.), Directory of World Cinema: Japan. Bristol: UK: Intellect Books, 2010 ISBN-13: 978-1841503356 UK£16.00 (pb) 350pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect Books) According to the editorial introduction, this volume “is intended to be informative rather than exhaustive. Instead of providing a general overview of Japanese Cinema, past and present…this volume aims to offer readers both familiar and unfamiliar …

Michael M. J. Fischer, Mute dreams, blind owls and dispersed knowledges: Persian poesis in the transnational circuitry. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0 8223 3298 1 475pp US$24.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Michael M. J. Fischer’s comprehension of the dynamics inherent in Iranian culture is more than substantial. An anthropologist, Professor Fischer spent …

Christopher Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach. University of Toronto Press, 2007. ISBN: 9 7808020 95206 US$39.95 (pb) 514pp (Review copy supplied by University of Toronto Press) Italian neo-realism was many things. At one end of the spectrum it was a wide social and artistic movement emerging from the debris of the Second World War – Fascism, German occupation, …

Geoff Andrew, 10. London: BFI Publishing, 2005. ISBN: 1 844 57069 X 88pp £9.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by BFI publications) Few films seem as wholeheartedly concerned with “America”, in the sense of ruminating on the singular character of the American condition, psyche, and way of life, as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi driver (US 1976). What that film depicts, more than anything else, …

Irving Singer, Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher: Reflections on His Creativity. MIT Press, 2007 ISBN-13: 978-0-262-19563-8 US$24.95 (hb) 240pp Irving Singer, Cinematic Mythmaking: Philosophy in Film. MIT Press, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-0-262-19589-8 US$24.95 (hb) 256pp (Review copies supplied by MIT Press) Could it be that “philosopher of film” is a persona on the way to becoming obsolete? This would perhaps be surprising, …

Albert Moran and Errol Vieth, Historical dictionary of Australian and New Zealand cinema. Scarecrow Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 810 85459 7 432pp Au$80 (hb) (Review copy supplied by Scarecrow Press) Addressing the topic of Australian cinema is a task fraught with difficulty. Judging from the currently available histories of Australian cinema, it is de rigueur for any project of the …

James Walters, Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema: Resonance Between Realms. Chicago: Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-1-84150-202-1 US$30.00 (pb) 232pp (Review copy supplied by Unireps) The recognition of fictionalized or fantasy worlds is nothing new to cinema studies. However, in Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema: Resonance Between Realms, University of Birmingham professor James Walters builds upon previous …

Patrick McGilligan (ed), Backstory 4: Interviews with screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 520 21518 0 424pp US$24.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) This latest of McGilligan’s useful and distinguished series of screenwriter interview collections is loosely themed around writers of a certain period of American studio cinema …

Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti (eds), Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-8166-4579-4 US$25.00 (pb) 340pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) My local community arts centre now offers Bollywood Dhamarka every Thursday. The South Asian population of the suburb is minimal so who are the participants of this fun-filled hour? …

Anne Billson, Buffy the vampire slayer. London: British Film Institute, 2005. ISBN: 1 8445 7089 4, 192pp, £9 (pb). (Review copy supplied by BFI publications) Rhonda Wilcox, Why Buffy matters: The art of Buffy the vampire slayer. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005. ISBN: 1 8451 1029 3, 256pp, £12.99 (pb). (Review copy supplied by I.B. Tauris) Stacey Abbott, …

Nitzan Ben-Shaul, Film: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg, 2007 ISBN-13: 978-1845203665 US$19.95 (pb) 192pp (Review copy supplied by Berg Publishers) Nitzan Ben-Shaul’s Film: The Key Concepts is part of a “Key Concepts” series from Berg that “aims to cover the core disciplines and the key cross-disciplinary ideas across the Humanities and Social Sciences.” Given its purpose, Film: The Key Concepts succeeds admirably. Divided into …

Michael Hammond, The big show: British cinema culture in the Great War 1914-1918. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 85989 758 3 304pp £45 (hb) (Review copy supplied by University of Exeter Press) While film studies has traditionally been grounded in textual analysis, it continues to try out models for incorporating context and reception in its accounts of …

Jeffrey Ruoff (ed), Virtual voyages: Cinema and travel. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2006. ISBN: 0 8223 3713 4 298pp US$22.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) “Vision ‘captivates’ us not only because it is a journey toward external things, but, also because it is a return to a reality of origin… to travel is to see, …

Michael Richardson, Surrealism and cinema. Oxford: Berg, 2006. ISBN: 1 84520 226 0 202pp £14.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Berg publications) Michael Richardson’s Surrealism and cinema addresses misconceptions about surrealism and dispels any limited notion of what surrealism might be. He shows that surrealism is an activity, a living thing or a tension within the work rather than it is a …

[Screening the Past asked Bill Routt to review this archival DVD set documenting most of the surviving films John Ford directed at (Twentieth-Century) Fox from 1920—1952. More of the review will appear in future issues.] Ford at Fox. Published by Twentieth-Century Fox, 2007. 21 disks. Includes coffee-table photo album, Ford at Fox, 168 pp. with essays by Joseph McBride (“Ford at Fox: …

András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema 1950-1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-226-45165-7 US$22.50 (pb) 428pp (Review copy supplied by University of Chicago Press) As we approach the end of the 2000s, it is worth remembering that it has been fifty years since that annus mirabilis during which history and aesthetics took a quantum leap. In …

Scott Nygren, Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN-13: 978 0 8166 4708 8 US$25.00 (pb) 304pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Scott Nygren’s prefatory caveats should dispel any expectation that his book title promises a history of film in Japan; an update, say, of Anderson and Richie’s The Japanese …

Jill Julius Matthews, Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydneys Romance with Modernity. Sydney: Currency Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 868 19755 6 Au$32.95 (pb) 342pp (Review copy supplied by Currency Press) This is a tale of modern romance, of heroic adventures and impassioned desire. It is set in the city of Sydney over thirty tumultuous years of prosperity, between the two …

Jo Fox, Film Propaganda in Britain and Nazi Germany: World War II Cinema. Oxford: Berg, 2007. ISBN: 9 781 85973896 2 £17.99 (pb) 368pp (Review copy supplied by Berg publishers) The Second World War still continues to exert great fascination on scholars and the public alike, and no aspect of the war appears more fascinating than film propaganda. In recent …

Deane Williams, Australian Postwar Documentary Film: An Arc of Mirrors. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2008. ISBN: 9781841502106 UK£29.95 (hb) 192 pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect Books) Deane Williams re-evaluates Australian documentary film production after World War 2, positioning it as part of an international left culture, which can embrace producers as different as the Realist Film Unit, Cecil Holmes, John …

Gideon Nisbet, Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture. Bristol Phoenix Press, 2006. ISBN: 1 904675 12 3 AUD$43.95 (pb) 170pp (Review copy supplied by Footprint Books) While Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture is hardly the first account of the ancient world in film (books from Solomon, Wyke, Winkler, and Cyrino come to mind), it is surely the first to …

Mark Browning, David Cronenberg: Author or Film-maker? Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Books, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-84150-173-4 US$25.00 (pb) 207pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect Books) After more than half a century of auteur film theory, the title of this book is quite puzzling. Should it be: David Cronenberg: Author and Film-maker? Particularly, in this case, this question seems rhetorical. Cronenberg’s films bear one …

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 520 25123 6 US$24.95 (pb) 346pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) It’s one of those delectable ironies of film history that the United States’ greatest (that is to say, most interesting) director should have been so profoundly un-American as Orson Welles. Everyone knows …

Michelle Langford, Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2006. ISBN 1-84150-138-7 US$40.00 (pb) 215pp (Review copy supplied by UniReps) Werner Schroeter is a marginal and itinerant (though prolific) figure in the history of New German Cinema, making fleeting but elusive appearances on the festival circuit, for instance, winning the Golden Bear …

Michael Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 520 24117 6 US$29.95 (hb) 393pp (Review copy supplied by the University of California Press) Tom Sito, Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, …

Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 231 13377 4 US$19.00 (pb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press) The predominant tone of discussion about the US film industry – not only that industry, but also the totality of the US economy – is that it …

Adrian Martin, Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 ISBN: 978-1-137-26994-2 US$96 (hb) 256pp (Review copy supplied by Palgrave Macmillan publishing) My contention is at once more modest and more inclusive: that the contemporary workings of dispositifs can offer us a new entrée into rethinking the field of film …

Sam Rohdie, Montage (Cinema Aesthetics). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-0719070396 US$19.95 (pb) 146pp (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press) This book treats of montage much as Eisenstein described cinematography at the outset of his chapter on the ideogram in The Film Form. For its author montage is cinema itself. Rather than laboring through the definitions it carries under the …

Sharon Lin Tay, Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-230-21776-8 US$80.00 (hb) 208pp (Review copy supplied by Palgrave Macmillan) Contemporary feminist media scholarship is indebted to the significant intellectual contributions of 1970s and 80s feminist theorists. Indeed, decades-long scholarly discussions surrounding conceptual frameworks such as “the gaze” and “women’s films” have had so great …

Petra Kupper, The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art. London: University of Minnesota, 2007. ISBN: 978 081664653 1 US$29.95 (pb) 360pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) When I was about eight years old I lay in hospital with a long, thick strip of sticky material across my lower belly. As the young male doctor examined …

Philip Brophy, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Australian Screen Classics Series). Sydney: Currency Press and the Australian Film Commission, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-86819-821-7 Au$16.94 (pb) 88pp (Review copy supplied by Currency Press) Philip Brophy’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is a most welcome tour de-force addition to Currency Press’s Australian Screen Classics, which is edited by the indefatigable film scholar-activist …

Natalie King (ed.), Up Close: Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and William Yang. Melbourne: Heide Museum of Modern Art/Schwartz City, 2010. ISBN: 9 78186395 501 0 AU$59.95 (pb) 241pp (Review copy supplied by Heide Museum of Modern Art/Schwartz City) “(Susan) Sontag once said to me that in all of human history, in only one brief period were people …

Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. ISBN: 978 0 262 06252 7 US$34.95 (hb) 448pp (Review copy supplied by MIT Press)   What counts for the orientation of the spectacle is not my body as it in fact is, as a thing in objective space, but as a system of possible actions, a virtual …

Jay McRoy, Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2008 ISBN: 978 90 420 2331 4 US$67 (pb) 219pp (Review copy supplied by Rodopi) In the opening pages of Nightmare Japan, Jay McRoy outlines his task: to “advance current studies” of Japanese horror cinema, and to answer the call for a “much-needed aesthetic and critical …

Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Hollywood Catwalk: Exploring Costume and Transformation in American Film. London: I.B. Tauris, 2010 ISBN-13: 978-1848850408 US$28.00 (pb) 256pp (Review copy supplied by I.B. Tauris) Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s latest book Hollywood Catwalk: Exploring Costume and Transformation in American Film attempts to pick apart one of the most peculiar, enduring and stupidly satisfying film tropes – the makeover. It …

J. E. Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. ISBN: 0 81312406 9 US$50.00 (hb) 447pp (Review copy supplied by the University Press of Kentucky) J. E. Smyth’s Reconstructing American Historical Cinema is intended, in the author’s own words, “to question the canons of film studies and American history” (24). This is a bold claim. In …

Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris and Sarah Street, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 1970 ISBN: 978 90 5356 984 9 US$39.50 (pb) 320pp (Review copy supplied by Amsterdam University Press) This is at once a very useful book and a flawed book. Any study that deals seriously with the place of …

Robin Visser, Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010 ISBN: 978 0 8223 4728 6 US$24.95 384pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) An unpronounced keyword in Robin Visser’s Cities Surround the Countryside is “intersubjectivity,” not so much as in how human beings interact and interfere with each other, but how space, …

Roger Beebe and Jason Middleton (eds.), Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones. Durham, Duke University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4162-8 US$23.95 (pb) 360pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) The beat goes on? Medium Cool is in many respects a very timely volume. As its subtitle suggests, it is a book that seeks to chart the progress of the …

Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin (eds), Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method. Duke University Press, 2007 ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-3821-5 US$24.95 (pb) 400pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) This is a very useful book. It has an introduction which states simply and clearly what it intends to do, and why; then twelve essays which …

Linda Aronson, The 21st Century Screenplay. Allen and Unwin, 2010 ISBN: 978-1-74237-136-8 Au$49.99 (pb) 512pp (Review copy supplied by Allen & Unwin) Patrick McGilligan, Backstory 5: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1990s. University of California Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-520-26039-9 US$24.95 (pb) 264pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) In this fifth volume of the Backstory series, Patrick McGilligan …

Leen Engelen and Roel Vande Winkel, Perspectives on European Film and History. Academia Press, Gent, 2007 ISBN: 97 890 3821082 7 Eur 30.00 (pb) 281pp (Review copy supplied by Gent, Academia Press) Perspectives on European Film and History brings together a number of essays by Dutch, Belgian, British and American scholars interested in the relationship between film and history, and notably …

George Kouvaros, Famous Faces Not Yet Themselves: The Misfits and Icons of Postwar America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-8166-4747-7 US$24.95 (pb) 304pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) My first experience of John Huston’s The Misfits (USA 1961) was not of the film itself, but of an Eve Arnold photograph of Marilyn Monroe on set. …

D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, Harvard UP, 2007. ISBN 13:978-0-674-02698-8 US$24.95 (pb) 193pp (Review copy supplied by Harvard University Press) Because the digital arts are without substance and therefore not easily identified as objects, no medium-specific ontology can fix them in place. The digital arts render all expressions as identical since they are all ultimately reducible …

Atara Stein, The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004 ISBN-13: 978-0809325863 US$45.00 (hb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by Southern Illinois University Press) Narratives that detail the gradual absorption of subcultures into the mainstream would do well to follow the lead of Atara Stein, an American scholar interested in the interface of Romanticism and …

Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman (eds), Wagner and Cinema. Indiana University Press, 2010 ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22163-6 US$27.95 (pb) 504pp (Review copy supplied by Indiana University Press) The scholarly book Wagner and Cinema presents the reader with what is perhaps an uneven sequence of some very interesting writing. Edited by Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman, Wagner and Cinema is not …

Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8166-4942-6 US$22.50 (pb) 257 pages (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) The recent growth of international interest in commercial Hindi cinema has resulted in the publication of a number of books which are important aids to teaching and research in this area. …

Christine Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-7486-1642-8 Au$49.95 (pb) 308pp (Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press) In the foreword to her new book, Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality, Christine Cornea makes it clear that its fundamental purpose is to “place the thematic and formal concerns raised by science fiction …

Christopher Shannon, Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classic Hollywood Cinema. University of Scranton Press, Scranton & London, 2010 ISBN: 978-1-58966-200-1 US$25.00 (hb) 220pp (Review copy supplied by Scranton University Press) Priests promoting a down-to-earth muscular Christianity; good-natured boozing fathers; saintly mothers working finger to the bone; pixilated soothsayer types: these were some of the ill-considered images of the …

Paul Grainge, Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age. London & New York: Routledge, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-415-35405-9 US$34.95 (pb) 224pp (Review copy supplied by Routledge) The brand is the new black. It is related to that last-millenium term synergy, but not simply reducible to synergy. The brand can refer to both the company and the way that companies …

Steve Chibnall, Quota Quickies: The Birth of the British ‘B’ Film. London: BFI, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-1844571550 US$28.95 (pb) 329pp (Review copy supplied by BFI Publishing) Steve Chibnall is a well-known and well-regarded film historian who specializes in British cinema, and here he tackles an area that has been ignored by many other film scholars, and does it magnificently. In Quota Quickies: …

Peter Verstraten (translated by Stefan van der Lecq), Film Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009 ISBN-13: 978 080209 505 3 US$27.95 (pb) 259pp (Review copy supplied by University of Toronto Press) In Film Narratology Peter Verstraten attempts one of film theory’s more ambitious and potentially fatal balancing acts. As a hypothetical outline of …

Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr, and Takayuki Tatsumi (eds.), Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8166-4974-7 US$20.00 (pb) 288pp (Review copy supplied by the University of Minnesota Press) Being a fan of anime and manga in the west inevitably involves seizing works out of their …

Guy Westwell, War Cinema. Hollywood on the Front Line. London: Wallflower Press, 2006. ISBN: 978-1-904764-54-0 £12.99stg (pb) 144pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) Despite the number of war films produced by Hollywood each year, there are few (recent) texts that actually analyse the genre from either an historical or cultural-political perspective. There are, of course, books dealing with the …

Amy Herzog, Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-8166-6088-9 US$25.000 (pb) 296pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Skipping Along the Groove: Landscaping with Amy Herzog’s Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same Rareness unlike originality defines itself. Originality escapes definition by taking flight, rareness …

Zhang Zhen (ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4074-4 US$26.95 (pb) 447pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) If we know anything at all about China right now, it is that it is the site of ferocious processes of change. One of …

Jonathan Auerbach, Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-520-25293-6 US$24.95 (pb) 214pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) …To achieve any sort of conceptual unity…practices of cinema during its first decade came to rely most crucially on the dynamic language of body movement – gestures, comportments, and attitudes which taken together …

Reynold Humphries, Hollywood’s Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-7486-2456-0 UK£19.99 (pb) 184pp (Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press) Fear and anxiety loomed over the offices and back lots of Hollywood studios throughout the early 1950s. Following World War II and the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, American politics shifted away from left-leaning …

Jeffrey Sconce (ed.), Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-3964-9 US$23.95 (pb) 352pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Jeffrey Sconce is a terrific smart arse. It’s what makes him such a pleasure to read, and what ensures his ‘Trashing the Academy’ is one of the …

Brian McFarlane, Real and Reel: The Education of a Film Obsessive. Glen Waverley: Sid Harta Publishers, 2010 ISBN: 1-921642-58-0 AU$29.95 (pb) 187pp (Review copy supplied by Sid Harta Publishers) There’s a lot of information packed into Brian McFarlane’s “‘rather specialised memoir’”. It contains multiple references to films, to film celebrities and it documents the evolution of the author’s staggering output …

Dorota Ostrowska, Reading the French New Wave: Critics, Writers and Art Cinema in France. London: Wallflower, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-905674-57-2 £16.99 (pb) 207pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) The links between the literary and cinematic avant-gardes of the 1950s and 1960s are often hinted at in scholarly studies of the period, but rarely examined in detail. It is the first …

Martin F. Norden (ed.), The Changing Face of Evil in Film and Television. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2007. ISBN: 978 90 420 2324 6 US$77.00 (pb) 244pp (Review copy supplied by Rodopi) The publication of an anthology of essays which strive to probe disciplinary boundaries through rigorous inquiries into specific subjects is an idea whose time has come. This is …

Barbara Hammer, Hammer! Making Movies out of Sex and Life. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. ISBN 9 781558616 12 7 Au$19.95 (pb) 281pp (Review copy supplied by The Feminist Press) At first glance, I thought that Hammer! would be an overview of the famous British horror film studio. A closer inspection revealed that …

Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8020-9189-5 US$29.95 (pb with dvd) 224pp (Review copy supplied by University of Toronto Press) Millicent Marcus has taught Italian film and literature, and co-taught courses on Holocaust literature and film, at the University of Texas, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Toronto, …

Abé Mark Nornes, Forest of Pressure – Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary. University of Minnesota Press, 2007 ISBN: 0 8166 4908 1 US$25.00 (pb) 317pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Abé Mark Nornes has become, with the publication of this book, an author with a considerable range, with a recent book on film translation – the …

Steven Ricci, Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922-1943. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. ISBN: 0 520 23310 7 US$24.95 (pb) 233pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) The recent wave of scholarly monographs about cinema in Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain, and Fascist Italy suggest two things: that European cinema in the interwar period can no …

Raymond Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke: The Restored Version. Madman/NFSA/ATOM, 2009 (Review copy supplied by ATOM http://www.metromagazine.com.au/shop/product.asp?pID=1864) The Sentimental Bloke is a classic of Australian – and even world – silent cinema: Bill Routt and I are quoted on the cover of this package, calling it “among the very best films made anywhere before 1920”. So I welcome this package, which hopefully …

Anna Powell, Deleuze and Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005 ISBN: 0-7486-1747-7 US$36.00 (pb) 232pp (Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press) The rhizome has bloomed. The leaves now push up. Even in many undergraduate film programs, the multiplicity of Deleuze (or Deleuzoguattarian, or schizoanalytical) film scholarship has begun to variegate, differentiate and change. At the arrival of Anna …

Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Gothic. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 415 39843 5 $US30.95 (pb) 290pp (Review copy supplied by Routledge) Showing no signs of releasing its grasp on the popular or critical imagination, the Gothic has confirmed its longevity with a spate of academic titles over the past few years. …

Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley (ed.), Hollywood in the Neighbourhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing. University of California Press, 2008 ISBN: 9 780520249 73 8 US$27.95 (pb) 290pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9480.php) Not so long ago – when serious film study meant the textual analysis of films – this book could not have been published. Post-structuralism and …

Joseph Epstein, Fred Astaire. Yale University Press, 2008 (Review copy supplied by Yale University Press) The question that engages Joseph Epstein concerns Fred Astaire’s enduring magic: why his movies still shimmer with glamour, 50 years after his time, when what he did may not have been all that worth doing in the first place. (The question may likewise be asked …

Abé Mark Nornes [Markus Nornes], Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema. Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press: 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8166-5042-2 US$22.50 (pb) 304pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Officially, Nornes’ fascinating book, about language-translation in the export and import of films, consists of 8 main segments: 6 ‘chapters’ plus ‘Introduction’ and ‘Conclusion’, the eight of which average …

Jane Mills, Loving and Hating Hollywood: Reframing Global and Local Cinemas. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2009 ISBN: 9 781741756 647 Aud$39.99 (pb) 249pp (Review copy supplied by Allen & Unwin) Jane Mills begins her monograph by calling for a widespread film education. Based on her observations of the Australian film industry, she asks why its domestic audience is so …

Marvin D’Lugo, Pedro Almodóvar. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006 ISBN-10: 0-252-07361-4 US$19.95 (pb) 192pp (Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press) Auteur on the Global Scene: Pedro Almodóvar’s Geocultural Strategies It is no secret that the public persona of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar is built on a series of oxymorons. An enfant terrible of Spanish cinema, he is also …

Robin Blaetz (ed), Women’s Experimental Cinema. Critical Frameworks. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2007. ISBN13: 978 0 8223 4044 7 US$25.95 (pb) 412pp (Review Copy supplied by Duke University Press) Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann (eds), Avant-Garde Film. Amsterdan – New York: Rodopi, 2007. ISBN: 978 90 420 2305 5 US$117.00 (hb) 416pp (Review copy supplied by Rodopi) There …

Sabine Nessel, Winfried Pauleit, Christine Rüffert (eds), Wort und Fleisch: Kino zwischen Text und Körper/ Word and Flesh: Cinema between Text and the Body, German edition. CD with English version and clips. Berlin: Bertz and Fischer ISBN: 978-3-86505-182-0 €19,90 158pp (Review copy supplied by Bertz+Fischer http://www.bertz-fischer.de/wortundfleisch.html) This collection of essays on film and media studies is published by the editors …

Charles R. Acland (ed), Residual Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007 ISBN-10: 0-8166-4472-1 US$25.00 (pb) 400pp (Review copy supplied by the University of Minnesota Press) Obituaries for old media, as standard news practice dictates for superannuated or terminally ill celebrities, have the peculiar fate of being written prior to the actual consummation of death. Prophets of the digital revolution …

Vanessa Schwartz, It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture. The University of Chicago Press, 2007 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74243-4 US$25.00 (pb) 272 pp (Review copy supplied by University of Chicago Press) The moment that I opened the envelope containing, It’s So French, I knew that I would be completely mesmerized by the subject matter. Before reading a single …

André Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009 ISBN: 9 780802095 86 2 US$27.95 (pb) 224pp (Review copy supplied by University of Toronto Press http://www.utpress.utoronto.ca) This translation of Gaudreault’s seminal French text, Du littéraire au filmique (1988) is of great significance to the English speaking population because the narrative theories …

Cindy Patton, Cinematic Identity: Anatomy of a Problem Film. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN: 0-8166-3412-2 US$19.50 (pb) 232pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) From the title, subtitle, and the advertising blurbs, I was expecting from this book an anatomy of a problem film, namely Elia Kazan’s Pinky (USA 1949). But that’s not what the book is. Only a …

Matthew H. Bernstein, Screening a Lynching: The Leo Frank Case on Film and Television. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-8203-3239-0 US$24.95 (pb) 332pp (Review copy supplied by University of Georgia Press) Matthew H. Bernstein’s Screening a Lynching: The Leo Frank Case on Film and Television is an exhaustively researched historical study that introduces a famous case of lynching …

Scott Anthony, Night Mail. London: British Film Institute, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-1-84457-229-8 £9.99 stg (pb) (Review copy supplied by British Film Institute) Night Mail, the GPO Film Unit’s 1936 paean to the British rail-based mail delivery system, occupies an ambivalent place in documentary history. It is almost always cited as a seminal film, but its influence on modern documentary form is …

Stella Hockenhull, Neo-Romantic Landscapes: An Aesthetic Approach to the Films of Powell and Pressburger. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008 ISBN (13): 9781847187444 US$69.99 (hb) 220pp (Review copy sent by Cambridge Scholars Publishing) Aesthetically and culturally, the Archers are often regarded as the great outsiders of British Cinema, who followed European and Hollywood models rather than belonging to any …

Jacob Smith, Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008 ISBN: 9 780520254 94 7 US$24.95 (pb) 304pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press http://www.ucpress.edu/) Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media begins with a description of a phonograph record from 1908 called The Laughing Spectator in which a talented comedian plays multiple speaking parts in a performance …

Garrett Stewart, Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77416-9 US$40.00 (pb) 299 pp (Review copy supplied by The University of Chicago Press) In F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (Germany 1922) the vampire Count Orlock meets his end by being exposed to sunlight. We see this death as a lap dissolve where the Count simply …

Pak Tong Cheuk, Hong Kong New Wave Cinema (1978-2000). Bristol: Intellect Books, 2008 ISBN: 9 781841501 48 2 UK£19.95 (pb) 264pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect Books http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk) From the perspective of Anglophone cinema studies, we often share the assumption that Hong Kong cinema is fundamentally “mass-produced” and industry-driven.[1] With this presupposition in mind, however, what does it mean to …

Jane Blocker, Seeing Witness: Visuality and the Ethics of Testimony. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-8166-5476-5 US$25.00 (pb) 153pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press http://www.upress.umn.edu/) A wedding is an allegorical event for the vertiginous mise en abyme that witnessing is. Frankenstein becomes a symbol of the monstrous burden of representing our invisibility. Blushing is the skin’s way …

Emiel Martens, Once Were Warriors: The Aftermath. The Controvery of OWW in Aotearoa New Zealand. Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007. ISBN: 978-90-5260-236-3. €24.90 (pb) 184pp (Review copy supplied by Aksant Publishers) How does one describe Once Were Warriors? In Aotearoa New Zealand it was originally a surprisingly successful first novel by Alan Duff, a man of no particular fame or standing at the …

Brian McFarlane (ed), The Encyclopedia of British Film (Third Edition). Methuen, London, 2008 ISBN: 9780413776600 UK £24.99 (pb) 816pp (Review copy supplied by Methuen) Twenty years ago in a television series titled Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future a character defined ‘book’ as ‘a non-volatile database’. The ‘non-volatility’ of such a database means that if the creator wants to add/subtract/amend or …

Eyal Peretz, Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. ISBN-13: 9 780 80475685 3 US$21.95 (pb) 224pp (Review copy supplied by Stanford University Press) Strange days This is a new kind of film book – fittingly enough, in that it dares to grandiosely assert the “birth of a new cinema and a …

Alexander Jacoby, A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors: From the Silent Era to the Present Day. Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, California, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-1933330 53 2 US$22.95 (pb) 398pp Aaron Gerow, A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan. Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2008 ISBN: …

Barbara Creed, Phallic Panic. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005. ISBN:0 52285 172 X Au$34.95 (pb) 200pp (Review copy supplied by Melbourne University Press) In his essay on the uncanny, Freud describes this phenomenon as an experience of terror or dread. He argues that all such experiences originate with the figure of the paternal castrator, who represents the threat of dismemberment …

Brooke Erin Duffy and Joseph Turow (eds), Key Readings in Media Today: Mass Communication in Contexts. London: Routledge, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-415-99205-3 Au$45.00 (pb) 496pp (Review copy supplied by Palgrave MacMillan http://www.palgravemacmillan.com.au/) For students new to the world of media studies, searching for books that elucidate the many different facets of a rapidly changing media environment can often be an arduous …

Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 7486 2042 5 US$65.00 (hb) 208pp (Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press) Anyone observing the fluctuating trends in recent French cinema will have noticed the emergence of a corpus of films that thrives on unsettling the audience on a …

Kristen Whissel, Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4201-4 US$22.95 (pb) 288pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Kristen Whissel’s Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema takes us deep into the world of cinema and cultural modernity at the turn of the twentieth century, a world that …

Steven Jacobs, The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2007. ISBN: 978 90 6450 637 6 €29.50 (pb) 344pp (Review copy supplied by 010 Publishers) ‘Authoritative’ is how I would describe this book. Steven Jacobs, an art historian, lectures on film history at Sint Lukas College of Art, Brussels, and the Academy of Fine Arts in …

Barry Curtis, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2009 ISBN: 9 781 86189389 5 US$16.00 (pb) 256pp (Review copy supplied by Footprint Books http://www.footprint.com.au/) Even a preliminary venture into the field of horror scholarship suggests that filmic manifestations of the haunted house function as much as characters as they do as mere locations or hackneyed plot …

John David Rhodes, Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4930-3 US$20.00 (pb) 240pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Pasolini was born in Bologna and spent his early years in a number of northern Italian cities as the family followed the father around in his military postings. He eventually returned to study …

Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-8166-4036-2 US$25.00 (pb) 384pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/B/betz_beyond.html) This book aptly starts with Susan Sontag and cinephilia, but any danger of retro wallowing in nostalgia is dispelled by p. 3: “What is dead…is…European art cinema as an …

Jeffrey Weinstock, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Cultographies). London: Wallflower Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-905674-50-3 US$15.00 (pb) 144pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) Some might say that a film like The Rocky Horror Picture Show (UK/USA 1975) is not worthy of serious criticism. Jeffrey Weinstock is not one of them. In The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Cultographies), Weinstock offers a deep look into the film …

Rob King, The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009 ISBN 978-0-520-25537-1 $24.95 (pb) 355pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) Frankly, I’ve never been a huge connoisseur of slapstick comedy, having inherited an innate prejudice of all low-brow culture from my European parents. With the …

Tom Conley, Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema (new introduction). University of Minnesota Press, 1991; 2006. ISBN 0-8166-4970-7 US$22.50 (pb) 296pp Tom Conley, Cartographic Cinema. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN 0-8166-4357-1 US$25.00 (pb) 336pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) If the increased production of cartographic knowledge in the seventeenth century was one of the earliest achievements of …

Joe McElhaney, Albert Maysles. University of Illinois Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-252-07621 US$19.95 (pb) 206pp (Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press) Joe McElhaney, associate professor of film and media studies at Hunter College of the City University of New York has written a detailed and insightful study of the work of the pioneering documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles. The volume …

Jonathan Rayner, The Naval War Film: Genre, History, National Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-0-7190-7098-3 US$84.95 (hb) 275pp (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press) A great deal of critical attention has been lavished on the war film by practitioners of film and history, but while films dealing with the doings of armies and air forces, have been …

Philip Gillett, Movie Greats: A Critical Study of Classic Cinema. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2008 ISBN: 978 1 84520 653 6 US$29.95 (pb) 256pp (Review copy supplied by Berg Publishers) Philip Gillett is obsessed with canons. He doesn’t like any of the existing ones. His ostensible intent in this book is to establish a fresh set of criteria by which to …

Alan Taylor, Jacobean Visions: Webster, Hitchcock, and Google Culture. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-3-631-56227-7 US$41.95 (pb) 201pp (Review copy supplied by Peter Lang) Read from a film-critical perspective, at least, Alan Taylor’s Jacobean Visions: Webster, Hitchcock, and Google Culture is an avowedly and enthusiastically eccentric book. In his ‘Preface: 1993-2007’, Taylor describes the “twenty-first century impetus” of his book as “one …

Steven Maras, Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice. Wallflower Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-1-905674-81-7 UK£16.99 (pb) 227pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press http://www.wallflowerpress.co.uk) From his initial point which suggests a problematic arising from the separating out of (manuscript based) screenwriting and screen writing (“writing” for the screen through cinematography and sound for example), it becomes evident that what Steven Maras is …

Robin Nelson, State of Play: Contemporary “High-End” TV Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN: 978-0-7190-7311-3 US$24.95 (pb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press) Even with the continued growth of television studies in the academy and television criticism in the popular press, little has been written about television aesthetics. In the thirteen years since John Thornton Caldwell’s Televisuality (1995), only …

Bert Cardullo, Out of Asia: The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Abbas Kiraostami, and Zhang Yimou; Essays and Interviews. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008 ISBN: 1443800252 UK£14.99 (pb) 200pp (Review copy supplied by Cambridge Scholars Publishing) The title of this book is long enough for me to pick an argument with before I start. Its length, I suppose, is the …

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, Film and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick and Wong Kar-wai. New York: Lexington, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-0739121870 US$65.00 (hb) 161pp (Review copy supplied by Lexington publications) Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is a scholar of philosophy with a background in formalism, dream theory and cinema studies, so it makes sense that he should be attracted to the work of filmmakers like Andrei …

Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging. London: Reaktion, 2008 ISBN: 978-1-86189-370-3 US$35.00 (pb) 268pp (Review copy supplied by Footprint Books http://www.footprint.com.au/) Gönül Dönmez-Colin’s Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging provides an historical overview of Turkish cinema from the perspective of the framework indicated by the book’s subtitle. While identity is a broad concept, the author has developed it into workable …

Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (Translated by Jeff Fort). New York: Zone Books, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-1-890951-82-5 US$25.95 (hb) 100pp (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) Philosophy adopts the task, usually as the task par excellence, of seeking the meaning of virtue – that is, it asks how judgment is possible, given the finitude of foresight. Human beings face this problem from the moment consciousness …

Deb Verhoeven, Jane Campion. London: Routledge, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-415-26275-0 US$31.95 285pp (Review copy supplied by Routledge http://www.routledge.com/) Over a decade ago, when I began working on Jane Campion’s The Piano, the amount of material a web search on the director’s name generated was overwhelming. So I appreciate Deb Verhoeven’s reference to “a time ‘BC’ (‘Before Campion’)” (xii); for female film scholars in …

Takayuki Tatsumi, Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. Duke University Press, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-3774-4 US$22.95 (pb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Full Metal Apache is not a book about Japanese cinema for two reasons. Literally speaking, it is more accurately a work about Japanese national discourse, culture and identity. Takayuki Tatsumi’s meditations on the …

Tony Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War. Baltimore: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007 ISBN: 978-1-55849-612-5 US$29.95 (pb) 352pp (Review copy supplied by University of Massachusetts Press http://www.umass.edu/umpress/about.html) In the forty-plus years that the Cold War dominated international politics, cinema became party to what Tony Shaw describes as “the longest of all national cinematic propaganda wars” (p. 2). Shaw’s meticulously researched book, Hollywood’s Cold …

Geoff King, Donnie Darko (Cultographies Series). London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-905674-51-0 US$15.00 (pb) 118pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) It may be no stretch of the imagination to suggest that, by all accounts, we are now living in a post-cult world. The dark underbelly of genuine cult practice, with its midnight screenings, seedy grindhouse theatres, dodgy …

Roger Ebert, Scorsese by Ebert. Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-226-18202-5 Au$25.00 (hb) 297pp (Review copy supplied by Footprint Books http://www.footprint.com.au/) Scorsese by Ebert opens with a prophetic claim that the Chicago Sun-Times film critic made in 1973, where he declared that, “in ten years Martin Scorsese will be a director of world rank”. I can imagine at …

Joanna Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema. Duke University Press, 2009 ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-4472-8 US$22.95 (pb) 248pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press http://www.dukeupress.edu/books/) In 1993, influential Argentine social theorist Néstor García Canclini asked the question: “¿Habrá cine latinoamericano en el año 2000?” (will there be Latin American Cinema in the year 2000?). Considering this question almost a …

Michel Ciment, Film World: Interviews with Cinema’s Leading Directors. New York: Berg, 2009 ISBN: 9 781845204 57 0 US$24.95 (pb) 384pp (Review copy supplied by Berg Publishers http://www.bergpublishers.com/Categories/flm/tabid/602/Default.aspx) Reviewing a collection of interviews as a unified book is a strange business, all the more so when the collection in question features 25 different filmmakers, from 19 different countries, interviewed at …

Jane Stadler with Kelly McWilliam, Screen Media: Analysing Film and Television. Crow’s Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2009 ISBN: 978 1 74175 448 3 AU$49.95 (pb) 390pp (Review copy supplied by Allen & Unwin) The authors of Screen Media do a highly commendable job of making a wide array of information about media analysis accessible to a reader with little or no …

Dina Iordanova with Ragan Rhyne (eds), Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit. St Andrews, Scotland: St Andrews Film Studies, 2009 ISBN: 978-1-906678-04-3 UK£16.99 (pb) 225pp (Review copy supplied by St Andrews Film Studies) In 1932, only five years after the release of the first film with sound, an event held in Venice Italy marked the genesis of the Film …

Amit Sarwal and Reema Sarwal (eds), Creative Nation: Australian Cinema and Cultural Studies Reader. New Delhi: SS Publications, 2009 ISBN: 81 902282 0 X AU$55 (hb) 600pp (Review copy supplied by New Delhi: SS Publications) In the past year, Australia has received some negative media coverage in India. This coverage has resulted largely from a spate of attacks against Indian …