As part of Screening the Past‘s tenth anniversary, we invited about 300 colleagues around Australia and the world to nominate the most important contributions to the field in the past decade – books, articles, reports, conferences, archival work, DVD reissues or commentaries, documentaries, online material, software – anything, not limited to any particular source, certainly not STP. We advised invitees that “…Screening the Past is a journal of screen history in a broad and inclusive sense, not narrowly a film history journal,” and, “While our invitation casually refers to ‘the field’, ‘area’, ‘discipline’ or what not, we have carefully avoided specifying what that ‘field’ might consist of and what its parameters might be. That is one of the things we are hoping your submissions will tell us.”

We received about 120 responses, some automatic (I am on sabbatical 2007-2008 or variants), some personal (love to but I’m too busy; I don’t think I’ve read enough; glad to; I’ll try to get to it; ten best lists are too hard; no, but here’s something else instead). We are grateful to all those who took the trouble to respond. Among those, about 60 sent in submissions, which appear below.

We were curious about what points of agreement might still be extant. The editors are old enough to have lived through periods in the field when everyone read and discussed Eisenstein, then Bazin, followed by periods when the text was Sarris’ American Cinema: Directors and Directions, or Perkins’ Film as Film, or Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, or Heath on Touch of Evil, or Cahiers’ editors on Young Mr. Lincoln, or Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Since then, of course, the field has become much larger: many more books, practitioners, institutions, ideas, methods, specialized areas of research, and a wealth of new technology. How would this explosion figure in the results?

What we have is a semi-random, semi-self-selecting mosaic showing us what we, as a field, are thinking about, valuing, and using.

It’s also a great reading list.

Contributors

Dudley Andrew; R. L. Armstrong; John Belton; Nicole Brenez; Philip Brophy; Warren Buckland; RobertBurgoyne; Susan Bye; Alan Cholodenko; Paul Coates; Tom Conley; John Conomos; Sean Cubitt; AdrianDanks; David Scott Diffrient; Wheeler Winston Dixon; James Donald; Anna Dzenis; David Ehrenstein; ThomasElsaesser; Jane Feuer; Tim Groves; Roger Hillman; Jan-Christopher Horak; Peter Hughes; Jason Jacobs; Laleen Jayamanne; D. B. Jones; Hester Joyce; Kathryn Kalinak; Craig Keller; Chuck Kleinhans; Adam Knee; Bill Krohn; Frank Krutnik; David Lavery; Richard Maltby and Ruth Vasey; Adrian Martin; Gabrielle Murray; James Naremore; Angela Ndalianis; Des O’Rawe; Tom O’Regan; Andy Rector; Jonathan Rosenbaum; Robert A.Rosenstone; Eric Smoodin; Vivian Sobchack; Peter Stanfield; Stephen Teo; Rick Thompson; Darren Tofts; SueTurnbull; Paolo Cherchi Usai; Janet Walker; Janet Wasko; Paul Willemen.

DUDLEY ANDREW

Quick list of impressive cinema studies ‘items’ made available in the past ten years
e-cahiers (on-line Cahiers du cinéma in English translation, starting March, 2007.
Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour eds., Subtitles: on the Foreignness of Film. MIT Press, 2004.
Gian Piero Brunetta, ed., Storia del cinema mondiale (multi-volume). Turin: Einaudi.
Six Moral Tales (Eric Rohmer), Criterion Collection boxed set.
Senses of Cinema (truly).
Serge Daney, La Maison Cinema et le monde (2 volumes) POL; and the translation of Perseverance, Postcards from the Cinema. Berg, 2007.
Wellesnet: the Orson Welles on-line resource.
Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema Face to Face with Hollywood.
David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (plus Bordwell’s expansion of this book on his website: http://www.davidbordwell.net/books/figures_intro.php
Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis. Chicago, 1999.

Dudley Andrew is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale University. He has written The Major Film Theories, Concepts in Film Theory, and André Bazin, (all Oxford U Press); Film in the Aura of Art and Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film (both Princeton U Press). His books also include two on specific films (Breathless and Sansho Dayu) and an edited collection, The Image in Dispute. With Steven Ungar, he recently published Popular Front Paris and The Poetics of Culture (Harvard U Press). He is now at work on two large projects: one, an advanced textbook called Cinema in the World, based on his courses at Yale that grapple with such cinemas as those of West Africa, Asia, Ireland, and France; the other, radiating from philological research on Bazin to related writers, filmmakers and philosophers, speculates on the nature of the film image.

R. L. ARMSTRONG

My choices are in no particular order of preference.

Books:
Nick James, Heat. BFI 2002.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We Can See. Wallflower Press, 2002.
Antonia Lant and Ingrid Periz, eds., Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema. Verso, 2006.
Heidi Wasson, Museum Movies. Berkeley: U of Cal Press, 2006.
Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy. Wallflower Press, 2006.
Mel Bagshaw, The Art of Italian Film Posters. Black Dog Press, 2005.

Articles:
Selected Irene Dobson pieces: “Marie de 7 a 7”; “I Walked with a Zombie”; “Spanking Babs Stanwyck”, in Flickhead 2006-07.
Adrian Martin, “The Body Has No Head: Corporeal Figuration in Aldrich”. Screening the Past 10, 2000.
DVDs:
M (Eureka Masters of Cinema New Restoration Region 2, 2003.)
Free Cinema (British Film Institute, Region 2, 2005).

R. L. Armstrong is the author of Billy Wilder (McFarland, 2000), Understanding Realism (BFI, 2005) and co-author of the Rough Guide to Film (Penguin, 2007). He is a contributor to Film Quarterly, Metro and Australian Screen Education.

JOHN BELTON

John Belton found that “There are just too many possibilities for your list…” but wanted to call special attention to the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement on Best Practices and Fair Use on the website of the Center for Social Media at American University.

NICOLE BRENEZ

10 Events of the Decade concerning knowledge of cinema (1997-2007) in chronological order and through personal experience
1988-2006: Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma (books, films, DVDs, CDs).
2000: Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films You See. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, A Capella Books.
2001: René Vautier gives a 4 hour conference at the FEMIS (Fondation Européenne des Métiers de l’Image et du Son) about Afrique 50 (no transcription yet).
2003: Creation of the website Rouge (www.rouge.com.au), Australia, by Adrian Martin, Helen Bandis and Grant McDonald.
2005: David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. University of California Press.
2005: Edition of 400 ‘films’ by Etienne-Jules Marey, under the direction of Laurent Mannoni at the Cinémathèque française, Paris.
2005: Restoration of the double-screen version of Lionel Soukaz’s Ixe (1980) by Eric Le Roy at the Service des Archives du Film, Paris.
2005: Europa 2005, by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, is first seen on the internet.
2006: International rediscovery of Peter Whitehead’s filmic work, thanks to Paul Cronin in the UK and Michael Chaiken in the USA.
2007: Carole Roussopoulos’ body of video work begins to be restored. Even the films made in Palestine are refound.
… and of course the existence of Screening the Past. Happy Birthday!
Of course there are so many things to add: in 2000, the restoration of Marcel Hanoun’s masterpiece L’Authentique procès de Carl-Emmanuel Jung; in 2002, the discovery and restoration by the Cinémathèque française of the remaining fragments of Armand Guerra’s films La Commune and Le Vieux Docker (both from 1913), produced by the Anarchist Cooperative Le Cinéma du Peuple; in 2003, Brad Stevens’ ultimate monograph Abel Ferrara, The Moral Vision (London, Faber & Faber); in 2004, the restoration of Philippe Garrel’s films of the 70s; in 2006, the rediscovery of a censored Jean-Luc Godard marxist-leninist interview from 1967 in the archives of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel … and so on.

Nicole Brenez teaches Cinema Studies at the University of Paris-1/Panthéon-Sorbonne (Maître de Conférences, Habilité à Diriger des Recherches). She has written Shadows de John Cassavetes (Nathan, 1995), De la Figure en général et du Corps en particulier. L’invention figurative au cinéma (De Boeck Université, 1998), Abel Ferrara (Illinois University Press, 2007), Traitement du Lumpenproletariat par le cinéma d’avant-garde (Séguier, 2007), and Cinémas d’avant-garde (Cahiers du cinéma, 2007). She has edited or co-edited several books, most recently Cinéma/Politique Série 1 (Labor, 2005) and Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (Centre Georges Pompidou, 2006). A regular contributor to Trafic, Panic, Cinéma, Cahiers du cinéma, and Rouge, she is curator of the Cinémathèque française’s avant-garde film sessions.
© Nicole Brenez October 2007

PHILIP BROPHY

As I’m sure there are squzillions of people proposing all sorts of books, articles, films, and DVDs, I’ll opt to not add to that congestion and instead propose the 10 most compelling film scores and sound designs of the last 10 years.
All titles listed alphabetically.

Film/Song Scores:
Dolls (Japan)
Buried Forest (Japan)
Funky Forest (Japan)
Fur (USA)
Gantz (Japan)
Magnolia (USA)
O Brother Where Art Thou? (USA)
Patlabor III (Japan)
Sugar Town (US)
Three Times (Taiwan)

Sound Designs:
Baran (Iran)
Copland (USA)
Cast Away (USA)
Electric Dragon 80,000 Volts (Japan)
FLCL (Japan)
Four (Russia)
Punch Drunk Love (USA)
The Straight Story (USA)
The Sun (Russia)
La Vie Nouvelle (France)
The only true mind-fuck of a movie made in the last 10 years is 300.

Philip Brophy specializes in three distinct areas: (1) horror, sex & exploitation; (2) film sound & music; and (3) Japanese animation. He has published widely in these areas internationally (for The Wire, London, and Film Comment, New York) and has curated programs for the Melbourne International Film Festival. His most recent curatorial project is the anime retrospective “Focus on Tezuka” for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne. His book 100 Modern Soundtracks (London: BFI) has been translated into Japanese, published by Film Art, Tokyo. His most recent book, 100 Anime is also for the BFI. He is director of the Cinesonic Conference on Film Scores and Sound Design and has edited three volumes of the conference proceedings. He originated the Soundtrack program in Media Arts at RMIT, Melbourne.

WARREN BUCKLAND

Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film. Indiana U Press, 2000.
Barry Salt, Moving Into Pictures. Starword, 2006.
Edward Branigan, Projecting a Camera: Language Games in Film Theory. Routledge, 2004.
Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After. Routledge, 2000.
Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect. MIT Press, 2002.
David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity,” Film Quarterly 55:3. 2002, pp. 16-28.
Alison McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Cinematic Visionary. Continuum, 2002.
IMDB.com (for reference purposes).
JSTOR electronic database (contains complete runs of numerous film journals)
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, DVD directed by Sophie Fiennes, presented by Slavoj ?i?ek. Too funny to pass by. Great to show extracts from it for teaching purposes.

Warren Buckland is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He is the author of The Cognitive Semiotics of Film (2000); Directed by Steven Spielberg (2006); and co-author (with Thomas Elsaesser) of Studying Contemporary American Film (2002). His edited volume Puzzle Films will be out in 2008. He is also editor of the New Review of Film and Television Studies.

ROBERT BURGOYNE

Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media.
Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History.
Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary.
Tom Conley, Cartographic Cinema.
David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (this one is 1993, too long ago to fall within the decade, but it’s terrific and I wanted to include Bordwell in the list).
Arthur Eckstein and Peter Lehman, eds., The Searchers: Essays and Reflections on John Ford’s Classic Western.
Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History.
Vivian Sobchack, ed., The Persistence of History, 1996.
Miriam Hansen, “Schindler’s List Is Not Shoah”.
Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment”.
Monica Cyrino, Big Screen Rome.
Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Reinventing Film Studies.

Robert Burgoyne is Professor of English and Film Studies at Wayne State University. His publications include The Hollywood Historical Film (2007); Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (1997); New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (co-authored with Robert Stam and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, 1992); and Bertolucci’s 1900: A Narrative and Historical Analysis (1991). He is currently working on a second edition of Film Nation, and is beginning a volume on Epic cinema.

SUSAN BYE

Some interesting contributions to television history published in the past ten years. They are in no particular order.
Janet Thumim, Inventing Television Culture: Men, Women and the Box, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
Don Storey, www.classicaustraliantv.com.
Alan McKee, Australian Television: A Genealogy of Great Moments, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Michele Hilmes (ed.), The Television History Book, London: BFI Publishing 2003.
Georgina Born, Uncertain Visions: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC, London: Secker and Warburg, 2004.
Su Holmes, British TV and Film in the 1950s: “Coming to a TV Near You”, Bristol UK; Portland, Oregon: Intellect Books, 2005.
Liz Jacka, ‘Doing the History of Television in Australia: Problems and Challenges’, Continuum, Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2004, pp. 27-41.
William Boddy, New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television and Digital Media in the United States, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Rob Turnock, Television and Consumer Culture: Britain and the Transformation of Modernity, London, New York: I. B. Taurus, 2007.

Susan Bye, Post-doctoral Fellow, La Trobe University. Current project: Australian Screen Comedy (ARC Discovery project with Chief Investigators, Dr Felicity Collins and Dr Sue Turnbull).

ALAN CHOLODENKO

Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion.
Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism.
Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning.
Paul Virilio, Ground Zero.
Slavoj ?i?ek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real.
Vivian Sobchack, ed., Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change.
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media.
Edward Scheer, ed., 100 Years of Cruelty: Essays on Artaud.
Stephen Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell.
Alan Cholodenko, ed., The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation.
Dr. Alan Cholodenko is an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, where he had been Head of Department and Senior Lecturer in Film and Animation Studies in the Dept. of Art History and Film Studies. He edited The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, Power Publications, 1991; The Illusion of Life II: More Essays on Animation, Power Publications, 2007; and Sam Weber’s Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media, Power/Stanford U Press, 1996. He has published pioneering essays on the theory of animation, especially on the relation of the work of Baudrillard and Derrida to poststructuralism, postmodernism, and film and animation.

Dr Cholodenko has organized “FUTURFALL: Excursions Into Postmodernity”, Australia’s first conference on postmodernism (Sydney, 1984) and the two “Illusion of Life” conferences on animation (Sydney, 1988 and 1995).

PAUL COATES

After much soul-searching, I’ve come up with the following list (the order is simply alphabetical – but, for the record, the books by Orr, Perez, and Vaughan are closest to my heart, and Perez is my favourite overall):
David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong.
Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time.
Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After.
John Orr, Contemporary Cinema.
Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost.
Robert Ray, How a Film Theory Got Lost, and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies.
Dai Vaughan, For Documentary.
Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card.
Garry Wills, John Wayne’s America.
Slavoj Zizek, The Fright of Real Tears, or Krzysztof Kieslowski Between Theory and Post-Theory.

Paul Coates is a Professor in the Film Studies Department of the University of Western Ontario. He has taught at McGill University and at the Universities of Georgia (Athens) and Aberdeen, and his books include The Story of the Lost Reflection (1985), The Gorgon’s Gaze (1991), Film at the Intersection of High and Mass Culture(1994), Lucid Dreams: the Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski (ed., 1999), Cinema, Religion and the Romantic Legacy (2003), and The Red and the White: The Cinema of People’s Poland (2005). He is currently working on a book on colour in film.

TOM CONLEY

My orientation tends to not to dismiss theory in view of history and, of course, for reason of professional orientation, to be close to French traditions of inquiry. So here goes:
– Jacques Rancière, The Cinematographic Fable, (Berg Publishers, 2005), the English translation of La Fable cinématographique (Paris: Seuil, 2001).
The approach bears on the historian’s work on the advent of the “aesthetic age” as of the Romantic Revolution and thus uses close analyses to inform in new and vital ways both individual films – from classical to modern or independent in style – and works that bear on film theory.
– Antoine de Baecque, La Cinéphilie: Invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture 1944-68 (Paris: Fayard, 2003).
Although the book has not been translated into English, it nonetheless anticipates a number of “cinephilia” studies that have since appeared in North America. Although, too, the focus is on post-war France, what it discerns has much to do with the fortunes of film studies in the world at large. One thinks of the advent of auteur theory; of its ostensible contrary, in Foucault, of the discursive and visible formation (in “What is an Author?”); that of the movement-image and time-image in Gilles Deleuze; even, too, that of Lacanian film theory: cinephilia is at the basis of their being, and de Baecque charts how these theories and practices came to be what they are.
– David Rodowick, Philosophy After the New Media (Durham: Duke UP, 2002).
The study is a careful and thoughtful assessment of figuration in cinema, both in the traditional sense of inscription (Astruc’s “camera-stylo”) and allegory (in which word and image are in play), that brings the reader to the threshold of the digital revolution that film is undergoing. The book is a good prelude to Rodowick’s recent Virtual Life of Cinema (Harvard UP, 2007).

Tom Conley is Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard. He has written, among other books, Cartographic Cinema (2006), and Film Hieroglyphs (1991).

JOHN CONOMOS

I hate doing these ‘best ten lists’ for a variety of reasons. Not least because such lists are next to impossible! But, I guess, we are all curious about what we are reading, etc., in this information saturated world of ours.

One of the first questions I asked of my friends when I see them the next time is “what are you reading?” I am by nature a ‘sticky-beak’ who has got to know what my friends are reading. After all, the older I get, the more I belatedly realise that as educators, artists, writers, readers and spectators of the unfolding adventure of the movie image we are in the business of “continuing the conversation” between ourselves, our students and the past, present and future.

So, I will begin by saying that I am “a gluttonous reader” (Susan Sontag) for at the moment I am reading four books at the same time. They are Luc Sante’s new collection of essays Kill All Your Darlings, Nicole Brenez’s wonderful book on Abel Ferrara (thanks to Adrian’s championing and translation of her work), Kent Jones’s significantly entitled Physical Evidence (2007) and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s ‘non-hagiographical’ new compendium of essays on one of my proverbial ‘desert island’ filmmakers, Orson Welles, called (rightly so) Discovering Orson Welles (2007).

Like a dragonfly I criss-cross from one book to the other, usually, at nighttime – well into the night. Blanchot’s view of a writer as a “daytime insomniac” has haunted me for years.

Three further things I need to say before I compile my list. All my life I have been a sucker for the essay form, the memoir, the fragment, autobiography, and I guess, also the interview and ‘anti-travel’ travel book. I primarily love books that are anchored in the essayistic textuality of reading oneself as one of the chief concerns as a writer/theorist. Books that are often “untimely” in the Nietzchean sense and go against the grain of official culture and its fixities.

My list will not cover books or articles that deal with video and new media studies; I believe that is another list, for another time. This is just a list of mainly film books that readily come to my mind. Tomorrow it would likely be another list. And the day after that, another one….

And finally, it is absolutely scandalous that the following ‘must read’ French critic-scholars, Raymond Bellour, Serge Daney and Jean-Paul Fargier, and the late Thierry Kuntzel, amongst others, have not been in the main translated into English. Why is this so?

Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood. London: Verso, 2002.
Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time. Harvard University Press, 2002.
Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second. 2006.
Adrian Martin and Jonathan Rosenbaum, eds., Movie Mutations. London: BFI, 2003. (See also Thomas Elsaesser’s essay, “Cinephilia or the uses of disenchantment,” in Marijke de Valck & Malte Hagener, eds., Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005; Christian Keathly, Cinephilia, or the Wind in the Trees. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006; and Juan Goytisolo, Cinema Eden. London: Eland, 2003.
David Malouf, A Spirit of Play. Sydney: ABC Books, 1998 (a wise and eloquent book on who we are here in the Antipodes.)
Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar, Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of French Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Chris Marker, One Day in the Life of Arsenevich, 2001. Documentary.
When I show this to my students they immediately become transfixed. One cinema poet on another. What more can you ask for?
Chris Petit, Negative Space, 1998, Video. Manny Farber and David Hickey – close up.
Homi Bhabha and W.J.T.Mitchell, eds., Edward Said Continuing the Conversation. Chicago and London; The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Edward Said has been one of my compass points for years. Poignant reading. Said’s posthumously published On Late Style, Bloomsbury, 2006, is invaluable and, characteristically, elegantly written.
James Williams, Michael Temple & Michael Witt (eds.) For Ever Godard. London: Black Dog, 2003. Also see Jean-Luc Godard and Yousef Ishaghpour, Cinema, Berg, Oxford and New York, 2005.
Here is my list but where are Deleuze, Serres, Lesley Stern, Miriam Hansen, Garrett Stewart, Giuliana Bruno, Jacques Ranciere, Gary Giddins, Geoffrey O’Brien, James Naremore, to name a few, that for me are compulsive reading?

John Conomos is an artist, critic and a writer who lectures at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. His videos and installations have been exhibited locally and overseas. His new book of essays entitled Mutant Media (Artspace/Power Publications) is shortly to be released. He is presently working on a radio program on Luis Bunuel called “The Bells of Toledo” for ABC National Radio.

SEAN CUBITT

Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Dartmouth College Press/University of New England Press, 2006.
Charlotte Brunsdon and John Caughie, series editors, Oxford Television Studies, Oxford University Press.
Rosemary J. Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation and the Law. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.
Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Rachel Dwyer, All You Want is Money, All You Need is Love: Sex and Romance In Modern India. London: Cassell, 2000.
Charles Harpole, series editor, History of the Americn Cinema. New York: Scribners; Then Berkeley: U of California Press.
Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Lynn Spigel, series editor. Console-ing Passions: Television and Cultural Power. Durham: Duke U Press.
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke U Press, 2003.
Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing And Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance; foreward by Timothy Druckrey. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
I should have included the DVDs of the Lord of the Rings, but there’s nothing I want to take off the list of books/book series.

Sean Cubitt is director of the Program in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of The Cinema Effect; EcoMedia; Simulation and Social Theory; Digital Aesthetics, and other books. He is the editor-in-chief of the Leonardo Book series.

ADRIAN DANKS

Histoire(s) du cinéma (dir: Jean-Luc Godard), France, 1988-98.
Welt Spiegel Kino/World Mirror Cinema (dir: Gustav Deutsch), Austria, 2005.
James Harvey, Movie Love in the Fifties, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2000
Treasures from American Film Archives, DVD, Image Entertainment, 2000.
Samuel Fuller, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking, Knopf, New York, 2002.
Private Hungary (dir: Péter Forgács), Hungary, 1988-2002.
Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2001.
Chris Marker, Immemory, CD-Rom, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1998.
David Bellos, Jacques Tati: His Life and Art, The Harvill Press, London, 2001.
[tie]: J Hoberman, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties, New Press, New York, 2003; Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1998; Robert B. Ray, How a Film Theory got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2001.

Adrian Danks is Senior Lecturer and Head of Cinema Studies in the School of Applied Communication, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (University). He is co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque (was President between 1988 and 2006), and editor of Cteq: Annotations on Film, published in Senses of Cinema.

DAVID SCOTT DIFFRIENT

Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinema, “Fatale beauté” (1997), “Seul le cinema” (1997),” La monnaie de l’absolu” (1998), “Le contrôle de l’univers” (1998), “Une vague nouvelle” (1998), “Les signes parmi nous” (1998).
Rick Prelinger, The Field Guide to Sponsored Films. San Francisco: National Film Preservation Foundation, 2006.
John Bengtson, Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood through the Films of Buster Keaton. Santa Monica Press, 1999.
Robert Ray, The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy. Harvard University Press, 2002.
Eric Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959. Duke University Press, 1999.
Michelle Citron, Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions. University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Edison: The Invention of the Movies 1891-1918, Kino Video, 2005.
Jodi Hauptman, Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema. Yale University Press, 1999.
Jeffrey Sconce, “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” ScreenVol. 36, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 371-393.
Samuel Fuller, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking. Knopf, 2004.
Honourable mention(s): All of the books in the University of California Press’ “History of American Cinema Series,” most notably Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (1999).

David Scott Diffrient is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Colorado State University. His essays have appeared in several journals and edited collections, including Cinema Journal and Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. sdiffrient@msn.com and Scott.Diffrient@colostate.edu.

WHEELER WINSTON DIXON

The DVD release of Jonathan Miller’s long unavailable Alice in Wonderland.
The DVD release of Jean-Isidore Isou’s Venom and Eternity (in the Avant-Garde 2 set).
Judith Mayne, Directed by Dorothy Arzner. Bloomington: Indiana U Press, 1994.
Geoffrey O’Brien, The Phantom Empire. New York: Norton, 1993.
Holly Willis, New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image. London: Wallflower, 2005.
Pearl Bowser, Jane M. Gaines, and Charles Musser, eds., Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era. Bloomington: Indiana U Press, 2001.
Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. New York: Knopf, 2006.
Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman, Women and Experimental Filmmaking. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 2005.
David Ehrenstein, Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928-2000, 2nd ed. New York: Perennial, 2000.
N. Frank Ukadike, Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Editor-in-Chief of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. His newest books as author or editor include Film Talk: Directors at Work (Rutgers University Press, 2007) and Visions of Paradise: Images of Eden in the Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2006). His next book will be A Short History of Film, co-written with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, which will be published by Rutgers University Press in 2008. In 2003, Dixon was honored with a retrospective of his films at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and his films were acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum, in both print and original format.

JAMES DONALD

I’m responding in personal terms, in terms of what’s been important to my projects and obsessions over the past decade. The invitation made me realise how long I’ve been working on my embryonic book about Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson, or rather about the way that cinema and Black American culture helped to define the modernist moment in Europe in the 1920s and its dissipation into something different and darker in the 1930s. This research has led me beyond ‘the field’ of film or screen studies in search of ways of thinking and writing that might contribute to an imaginative reconstruction of that period and those phenomena. Among the pleasures have been a more sustained engagement with Siegfried Kracauer and an introduction to work on the culture of literary modernism that is interested in something more than clever readings of texts.

Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of his Time, Trans. Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher, Zone Books, 2003.
Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, Oxford University Press, 2001.
Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics, Cornell University Press, 2002.
Alice Maurice, “’Cinema at Its Source’: Synchronizing Race and Sound in the Early Talkies”, camera obscura, 17.1, 2002, 31-71.
The past ten years have seen some wonderful archival work relevant to this project. The Criterion Collection has probably done more for film studies than anyone else in that time, and so it’s good to get one of their titles in here – the POOL Group’s Borderline, now made not just watchable but engaging by the ingenious addition of Courtney Pine’s jazz score. Similarly, seeing the Anthology Archives’ rediscovered longer version of Ballet mécanique with George Antheil’s original score finally synchronised to it is a revelation.
Borderline. Dir. Kenneth Macpherson. Perf. Paul Robeson, H.D. Music Courtney Pine. 1930, in Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist. DVD. Criterion Collection, 2007.
Ballet mécanique. Dir. Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy. Music: George Antheil. 1923-24, in Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941. DVD. Anthology Film Archives/Image Entertainment, 2005.
Quality writing about another of my interests, the city in cinema, continues to flourish.
Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, Harvard University Press, 2004.
Thierry Jousse and Thierry Paquot (eds), La Ville au cinéma, Cahiers du Cinéma, 2005.
A different take on a cinematic city, and one of the most insightful books from a political economy/geography perspective is:
Allen J. Scott, Hollywood: The Place, The Industry, Princeton University Press, 2005.
Finally, despite my historical focus at present, I am interested in the question of what sort of thing cinema is going to turn into in the twenty-first century. I am lucky enough to work with two of the most talented people in the emerging field of interactive cinema, Dennis del Favero and Jeffrey Shaw at iCinema. Their creative work keeps my optimism levels up by combining intellectual grunt with wit and aesthetic sophistication as well as extraordinary technological inventiveness. To celebrate their work I nominate a forthcoming title:
Jill Bennett, T-Visionarium: A User’s Guide, UNSW Press, 2008.

James Donald’s collection Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism (with Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus) was published in 1998 and his book Imagining the Modern City in 1999. The blockbuster Sage Handbook of Film Studies (edited with Michael Renov) appears in 2008 and the long promised Baker-Robeson book at some date thereafter. He is Professor of Film Studies and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales.

ANNA DZENIS

As book review editor, I see so many interesting books. However, these are some of the books, essays, DVDs and websites that have particularly impressed me in the last ten years – in no particular order.
Gilberto Perez. The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. 2000.
Philip Brophy. 100 Anime. London: BFI. 2005. 100 Modern Soundtracks. London: BFI, 2004.
Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin. (eds.) Movie Mutations: the Changing Face of World Cinephilia. London: BFI Publishing, 2003.
James Naremore. More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Edison: The Invention of the Movies (1891-1918). Kino DVD.
Jean-Luc Godard. Histoire(s) du cinema.
Edward Dimendberg. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004.
William D. Routt, “For Criticism.” Screening The Past. March 2000.
Rouge. Rouge.com.au
Tom Gunning. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: BFI. 2000.
Bill Krohn. Hitchcock at Work. London: Phaidon. 2000.
Manny Farber. Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies (expanded edition). New York: Da Capo Press. 1998.

Anna Dzenis is co-editor of Screening the Past and has been its review editor from the beginning. She lectures in Cinema Studies at La Trobe University; her forthcoming book, Michael Mann, will be published by University of Illinois Press.

DAVID EHRENSTEIN

I’ve been giving this some thought. The state of serious film criticism is dire. Interest in aesthetics has been almost entirely replaced with interest in box office results.
The publications (on- and off-line) that have carried on the good fight:

Screening the Past
Senses of Cinema
CinemaScope
Light Sleeper
Criterion Forum
Only the Cinema

Books:
Colin McCabe, Performance. BFI Film Classics, 1998.
Gavin Lambert, Mostly About Lindsay Anderson. New York: Knopf, 2000.
Lindsay Anderson, Never Apologize: The Collected Writings of Lindsay Anderson, edited by Paul Ryan. Plexus, 2005.
Lawrence Fascell and Al Weisel, Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of The Making of Rebel Without A Cause. Tombstone/Simon & Schuster, 2005.
Raul Ruiz. Poetics of Cinema, trans. Brian Holmes. DisVoir, 1995.
Alexander MacKendrick, On Film-Making. Faber & Faber, 2004.
Arthur Laurents, Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and HollyWood. Knopf, 2000.
Gary Indiana, Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom. BFI Film Classics, 2000.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons. Johns Hopkins U Press, 2004.
Wheeler Winston Dixon, Visions of the Apocalypse. Wallflower Press, 2003.

David Ehrenstein is the author of Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928-2000 (Harper/Collins); The Scorsese Picture: The Art and Life of Martin Scorsese (Birch Lane Press); and Film: The Front Line 1984 (Arden Press).

THOMAS ELSAESSER

Books:
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.
Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 2002.
Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis. Chicago & London: U of Chicago Press, 1999.
Edward Branigan, Projecting a Camera: Language Games in Film Theory. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect. Cambridge & London: MIT Press, 2004.

Articles:
Tom Gunning, “Light, Motion, Cinema! The Heritage of Loie Fuller and Germaine Dulac”. Framework, 46: 1, Spring 2005, pp. 106-29.
Charles Musser, “Introduction: Documentary Before Verite”, Film History 18:4, 2006, pp. 355-360.

DVDs:
Ernst Lubitsch Collection. Transit Classics, Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung. Six DVDs ca. 500 min: a superbly edited and restored edition of Lubitsch’s Pre-1920 German films.
R. W. Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz Re-Mastered. Suddeutsche Zeitung/Bavaria/RWF-Foundation, 48-page booklet; six DVDs ca. 1005 mins., 2007. A major re-discovery.
Oskar Fischinger – Ten Films. Center for Visual Music, Los Angeles; 1 DVD, c. 50 mins. An anthology of films from 1931-47 from an important director of animation and avant-garde films.
Pandora’s Box G. W. Pabst. Criterion Collection edition.

Thomas Elsaesser is Professor in the Department of Media and Culture and Director of Research Film and Television at the University of Amsterdam. His books include Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject(1996); Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? (1998, as co-editor); Weimar Cinema and After (2000);Metropolis (2000); Studying Contemporary American Film (2002, with Warren Buckland); Filmgeschichte und Frühes Kino (2002) The Last Great American Picture Show (2004, as co-editor); European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (2005); Terror and Trauma (2007); and Filmtheorie zur Einführung (2007, with Malte Hagener).

JANE FEUER

Books:
James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts.
Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound.
Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White From Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson.
Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties.

DVDs:
Touch of Evil Restored version. Universal, 2000.
Singin’ in the Rain 50th Anniversary edition, Warner Bros.

Jane Feuer is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her publications include The Hollywood Musical, 2nd ed., 1993, and Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism, 1995. She has contributed to a wide range of journals.

TIM GROVES

Ten projects for the next ten years
This issue of Screening the Past celebrates the significant achievements in screen studies over the last decade, but what will the next decade of scholarship accomplish? This piece sketches out some ideas for projects that could be undertaken in the next ten years, but it is not a list of “what is to be done”. My apologies to anybody already working in these areas.

What is post-classical American cinema?
Many of us think we already know the answer to this question: there are several “post-classical” American cinemas or new Hollywoods. They include the period 1967-1977 aka The last great American picture show; a cinema that privileges SFX, spectacle and/or a theme park experience over classical narrative, or an industry structured around the blockbuster and commercial synergies. On the other hand, David Bordwell is convinced that there is no such thing. Who is right? Are the various aesthetic, industrial or commercial definitions of post-classical American cinema adequate? Can they be reconciled or integrated? What other post-classical cinemas exist? Forty years after the release of Bonnie and Clyde, I think we need a vigorous new debate around these questions.

Phenomenological film theory and empirical audiences
One of the most exciting trends in film studies in recent years has been the renewed interest in phenomenological perspectives. (I’d be surprised if Vivian Sobchack’s Carnal Thoughts isn’t included on several top ten lists.) This development has facilitated innovative discussions about the viewing body, the senses and affective responses in cinema. Something that concerns me about these approaches is that they are often speculative, hypothetical and/or intensely subjective (by which I mean that interpretations of films are often based on the author’s personal experiences). To some extent this subjectivity and speculation are understandable: phenomenological approaches to cinema often try to reclaim what has been previously been excluded from film studies, namely the private, the personal, the emotional, the sensual, and the corporeal. However, I think we need to ask what, if anything, does phenomenological film theory and criticism have to do with real viewers? Unless these approaches are connected in a substantive way to the experiences of actual audiences they may be criticized and ultimately discarded because they do not speak to the experiences of those outside the academy.

Adrian Martin’s Introduction to film studies
Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction was the preferred textbook for introductory Film courses for years. Although it provides plenty of information about film techniques, it’s not particularly useful when it comes to teaching students about concepts such as genre and authorship, let alone the social and cultural meanings of films. And, despite the formalist approach of its authors, it’s not much help with getting students to writing a piece of film criticism. Scholars and publishers have recognized these limitations (not to mention the financial opportunities) and several alternatives have appeared recently.

I think that there is room for at least one more. Adrian Martin is an eclectic, stimulating and hugely knowledgeable writer on film. He has published books on Once Upon a Time in America and the Mad Max trilogy, and countless articles, essays and film reviews. However, Martin has not published a general book on cinema. He’s also expressed some reservations about the teaching of film studies in the university environment. I’d like him to take up the pedagogical challenge of writing a wide-ranging text that encompasses what he regards as the key elements of film studies and how they can be taught (more) effectively.

Moving images as performative rhetoric
Affect has become an increasingly important area of research across the humanities in the last decade. An issue that could be researched further is why do people have different affective responses to films? I think that one approach to this question is to treat moving images as a form of visual rhetoric. This idea is, of course, not new. However, it might be extended usefully by considering the ways in which the rhetoric of moving images is performative. Bill Nichols has suggested the manner in which some documentary films are performative. (He also makes a case for the centrality of the concept of rhetoric in the analysis of visual culture.[1] ) I think that the analysis of the performative dimension of cinema could be extended to fiction film. Crucially, we need to ask why texts succeed in their performance with some viewers but fail with others? How does a text persuade some of us to feel but not others in its performance?

The construction of race in Peter Jackson’s work
Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy has understandably received considerable attention from film scholars (there are at least three anthologies and a book by Kristin Thompson). However, the construction of race in his work has received comparatively little attention. The “whiteness” of the LOTR trilogy may be derived from Tolkien, but that does not make it any less problematic. The representation of indigenous people in King Kong is appalling. Current or future projects include an adaptation of the Tin Tin books, which are imperialist and frequently racist, and The Dambusters, a pro-British World War 2 film. Nor should we forget that Jackson championed Pakeha “can do” innovation culture in Forgotten Silver as much as he satirised it. A critical project on race in Jackson’s cinema could yield some interesting results indeed. It might also recontextualise the nationalist discourse surrounding this figure. For someone often considered to embody a uniquely Kiwi presence in contemporary media culture, he seems awfully concerned with British and American subjects from half a century ago.

Infomercials
Infomercials may be annoying, but they screen on free-to-air television more frequently than news bulletins, and on some stations more often than drama programs. They’re also an important source of revenue for television stations. Infomercials have distinct formal structures, contain intertextual references and occasionally even involve parodies. The extensive emphasis on fitness equipment, memory systems and financial products can be read in terms of self-improvement. Those programs that sell collections of music or television series are indicative of the ways in which popular culture is archived and reconstituted for contemporary audiences. The advertising of kitchen utensils forms part of the discourses on domesticity and consumption in post-War Western culture. Kind of makes you wonder why media and television studies have largely overlooked infomercials …

More critiques of cognitive film theory
While some very good critiques of cognitive film theory have appeared in recent years, including some by cognitivist scholars, there are still plenty of opportunities left for researchers. Cognitive film theory rarely addresses actual film audiences. Rather it usually constructs a hypothetical viewer based on research on cognition and perception in Western psychology. Cognitive film theory is also often short on film analysis. It would be interesting to assess cognitive film theory in terms of the arguments put forward by David Bordwell inMaking Meaning. I’m thinking specifically of the tendency of some cognitive writers to structure their material around a critique of psychoanalysis (or anything else they don’t like), followed by an articulation of the nature and/or benefits of cognitive psychology, and a detailed explanation of the cognitive psychological research on the phenomenon under discussion. Perhaps it’s not surprising that there is little room left for the experiences of audiences or textual analysis. I also wonder whether it is time to analyse cognitive film theory as a “grand theory”. While most cognitive film scholars are engaged in middle level or piecemeal theorising, some appear to be more ambitious. For example Noel Carroll writes in “Film, emotion and genre”: “My theory is intended to be instructive in analysing virtually every instance of our emotional engagement and emotive tracking of cinema”.[2]  In this article he also mentions Ed S. Tan’s Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine favourably. How would Carroll have reacted if, say, Laura Mulvey had written a book called Desire (or Gender) and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as a Desire (or Gender) Machine?

The full publication and translation of Eisenstein’s written work
Sergei Eisenstein’s ideas about cinema continue to be influential almost sixty years after his death. Yet a large proportion of his writings remain either unpublished or untranslated (including significant texts such as his Method, which appeared in Russian for the first time in 2002). We should help fund the publication in Russian of all of this material. There is also a need for an English language edition of Eisenstein’s collected works, notwithstanding Richard Taylor’s four volume Selected Writings edition.

Style in contemporary American television
Those people who lament the aesthetic aridity of recent American cinema should pay more attention to American television. Whether it is prominent programs such as 24 or CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, older texts like the early years of ER or The X Files, or lesser known material such as Push, Nevada (Ben Affleck’s mean and dusty update of Twin Peaks), or made-for-TV serial killer films, American TV is a rich source of visual style. John T. Caldwell’s landmark book Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television was published in 1995, but there are still plenty of opportunities for more research, including extensive textual analysis of individual episodes. (Jason Jacobs’ Body Trauma TV doesn’t do anywhere near as much as it could with the aesthetics of ER. I much prefer Sue Turnbull’s research on stylistic links between Michael Mann’s work and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.)

A model of cinematic intertextuality
Intertextuality informs genre criticism. It’s an inherent element of auteurism. Where would cinephiles be without it? However, I wonder how useful terms such as pastiche, parody, homage, and transtextuality actually are to film scholars, critics and cineastes? Do they adequately describe and explain the many different and quite specific ways in which films enter into dialogues with each other? I would like to suggest that a terminological framework applied consistently that allows us to categorize things such as the quotation of a piece of dialogue, the knowing casting of a particular actor, iconography in genre films, the reworking of a scene from another film, the repetition of a gesture, shot or prop, or the use of certain plot devices could be extremely helpful in film analysis.

Tim Groves teaches film at Victoria University of Wellington. His research interests include affect, style, horror films, and contemporary American cinema.

Endnotes
[1] See Bill Nichols “Film theory and the revolt against master narratives” in Reinventing Film Studies. Eds Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, London: Arnold, 1999, 34-52.
[2] Noel Carroll “Film, emotion, and genre” in Philosophy of Motion Pictures: An Anthology, ed. Noel Carroll and Jinhee Choi, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006, 225.

ROGER HILLMAN

DVD: Brownlow/Mollo, It Happened Here.
Walking archives, national treasures: Marilyn Dooley and Bruce Hodsdon.
Great local conferences: Film and History, every time; Phil Brophy’s historic Cinesonic series; Documentary (National Museum 2004? Convened by Cathie Summerhayes).
Publications:
David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema. Princeton U Press, 1998.
Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History. Pearson, 2006.
Anton Kaes, M. BFI, 2000 – complemented by Adrian Martin’s analysis of the opening sequence in one of the Cinesonic volumes.
Thomas Elsaesser, chapter in The German Cinema Book. BFI, 2002.
Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Columbia U Press, 1995. [fudging the last decade…]
Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema. Columbia U Press, 1999.
Rebecca Coyle, ed., Screen Scores: Studies in Contemporary Australian Film Music. AFTRS, 1998.

Roger Hillman teaches Film Studies and German Studies at the Australian National University. Research interests focus especially on European cinema, and film’s relationship to history, and to music. Publications include Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, Ideology (Indiana U Press, 2005), and, co-edited with Leslie Devereaux, Fields of Vision (U of California Press, 1995).

JAN-CHRISTOPHER HORAK

David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde. History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. Berkeley: U of California Press, 2005.
Eric Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History of Exploitation Films 1919-1959. Durham: Duke U Press, 1999.
Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser (eds), Oscar Micheaux & His Circle. African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era. Bloomington: Indiana Press, 2001.
Vanessa Toulmin, Simon Popple and Patrick Russell, The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film. London: BFI, 2004 (DVD set).
Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion. Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife. Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 1996.
Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia U Press, 2005.
Treasures From American Film Archives, Vols. 1, 2, 3, San Francisco: National Film Preservation Board, 2000, 2004, 2007.
Daniel Bernardi (ed.), The Birth of Whiteness. Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema. New Brunswick: Rutgers U Press, 1996.
Lutz Koepnick, The Dark Mirror. German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood. Berkeley: U of California Press, 2002.
Scott MacDonald, ed., Cinema 16. Documents Towards a History of the Film Society, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.

Jan-Christopher Horak is Director, UCLA Film & Television Archive; also Acting Director, Moving Images Archives Program, UCLA, and Visiting Professor. Formerly Director, Archives & Collections, Universal Studios; Director, Munich Filmmuseum; Senior Curator, George Eastman House; Professor, University of Rochester; Hochschule fuer Film und Fernsehen, Munich; University of Salzburg. PhD. Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universitaet, Muenster, Germany. M.S. Boston University. Publications include: Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-Garde Cinema (1997); Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde 1919-1945 (1995); The Dream Merchants: Making and Selling Films in Hollywood’s Golden Age (1989). Over 200 articles and reviews in English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Hebrew publications.

PETER HUGHES

Being an indecisive person at the best of times I have not been able to rank this list, but have resorted to merely listing them in reverse chronological order.
Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary, Visible Evidence; v. 16. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Annette Hill, Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television. London & New York: Routledge, 2004.
Michael Rabiger, Directing the Documentary. 4th ed. Amsterdam; Boston: Focal Press, 2004.
John Corner, “Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions”. Television and New Media 3, no. 3:255-269, 2002.
Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.
John Izod, R. W. Kilborn, and Matthew Hibberd. From Grierson to the Docu-soap: Breaking the Boundaries. Luton, Bedfordshire, UK: University of Luton Press, 2000. [Papers from the Stirling Documentary Conference, many of which were originally published in Screening the Past].
Arild Fetveit, “Reality T.V in the digital era: a paradox in visual culture”. Media, Culture and Society. 21, no. 6:787-804, 2000.
John Dovey, Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television. London: Pluto, 2000.
Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 2000. [2nd Edition, 2006].
Derek Paget, No Other Way To Tell It: Dramadoc/docudrama on Television. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.

Peter Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at La Trobe University, Australia, where he teaches some aspects of documentary media. He has had editorial roles at Screening the Past since its inception, and has published on documentary; new media; and emergency communications. He can be contacted on p.hughes@latrobe.edu.au.

JASON JACOBS

V. F. Perkins, ‘“Where is the world?” The horizon of events in movie fiction’, in John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film. Manchester U.P., 2005.
Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘Structure of Anxiety: Recent British Television Crime Fiction’, Screen 39:3, 1998.
George Toles, ‘Auditioning Betty in Mulholland Drive’, Film Quarterly 58:1. Fall 2004.
Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium. Johns Hopkins U Press, 2000.
George Toles, A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film. Wayne State University Press, 2001.
Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. Harvard University Press, 2004.
William Boddy, New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television and Digital Media in the United States. Oxford University Press, 2004.
Deborah Thomas, Beyond Genre. Cameron and Hollis, 2000.
Andrew Klevan, Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film. Flicks Books, 2000.
V. F. Perkins, The Magnificent Ambersons. BFI, 2000.
I submitted the original list late one evening and, driving back home through the beautiful Brisbane suburbs, the names and book titles I had not included came rushing at me through my windscreen freighted with shame and guilt. I mostly write in the field of television studies and it’s a bit odd that my selection is dominated by film studies – scholarship that is characterised by its intense concentration on particular moments in movies and their wider significance. My list sincerely represents the texts that have most engaged and excited me over the past ten years, and I think they are important for television studies insofar as they point to its corresponding lack of density of this kind of attention. So, this is not to say that that kind of close, sensitive engagement with texts is totally absent in the field. The recent BFI television classics series offers several such examples, and the work of Catherine Johnson, Sarah Cardwell, Helen Wheatley, Glen Creeber, Jeffrey Sconce, Jason Mittell, David Lavery, Janet McCabe, Karen Lury and many others clearly points to an already established interest in such engagement. One would like to hope that in ten years there would be many more instances of television scholarship to match the work of Toles, Cavell, Perez, Perkins, Thomas and Klevan. Certainly Brunsdon’s work on crime series points to the kind of theoretical insights that close engagement with a genre can produce. But if I had a longer list it would certainly include Georgina Born on the BBC, John Ellis on televisual plenty, Lynn Spigel on television and 9/11, Frances Bonner on ordinary television, John Caughie on television and modernism as well as – to return to film! – James Naremore on Kubrick, Noel Carroll on the moving image, and Slavoj ?i?ek on anything.

Jason Jacobs has taught at the University of East Anglia, the University of Warwick, Griffith University, and will take up an appointment as Associate Professor of Cultural History at the University of Queensland in 2008. He is the author of The Intimate Screen and Body Trauma TV, as well as several essays on television history and aesthetics. His interests include the historical development and critical evaluation of television, and the ways in which notions of the ‘specificity of the medium’ have been used to legitimate particular forms of approbation and criticism. He runs the website screenaesthetics.com.

LALEEN JAYAMANNE

Laleen Jayamanne’s top 10 in the field in an unranked list
Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, Germany’s Historical Imaginary, Routledge: London, 2000. Formidable multiperspectival, transversal scholarship combining political history and economic history of the German film industry in the silent era in relation to the globalization of Hollywood and also the psychic economies of Weimar cinema with a profound contribution to film aesthetics. The brilliant chapter “Lulu and the meter man: Louise Brooks, G. W. Pabst and Pandora’s Box”, suggests, to me, that there might be a secret rapport between Kubrick’s much maligned Eyes Wide Shut and the ever modern Pandora’s Box. The connections may have to be forged by reading the art historical writings of Pabst’s compatriot, the Curator of Textiles at the Museum of Art and Industry in Vienna, Alois Riegl.
Alois Riegl, Historical Grammar of Visual Arts, Zone Books: New York, 2004. Reading this book cover to cover will require a long retirement after working in a Taylorised academic milieu. His theory of the ornament, including that of the arts of Islam, is important to thinking of the cinematic image in its long duration. And without a proper Cinematheque/archive in Australia such work would be prohibitive.
The inauguration of the Australian Cinematheque at the Gallery of Modern Art, in 2006 as part of the Asia Pacific Triennale of the Queensland Art Gallery. I cite two of its significant achievements.
(i) The purchase of three films by Kumar Shahani, the Indian avant-garde director (in their original 35mm format: Khyal Gatha, 1988; Kasba, 1990; and The Bamboo Flute, 2000) is noteworthy in itself. As well, the initiative taken to restore, archive and thereby preserve Khyal Gatha (whose negative was irretrievably damaged) is a singular achievement of the new institution under a dedicated curatorial team headed by Kathryn Weir. It is a film that contributes to the theme of cinema and civilization and demonstrates the strong, sustained commitment of QAG in creating a civilizational and contemporary audio-visual network that links Australia with Asia.
(ii) The screening of the long awaited Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988-1998), by Jean-Luc Godard in August 2007 within the context of a comprehensive retrospective of the French New Wave cinema. The chance at last to see the man, bare-chested, moving fluently between the roles of prophet and clown as well. (Gaumont, DVD, 2007).
The archival exhibition “Stanley Kubrick” at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in December-January, 2005/6; the screening of all of his films in the original format; the forums which included a session with Christiane Kubrick; the catalogue Kinematograph 20/2004 (Deutsches Film Museum, Frankfurt Am Main & Deutsches Architektur Museum), with superb German scholarship on his oeuvre. The chance to resee 2001: A Space Odyssey on a 70mm screen with several age-groups, including young people who had only seen Kubrick’s work on video and DVD. The quiet sound of astonishment we all emited collectively as the screen opened wider and wider and the extraordinary slowness, silence, stillness and small vibrations of the opening ten or so minutes making one rotate one’s neck from one side to another are memories I cherish.
Meaghan Morris, Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture, Sage: London, 2006. Vital for formulating the idea of “Aesthetic Skills” which I believe can act as a bridge or tight rope to cross the treacherous waters of our “fields”. Oops, mixing metaphors, fields are now flooded and we are carried away by currents.
Felix Guattari, Three Ecologies, The Athlone Press: London, 2000. Important for understanding how to make transversal connections; cut-across, deeply, and connect the different layers, if you can or at least try, try and try. A bit like how Godard painted film with video in Histoire(s) du Cinema.
Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, Texts and Interviews, 1975-1995. Chapter 1, exploring Heinrich Von Kleist’s celebrated essay “On the Marionette”, indispensable for understanding how agile a modern clown must become.
Two Australian e-journals on film, Senses of Cinema (eds. Rolando Caputo and Scott Murray) andRouge (eds. Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin and Grant McDonald); the first for providing a forum for Australian work to connect with each other locally and internationally, the latter for publishing major theoretical articles on cinema, including those, otherwise inaccessible to Anglophone readers.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Bollywoodization of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 4.1 (2003). A brilliant essay, locating the transnational moment of Indian cinema, within the long duration of its history.
The appointment in 2004 of Dr. Paolo Cherchi Usai as the Director of ScreenSound, the Australian, National Screen and Sound Archive. A major curator of film, he is also a scholar of silent cinema and a founder and director of the Silent Film Festival of Pordenone in Italy.

Laleen Jayamanne is a senior lecturer in film in the Department of Art History and Film Studies, University of Sydney. She is the author of Towards Cinema and its Double, Cross-Cultural Mimesis, Indiana UP, 2001, and “The Museum as Refuge for Film; The case of Kumar Shahani’s Epic Cinema” PostScript, (special issue on Indian Cinema), 25/3, 2006. She delivered a public lecture recently at the Australian Cinematheque, entitled, “Jean Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema, Or ‘Memory of the World’”, (see website). laj@arts.usyd.edu.au

D. B. JONES

Two recent films have impressed me very much.
One is Florien Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006), the only truly successful new film for adults that I’ve seen in years. Its depiction of life under East Germany’s STASI is direct and unaffected. Its vision does not fit into any prevalent, tired formula. It is free from ideological taint (although I know there are people who can find ideology in anything). The director subordinates himself to the material. Yet this bleak account of the Stasi’s corrupting effects ends in a way that surprises and satisfies us without resort to sentimentality, and it manages to observe historical, contingent truth while providing broadly applicable insights into the totalitarian urge lurking in all societies.

The other is Mike Rubbo’s All About Olive (2004), a documentary as obscure as The Lives of Others is acclaimed. Rubbo’s film is a portrait of his then-103-year-old aunt (now 107 years old). Rubbo, whose influence on the late twentieth-century and current documentary is under-recognized, continues in this film to find ways to innovate while keeping his subject, not himself, as the film’s focus. In the most memorable scene, he films Olive directing a pair of child actors in a re-enactment of an event from her childhood. Instead of seeing a finished re-enactment, we watch Olive work hard to help the kids get it right, the way she remembers it. It is imaginatively reflexive, showing us both the remembered event and the remembering. And the film does not sugar-coat aging. It is distributed by Ronin Films, and lives on in a weblog (allaboutolive.com.au) that Rubbo has established and maintains for Olive.

D. B. Jones is a professor of film at Drexel University. He is the author of two books on the National Film Board of Canada, Movies and Memoranda: An Interpretive History of the National Film Board of Canada and The Best Butler in the Business: Tom Daly of the National Film Board of Canada and numerous essays, articles and reviews on film and literature. He has a wide range of experience in film and video production, including screenwriting and production credits with such organizations as CBS-TV, the National Film Board, Film Australia, the Australian Experimental Film Fund, and American public television, among others.

HESTER JOYCE

Barclay, Barry. Our Own Image. Auckland: Longman Paul, 1990.
Collins, Felicity, and Therese Davis. Australian Cinema after Mabo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
hooks, bell. Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies. New York Routledge, 1996.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005.
Kaplan, E Ann, and Ban Wang, eds. Trauma and Cinema: Cross Cultural Explorations. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004.
Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam, eds. Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
Stam, Robert. Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2005.

Dr Hester Joyce is a lecturer in Cinema Studies at Latrobe University, Melbourne. She has professional credits in acting, writing and directing in theatre and in acting, script editing and consulting in film and television. Research interests include national cinemas/indigenous cinema; New Zealand cinema; scriptwriting theory, policy and practice; scriptwriting; screenplay narrative, aesthetics and formal analysis, creative project assessment.

KATHRYN KALINAK

Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia U Press, 2004.
Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
K. J. Donnelly, The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television. Berkeley: U of Cal Press, 2005.
Hanns Eisler and (uncredited) Theodor Adorno. Composing for the Films. London: Continuum Books, 2005. (I know this is a bit of a cheat. The book was originally published in 1947 but was out of print until the 1990s. Since it is such a founding text AND since Continuum technically published it in the last 10 years, here it is).
Caryl Flinn, The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style. Berkeley: U of Cal Press, 2003.
Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for Toons. Berkeley: U of Cal Press, 2005.
Kathryn Kalinak, How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford. Berkeley: U of Cal Press, 2007.
Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film Music: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Film Music. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926). Kino International restoration and reissue with original score, 2002.
Martin Marks, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895-1924. New York and Oxford: Oxford U Press, 1997.
Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. New York: Columbia U Press, 1998.

Kathryn Kalinak is Professor of English and Film Studies at Rhode Island College and author of Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (1993). Her most recent publication is How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford (2007).

CRAIG KELLER

Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma + De l’origine du XXIe siècle pour moi.
Tag Gallagher, “Straub/AntiStraub”. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/07/43/costa-straub-huillet.html+ personally distributed electronic document.
Pedro Costa, “A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing”. Rouge, www.rouge.com.au
B. Kite, “Jacques Rivette and the Other Place: Tracks One and 1B”. CinemaScope, No. 30 and 32 +www.jacques-rivette.com
Alain Bergala, Le cinéma comment ça va, lettre à Fassbinder suivie de onze autres. Cahiers du cinéma Press
Bill Krohn, Hitchcock at Work. Phaidon Press.
Jalal Toufic,(Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film – revised edition. The Post-Apollo Press.
Jean-Pierre Gorin, video lectures on The Criterion Collection editions of Pialat’s A nos amours; Godard’s Masculin-Féminin; Godard and Gorin’s Tout va bien / Letter to Jane; and Marker’s La Jetée / Sans soleil.
Tag Gallagher, video essays: A New Reality: Roberto Rossellini‘s Francesco giullare di Dio + Letter from an Unknown Woman: Passions Triumph – 2.
Jean-Pierre Coursodon, Dan Sallitt, and Brad Stevens, “A Roundtable on Buster Keaton”, the 100-page transcript of a discussion between the three critics on the matter of every Keaton short film, located inside the book that accompanies The Masters of Cinema Series The Complete Buster Keaton Short Films: 1917-1923 box set.

Craig Keller is a producer for The Masters of Cinema Series of DVDs, and writes the Cinemasparagus blog atcinemasparagus.blogspot.com. His digital film work appears at his site www.filmsofevillights.org

CHUCK KLEINHANS

By Brakhage (dir. Stan Brakhage) The Criterion Collection, 2 DVDs, 243 min., 26 films. This collection fairly represents and reproduces one of the most complex C20 visual artist’s work. Essential, authoritative, redefines the field of experimental film.
Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde. London: Verso, 2002. Astonishingly smart analysis of animation by reading it through German critical theory and the C20 film avant-garde: redefines all three subjects.
Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and The Senses. Durham: Duke, 2000; and, Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2002. Current benchmark in theoretically sophisticated analysis.
Miriam Bratu Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism”, Modernism/modernity 6:2, 1999, pp. 59-77.
Scott Macdonald, The Garden in the Machine. Berkeley: U of California Press, 2003. Masterful summary of decades of studying, teaching, and writing about experimental film; Macdonald addresses the landscape tradition.
Jon Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle Over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry. New York: NYU Press, 2000. A model historical analysis of industrial practices and cultural context at a crucial turning point for both.
Kevin Heffernan, Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953-1968. Durham: Duke U Press, 2004.
Adrienne L. McLean, Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom. New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2004. Fine example of next generation star studies centering on the making of a female ethnic star.
David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film”. Film Quarterly 55:3, 2002; pp. 16-28.
J. Hoberman, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties. New York: New Press, 2003;The Magic Hour: Film at fin de siecle, Philadelphia: Temple U Press, 2003; The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism, Temple U. Press, 1998. Every generation needs its best journalist, reviewer, and public intellectual on film. For the US today, it’s Hoberman.
And two things that don’t quite fit the criteria, but are crucially important for the near future:
Ubuweb. An astonishing online site that includes streaming examples of experimental film. Will redefine the field for teaching and studying the subject. http://www.ubu.com
Arab Film Distribution. A US film/video distribution company with a rich and deep collection of Arab and Middle East media. At this historic moment in the US, this is the most important media distributor for social and political change. A crucial intervention. http://www.arabfilm.com

Chuck Kleinhans is co-editor of Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. He teaches documentary, new media, and dramatic narrative at Northwestern University’s Radio/TV/Film department. He has recently published on Court TV as a reality format, the documentary narrator as alibi in exploitation films, research problems in publishing sexual images, audio documentary, and Fruit Chan’s Dumplings.

ADAM KNEE

Adam Knee’s list for his old friends and colleagues at Screening the Past, on the auspicious occasion of that publication’s tenth anniversary
I hate to refer to a “top ten,” but these are some publications from over the past decade that have seemed especially useful to me. I have not ranked them, but rather have listed them firstly according to central issue and secondly by year.
I. Six publications which have helped revise conceptualizations of national and regional cinema, especially with regard to Southeast Asia and Hong Kong:
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journal. Routledge, 2000-present.
Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds., Cinema and Nation. Routledge, 2000.
David Hanan, ed., Film in South East Asia: Views from the Region. South East Asia-Pacific Audio Visual Archive Association, 2001.
Esther C. M. Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Wong Ain-ling, ed., The Cathay Story. Hong Kong Film Archive, 2002.
Wong Ain-ling, ed., The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study. Hong Kong Film Archive, 2003.
II. Four publications which have helped refine understandings of the dynamics of cinematic intertextuality:
Nick Browne, ed., Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History. University of California Press, 1998.
James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. University of California Press, 1998.
Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood. Routledge, 2000.
Robert Stam, “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation”, in James Naremore, ed., Film Adaptation. Rutgers University Press, 2000, pp. 54-76.

Adam Knee is Assistant Professor and MA Program Coordinator in the Ohio University School of Film. His teaching has also included stints in Thailand, Taiwan, and – long, long ago – the wilds of Bundoora.

BILL KROHN

Tag Gallagher, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini.
Chris Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall.
Joe McBride, Searching for John Ford: A Life.
The Jeriad” by B. Kite in The Believer.
J. Hoberman, The Dream Life.
Luc Moullet, “DeMille, vers la fiction pur” in Trafic 36.
Dan Sallitt, “Intrarealism” in Wide Angle.
Jean-Claude Biette, Qu’est-ce qu’un cinéaste? Published by POL.
Murray Pomerantz, Johnny Depp Starts Here.
Andrew Repasky McIlhenney, “Thoughts on Grindhouse” posted at Carrie Rickey’s website, reprinted in Trafic 64.

Bill Krohn has been the LA correspondent for Cahiers du cinéma since 1978. He co-wrote, -directed, and –produced It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles. His books include Hitchcock at Work; Luis Bunuel: Chimera; and Stanley Kubrick, published by the Cahiers and Le Monde. He is currently completingAlfred Hitchcock, also for the CdC/Le Monde; Serial Killer Dreams for Reaktion; and a translation of five Godard “cinepoems” for Beyond Baroque. He also reviews films for The Exconomist.

FRANK KRUTNIK

Steve Neale: Genre and Hollywood, London: Routledge, 2000.
Pete Stanfield: Body and Soul: Jazz, Blues and Race in American Film, 1927-63. University of Illinois Press, 2005.
Adrienne L. McLean: Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity and Hollywood Stardom. Rutgers University Press, 2004.
Jerry Lewis: Dean and Me: A Love Story. New York: Broadway

Books, 2006.
Thomas Schatz: Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
James Naremore: More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton: A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941-1953. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002.
Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle: Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Sam Fuller: A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking, New York: Knopf, 2004.

DVD: The Jazz Singer (Three Disc Deluxe Edition), Warner Home Video, 2007.

Frank Krutnik teaches film at the University of Sussex and is the author of In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (1991) Popular Film and Television Comedy (with Steve Neale, 1990); Inventing Jerry Lewis(2000); Hollywood Comedians: The Film Reader (editor, 2003); and “Unamerican” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (co-editor, 2007). He is currently working on a new book on film noir.

DAVID LAVERY

John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London: Tauris, 2000.
Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture (2004- ): http://flowtv.org
Jonathan Gray, Watching with the Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Inter- textuality. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Matt Hills, Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002.
Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.
Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.
Rhonda V. Wildox, Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. London: I. B. Tauris, 2005.
Television without Pity: http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com

David Lavery holds the Chair in Film and Television, Brunel University, UK. He is the author of Joss Whedon, a Creative Portrait (forthcoming); co-editor of Slayage and Critical Studies in Television and editor of Intensities, and of The Essential Cult TV Reader (forthcoming). He is author/editor/co-editor of books on Owen Barfield, Lost, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, The Sopranos, Buffy, Teleparody, Seinfeld, Deadwood, My So-Called Life, The Gilmore Girls, Heroes, and Battlestar Galactica. Website: http://davidlavery.net; blog:http://thelaverytory.blogspot.com; e-mail: david.lavery@gmail.com.

RICHARD MALTBY AND RUTH VASEY

Five Things that Have Changed What We Do and How We Do It, and Some Role Models

1. Web-based Archives. To be able to access entire governmental policy documents, court judgments, etc. as soon as they are available, and to be able to trace almost anything to its source using search engines, has radically affected our own scholarship and that of our students. Scanning and database technologies and institutional digital repositories make it possible to construct your own archive and make it accessible.
2. Internet shopping: Every time we look there are new collections of classical historical material available on DVD that until recently only existed on disintegrating 16mm film. Being able to find and buy the only available copy of Dennis Hartman’s 1947 Motion Picture Law Digest in two minutes on sale is pretty cool, too.
3. Turner Classic Movies. The airing of large numbers of “ordinary” movies from the Classical era without regard for the limited canons discussed in many standard film histories has constituted an invaluable correction to accepted notions of what the output of the industry under discussion actually looked and sounded like.
4. The American Film Institute Catalog: Feature Films, 1941-1950 (University of California Press, 1999). This is the latest of the American Film Institute series which has made available a literally encyclopaedic account of the output of the American film industry, starting in 1911. These volumes contain a mine of detailed information unavailable elsewhere. It is puzzling and unfortunate that so far they have not been put out in a searchable digital format.
5. Special Features on DVDs. The availability of this material necessarily changes the way we discuss movies with our students, for better and for worse, since commentaries by participants in production, including directors and cinematographers, now provide students with perspectives on both intentionality and the specific mechanics of production that were previously inaccessible to them.
6. Role models for the field: Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003); Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth-century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998); Richard M. Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century. (London: Verso, 1996).
7. Role models in the field: Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Annette Kuhn, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002); James Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Eric Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!”: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). John Sedgwick, Popular Filmgoing in 1930s Britain: A Choice of Pleasures (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000); Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Eric Smoodin, Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies, 1930-1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

Richard Maltby is Professor of Screen Studies, Flinders University, and author of Hollywood Cinema, 2003;Ruth Vasey is Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies at Flinders University, Adelaide and author of The World According to Hollywood, 1997.

ADRIAN MARTIN

Screening the Past of Screening the Past

Once upon a time not so long ago, in a local film publication, contributors were asked, at the end of each year, to offer their best viewing – and their best reading, too, as an equally important part of the equation. After all, some of us grew up in the era (mid 1970s) when even Film Comment would publish favourite-film lists bolstered with weighty and fascinating bibliographic notes. But by the year 2001, it seemed – and it shocked me then as it shocks me now to remember it – that very few people could ever bother, at the bottom of their gargantuan laundry lists of best, near best, worst, seen, re-seen, missed, traded (etc.) movies, to mention a single book, essay, article or review. (And this seemed to chime with a trend towards a certain kind of writing that oozed a hip fluency with critical/theoretical-speak, but haughtily eschewed footnotes for the sake of immediacy.)

This leads to two possible conclusions, equally appalling to consider:

1. Film critics/scholars are mean-minded, territorial types, unwilling to in any fashion discuss, promote or acknowledge the contributions of their peers.
2. Film critics/scholars don’t read much anymore.

Here are some highlights from the decade of film publishing that coincides with the history of – and, thankfully, received substantial coverage in – the life (so far) of Screening the Past. In fact – despite hearing during every one of these ten years that the film-book market has dwindled, and that the possibilities for adventurous publication in cinema studies have shrivelled – it has been a remarkable and rich decade in which to be a faithful reader of the field.

De la figure en général et du corps en particulier. L’invention figurative au cinéma (Bruxelles: De Boeck, 1998) by Nicole Brenez. This is the masterpiece of the last ten years of criticism/theory/history/scholarship, going back another ten years to the start of Brenez’s work in publications such as Admiranda, through to her vigorous exhumation and revitalisation of the international avant-garde (from Jean Epstein to Peter Whitehead). In terms of the passage of Brenez’s remarkable work into English, Screening the Past was there at the start, in an early issue: Bill Routt’s superb translation of the long version (from Art Press) of ‘The Ultimate Journey’. And, since then, more Brenez (her essay on Baise-moi, timely in terms of its brush with Australian censorship), and Bill’s great piece ‘For Criticism’, a far-reaching review-essay on De la figure.

The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film (University of California Press, 1998) by Mikhail Iampolski. I first heard of this book through Helen Grace’s detailed review in Screening the Past. Like Yuri Tsivian (whose Vertov book Lines of Resistance or his BFI Classic on Ivan the Terrible could easily find a place in my list), Iampolski is one of those furiously erudite and lucid Russian scholars who have moved to universities in the West. Memory of Tiresias mixes textual analysis, cultural history and semiotic theory in a dazzling performance, reminding us – in the year of the deaths of Thierry Kuntzel and Marie-Claire Ropars – how much we have forgotten or lost since the heyday of film theory in the ‘70s.

Robert Bresson (Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario, 1998) edited by James Quandt. On his indispensable blog (girishshambu.com/blog), Girish Shambu recently remarked: ‘Is there a richer single-volume collection devoted to a filmmaker in recent (or even not-so-recent) memory?’ He’s right: for its historic translations (the priceless Godard-Bresson dialogue), its pieces by a vast range of engaged and passionate writer-critics from P. Adams Sitney to Kent Jones, and especially for a late, intellectually encyclopedic piece by Raymond Durgnat (‘The Negative Vision of Robert Bresson’), this book is a must.

Eyes Wide Shut (BFI, 2002) by Michel Chion. Quite apart from the fact that it offers the best account to date of a film I love, this book is a splendid discourse on method: how to approach, how to proceed, what to look for and listen for, and why any of it matters, in the art of film analysis. There is an eccentric side to Chion which is very endearing.

Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See (A Cappella, 2000) by Jonathan Rosenbaum. The finest book of cinema polemics and politics for our time – raising, and brilliantly arguing, all the issues of access to and recognition of cinema (as well as its discourse) that we too easily take for granted as we slide back into the prison-house cushily upholstered for us by the mainstream industry. Lest we forget! Cinephilia as war machine – the only kind of cinephilia worth having. And then, the books that, in a sense, follow on from this polemic, criticism from (often, usually) the ignored countries and regions, on a cinema which is not its own, nationalistically, but claimed for a new global cinema culture of exchanges, re-readings and re-writings: Leos Carax (Manchester University Press, 2003) by Fergus Daly & Garin Dowd, and Philippe Garrel: Cinema Revealed, edited by Quim Casas for the San Sebastian Film Festival (2007) are the first two that spring to mind.
Writings – theories, reflections, accounts, principles – by filmmakers are generally under-appreciated and under-valued. But astonishing landmarks have lately appeared in this largely unmapped area: Alexander Mackendrick’s On Filmmaking (Faber and Faber, 2004), Marcel Hanoun’s Cinéma cinéaste (Yellow Now, 2001), and the second volume of Raúl Ruiz’s hilarious and visionary Poetics of Cinema (Dis Voir, 2007).

The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) by Gilberto Perez. I did a review-essay on this extraordinary book in Screening the Past – a book which I believe has still to receive its proper due. A brilliant work of aesthetic exploration, with a subtle deconstructionist feel for paradoxes-in-motion, it ranges from Renoir’s fleshy humanism to Straub-Huillet’s concrete materialism – along the way advancing a new and radical notion of cinematic drama and narrative. This guy should write more books.

Notions de base (Flammarion, 2005) by Petr Král. Speaking of cosmopolitanism … few writers are as seductive as this Czech exile, a Surrealist poet who became, in France, the specialist in silent comedy and, eventually, the modern stylish chronicler of everyday life in several cities of the world. Notions de base (‘Basic Notions’) is not strictly a film book (it is a little, here and there, amidst the fragments, like Lesley Stern’s The Smoking Book [University of Chicago Press, 1999]), but it allows me to mention one of my favourite-ever film essays, which I was able to reprint in the Auteurism 2001 double-issue of Screening the Past: ‘Tarkovsky, or The Burning House’.

Or speaking, again, of Benjamin: two great books I think of together are Tom Gunning’s The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: BFI, 2000) and Ed Dimendberg’s Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Harvard University Press, 2004) – plus, come to think of it, Anton Kaes’ short but action-packed BFI Classic on M (2000). All these works reveal a new attentiveness (New German Critique style) to the intricate histories of modernity, industrialism, urban space – and all find a new way from this back to the detail of close filmic analysis. As does, across an even broader and more synthetic span of critical-theoretical approaches, Thomas Elsaesser’s mighty European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam University Press, 2005).

Auteurism comes back around in many guises in the 21st century – especially with the various director-series published by BFI, Illinois University Press, Routledge, Wallflower … Two books on Hitchcock stand out: Bill Krohn’s Hitchcock at Work (Phaidon, 2003) – the ‘at work’ series (French or English), covering also Welles, Truffaut and Godard-in-the-‘60s so far, is indispensable – and The Alfred Hitchcock Story (UK edition: Titan, 1999) by Ken Mogg, another Melbourne lad who goes his own singular, extra-curricular, seeker’s way. And then – another candle for the dead – Alain Bergala’s stunning little 2005 book for the latest elegant Yellow Now series from Belgium, on Ingmar Bergman’s (Summer with) Monika: the culmination of everything this critic-filmmaker has pondered and experimented with in terms of cinematic creation and its speculative principles, most recently extended to the generous curation of the Erice-Kiarostami exhibition (soon for Australia, the rumour goes). Or: Chris Fujiwara’s magisterial Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Or: the impressive German-English publications – full of incredible archival and reconstructive work – from the Austrian Film Musuem, on Dziga Vertov (2006), and Josef von Sternberg’s The Case of Lena Smith (2007), among others …

Film Fables (London: Berg, 2006) by Jacques Rancière. Another book of radical propositions on the history, aesthetics and politics of what Rancière terms the ‘cinematographic fable’ – a truly liberating work (like the best of Rancière) which rewrites the history of modernism and finds another way into the mythos of narrative and storytelling. Stick him on a panel with his soul-brother: John Flaus (their tastes – for Godard, Mann, Nick Ray, the film-essay … are oddly similar!).

I discovered the incandescent work of Roger Tailleur on a Screening the Past mission, reviewing the Positifanthology from MoMA (2002). His posthumous collection Viv(r)e le cinéma (Lyon: Actes Sud, 1997) is a best-of from the early ‘50s to the late ‘60s, when Tailleur (enigmatically) gave up the cinephile game and instead went to look at frescoes in Italian churches for the final 15 or so years of his life. It’s good to see that he gets a respectful, ruminating chapter in the best (partial) history of his kind of work so far written, Antoine de Baecque’s La Cinéphilie (Fayard, 2003). Not to mention a recent Italian tribute, Roger Tailleur e Positif(Falsopiano, 2006), edited by Gianni Volpi. Tailleur is among the greats, and this book stands shoulder to shoulder to the now-canonical Negative Space (Da Capo: 1998) by Manny Farber (with a little help from Patricia Patterson).

Melbourne produces all the film magazines and journals, but it’s writers in (or originally hailing from) New South Wales who have written the important Australian film books, in so many ways bringing the paths and promises of Oz Screen Studies in the ‘80s into a rendezvous with contemporary researches of the Benjaminian variety (well, I very nearly put the 4 volumes of Benjamin’s Selected Writings – ideal Christmas present – on this list, too): Laleen Jayamanne’s Toward Cinema and Its Double (Indiana University Press, 2001), Michelle Langford’s Allegorical Images (Intellect, 2006), Therese Davis & Felicity Collins’ After Mabo (Cambridge University Press, 2004), George Kouvaros’ Where Does it Happen? (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), John Conomos’ Mutant Media (Artspace, 2007), Alan Cholodenko’s edited collection The Illusion of Life II (Power Publications, 2007) … and for that cold shower of realism we all so desperately need, Barrett Hodsdon’s epic Straight Roads and Crossed Lines (Bernt Porridge, 2001). But Victoria strikes back with Angela Ndalianis’ Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (MIT Press, 2005), Con Verevis’ Film Remakes (Palgrave, 2005), Philip Brophy’s two books for the BFI 100 series (on soundtracks [2004] and anime [2006]), Darren Tofts’ books and anthologies of digital theory (Memory Trade [1998], Parallax [1999], Interzone [2005]), and Christos Tsiolkas’ The Devil’s Playground in the Currency/Screensound Australian Classics series (2002). And there’s a UK-to-NZ-to-Melbourne hook-up via Sean Cubitt’s The Cinema Effect (MIT Press, 2005) and EcoMedia(Rodopi, 2005). Not to mention the Hong Kong-Melbourne-Singapore circuit via the redoubtable Stephen Teo and his Wong Kar-wai: Auteur of Time (BFI, 2005) … It’s interesting to take stock of how many of these books were published abroad – and in that cosmopolitan light, I will also mention the groundbreaking collection Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (Durham & Hong Kong: Duke University Press/Hong Kong University Press, 2005), edited by Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung Li & Stephen Chan Ching-kiu. Plus Morris’ Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture (Sage, 2006), a rich mosaic of cultural essays, in a constellation that makes even the old, familiar entries completely new and alive.

Entries, entry-points … As I write, copies of The Little Black Book: Movies (its US title was better: Defining Moments in Film) are beginning to appear in the shops. Each entry 250 words, and not just on Citizen Kane and Star Wars and Marilyn Monroe but also Boris Barnet, Tsai Ming-liang, Bulle Ogier … Edited by Chris Fujiwara for Cassell (UK) and bringing together critics the calibre of Rosenbaum, Miguel Marías, Jean-Pierre Coursodon, and so many others, it’s the kind of coffee table book that will infiltrate the heads of 15-year-olds everywhere and change their attitudes to cinema, when they find it in homes, libraries, waiting rooms … it’s the dirty-bomb that film culture needs today.

© Adrian Martin 30 October 2007

TRAVIS MILES

Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin, Grant McDonald, eds., Rouge, 2003-2007 http://www.rouge.com.au
Grady Hendrix, Kaiju Shakedown, 2004-2007, http://www.varietyasiaonline.com/kaijushakedown
Restoration/re-release of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. Ross Lipman, UCLA Film & Television Archive; Amy Heller & Dennis Doros, Milestone Films.
Nicole Brenez, Abel Ferrara, trans. Adrian Martin. University of Illinois Press, 2006.
Establishment of Avant-Garde Masters preservation grant through the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Eugene Green, Presences. Desclée de Brouwer, 2003.
Pedro Costa, Où gît votre sourire enfoui?, arte, INA, CNC, ICAM, RTP, producers, 2001.
Ross Chen, AKA Kozo, ed. Love HK Film.com, 1997-2007 http://lovehkfilm.com
Hervé Dumont, Frank Borzage: The Life and Films of a Hollywood Romantic, trans. Jonathan Kaplansky. McFarland & Company, 2006.
Andrew Rector, Kino Slang 2005-2007. http://kinoslang.blogspot.com

Travis Miles is a freelance writer and film programmer, and was formerly a programmer at Anthology Film Archives. He has organized retrospectives of Jean-Luc Godard, Miklos Jancso, Peter Watkins, Eugene Green, and David Brooks, among others. He is most recently published in The Little Black Book: Movies, edited by Chris Fujiwara.

GABRIELLE MURRAY

Edgar Morin, The Cinema or the Imaginary Man. Trans. Lorraine Mortimer. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
David MacDougall, Film, Ethnography, and the Senses: The Corporeal Image. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
Anne Nesbet, Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking. London: I.B Tauris, 2003.
Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Robert Stam, Literature through Film: Realism, Magic and the Art of Adaptation. Malden: Blackwell, 2005.
Eisenstein: The Sound Years. DVD: The Criterion Collection, 2001.
Sam Peckinpah’s The Legendary Westerns Collection. DVD: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc and Turner Entertainment 2006. (Even with all its problems)
Rachel O. Moore, Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2000.
Terry Eagleton. Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Malden, Oxford: Backwell, 2003.

Gabrielle Murray is a Lecturer in the Cinema Studies program at La Trobe University in Australia. Her research areas include screen violence, phenomenology, film and philosophy, and aesthetics. She has published in several journals including Metro, Senses of Cinema and Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media. She has contributed chapters to the anthologies The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand (Wallflower Press, 2007) andSuper/Heroes (New Academic Publishing, 2007) and is the author of This Wounded Cinema, This Wounded Life: Violence and Utopia in the Films of Sam Peckinpah (Praeger, 2004).

JAMES NAREMORE

I’m participating reluctantly in this survey because I was out of country and travelling when the invitation came, and because in my haste to contribute I’m sure to forget something important. In any case, here are ten single-author film books (or books mainly about film) published in English during the past decade that gave me special pleasure and edification. I could easily list another ten, and I’m painfully aware of many highly recommended books that I might have listed but haven’t yet read. In the interest of limiting the range of things that might qualify, I haven’t listed DVDs, articles, biographies (such as Searching for John Ford, by Joseph McBride), reference books (such as Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, ed. Ian Aitken), or anthologies (such as Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, ed. Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfor). I’ve also cheated slightly in two cases, in which I list a pair of books as a “tie.” I would defend myself on the grounds that each pair is the work of a single person. The items in the list are arranged alphabetically, not in order of importance:

Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound.
David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light.
Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood.
Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang.
Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine.
Alexander Mackendrick (ed. Paul Cronin), On Film-Making.
Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Wars and Discovering Orson Welles.
Robert Stam, Film Theory and Literature through Film.
Juan A. Suarez, Pop Modernism.

James Naremore is Emeritus Chancellor’s Professor of Communication and Culture, English, and Comparative Literature at Indiana University. His most recent book is On Kubrick (BFI, 2007). His other books include Acting in the Cinema (1988) and More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts, 2nd ed. (2008).

ANGELA NDALIANIS

Charles R. Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture. Durham: Duke U Press, 2003.
Jay David Bolter,& Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
Scott Bukatman, “Comics and the Critique of Chronophotography, or ‘He never knew it was coming’”. Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal, v. 1, n. 1, July 2006, pp. 83-103.
Jim Collins, “Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and New Sincerity” in The Film Cultures Reader, ed. Graeme Turner. Routledge: London and New York, 2002.
John Hannigan, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis. Routledge: New York, 1998.
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press, 2006.
Norman M. Klein, The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects. New Press, 2004.
Steve Neale & Murray Smith, eds., Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. London & New York: Routledge, 1998.
Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: U of California Press, 2004.
Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema. Minneapolis: & London, U of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Angela Ndalianis is Associate Professor in Cinema Studies at Melbourne University.  Her areas of research include: Hollywood genres and special effects history; contemporary Hollywood and the effects of conglomeration; and entertainment media history.

DES O’RAWE

Various, Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. (2 DVD box set). Kino, 2005.
Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du Cinéma. (4 DVD box set). Gaumont, 2007.
Roberto Rossellini, Francesco giullare di Dio/Francis, God’s Jester. (DVD). Eureka, 2005
Richard Abel and Rick Altman, eds., The Sounds of Early Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana U Press, 2001.
Yuri Tsivian, ed., Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, trans. Julian Graffy. Gemona: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004.
Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema. Exeter: U of Exeter Press, 1997.
Mitry, Jean. The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema, trans. Christopher King. Bloomington: Indiana U Press, 1998.
Sam Rohdie, Promised Lands: Cinema, Geography, Modernism. London: BFI, 2001.
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ed., The Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford: Oxford U Press, 1997.
Various, Surrealism: Desire Unbound Exhibition, London: Tate Modern, 2001-2.

TOM O’REGAN

Decade’s Ten Most Significant/Best/Indispensable Publications List
Allen J. Scott, On Hollywood, the Place, the Industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Allen J. Scott, The Cultural Economy of Cities: Essays on the Geography of Image-Producing Industries. London, Sage, 2000.
Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell, Global Hollywood. London: BFI, 2001.
Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2005.
Kay Hoffmann and Thomas Elsaesser, eds., Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable?: The Screen Arts in the Digital Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998.
Rouge http://www.rouge.com.au/ The online journal.
Charles Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes and Global Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Alan Williams, ed., Film and Nationalism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Tom O’Regan is Head of the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland. He is the author of The Film Studio (2005, with Ben Goldsmith); Australian National Cinema (1996); Australian Television Culture (1993); and is co-editor with Albert Moran of Australian Screen and An Australian Film Reader.

ANDY RECTOR

Histoire(s) du cinéma. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Video. Prod/Dist. Gaumont/Périphéria, 1998.
A New Art (but who notices?) Dir. Tag Gallagher. Video. Dist. Second Sight: 2NDVD 3104, Letter From An Unknown Woman; and 2NDVD 3105, The Reckless Moment, 2003.
Serge Daney, “The Tracking Shot in Kapo.” 1992; trans. Laurent Kretzschmar.http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/30/kapo_daney.html. Jan-Mar 2004.
Jean Narboni, Sylvie Pierre, Jacques Rivette, “Montage.” 1969. Trans. Tom Milne. http://jacques-rivette.com/. 2007.
Bill Krohn, “Interview with Sylvie Pierre.” http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/23/pierre.html Nov-Dec 2002.
Jean Renoir, “Jean Renoir vous parle de son art.” Dir. Jean-Marie Coldefy. 1961. Dist. Criterion, Stage and Spectacle: Three Films by Jean Renoir DVD, 2004.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics. Berkeley: University of California, 1997.
Yuri Tsivian, “Factories of Facts” + Program Notes 1-19. Pordenone. Le Giornate Del CinemaMuto, XXIIIEdizione. http://www.cinetecadelfriuli.org/gcm/previous_editions/edizione2004_frameset.html. 2004.
Gilberto Perez, Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium. Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1998.
Les Messages de Fritz Lang. Dir. Bernard Eisenschitz. Video. Prod. CNDP and TCM. Dist. L’Eden Cinema Les Contrabandiers de Moonfleet, DVD. 2001.
Honourable Mention: Reri in New York. Dir. Janet Bergstrom. Video. Prod. Milestone. Dist. Milestone Tabu, DVD. 2002.
Andrew Rector is a film critic living in Los Angeles. He has contributed to FIPRESCI’s online magazineUndercurrent, Panic, and to a forthcoming DVD of No Quarto da Vanda (Pedro Costa). He runs a weblog called Kino Slang (www.kinoslang.blogspot.com).

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Ten Essential Tools for the New Cinephilia (in no particular order):

James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts.
Chris Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall.
Shiguéhiko Hasumi, Yasujiro Ozu in French translation.
Nicole Brenez, Abel Ferrara.
Rouge (the best online film magazine in English).
CinemaScope (the best film magazine in English on paper).
Masters of Cinema (web page and English DVD series).
Ivan the Terrible (DVD, Criterion Collection #88 – especially for the audiovisual essays by Joan Neuberger and Yuri Tsivian, the best critical-historical work on Eisenstein’s masterpiece that I know, surpassing even the books by Neuberger and Tsivian on the same subject).
Carl Theodor Dreyer (DVD box set, Criterion Collection #125-128).
The Chaplin Collection (DVD box set, Region 2 MK2 edition only).

Jonathan Rosenbaum is about to return to freelance writing after 20 years as film critic at the Chicago Reader. His books include Discovering Orson Welles; Essential Cinema; Movie Mutations (coedited with Adrian Martin); Abbas Kiarostami (with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa); Dead Man; Movie Wars; Movies as Politics; This is Orson Welles (as editor); Greed; Placing Movies; Film: The Front Line 1983; Midnight Movies (with J. Hoberman); and Moving Places.

ROBERT A. ROSENSTONE

Film and History: Most Important Works

Robert A. Rosenstone, Film on History / History on Film. Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2006.
Robert Burgoyne, Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at US History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997.
Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Memory in an Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Natalie Zemon Davis, Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision. Cambridge: Harvard, 2000.
Robert A. Rosenstone, “Inventing Historical Truth on the Silver Screen,” Cineaste 29 (Spring), 29-33/
Marnie Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies (London and NY: Routledge, 2007).
William Guynn, Writing History in Film. New York & London: Routledge, 2006.
J.E. Smythe,Reconstructing American Historical Cinema. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
Robert Brent Toplin, ed., Oliver Stone’s USA. Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2000.
Robert A. Rosenstone, professor of history at the California Institute of Technology, has published works of history, biography, criticism, and fiction, including a book of family stories, The Man Who Swam Into History(2005), and a novel, King of Odessa (2004). His scholarly works are Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (1970), Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (1975), Mirror in the Shrine: Americans in Meijij Japan (1988), Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History(1995), and History on Film / Film on History (2006). Rosenstone created a film section of the American Historical Review and is Founding Editor of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice. He has worked on both dramatic features and documentaries: Reds, The Good Fight, Darrow, and Tango of Slaves.

ERIC SMOODIN

Most Important Publications in the Field, 1997-2007
Emilie Altenloh, A Sociology of the Cinema. Screen, Volume 42, Number 3, Autumn 2001, 249-293. (a translation of her 1914 study).
James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus, eds. Close Up, 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism. Princeton UP: 1998.
Ann Martin and Brian Henderson, Film Quarterly: Forty Years – A Selection. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Annette Kuhn, Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory. New York: New York University Press, 2002.
Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, eds., A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
Treasures From American Film Archives DVD series, Volumes 1, 2, and 3. Compiled by the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular. www.vectorsjournal.org
American Memory from the Library of Congress. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/browse/ListSome.php?format=Motion+Picture
tinfoil.com. Dedicated to the preservation of early recorded sounds. www.tinfoil.com
Internet Archive. http://www.archive.org/details/movies

Eric Smoodin is Professor in the Programs in American Studies and Film Studies at the University of California, Davis. He is the author, most recently, of Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies, 1930-1960. Duke UP, 2004, and the co-editor (with Jon Lewis) of Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method. Duke UP, 2007. He is also the author of Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons From the Sound Era (Rutgers, 1993), the editor of Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom (Routledge, 1994) and co-editor, with Ann Martin, of Hollywood Quarterly: Film Culture in Postwar America, 1945-1957 (U. of California, 2002).

VIVIAN SOBCHACK

When the Levees Broke (Spike Lee, 2006).
UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies Program (1st MA in archival studies in the US, established in 2002).
49 Up (Michael Apted, 2005).
English translation of Jean Mitry’s The Psychology and Aesthetics of the Cinema, trans. Christopher King. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1997.
Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Wiebel, eds., Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film (Electronic Culture: History, Theory and Practice). Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.
Jennifer M. Bean, “Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body,” camera obscura 16:3 (2001): 9-57.
Murnau’s Four Devils: Traces of a Lost Film (Janet Bergstrom, 2003, reconstruction).
Diane Negra and Jennifer Bean, eds., A Feminst Reader in Early Cinema, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
Turner Classic Movies (Cable TV Channel).
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, London: Verso, 2007.

Vivian Sobchack is Professor Emeritus in the Dept. of Film, Television & Digital Media at the UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television and author of numerous essays and books including The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, and Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture.

PETER STANFIELD

W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance From Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Cambridge: Harvard, 1998.
Richard Maltby, “The Spectacle of Criminality” in J. David Slocum, ed., Violence & American Cinema. AFI/Routledge, 2001, pp. 117-52.
Will Straw, “Urban Confidential: The Lurid City of the 1950s” in David B. Clarke, The Cinematic City. Routledge, 1997, pp. 110-28.
Alexander Nemerov, Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures. California, 2005.
Steve Neale, Genre & Hollywood. Routledge, 2000.
Greg Taylor, Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, American Film Criticism. Princeton, 1999.
Robin Walz, Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris. California, 2005.
Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood 1918-1939. Exeter, 1997.
Frank Krutnik, Inventing Jerry Lewis. Smithsonian, 2000.
Mike Siegel, Passion & Poetry: Sam Peckinpah in Pictures. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 2003.

Peter Stanfield is a Reader in Film Studies at the University of Kent and is author of Body & Soul: Jazz & Blues in American Film, 1927–63 (2005); Horse Opera: The Strange History of the Singing Cowboy ( 2002);Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail (2001); joint-editor of Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film (2005); and “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (2008).

STEPHEN TEO

Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: BFI, 2000.
David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment. Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 2000.
Reflections in a Golden Eye, dir. John Huston. Warner Bros. DVD: restored version with original golden tint.
Shaw Brothers DVDs: restored classics from the Shaw Bros. library published by Celestial. No particular film, but highlights include King Hu’s Come Drink With Me; Zhang Che’s The One-Armed Swordsman; Blood Brothers; Disciples of Shaolin; Return of the One-Armed Swordsman; The Assassin; Li Hanxiang’s The Empress Dowager; The Last Tempest; Chu Yuan’s Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan; The Magic Blade; The Killer Clans; and Gui Zhihong’s Killer Constable.
Dai Jinhua, Gendering China (Xingbie Zhongguo) in Chinese. Taipei: Maitian, 2006.
Paul Willemen and Valentina Vitali, eds., Theorising National Cinema. London: BFI, 2006.
Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema. 1896-1937. Chicago & London: U of Chicago Press, 2005.
David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema. Princeton: Princeton U Press, 1998.
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “Hollywood, Americanism and the Imperial Screen: Geopolitics of Image and Discourse after the End of the Cold War”. Inter-Asian Cultural Studies, v. 4, n. 3, 2003, pp. 451-459.
Noel Carroll, Engaging the Moving Image. New Haven: Yale U Press, 2003.

Stephen Teo is a research fellow of the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and a research associate of RMIT University. He is the author of Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: BFI, 1997); Wong Kar-wai (BFI: 2005); King Hu’s A Touch of Zen (Hong Kong U Press, 2007); and Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film (Hong Kong U Press, 2007).

RICK THOMPSON

I don’t do ten best lists, never have, but my co-editor pointed out that it was not on to ask others to do something one would not do oneself. I took it personally: what marked off this past decade from earlier ones? What changed for my work and how I did it? I did less reading and more watching. DVD technology and the way it has been employed in screen studies is the center of the decade’s change for me: ease of access, range of material available, and archival/scholarly/critical/historical extra features. So, with a general vote of praise for the Criterion Collection and all similar enterprises, ten things of the decade which I would not want to be without:

Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, vols. 1 & 2. Kino International, 2005; and Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941. Anthology Film Archives/Image Entertainment, 2005.
Edison: The Invention of the Movies. Kino/Museum of Modern Art, 2005.
Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinema.
Charles Harpole, series editor, History of the American Cinema. New York: Scribners; then Berkeley: U of California Press.
Looney Tunes Golden Collection, 1-5. Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2003-2007.
Norman McLaren: The Master’s Edition. National Film Board of Canada/Image Entertainment, 2006.
The Movies Begin: A Treasury of Early Cinema 1894-1913. Film Preservation Associates/BFI/Kino Video, 2002; and The Origins of Film (1900-1926). Library of Congress Smithsonian Video/Image Entertainment.
Gilberto Perez. The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
V.F. Perkins. The Magnificent Ambersons. London: BFI Publishing, 1999.
Treasures from American Film Archives and More Treasures from American Film Archives, 1894-1931. National Film Preservation Foundation/Image Entertainment, 2000 and 2004.

Rick Thompson is a retired academic, now an Honorary Associate at La Trobe University. With Anna Dzenis, he co-edits Screening the Past.

DARREN TOFTS

(in chronological order, but not differentiated re medium)
Adrian Martin, Once Upon A Time in America. BFI Modern Classics, 1998.
Philip Brophy “Cinesonic” International Conference on Film Scores & Sound Design 1998-2002.
Fourth Australian Film Commission Filmmaker and Multimedia conference, “Being Connected: The Studio in the Networked Age” (1998), directed by Tim Read and coordinated by Lisa Logan.
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2001.
Fibreculture. 2001, ongoing.
Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp, eds., New Screen Media. Cinema/Art/Narrative. BFI, 2002. Includes DVD of artists’ works.
Andrew Murphie & John Potts Culture and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Daniel Palmer, Participatory Media: Visual Culture in Real Time. PhD thesis, Depart of English with Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne, 2004.
Pixel Pirate II: Attack of the Astro Elvis Video Clone. 2002-2006, Soda_Jerk with Sam Smith (DVD remix).
Philip Brophy, 100 Modern Soundtracks. BFI Screen Guides, 2004.
Mark Amerika, Filmtext, 2004. Online interactive cinematic narrative.

Darren Tofts is Associate Professor of Media & Communications, Swinburne University of Technology. His most recent book, edited with Lisa Gye, is Illogic of Sense: The Gregory L. Ulmer Remix. 2007, published by ALT-X Press.

SUE TURNBULL

Francis Bonner, Ordinary Television. Thousand Oaks, Calif; London: Sage, 2002. An important book which takes the TV that most people take for granted seriously.
John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style Crisis and Authority in American Television. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995. I know this book is technically outside the ten year zone, but it is the book which has probably had the most influence on my own thinking about the history and aesthetics of television in the last ten years.
Matt Hills, Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002. Hills took up where Henry Jenkins left off in Textual Poachers and usefully expanded the debate about audience/text relations within consumerist cultures.
Jason Jacobs, Body Trauma, London: BFI, 2003. An elegant and perceptive exploration of the television medical series with a focus on ER.
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: London: New York University Press, 2006. An invaluable corrective to technophobia.
I’d like to nominate David Lavery for his inspirational work in television studies generally, getting behind popular TV series and encouraging people from a diversity of academic backgrounds into print on TV series from The X-Files to Deadwood and cult TV in general.
Karen Lury, Interpreting Television. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005. An inspiring attempt to do something different with television study from an aesthetic and formal point of view.
Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (eds), Reading Sex and the City. I.B Tauris: London, 2004. This has been my students’ favourite book on television in the last three years.
Brett Mills, Television Sitcom. London: BFI, 2005. An important book which engages with new hybrid forms of television comedy.
Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture, New York; London: Routledge, 2004. Breaks new ground in thinking about genre.

Sue Turnbull is an Associate Professor in Media Studies at La Trobe University and a former Chair of the Australian Teachers of Media Association in Victoria (ATOM). She has published broadly in the fields of media education, audience studies and television with particular attention to comedy and crime. Her current research project with Dr Felicity Collins and Dr Susan Bye at La Trobe is concerned with the history of Australian screen comedy, and is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant. She is regular television reviewer for Radio National Breakfast, and is currently engaged as a consultant with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) on a permanent exhibition showcasing the history of the moving image in Australia.

PAOLO CHERCHI USAI

Yuri Tsivian, Ivan the Terrible. BFI Publishing, 2002.
International Film Archive Database. Database on archival holdings from the members of the International Federation of Film Archives. Brussels: FIAF, 1997-ongoing. Also available by internet subscription, and on cd-rom.
Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 1982-2001. Silent cinema database on cd-rom. Pordenone: Pordenone Silent Film Festival, 2002.
Cinemetrics. Film study tool database, available from www.cinemetrics.lv
Torkell Saetervadet, The Advanced Projection Manual. Oslo: Norsk filminstitutt, 2006.
Roger Smither, ed., This Film Is Dangerous. Brussels: FIAF, 2002.
Treasures from American Film Archives. DVD set of four discs, National Film Preservation Foundation / Image Entertainment, 2000.
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film History: An Introduction, 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003.
Virgilio Tosi, The Origins of Scientific Cinematography. London: British Universities Film and Video Council, 2005.

Film curator, critic, and writer, Paolo Cherchi Usai is Director of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia; co-founder of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival and of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. He is the author of books and essays on film history, digital culture, and moving image preservation. Among his published works are Before Caligari (co-editor, 1990); Burning Passions: An Introduction to the Study of Silent Cinema (revised edition, 2000); The Death of Cinema (2001); D.W. Griffith (forthcoming, 2008). Among the musicians he has worked with in silent film music productions are John Cale for The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927), Wim Mertens for La Femme de nulle part (Louis Delluc, 1921) and the Alloy Orchestra for Lonesome (Paul Fejós, 1928) and The Man with the Movie Camera(Dziga Vertov, 1929). He is the author of the experimental silent feature Passio (2007), a visual meditation on the challenges and limits of film preservation.

JANET WALKER

Decade’s Best Publications:
USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education; originally founded by Steven Spielberg with the goal to record the testimonies of the remaining survivors of the Holocaust, the foundation renewed its educational mission when it partnered with and was relocated to the University of Southern California in 2006. The largest audiovisual database in the world.
Internet Movie Database, launched in 1990, acquired by Amazon.com in 1998.
Visible Evidence book series. Series editors Michael Renov, Jane Gaines, and Faye Ginsburg; Minnesota University Press, 1997-present.
Hamid Naficy,ed. Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.
An Inconvenient Truth, dir. Davis Guggenheim, 2006; goes back 650,000 years.
Ian Aitkin, ed. Encyclopedia of Documentary Film, 3 Volume Set. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 1997.
Women Film Pioneers Project, directed by Jane Gaines, Duke University; a collaborative research initiative including an on-line database and a scholarly publication and conference series focused on the accomplishments and history of women filmmakers from the birth of cinema through the coming of sound; begun as a conversation in 1995 and established as a sub-unit of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in 1999.
Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia U Press, 2004.
Screening the Past: an international, refereed, electronic journal of visual media and history, founding editor Ina Bertrand, current editors Anna Dzenis and Rick Thompson, 1997-present.

Janet Walker is professor and former chair of the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her books are Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry; Feminism and Documentary (co-ed. Diane Waldman); Westerns: Films through History (ed.); and, most recently, Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust, about the filmic representation of catastrophic past events. She is currently project Director of Video Portraits of Survival, a series of expressive documentary shorts about residents of Santa Barbara who are survivors and refugees of the Holocaust.

JANET WASKO

While I would hesitate to list the most important publications in the field during the past decade, I would like to note the increasing amount of film scholarship devoted to the analysis of industrial or economic concerns. While not all of them address a political economy of film, which I think is still important, many are critical studies of political and economic factors that must be tackled to understand film (and other media) today.

There are also more books written about the film business itself, from insiders, former insiders, and other non-academic sources. (For instance, Schuyler M. Moore’s The Biz: The Basic Business, Legal and Financial Aspects of the Film Industry; Frederick Levy’s Hollywood 101: The Film Industry; and Donald Farber, Paul Baumgarten and Mark Fleischer’s Producing, Financing, and Distributing Film: A Comprehensive Legal and Business Guide.)

And only a few of the interesting academic studies:

Frederick Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR. University of Texas Press, 2002.
Charles R. Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture. Duke University Press, 2003.
Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard Maxwell, Global Hollywood. BFI, 2005.
Allen Scott, On Hollywood: The Place, The Industry. Princeton University Press, 2005.
Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan, The Film Studio: Film Production in the Global Economy. Roman & Littlefield, 2005.
Greg Elmer, Contracting Out Hollywood: Runaway Productions and Foreign Location Shooting. Roman & Littlefield, 2005.
Paul McDonald, Video and DVD Industries. BFI, 2007.
The expansion of this type of scholarship has meant that a few years ago, when Paul McDonald and I looked around for contributors for a volume that would represent a contemporary version of Tino Balio’s The American Film Industry, we found lots of good people. The result will be The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, which will be published sometime this month by Blackwell.
I suppose I should also note my other contributions relating to film during the last decade:
How Hollywood Works, London: Sage Publications, 2003. (Chinese translation, China Citic Press, 2006).
Dazzled by Disney? The Global Disney Audience Project (edited with Mark Phillips and Eileen Meehan). London: Leicester University Press/Continuum, 2001.
Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy. Cambridge: Polity Press/Basil Blackwell, 2001. (Chinese translation (Taiwan): Hurng-Chih Book Co., Ltd., 2004).

Janet Wasko is the Knight Chair for Communication Research at the University of Oregon (USA). She is the author and/or editor of around 16 books on the political economy of communication and democratic media.

PAUL WILLEMEN

The most important writings for an understanding of cinema that I have come across since 1997 are (in chronological order of publication):
Mikhail Iampolski, The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1998.
David Harvey, The Limits of Capital. London: Verso, 1999.
Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice In India. New Delhi: Tulika, 2000.
Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice and the Question of Everyday Life. New York: U of Columbia Press, 2000.
Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Laleen Jayamanne, Toward Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis. Bloomington: Indiana U Press, 2001.
Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film. London: Verso, 2002.
Serge Daney, La maison cinéma et le monde, vols. 1-2. Paris: POL, 2001/2.
Abe Mark Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era Through Hiroshima. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2003.
David Harvey, The New Imperialism. Oxford: OUP, 2003.
Valentina Vitalia, Hindi Action Cinema. Oxford: OUP, forthcoming.

Paul Willemen was part of Screen‘s editorial board in the 1970s, edited Framework in the 1980s and has been involved in the InterAsia Cultural Studies movement / journal since the mid-90s. He has co-authored The Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (with A. Rajadhyaksha) and published Looks and Frictions (1994). He is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Ulster.

THE RESULTS:

We received 59 submissions from colleagues on five continents. Hundreds of items were nominated. We finished with a top thirteen and an honorable mention field of 17. They are, in order of number of nominations received, as follows:

9 nominations:
Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma.
Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium.
6 nominations:
James Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts.
Rouge.
5 nominations:
Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound.
Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity.
Treasures from American Film Archives, v. 1, v. 2, v. 3 (DVD).
4 nominations:
Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive.
Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary.
Charles Harpole, general editor, History of the American Cinema series.
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We Can See.
Screening the Past.
Honorable Mention: 3 nominations:
Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s and Avant-Garde 2: Experimental Cinema 1928-1954 (DVD).
Charles R. Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture.
Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect.
Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity.
Edison: The Invention of the Movies 1891-1918 (DVD).
Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema Face to Face with Hollywood.
Chris Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall.
Samuel Fuller, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking.
J Hoberman, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties.
Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place.
Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood.
V. F. Perkins, The Magnificent Ambersons.
Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History.
Eric Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Schocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films 1919-1959.
Allen J. Scott, On Hollywood: the Place, the Industry.
Senses of Cinema.
Robert Stam, Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation.

Created on: Sunday, 16 December 2007