Author Archive for: ‘Colin Crisp’

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

Charles O’Brien, Cinema’s Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style in France and the U.S. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 253 34463 8 (hb) US$45.00 ISBN: 0 253 21720 2 (pb) US$19.95 168pp (Review copy supplied by Indiana University Press) This ambitious book aims, by focussing on the years 1930-34, to identify certain characteristics of the …

Lucy Mazdon, Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema. London:BFI Publishing. 2000. ISBN 0 85170 801 3 240pp A$52.95 (Review copy supplied by Peribo: Distributors of Fine Books) Uploaded 1 March 2001 This book arises out of the recent proliferation of American re-makes of successful French films. It proposes to contest the notion that such re-makes inevitably signal the degradation of an …

Matthew C. Ehrlich, Journalism in the Movies. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. ISBN 0 252 02934 8 208pp US$35.00 (hb) (Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press) Journalism in the Movies provides a useful overview of the representation of American journalists/reporters and of their profession in a number of key movies of the sound period. It is …

Joseph Cunneen, Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film. New York & London: Continuum, 2003. ISBN: 0826416055 (pb) US$17.95 ISBN: 0826414710 (hb) US$29.95 224pp (Review copy supplied by Continuum) The professed aim of this book is to introduce to a wider public, particularly a wider American public, a French filmmaker who has been widely honoured but whose films have been …

Phil Powrie (ed), The Cinema of France. (24 frames series) Wallflower Press, London, 2006. 288pp ISBN: 1 904764 46 0 (pb) £18.99 ISBN: 1 904764 47 9 (hb) £45.00 (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) This book takes its place in a series entitled “24 Frames,” which looks at a wide range of work. A major problem with the formula …

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

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

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

David Henry Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France: White Blind Spots, Male Fantasies, Settler Myths. Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 2001. ISBN: 0 8018 6616 2 288pp US$42.00 (hb) (Review copy supplied by John Hopkins University Press) Uploaded 20 September 2002 This is a book which aims to relate a number of French colonial films of the period …

Alison Smith, Agnès Varda. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. ISBN 0 7190 5060 x 213pp £9.95 (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press) Uploaded 30 June 2000 This is one of the first of Manchester University Press’s new series on French film directors. The editors indicate that the series is targeting “students and teachers seeking information and accessible but rigorous …

Cahiers du Cinéma presents The Hollywood Interviews. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006. ISBN: 9 7818 452044 19 £9.99 (pb) 151pp (Review copy supplied by Berg publshers) This book serves no useful purpose. It is a translation of six interviews with Hollywood filmmakers selected from the 1995 collection of such interviews published under the title 15 ans de cinema américain, which brought …

Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam University Press, 2005. ISBN: 978 90 5356 594 0 (pb) US$32.50 ISBN: 978 90 5356 602 2 (hb) US$80.50 566pp (Review copy supplied by Amsterdam University Press) A book on European cinema by Thomas Elsaesser would be an exciting prospect indeed, but unfortunately this is not it. This is an …

Jo Fox, Film Propaganda in Britain and Nazi Germany: World War II Cinema. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007. ISBN: 9 7818 597389 62 £17.99 (pb) 368pp (Review copy supplied by Berg publishers) This book is at once extremely informative and extremely disappointing. For those desiring specific knowledge about the principal Nazi propaganda films produced between 1939 and 1945 and …

Naomi Greene, Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in Postwar French Cinema . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. ISBN 0 691 02959 8 234pp US$18.95 (Review copy supplied by Princeton University Press) Uploaded 1 November 2000 This intelligent and thoughtful book looks at the way in which French history and culture has been represented in certain post-war French films, notably …