Author Archive for: ‘Jan-Christopher Horak’

Klaus Kreimeier, The UFA Story. A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945. London: University of California Press, 1999. ISBN 0-520-22069-2 451pp US$19.95 (Review copy supplied by California University Press) Uploaded 1 November 2000 The story of the Universum-Film A.G., popularly known as UFA, is indelibly bound to the history of Germany’s cinema. As perhaps no other film company in …

Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams. Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2013 ISBN 978 0 8223 5453 6 US$27.95 (pb) 369 pages (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) One can easily argue that travelogues were present at the very birth of cinema, given that the Lumiére Brothers’ first film program in the …

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

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

Francis Guerin, A Culture of Light. Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 8166 4286 9 314 pp US$24.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) As Thomas Elsaesser notes in his book on German cinema, Weimar Cinema and After (2000), the historiography of German cinema in the 1920s was dominated for decades …

Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle (eds), Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-8166-8037-5 US$29.95 (pb) 776 pages (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) First published in 1997, Tender Comrades has been republished by University of Minnesota in their commendable series of reprints. Based at least conceptually on a never …

Charlie Keil & Shelly Stamp (ed.), American Cinema’s Transitional Era. Audiences, Institutions, Practices. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. ISBN: 0 520 24025 1 US$60.00 (hb) ISBN: 0 520 24027 8 US$24.95 (pb) 371 pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) While the study of early cinema has successfully established itself in the last twenty years as a …

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

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

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

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

Lutz Koepnick, The Dark Mirror. German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002. ISBN 0 520 23310 7 334 pp US $ 24.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) The subtitle of Lutz Koepnick’s book may be taken literally, the subject of this ambitious and ground-breaking work being German cinema in the Third …

Maya Montañez Smukler, Liberating Hollywood. Women Directors & the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019 ISBN 9780813587479 US$46.80 (pb) 351pp (Review copy supplied by Rutgers University Press) In October 2019, it was announced in the trade press that Elaine May was, at 86 years old, making her first film in more than three …

Sheri Chinen Biesen, Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 8018 82218 4 243pp US$20 (pb) (Review copy supplied by John Hopkins University Press) The literature on film noir has grown positively voluminous over the past twenty years. Alain Silver, whose Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (1979) has become …

Jeffrey Skoller, Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film. Minneapolis MN, University of Minnesota University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 8166 4232 X 232pp US$25.00 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Minnesota University Press) Most film histories of the avant-garde have approached their subject from a formalist and aesthetic point of view, less concerned with the content of images than with …

Klaus Kreimeier, The UFA Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945. London: University of California Press, 1999. ISBN 0-520-22069-2 451pp US$19.95 (Review copy supplied by California University Press) Uploaded 30 June 2000 The story of the Universum-Film A.G., popularly known as Ufa, is indelibly bound to the history of Germany’s cinema. As perhaps no other film company in …

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

Paula Amad, Counter-Archive. Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète New York: Columbia University Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-231-13501-6 US$34.95 (pb) 408 pp (Review copy supplied by Footprint Books) Until research in this century revealed its existence, Albert Kahn’s “Archives de la Planète” had not even warranted a footnote in film history, its film collections of unedited, documentary …

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

Stephan Oettermann The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (Trans. By Deborah Lucas Schneider) New York: Zone Books, 1997 ISBN 0-942299-83-3, 407 pp, $37.50 US (cloth). Uploaded 16 April 1999 A major controversy has ignited in the United States among Civil War historians and preservationists over the Cyclorama Center at Gettysburg, discussed by Thomas Hine in the New York Times. Designed …

Anne Morey, Hollywood Outsiders. The Adaptation of the Film Industry 1913-1934. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003. ISBN 0 8166 3733 4 242 pp US $ 22.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) It is perhaps a sign of the maturity of the field of film studies that ever more complex and multi-dimensional models of the film …