Author Archive for: ‘Jodi Brooks’
Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film
Arthur Knight, Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. ISBN 0 8223 2963 8 338 pp US$21.95 (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Arthur Knight’s Disintegrating the Musical examines the place of African American performance in the film musical, tracing both its histories in, and impact on, the genre. Knight has set …
Read MoreCinema, Disappearance and Scale in David Lynch’s Inland Empire
In the lead-up to and long shadow following cinema’s centenary in 1995, film has increasingly been understood and defined in terms of its disappearance or demise. Over the past decade, film studies conferences have been regularly peppered with papers on cinema’s passing, journals have run special issues on the medium’s anticipated death, and leading film theorists have bookended their publications …
Read MoreThe Sound of Knocking: Jacques Becker’s Le trou
Uploaded 1 March 2001 Jacques Becker’s Le trou (The Hole France 1960) is a particular kind of sound film. It captures your ears, takes them and holds them weightless as it traces a sensory rush across their surface. Playing us between sound and silence, feeding and holding our anticipation of and need for the next aural fill, the film carries us suspended and attentive …
Read MoreThe Lure of the breach: invisibility and the dissolution of cinematic vision
In her chapter on Tom Joslin’s video AIDS diary Silverlake Life: The View from here (1993), Peggy Phelan argues that Joslin’s video summons and directs its viewer to a kind of off-screen time. Discussing a close up of Joslin’s eye that appears toward the end of the video, Phelan writes that as his eye “gazes in an out-of-focus way at something whose …
Read MoreMissed Beats: Unseen Cinema and a Cinema of the Unseen (or Stella Dallas, Again)
In the closing moments of King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937), Stella/Barbara Stanwyck becomes a spectator to a scene predicated on her absence, a scene she has nevertheless made possible. The scene is that of her daughter Laurel’s wedding, a wedding that stands for both social mobility and happiness in the film (though as the spectator has been a silent and …
Read MoreThe Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora
Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. ISBN 0 8223 3643 x US$22.95 (pb) 304pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Theirs was in fact a unique and legitimate form of musical theatre, as most commentators would recognize and most black audiences would appreciate. But it …
Read MoreSuspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture London and Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. ISBN 0 262 03265 1 397pp US$39.95 (cloth) (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) Uploaded 1 November 2000 In a class not so long ago, during one of those sessions where I’d decided we were going to do some “close reading,” I noticed that …
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