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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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)…