Author Archive for: ‘Matt Wanat’

Wheeler Winston Dixon (ed.), American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations. Oxford: Berg, 2006. ISBN: 9781845204358 £14.99 (pb) 283pp (Review copy supplied by Berg) As the title suggests, Wheeler Winston Dixon’s American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations applies the now half-century old decades formula to the study of 1940s Hollywood film. The purpose of the book, and of the …

Gabrielle Murray, This Wounded Cinema, this Wounded life: Violence and Utopia in the Films of Sam Peckinpah. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2004. ISBN: 0 2759805 88 US$89.95 (hb) 176pp All they saw was the violence. (Pauline Kael qtd. in Murray, 6) Analyzing the work of Sam Peckinpah is a little like defending Huckleberry Finn or Heart of Darkness; each endeavor endlessly conceals, even as …

Marguerite H. Rippy, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2009 US$35.00 (pb) 223pp (Review copy supplied by Southern Illinois University Press) Marguerite H. Rippy’s book on Orson Welles offers a provocative, ground-breaking, and occasionally scattered exploration of Welles’s construction as a ‘star director’ and the significance of this cultural-textual project to a …

Nitzan Ben-Shaul, Film: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg, 2007 ISBN-13: 978-1845203665 US$19.95 (pb) 192pp (Review copy supplied by Berg Publishers) Nitzan Ben-Shaul’s Film: The Key Concepts is part of a “Key Concepts” series from Berg that “aims to cover the core disciplines and the key cross-disciplinary ideas across the Humanities and Social Sciences.” Given its purpose, Film: The Key Concepts succeeds admirably. Divided into …