Author Archive for: ‘Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith’

Johannes Ehrat, Cinema and Semiotic: Peirce and Film Aesthetics, Narration, and Representation. Toronto studies in semiotics and communication. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 8020 3912 x 682pp US$95.00 (hardcover) (Review copy supplied by the University of Toronto Press) This large book serves many purposes: to introduce readers to the pragmatic and semiotic writings of …

Julianne Pidduck, Contemporary Costume Film: Space, Place and the Past. London: BFI, 2004. ISBN: 1 84457 054 1 188pp US$27.50 (pb) (Review copy supplied by BFI Publishing) Costume film is sometimes called “costume drama”, “(British) heritage cinema”, “period film” or “quality cinema.” On one hand, its emphasis on visual spectacle, frequent use of beautiful painterly mise–en–scènes and adaptation of much-loved …

David C. Gillespie, Russian Cinema. Inside Film Series. Harlow, Eng., London: Longman, Pearson Education, 2003. ISBN: 0 582 43790 3 201pp US$11.95 (pb) Russian cinema, though represented often by the bipartite division of Soviet and post-Soviet films, reveals figures and a world view bound to the motherland (the landscape), ingrained in ideology, inspired and penetrated by art, literature, and theatre, …

Alexandra Juhasz (ed.), Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video. Visible Evidence, vol. 9. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. ISBN: 0 8166 3372 X 343pp US$22.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Women of Vision consists of the author’s introduction and afterword and twenty interviews with women involved in the filmmaking, production, distribution, …

Joe Milutis, Ether: The Nothing that Connects Everything. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 8166 4644 9 208 pp. US$ 29.95 (hb) (Review copy supplied by the University of Minnesota Press) The term “ether” has multiple points of reference, but it can still mean nothingness. Ruminating about ether (or the ether) is like mulling over infinity …

Irving Singer, Reality Transformed: Film as Meaning and Technique. Cambridge, Mass. & London: The MIT Press, 1998. 216pp US$18.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by The MIT Press) According to Singer, there are two kinds of film theorists – formalists and realists – and since the formative years of film theory their differences have been at the core of controversies in …