Author Archive for: ‘Mike Walsh’

Michael Ingham, Johnnie To Kei-fung’s PTU. Hong University Press, Hong Kong, 2009 ISBN: 978-962-209-919-7 HKD135.00 (pb) 149pp (Review copy supplied by Hong Kong University Press hkupress@hkucc.hku.hk) It has become something of a commonplace to observe that, by the time cinema studies discovers a film movement, it is generally over. For the past couple of years, even as the books have …

Joe McElhaney (ed.), Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment. Detroit: Wayne State University, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-8143-3307-5 US$29.95 (pb) 472pp (Review copy supplied by Wayne State University Press http://wsupress.wayne.edu/) For a discipline which frequently stresses the importance of a historical perspective, film studies has rarely reflected on its own history. Last year we were reading Deleuze, this year we are “doing” …

Catherine Russell, The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-8223-4312-7 US$47.95 (pb) 465pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the great breakthrough for film historians was the increased availability of films made before 1910. In the new century, the availability …

Poshek Fu and David Desser (ed), The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN 0 521 77235 4 (hb) 0 521 77602 3 (pb) 352pp $Au59.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Cambridge University Press) This is the second anthology on Hong Kong cinema to appear recently, alongside Esther Yau’s At Full Speed (University of Minnesota Press, 2001). …

Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd, Leos Carax. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0 7190 6315 9 244pp UK£11.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press) It’s about time we had a book on Leos Carax. Although he has made only four feature films over the course of a twenty year career, he is a major …

Sarah Street, Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA. New York: Continuum, 2002. ISBN 0 8264 1396 X 280pp UK£18.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Continuum International Publishing Group) Sarah Street has been a major figure in recent studies of the British cinema industries with well-known works such as Cinema and State (1985) and the 1997 British entry in Routledge’s National …

Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ISBN: 0-226-98237-8 (hb) US$75 ISBN: 0-226-98238-6 (pb) US$30 488pp (Review copy supplied by University of Chicago Press) As the surging metropolises of contemporary China loom increasingly large for international economies, as international film industries look toward China as a source of production …

David West, Chasing Dragons: An Introduction to the Martial Arts Film. London, New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006. ISBN: 978 1 85043 982 0 £12.99 (pb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by I. B. Tauris) The cover of this book tells us that the author is a martial arts practitioner and manager of “former Ultimate Combat World Champion Pierre Guillet.” With …

Daisuke Miyao, The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013 ISBN 978 0 8223 5422 2 US$27.95 (pb) 400pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Perhaps the most important achievement in cinema history in the 21st century has been the amount we have learned about Japanese cinema during the silent and studio …

Alistair Phillips and Julian Stringer (eds.), Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts. Oxford: Routledge, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-415-32848-7 US$35.95 (pb) 363pp (Review copy supplied by Routledge) The study of Japanese cinema has typically held a high place among national cinema studies for a couple of reasons. The first is, of course, the quality of the films, but beyond this, there has always …

Chi-Yun Shin and Julian Stringer (eds.), New Korean Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 7486 1851 1 (hb) £45.00 ISBN: 0 7486 1852 X (pb) £16.99 234pp (Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press) South Korean cinema is the latest in a line of national cinemas which have come to international prominence in the past decade. Unlike national …

Ramon Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution London: British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-84457-411-7 US$85 (hb) 176pp (Review copy supplied by Palgrave Macmillan) Ramon Lobato opens this impressively researched book with a personal anecdote about attending the Melbourne International Film Festival and finding many of the same films at a shop “of dubious legality” just around …

Kyung Hyun Kim, Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011 ISBN978-0-8223-5101-6 US$24.95(pb) 256pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Kyung Hyun Kim seems well placed to write an interesting study of contemporary Korean cinema. The UC Irvine professor has already written one book on the subject, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema …

Matthew Solomon (ed.), Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: George Méliès’s Trip to the Moon Albany: SUNY Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-1-4384-3580-0 $29.95 (pb) 271pp (Review copy supplied by SUNY press) George Méliès has always figured as a term in larger debates: as a fantasist in opposition to the realism of the Lumières, or as an early narrativist in Sadoul’s teleological …

Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009 (first published 2002) ISBN 1 86064 749 9 UK£18.99 (pb) 296pp (Review copy supplied by I.B. Tauris) All the action here is after the colon. The label “An Introduction” should alert you to the ambitions and purpose of this book. Do not look here for new primary research or …

Michael Hammond, The big show: British cinema culture in the Great War 1914-1918. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 85989 758 3 304pp £45 (hb) (Review copy supplied by University of Exeter Press) While film studies has traditionally been grounded in textual analysis, it continues to try out models for incorporating context and reception in its accounts of …

Noël Carroll, Interpreting the Moving Image Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998. ISBN 0 521 58039 0 (cloth) ISBN 0 521 58970 3 (paper), 370pp. Uploaded 18 December 1998 This collection of Noël Carroll’s critical writings stands as a companion to his 1996 collection of theoretical essays, Theorizing the Moving Image. It contains 24 essays published between 1973 and 1990 in anthologies …

Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8166-4942-6 US$22.50 (pb) 257 pages (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) The recent growth of international interest in commercial Hindi cinema has resulted in the publication of a number of books which are important aids to teaching and research in this area. …

Paul Grainge, Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age. London & New York: Routledge, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-415-35405-9 US$34.95 (pb) 224pp (Review copy supplied by Routledge) The brand is the new black. It is related to that last-millenium term synergy, but not simply reducible to synergy. The brand can refer to both the company and the way that companies …

Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr, and Takayuki Tatsumi (eds.), Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8166-4974-7 US$20.00 (pb) 288pp (Review copy supplied by the University of Minnesota Press) Being a fan of anime and manga in the west inevitably involves seizing works out of their …

Zhang Zhen (ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4074-4 US$26.95 (pb) 447pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) If we know anything at all about China right now, it is that it is the site of ferocious processes of change. One of …

Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age Indiana University Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-0-253-22252-7 US$24.95 (pb) 392pp (Review copy supplied by Indiana University Press) Kerins says at the outset that a few years ago it was customary to begin any book on film sound by stating that it was an area that had been largely ignored, but …

Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (eds.), Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and Emotion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. ISBN 0 8018 6011 3 (pb) 312pp US$17.95 (Review copy supplied by John Hopkins Press) Uploaded 30 June 2000 The case for cognitive approaches in film studies goes something like this: cognitivism sets out to explain the ways we make sense …

Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Film-makers from Iran and Turkey (2nd ed.) Bristol & Chicago: Intellect Books, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-84150-548-0 323pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect) The increasing need to find out about the societies and the cinemas of the region very loosely categorised as the Middle East will give many cinephiles and researchers an …