Author Archive for: ‘Paul Ramaeker’
The West Wing
Janet McCabe, The West Wing (TV Milestones series) Wayne State University Press, 2012 ISBN: 9 780 81433436 2 US$15.95(pb) 133pp (Review copy supplied by Wayne State University Press) The scholarly genre of the slim-volume-on-one-film and/or-TV-programme is a burgeoning one this millennium. BFI popularized the notion in the early 1990s with their Film Classics series, now at around 150 titles. The …
Read MoreDirected by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster
Warren Buckland, Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006. ISBN: 0 8264 1691 8 242pp US$19.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Continuum) Within the last eight years or so, the body of scholarship on contemporary Hollywood cinema has grown exponentially. Prior to this, a few key works, like Timothy Corrigan’s 1991 A cinema …
Read MoreSteven Soderbergh
Aaron Baker, Steven Soderbergh Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011 ISBN: 9 7802 520779 68 US$19.95 (pb) 148pp (Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press) Since the inception of auteurism, studies of directors have proliferated largely in short-form writing, from the capsule entries in Sarris’ The American Cinema to the slim volumes on directors included in the Secker and …
Read More“The Uncensored Cortex”: Psychedelia and American Avant-garde Film in the 1960s
The youth-movement counterculture(s) of the 1960s remain contested terrain for commentators across the ideological spectrum, interpreted and re-interpreted from every conceivable political or socio-cultural perspective. The struggle over the counterculture’s meaning in relation to larger historical contexts, in fact, mirrors its own concerns with representations of itself. One abiding concern of radical movements of the period was that of authenticity …
Read MoreState of Play: Contemporary “High-End” TV Drama
Robin Nelson, State of Play: Contemporary “High-End” TV Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN: 978-0-7190-7311-3 US$24.95 (pb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press) Even with the continued growth of television studies in the academy and television criticism in the popular press, little has been written about television aesthetics. In the thirteen years since John Thornton Caldwell’s Televisuality (1995), only …
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