Author Archive for: ‘Wheeler Winston Dixon’
Flash Gordon and the 1930s and 40s Science Fiction Serial
Motion picture serials, the forerunner of today’s serialized television dramas, have been around since the earliest days of the narrative cinema. Exhibitors rapidly realized that in order to assure continued audience attendance, open ended “cliff hangers” were sure to keep viewers returning week after week, to find out the latest plot twists, character developments, and of course, how the hero …
Read MoreThe British ‘B’ Film
Stephen Chibnall and Brian McFarlane, The British ‘B’ Film. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-84457-319-6 US$30.00 (pb) 256pp (Review copy supplied by BFI/Palgrave Macmillan) Let me say right off that this is an excellent book on a topic that certainly deserves attention; the low-budget British feature film, as produced from the 1930s through the late 1960s (roughly), and released mostly …
Read MoreWavelength
Elizabeth Legge, Wavelength. London: Afterall Books, 2009 ISBN-10: 1-846380-56-1 US$16.00 (pb) 112pp (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) Michael Snow’s Wavelength (US 1966) is a groundbreaking film in every sense of the word, for it marked the end of an era in experimental cinema, and the beginning of the structuralist movement. Elizabeth Legge, one of the latter day champions of the film, …
Read MoreThe Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II
David Welky, The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-0801890444 US$45.00 (pb) 448pp (Review copy supplied by John Hopkins University Press) This is a superb book, smoothly written, skillfully designed and researched, and is easily the text on the subject of the Hollywood studios’ reaction in the …
Read MoreThe Anatomy of Harpo Marx
Wayne Koestenbaum, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780520269019 US$29.95 (pb) 336pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) This is an eccentric, or perhaps concentric book, in the best possible sense of both words, an extended meditation on the on-screen persona of Harpo Marx, circling around a framing quote from Roland Barthes …
Read MoreAndy Warhol’s Blow Job
Peter Gidal, Andy Warhol’s Blow Job. London: Afterall Books, 2008. ISBN: 1-846380-41-3 US$16.00 (pb) 112pp (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) During its most influential “Silver” period, Andy Warhol’s factory churned out a torrent of paintings, sculptures, and films – films that pretty much reinvented the cinema from the ground up. In this short book, filmmaker and critic Peter Gidal …
Read MoreBeyond Characterization: Performance in 1960s Experimental Cinema
Abstract The New American Cinema of the 1960s differed from conventional models of filmmaking in many ways, embracing chance, roughness of physical execution, an impoverishment of technical and financial facilities, but also freeing the filmmakers to create personal films that reflected their lives, their sexuality, and their social beliefs. The “actors” in these films are really performing themselves, even …
Read MoreQuota Quickies: The Birth of the British ‘B’ Film
Steve Chibnall, Quota Quickies: The Birth of the British ‘B’ Film. London: BFI, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-1844571550 US$28.95 (pb) 329pp (Review copy supplied by BFI Publishing) Steve Chibnall is a well-known and well-regarded film historian who specializes in British cinema, and here he tackles an area that has been ignored by many other film scholars, and does it magnificently. In Quota Quickies: …
Read MoreFilms by Gordon Ball (dvd review)
(Canyon Cinema.www.canyoncinema.com) US$50 (individual) US$150 (institution) Some films move you, some films entertain you, and some films enlighten you. Watching Gordon Ball’s films is a transcendent experience, and I’m sure that’s just what Ball intended; viewing them in sequence is to follow the trajectory of a life from ecstatic youth and endless possibility into the more circumscribed and difficult terrain …
Read MoreIdols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s, Patrice Petro (ed.)
New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-8135-4732-9 US$25.95(pb) 328pp (Review copy supplied by Rutgers University Press) This excellent volume, part of the series Star Decades: American Culture/American Cinema, edited by Murray Pomerance and Adrienne L. McLean for Rutgers University Press (five volumes published, five more forthcoming, covering each decade of the 20th century in American cinema from the perspective of …
Read MoreWorking Within the System: An Interview with Gerry O’Hara
Gerry O’Hara is a true original, and if he never really got the chance to definitively climb out of the ranks of assistant directors into the realm of full-fledged feature directors, he nevertheless managed to carve out a solid career in the cinema working with such luminaries as Sir Laurence Olivier, Ronald Neame, Michael Powell, Sir Carol Reed, Anatole Litvak, …
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