Category Archive for: ‘Issue 7 – Reviews’

Without Lying Down. Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood

Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down. Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1997 ISBN 0520214927 475pp $US 17.95 (pb) Uploaded 1 July 1999 Biography is a significant mode of narrating Hollywood history. It is also a significant mode of writing new players into standard film histories. The creative role of women behind the …

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The Victorian Internet : The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers

Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet : The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers. Walker Publishing Company. 1998 ISBN 0 8027 1342 4 240pp US $22.00 Uploaded 1 July 1999 We live in an age where knowledge of the past has all but disappeared from everyday thinking. The managerial ethic which assumes that an MBA is all …

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Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture

Michael Anderegg Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1999. ISBN 0 231 11229 7 216pp $16.50 US (PB) Uploaded 16 April 1999 Long before Shakespeare in Love became the most commercially successful depiction of the bard and his work on screen, there were directors in love with Shakespeare. Loving Will, as opposed to flirting with him, demands …

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The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film

Mikhail Iampolski, The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film. University of California Press. 1998 ISBN 0-520-08530-2 285pp $22.50 US (pb) Uploaded 1 July 1999 | 1709 words Academic books from American university publishing houses are frequently characterised by two features: covers with the sensual appeal of perfume packaging to attract readers and lists of acknowledgements which situate the author, attempting …

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Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes

Andrew Horton & Stuart Y.McDougal (editors), Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1998 ISBN 0520205936 362pp $US 19.95 (pb) Uploaded 1 July 1999 If the central injunction of structuralist and post-structuralist theory was something like “think relationally, not substantially”, then cinematic remaking offers a particularly compelling model of a practice which makes it impossible …

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The Art of Record : A Critical Introduction to DocumentaryNo Other Way to Tell it: Dramadoc/docudrama on TelevisionDocumentary Film Classics

John Corner, The Art of Record : A Critical Introduction to Documentary, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-7190-4687-4 212 pp Derek Paget, No Other Way to Tell it: Dramadoc/docudrama on Television, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998. ISBN 0 7190 4533 9 213 pp William Rothman, Documentary Film Classics, New York, Cambrige University Press, 1997. ISBN 521456819 218 pp Uploaded 1 July 1999 …

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The Birds

Camille Paglia, The Birds. British Film Institute: BFI Film Classics. 1998 ISBN 0851706517 104pp A$19.95 (Pb) Evan Hunter, Me and Hitch. Faber & Faber. 1997 ISBN 0571193064 96pp US$12.95(Pb) Uploaded 1 July 1999 Camille Paglia’s BFI Film Classics monograph on The Birds is an odd duck, and Evan Hunter’s alternately warm and bitter memoir of writing that film, Me and Hitch, is a croaking raven of …

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Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond

Robin Wood, Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998 ISBN: 0-231-07605-3 352pp $US22.50 (pb) Uploaded 1 July 1999 This book has two authors: a clever, worm-catching Robin and a very thick Wood. Robin is a shrewd analyst of other critics’ logic and an attentive, informed observer of a wide range of films. Wood …

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Celluloid Dreams: A Century of Film in New Zealand & 80 Turbulent Years: The Paramount Theatre Wellington 1917-1997

David Lascelles, Celluloid Creams: A Century of Film in New Zealand. Wellington: IPL Books. 1997 ISBN 0 908876 96 3. 144 pp. NZ$39.95 within New Zealand or $45 overseas (Pb) Fax 64-4-499-3032. David Lascelles, 80 Turbulent Years: The Paramount Theatre Wellington 1917-1997. Wellington: Millwood Press. 1997 ISBN 0-908582-80-3. 90 pp. NZ $39.95 (Pb) Uploaded 1 July 1999 Both Celluloid Dreams: A Century …

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Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture

Linda S. Kauffman, Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. University of California Press, California, 1998. ISBN 0-520-21032-8 324pp $18.95 US (pb) Uploaded 16 April 1999 Although we’re gravitating closer to the unfleshed dimensions of cyberspace it seems to me that our obsessions with the body are just as delirious as they’ve always been. The 90’s …

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Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History

Tony Barta (editor), Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History. Westport Ct: Praeger. 1998 ISBN 0-275-95402-1 279pp $59.95(hb) Uploaded 1 July 1999 The essays in Tony Barta’s collection focus on the relationship between film and history – on the ‘many ways in which the past is “screened” ‘; an attempt to ‘integrate the academic culture of historians….with the …

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