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Introducing Occasional Papers

Welcome to Screening The Past’s series of Occasional Papers, an initiative to extend the space of the journal and publish essays and articles longer than the customary 5000 word length. Three Occasional Papers will be published within a year and released in between each issue of the journal.

‘Give It a Go You Apes’: Relations Between the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, and the Early Australian Film Industry (1954–1970)

This paper extends our previous analyses of the early history of the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, by examining the relations between the festivals and the Australian film industry, from 1954 to 1970. [1] Like those previous papers, it is built on the premise that the history of the two Festivals is best understood as an ongoing negotiation between the …

China’s New “Women’s Cinema”

Chris Berry, “China’s New Women’s Cinema” originally appeared in Camera Obscura, Volume 18. Copyright 1989 Camera Obscura. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. “Women’s cinema” (女的电影院 ) is a term that has come into common critical usage in the People’s Republic of China over the last year or two. Certainly, Chinese commentators are aware …

Ford At Fox Part 3b

Four Men and a Prayer (1938) Let’s get this straight first off: Four Men and a Prayer is not a religious picture. Far from it. Or, at least, given the angelic overtones of this last shot, it is no more a religious picture than Doctor Bull is. The print on the DVD is excellent. There are no extras. It shares …

Films 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 …

Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, Maitland McDonagh

Maitland McDonagh, Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 ISBN 978-0-8166-5607 US$22.95 (pb) 328pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Towards the end of ‘An Interview with Dario Argento’, Maitland McDonagh suggests to the director that only he “could take the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and make a …

Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince, Mark A. Vieira

Mark A. Vieira, Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince Berkeley, University of California Press, 2010 ISBN: 9780520260481 US$34.95 (hb) 528pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) Irving Grant Thalberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1899 with a congenital heart condition that would kill him 37 years later. By the time of his death he had …

Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier, Homay King

Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4759-0 US $22.95 (pb) 216pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier develops an analytical framework for attending to a broad range of visual texts, from cinema to art installations. Homay King is equally expansive in terms of the historical periods and genres from which she …

Film Violence: History, Ideology, Genre, James Kendrick

London: Wallflower Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-906660-26-0 UK£12.99 (pb) 144pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) Upon first receiving a copy of James Kendrick’s Film Violence: History, Ideology, Genre, the thought of a book consisting of only one hundred and thirteen pages (plus notes) that deals with the broad concept of film violence instantly flagged suspicion. This book is part of …

The Last Silent Picture Show: Silent Films on American Screens in the 1930s, William M. Drew

Lanham/Toronto/Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2010 ISBN 978-0-8108-7680-4 US$50 (pb) 243 pp (Review copy supplied by The Scarecrow Press, Inc) The afterlife of silent films has lasted much longer than anyone would have predicted in 1930, the year most industry people declared the medium dead. In transitioning from commercial product to historicized, aesthetic object, silent film has survived more than …

New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves, Darcy Paquet

(Short Cuts)London: Wallflower Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-1-906660-25-3 UK£12.99 (pb) 135pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves reads as a series of vignettes through which the reader glimpses the turmoil of the last three decades of South Korean history. The glimpses are in fact iconic scenes from the films of New Korean Cinema that the …

Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents, Tom Kemper

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780520257078 US$21.95 (pb) 312pp (review copy supplied by University of California Press) Were Tom Kemper naming his book right now, he might be tempted to title it ‘The Social Network’,d befitting the nexus of personal connections that formed the basis for the rise of Hollywood talent agents in the 1930s. …

British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade, Laurel Forster and Sue Harper (eds)

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. ISBN-13: 978-1-4438-1734-9 US$67.99 (hb) 310pp (Review copy supplied by Cambridge Scholars Publishing) As Laurel Forster and Sue Harper relate in their Acknowledgments and Preface, the scholarship in British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade was borne out of a multi-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research project on British cinema in the …

Casablanca: Movies and Memory, Marc Augé (Translated and with an Afteword by Tom Conley)

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota PressISBN: 978-0-8166-5641-7 US$18.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) In this essay, prolific French anthropologist Marc Augé uses the means of autobiography to investigate the traumatic collective history of France during the second World War. What sets this elegant work apart from mere remembrance or dry theory is Augé’s use of the film …

English Filming, English Writing, Jefferson Hunter

Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University press, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-253-22177-3 US$24.95 (pb) 376pp (Review copy supplied by Indiana University Press) The founding argument of this book is stated on the first page: “(The author) is obliged to take literary connections into account…” Why is he obliged to do so? Because: “English filming turns out to have a great deal to do …

Calling All Cars: Radio Dragnets and the Technology of Policing, Kathleen Battles

Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8166-4914-3 US$22.50 (pb) 282pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) For anyone interested in the representation of crime, Kathleen Battles’ study of the radio crime drama in the 1930s is essential reading. While Battles admits that she is primarily concerned with addressing a gap in the cultural history of …

The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclopedia, James M. Welsh, Gene D. Phillips, and Rodney F. Hill (eds)

Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2010 ISBN: 978 0 8108 7651 4 US$70.00 (hb) 328pp (Review copy supplied by The Scarecrow Press) James M. Welsh, in his Introduction (“So Why Does Francis Coppola Deserve His Own Encyclopedia”) to The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclopedia, writes that the main function of the text could be worded as explaining “why Coppola matters.” …

Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory – Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, (Edited by Erica Carter, Translated by Rodney Livingstone)

Berghan books, 2010 ISBN 978-1-84545-660-3 US$95.00 (hb) 314pp (Review copy supplied by Berghan Books) The work of Béla Balázs (1884-1994) belongs to the classical film theory period, a period which came to an end around the mid-1960s. The two most prominent figures of classical film theory are Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) and André Bazin (1918-1958), whose works have not only overshadowed …

Idols 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 …

Wake in Fright, Tina Kaufman

Sydney: Currency Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-86819-864-4 AU$16.95 (pb) 71pp (Review copy supplied by Currency Press) “It’s death to farm out here, it’s worse than death in the mines; you want them to sing bloody opera as well?” Doc (played by Donald Pleasance, qted by Kaufman, p. 26). Tina Kaufman notes in her study of Wake in Fright (Australia/USA 1971) that …

Neo-Noir, Mark Bould, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck (eds.).

London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-1-906660-17-8 (pbk) UK 16.14 ISBN 978-1-906660-18-5 (hbk) UK 45 267pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) It is hard to believe that that the term neo-noir has been in common currency for approximately the past forty years. Bu, t with the exception of the pioneering works of Alain Silver and James Ursini, …

Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel, Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis (eds.)

Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010 ISBN: 978 1 4384 3030 0 US$ 29.95 (pb) 264 pp. (Review copy supplied by SUNY Press) Second Takes examines a proliferating cinematic mode of production that increasingly informs film release schedules: the sequel. As Michael Cieply states in a 2007 New York Times article, “In the last five years, only about 20 percent of …

On Michael Haneke, Brian Price and John David Rhodes (editors)

Detroit, Wayne State University Press ISBN: 978-0-8143-3405-8 US$29.95(pb) 304pp (Review copy supplied by Wayne State University Press) Introducing their edited collection of work on Michael Haneke, Brian Price and John David Rhodes describe the director as “one of the most innovative filmmakers of this or any other moment of film history” (p. 8). This type of declaration, common to many …

Introduction to Reprints of Two Essays on Blake Edwards

Years ago we were sitting in Blake Edwards’s bungalow on the Culver Studios lot. When he walked in to begin a long interview, he remarked that he had just come from a session with his analyst, Milton Wexler, where they had discussed our books on his films. We lightheartedly asked whether, after a lifetime of psychoanalysis and our two books …

Detecting, Defecting & Whistling in the Dark: The Films of Blake Edwards

This article was originally published in Velvet Light Trap no. 13 Fall 1974. It is published here with the kind permissions of the authors. A woman enters a bar where she expects to meet and negotiate with her sister’s kidnapper. A man looks her over. Perhaps he is the man, but, strangely, he moves to another room. She, hesitatingly, follows. …

“Crazy World Full of Crazy Contradictions”, Blake Edwards’ Victor/Victoria

This article was originally published in Wide Angle vol. 5 no. 4 1983. It is published here with the kind permissions of the authors. When we first see Victoria Grant (Julie Andrews) in Blake Edwards’ Victor/Victoria, she is friendless, without money or a job and starving. When her hotel manager demands the rent she hasn’t paid for two weeks and …

On Blake Edwards

This article was originally published in American Directors Volume II, edited by Jean-Pierre Coursoson and Pierre Sauvage (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1983). It is published here with the kind permission of the author. For the appearances are glimpses of the unrevealed. (Anaxagoras) Blake Edwards, the most important comic stylist (along with Richard Lester) of the 1960s, and without peer today, parlayed …

The Bitter Essence of Blake Edwards

This article was first published in the Village Voice, 5 May 1987. It is published here with the kind permission of the author. Let’s talk bottom line for a sec. With Blind Date Blake Edwards has bounced back at the box office from almost certain oblivion after his distinctive brand of cerebral slapstick bombed out in A Fine Mess. Indeed, …

Sophisticated Naturalism

Interview with Blake Edwards by Jean-Francois Hauduroy This interview with Blake Edwards was first published in English in Cahiers du cinéma in English, Number 3, 1966. Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holder of the following interview conducted by Jean-Francois Hauduroy reproduced in this Tribute to Blake Edwards. As these efforts were unsuccessful, the copyright holder …

Ridicule and Panic: On Blake Edwards

This article was originally published in the French monthly cinema journal Positif, no. 290, April 1985. It is published here with the kind permission of the author. Translated from the French by Edith Nicolas, with thanks to Adrian Martin and Gabriel Stibio. In A Shot in the Dark (1964), a photograph of the President of the French Republic shaking …

Blake Edwards, Switch, and the Price of a New Man

Cinephiles have a remarkable capacity to abstract the films that they love. If, as Laura Mulvey once put it, narrative cinema is ‘an illusion cut to the measure of desire’, [1] these buffs cut an even finer illusion to the measure of their very particular desire. They can watch the collected works of John Ford and not even remember the …

Topping the Topper: Blake Edwards

Interview by Raffaele Caputo This interview was originally published in Cinema Papers no. 85, November 1991. Leslie Halliwell once wrote of Blake Edwards, “a man of many talents, all of them minor.” This is perhaps the standard view of Edwards among many critics, particularly Anglo-American. He has been described as one who showed a great deal of promise early in …

Strange Bodies: On The Great Race

This article was first published in English in Cahiers du cinéma in English, Number 3, 1966. Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holder of the following article by Serge Daney reproduced here in this Screening The Past Tribute to Blake Edwards. As these efforts were unsuccessful, the copyright holder is asked to contact the Screening The …

The Party

This article was originally published in Movie no. 17 (Winter 1969 – 70). It is published here with the kind permission of the author. Nothing to lose— If we are wise, We’re not expecting rainbow-coloured skies. These are lines from the song which Michèle (Claudine Longet) sings halfway through the film and the party; the musicians played it at the …

You Can’t Keep A Good Auteur Down / Cruel To Be Kind

You Can’t Keep A Good Auteur Down This article was originally published in The Chicago Reader 23 August 1974. It is published here with the kind permission of the author. Most of the people I know don’t seem to like Julie Andrew’s too much. And so, I suppose that most of the people I know aren’t going to like The …

The Party

“In India we don’t think who we are, we know who we are.” Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party (1968) In film after film Blake Edwards explored the various ways in which human beings expose, mask, shape and shed their identities. This theme is the driving force behind The Party and it takes the film in unexpected directions. It also …

“The China Film”: Madame Chiang Kai-shek in Hollywood

The time is short; the enemy is sly; And all who once loved peace and sorely tried; But she shall take her people this reply: “Our cause is common, and your pride our pride Your triumph ours: sacred as ours, your loam,” When she goes through the far horizon, home. – Anonymous, Sonnet III, “Three Sonnets Written for Madame Chiang” …

Tokens of Exchange, or The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Lover: Marginal Asian Characters in 1920s Australian Cinema

Since Australia’s film renaissance from the mid-1970s, there have been numerous films featuring Asian characters in both leading and marginal roles. This paper traces the historical representation of Asian characters in Australian feature films, focusing on films from the 1920s as establishing some of the earliest tropes that have persisted through to contemporary examples. Character types—from the cook to the …

Working 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, …

Two Channels, Two Truths: Reporting the Iraq War in Control Room

The image we make ourselves of history is, more than ever, shaped by the audiovisual record. But the documentary image and sound cannot provide a transparent view on reality; it represents a world by mediation through an interpretive act. Therefore the documentary film’s historical account requires a perceptual engagement that resists the pull of the indexical and views the audiovisual …

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