In Search of Mystery
Bernardo Bertolucci was born (in 1940) into a world - and more specifically, a household - of poetry. “I began writing poetry as soon as I could write, when I…
The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses
Angela Ndalianis, The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland, 2012 ISBN: 978 0 7864 6127 1 US$38.00 (pb) 223pp (Review copy supplied by McFarland…
Richard Linklater (Contemporary Film Directors Series)
David T. Johnson, Richard Linklater (Contemporary Film Directors Series) University of Illinois Press, 2012 ISBN: 978 0252078507 US$22 (pb) 200pp (Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press) “… a…
Cinema
Alain Badiou, Cinema Cambridge, Maiden, ma: Polity, 2013 ISBN: 978-0-7456-5568-0 AUD$34.95 (pb) 320pp (Review copy supplied by Polity publishers) “Alain Badiou’s Cinema: From Stupidity to Hope” For Badiou our society…
Beautiful Fighting Girl (trans. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson)
Saitō Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl, (trans. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011 ISBN: 978 0 8166 5451 2 US$19.95 (pb) 213pp (Review copy supplied by…
Steve McQueen: The Go-Between
Steve McQueen: Schaulager, Basel, Switzerland 16 March – 1 September 2013 ‘Steve McQueen’ at the Schaulager, Basel was a major survey exhibition of nearly all the artist’s work in moving…
Ben Hecht’s Funny Valentine
I. My heart performed a minuet in an ashcan. – Lionel Gans, Specter of the Rose The line seems to keep uneasy company with “Here’s looking…
Béla Tarr, The Time After, Translated from French by Erik Beranek
Jacques Rancière, Béla Tarr, The Time After , Translated from French by Erik Beranek, Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013 ISBN: 9781937561154 US$19.95 (pb) 81pp Erik Beranek’s translation of Jacques Rancière's Béla Tarr, The Time…
The Aquarium Syndrome: On the Films of Michael Mann
Here [the Santa Monica Pier] at dawn, is one of the most insignificant shorelines in the world, just a place to go fishing. The Western World ends on a shore…
Education in the School of Dreams. Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film
Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams. Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2013 ISBN 978 0 8223 5453 6 US$27.95 (pb) 369 pages (Review…
The Western Suburbs
In Johnny Guitar did Nicholas Ray A weird and twisted tale decree: Where meanings, measureless to man, ran Down to Albuquerque … Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954) is a machine…
Digital Memory and the Archive
Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013 ISBN: 978 0 8166 7767 2 US $25.00 (pb) 265pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota…
What Do we Know When We Know Where Something Is? World Cinema and the Question of Spatial Ordering
When the moon hits the eye Like a big pizza pie – That’s amore. – Dean Martin Everything is somewhere. Even Corsica is somewhere. – Nurit (age six) The concept…
Hollywood’s New Yorker: The Making of Martin Scorsese
Marc Raymond, Hollywood’s New Yorker: The Making of Martin Scorsese. Albany: SUNY Press, 2013. ISBN13: 978-1-4384-4572-4 US$26.95 (pb) 261pp (Review copy supplied by SUNY Press) Few contemporary Hollywood directors are…
Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 1, Critical Positions
Noel King, Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams, Australian Film Theory and Criticism, volume 1, Critical Positions Bristol: Intellect Books, 2013. ISBN 978-1-84150-581-7 US$30 (pb) 192pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect…
The Utopia of Film: Cinema and its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik
Christopher Pavsek, The Utopia of Film: Cinema and its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik New York: Columbia University Press, 2013 ISBN: 978-0-231-16099-5 $29.50 (pb) 304pp (Review copy supplied by Columbia…
Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio
Timothy D. Taylor, Mark Katz, Tony Grajeda (eds.) Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio Duke University Press, 2013 US$27.95 (pb) 432pp…
Working in the Global Film and Television Industries: Creativity, Systems, Space, Patronage
Andrew Dawson and Sean P. Holmes (eds.) Working in the Global Film and Television Industries: Creativity, Systems, Space, Patronage Bloomsbury publishers, 2012 ISBN 13: 9781780930237 US$32 (pb) 224pp (Review copy supplied…
The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema
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…
Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image
John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel (eds.) Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image Minneapolis London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-0-8166-6517-4 (Paperback) 376 pp US$27.50 (pb) (Review copy…
Jean-Paul Sartre, Hollywood, Citizen Kane and the Nouvelle Vague
Part I: Dreams I had a lot of dreams about the cinema...I always wanted to make films. I wrote film scripts and some were shot, but in the end it…
Cause and Effect in Merci pour le chocolat
The impact of Hitchcock’s work on that of Claude Chabrol is well known and when Merci pour le chocolat was released in 2000, some critics commented on what they saw…
‘Is Happiness Festival-Shaped Any Longer?’: The Melbourne and Sydney Film Festivals and the Growth of Australian Film Culture 1973-1977.
This is the fourth in a series of papers discussing the history of the Melbourne and Sydney Film Festivals. Three of our previous papers examined the period from the Festivals’…
Green Olives Seeing Red: Gangsters, Youngsters, and Insurrection in Cecil B. DeMille’s This Day and Age (1933)
In 1933, after a decade of filming wives changing husbands before repenting before the sign of the cross, director Cecil B. DeMille briefly stopped filling his celluloid bathtubs with ass’s…
Holding a Mirror to Iran: Liminality and Ambivalence in Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men
The recent proliferation of Iranian women’s diasporic cinema testifies to the importance of recognising and mapping current trends within the growing field of transnational cinema. In particular, the contribution of…
Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez
Adrian Martin, Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez Brooklyn, New York: Punctum Books, 2012 ISBN: 978 0615719 467 US$9.00 (pb) 54 pp…
Chris Marker and Level Five
This is an introductory text written for the Masterclass booklet of the Jeonju International Film Festival in 2009. Three critic-scholars were invited to present a film and speak about their…
‘Thinking Cinematically before Deleuze’
The seven papers included in this special issue of Screening the Past were presented at a workshop on ‘cinematic thinking’ held at the University of New South Wales in Sydney,…
The cinema of Michael Winterbottom
Deborah Allison, The cinema of Michael Winterbottom Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2013 ISBN: 9780739125847 US$32.99 (pb) 224pp (Review copy supplied by Lexington Books) This is the second book-length study devoted…
Early Film-Philosophy: A Dialectical Fable
The philosophy of film remains to be formulated. Jean Epstein, “The Senses 1 b)” (1921) With the demise of ‘grand theory’ in the 1990s, film studies in recent decades has…
Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist
Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle (eds), Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-8166-8037-5 US$29.95 (pb) 776 pages (Review copy supplied by…
Ricciotto Canudo: Cinema Art Language
[1] Introduction In 1908, by announcing the arrival of a new ‘Art’, Ricciotto Canudo introduced into early French film theory the paradigmatic problems of nineteenth century aesthetics. Together these problems…
Ride, Boldly Ride: The Evolution of the American Western
Mary Lea Bandy and Kevin Stoehr, Ride, Boldly Ride: The Evolution of the American Western University of California Press, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-520-25866-2 US $39.95(hb) 344pp (Review copy supplied by University…
October and the Question of Cinematic Thinking
Introduction Eisenstein’s experiments with intellectual montage – the use of montage techniques to do intellectual work – might seem like no more than an episode in the history of Soviet…
The Cinema of Eric Rohmer: Irony, Imagination, and the Social World
Jacob Leigh, The Cinema of Eric Rohmer: Irony, Imagination, and the Social World New York: Continuum, 2012 ISBN: 9 781441198 310 Au$45 (pb) 384pp (Review copy supplied by Continuum) “I…
Eisenstein/ Vygotsky /Luria’s project: Cinematic Thinking and the Integrative Science of Mind and Brain.
Introduction When Sergei Eisenstein died on the 11th of February 1948, a post-mortem examination was conducted to establish the cause of death. His body was subjected to a dissection and…
A Marxist Romanticism? Visconti’s La Terra Trema and the Question of Realism
‘We do not see and hear the universal; only for the spirit is it present.’ (Das Allgemeine also hört man nicht und sieht man nicht, sondern dasselbe ist nur für…
Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany
Frances Guerin, Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012 ISBN: 9 780 816670 079 US$27.95 (pb) 342 pp (Review copy supplied by University…
Serious Film: Cavell, Automatism and Michael Haneke’s Caché
Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film can be regarded as the first broad philosophical examination of cinema, indeed the first philosophy of film that attempts…
From Christian Metz to Life of Pi: Thoughts on Ideology and Cinema
My purpose in this paper is to argue that scholars have for the most part been mistaken with regard to Christian Metz’s arguments in ‘The Imaginary Signifier’[1] . Commentators seem…
Cinema After Deleuze
Richard Rushton, Cinema After Deleuze London: Continuum International Publishing, 2012 ISBN: 9 780 8264389 28 US$29.95 (pb) 184pp (Review copy supplied by Bloomsbury publishing) Of the fruits of philosophers of…
Speakers and Abstracts
Damian Cox, Bond University dcox@bond.edu.au Plato and Eisenstein on the Significance of Montage Plato invented the idea of the cinema in The Republic, not when he imagined moving shadows projected…
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…
The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture, 1933-2000
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Christophe Dupin (ed.) The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture, 1933-2000 Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2012 ISBN: 978 0 7190 7908 5 US$95/UK£65 (hb)…
Sustainable Projections: Concepts in Film Festival Management
Alex Fischer, Sustainable Projections: Concepts in Film Festival Management St Andrews, Scotland: St Andrews Film Studies, 2013 ISBN: 978-0-9563730-8-3 UK£17.99 (pb) 157pp Available from www.stafs.org (Review copy supplied by St.…
Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st-Century Cinema?
J. Hoberman, Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st-Century Cinema? Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2012 ISBN-13: 978-1844677511 US$34.95 (hb) 304pp Review copy supplied by Verso Long-time (but now former) Village Voice…
Hyper Material For Our Very Brain
Philip Brophy, Hyper Material For Our Very Brain Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2012 ISBN: 9 781 8757927 57 Aud$25 (pb) 136pp (Review copy supplied by IMA publishers) Sonority does…
The Hollywood Family Film: A History, From Shirley Temple to Harry Potter
Noel Brown, The Hollywood Family Film: A History, From Shirley Temple to Harry Potter I.B. Tauris, London & New York, 2012 ISBN: 978 1 78076 270 8 US$29 (pb) 276pp…
Mourning Films: A Critical Study of Loss and Grieving in Cinema
Richard Armstrong, Mourning Films: A Critical Study of Loss and Grieving in Cinema McFarland & Company Inc., 2012 ISBN: 978-0-7864-6699-3 US$40.00 (sb) 212pp (Review copy supplied by McFarland publishers) In…
What Are You Laughing At? A Comprehensive Guide to the Comedic Event
Dan O'Shannon, What Are You Laughing At? A Comprehensive Guide to the Comedic Event New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012 ISBN 978 1 4411 6293 9 US$24.95 (pb) 298pp…
British Cinema Comedy
I.Q. Hunter & Laraine Porter, British Cinema Comedy London and New York: Routledge, 2012 ISBN: 978 0 415 6666 7 1 UK £24.99 (pb) 228pp (Review copy supplied by Routledge)…
Falling Women and Fallible Narrators
Several of Max Ophüls’ late films make elaborate use of narrators who, in different ways, tell the story, or at least major parts of it: Lisa (Joan Fontaine) in Letter…
An Abandoned Mine: Notes on Orson Welles’ Radio Work
During his interview sessions with Peter Bogdanovich between 1969 and 1972, director-writer-actor Orson Welles looked back on his work in radio and described the medium as “an abandoned mine”, akin…
Jazz and Cinema: An Interview with Gilles Mouëllic
Translated by Adrian Martin Jean-Baptiste Thoret: Your book title (Jazz et cinéma, Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2000) suggests almost an opposition in kind - as if there was jazz on…
Ford at Fox 4
Ford At Fox 4.1 Introduction to Part 4 4.2 Documentaries (1941-43) 4.3 [My Darling Clementine (1946)] 4.4 When Willie Comes Marching Home (1950) 4.5 This Is Korea! (1951) 4.6 What…
Political Cinema Today – The New Exigencies: For a Republic of Images
Cinema and World ‘World Cinema’, to a French eye, is a very welcoming notion that could mean several different, even contradictory things. Among these, I will evoke three meanings: Because…
Materialist Performance in the Digital Age
There has been a renewed interest in film and video performance over the last decade, evident in the emergence of the VJ (Video Jockey) and VJing as real-time visual performance.…
Sublime Materiality: Un lac
In the opening moments of Philippe Grandrieux’s Un lac (A Lake, 2008), we hear the sharp, rhythmic thwack of an axe. The arms swinging it fly across the screen. Behind…
Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture
Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture New York: NYU Press, 2013 ISBN: 9 7808 1474350 8 $29.95 (US) 352…
Innocent When You Dream: Affect and Perception through Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence
In Passing In Parables for the Virtual (2002), Brian Massumi argues that movement and sensation are integral to the body. Massumi describes the body in motion as in relation to…
The Organology of Dreams and Arche-Cinema
I argued in Le temps du cinema - the third volume of Technics and Time, translated as Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise - that we must refer to…
Foreign Bodies, Community and Trauma in the Films of Claire Denis: Beau Travail (1999), 35 Rhums (2008) and White Material (2009)
… if my films have a common link, maybe it’s being a foreigner – it’s common for people who are born abroad – they don’t know so well where they…
Enfolding Surfaces, Spaces and Materials: Claire Denis’ Neo-Baroque Textures of Sensation
Is it a texture, or a fold of the soul, of thought? – Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque Those familiar with the work of contemporary French director…
“I Dips Me Lid”: The Sentimental Bloke’s Hats
Ginger Mick (Gilbert Emery) and Bill (Arthur Tauchert) in Raymond Longford's The Sentimental Bloke. From the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. Introduction Raymond Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke, completed in…
Il gatto selvatico
Il gatto selvatico (1) Bernardo Bertolucci’s La via del petrolio (The Oil Road) is a film made for RAI television in 1965. The film was commissioned by the Italian oil…
The Immobilised Body: Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange
-1- A small cinema, new and well equipped. In the foreground, an attendant in a white laboratory coat leans over a figure seated in the front row, fussing over him…
Fallout On the Beach
This article draws from primary sources at the Eisenhower Presidential Library, the Department of Defense Film Liaison Branch archive at Georgetown University Special Collections, the Stanley Kramer deposit at UCLA…
Affectless Empathy, Embodied Imagination and The Killer Inside Me
Is it possible for an emotionless psychopath such as Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford (played by Casey Affleck), the mild-mannered murderer in Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me (2010), to experience empathy? [1] This…
The Bloody Innocence of a Dream: Borges, Cammell, Tourneur and the Western
Reality is partial to symmetries and slight anachronisms. - Borges, “The South” [1] I think that human beings are not in a place from the beginning of humanity. We have…
Not Quite
What is a shot? A first definition might proceed as follows: the shot, whether in still photography or cinema, is a record of what happened and is so essentially; there…
A Modern Kiều: Immigration and the Ethics of Sexuality in John Duigan’s Careless Love
In the closing scene of John Duigan’s Careless Love (Australia 2012), the protagonist Linh is seated alone in a dark, imposing hallway outside a university lecture theatre, waiting to take…
De-Westernizing Film Studies
Saër Maty Bâ and Will Higbee (editors) De-Westernizing Film Studies New York: Routledge, 2012 ISBN-13: 978-0415687843 US$34.01 (pb) 296pp (Review copy supplied by Routledge) While it is usually difficult to…
The Cinema of Béla Tarr: The Circle Closes
András Bálint Kovács, The Cinema of Béla Tarr: The Circle Closes London: Wallflower Press, (2013) ISBN: 978-0-231-16531-0 AU$39.95 (pb) 183pp (Review copy supplied by Footprint Books) He was used to…
A Trip to the Moon
The truth of our placement, when film works as art, is a continuous sense of drawing nearer to a place we seek, with some last vital task or piece of…
Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation
Belén Vidal, Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-231-16203-6 $US20 (pb) 144 pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) Belén Vidal’s recent…
Alfred Hitchcock’s America
Murray Pomerance, Alfred Hitchcock’s America Polity, 2013 ISBN: 9 780 74565303 7 AU$29.95 (pb) 352pp (Review copy supplied by Polity press) It is not easy to write a new book…
The Film Experience: An Introduction (3rd ed.)
Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White, The Film Experience: An Introduction (3rd ed.) Boston, New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012 ISBN-13: 978-0-312-68170-8 US$ 86.95 (pb) 544 pp (Review copy supplied by Bedford/St.…
A Musical Neorealism : Jean-Luc Godard’s Une femme est une femme
If I analyse myself today, I see that I always wanted, primarily, to make a film of research under the form of spectacle. (Jean-Luc Godard) I like to say that…
Rosebud Sleds and Horses’ Heads: 50 of Film’s Most Evocative Objects
Scott Jordan Harris Rosebud Sleds and Horses’ Heads: 50 of Film’s Most Evocative Objects Intellect, 2013 ISBN: 9 7817 8320040 5 US$18.00 (pb) 128pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect publishers) In…
Becoming Jack Nicholson: The Masculine Persona from Easy Rider to The Shining
Shaun R. Karli, Becoming Jack Nicholson: The Masculine Persona from Easy Rider to The Shining ISBN: 9 7808 1088598 1 Scarecrow Press, 2012 US$50.00 (hb) 204pp (Review copy supplied by…
Rabbit-Proof Fence (Australian Screen Classics Series)
Larissa Behrendt, Rabbit-Proof Fence (Australian Screen Classics Series) Strawberry Hills: Currency Press, 2012. Co-published with the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) ISBN: 978-0-86819-910-8 AU$16.95 (pb) 94pp (Review copy supplied…
Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Film-makers from Iran and Turkey (2nd ed.)
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…
Documenting The Dark Side: Torture and The “War On Terror” in Zero Dark Thirty, Taxi To The Dark Side, and Standard Operating Procedure
Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, US Vice-President Dick Cheney declared the need for the USA and its allies to work “the dark side,” ushering in an era of globalized…
Hey, Little Girl: Beautiful and the “Sexualisation of Youth”
Hey, little girl, is your daddy home? Did he go away and leave you all alone? I got a bad desire (Bruce Springsteen, “I’m on Fire”) And it’s no surprise,…
Interactive Cinema from Vending Machine to Database Narrative: The Case of Kinoautomat
Introduction Interactive cinema (IC) is a productive realm of inquiry in film and media studies. This area of inquiry compels us to rethink the role of film narrative in contexts…
A League of Their Own: The Impossibility of the Female Sports Hero
“Every girl in this league is going to be a lady.” (Ira Lowenstein [David Strathairn] commenting on the female athletes in A League of their Own [USA 1992]) This line…
’Make Mine a Movie! In a Movie Theater!’ (Or on My Pay-TV Service): How America’s Theater Owners Learned to Stop Worrying and Accept Cable Television, 1969-1976
Cable television is such a fixture of modern life that it might be easy to forget that its development from a method of delivering distant broadcast signals to a sprawling…