Author Archive for: ‘Anna Dzenis’

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas MS .45 (Cultographies series) Columbia University Press/Wallflower, 2017 ISBN: 9780231851053 Au$28.99 (pb) 156pp (Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press) Alexander Heller-Nicholas begins her scholarly and engaging book on MS .45 with the compelling claim, that “few films have left quite the same cultural imprint as Abel Ferrara’s 1981 film MS .45”. (p. 1) She then proceeds to …

Adrian Martin, “What is Modern Cinema?”. Santiago: Uqbar, 2008 ISBN: 9 78999568 601256 $18900 Chile Pesos (pb) 278pp This book Que es el cine moderno?, I see it as a kind of Ruizian maleta. Strange things come out of it – strange objects, strange films, strange bodies – for our strange new modern world.[1] (Adrian Martin) A new book by Adrian …

Kent Jones, L’argent BFI Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0 85170 733 5 96pp A$24.95 (Review copy supplied by Peribo: Distributors of Fine Books) Uploaded 1 March 2001 “The fact that Bresson’s long life had more or less begun and ended with ‘the century of cinema’ seemed right, as natural as the setting of the sun and the rising of the moon. …

Steven M. Sanders, Miami Vice (TV Milestones series). Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-8143-3419-5 US$14.95 (pb) 128pp (Review copy supplied by Wayne State University Press) “Why does Miami Vice matter?” is at once historical, sociological, aesthetic and philosophical. (p. 85) The Wayne State University Press books in the TV Milestone series remind me of the great BFI books on single …

Adrian Martin Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982 – 2016 University of Western Australia Publishing, 2020 ISBN: 9781760801298 AU$29.99 (pb) 484pp (Hardback edition published and supplied for review by Amsterdam University Press, 2018) A life of analysing films, if it is to be truly liveable, needs to occur in this curious but finally rather delightful …

Tom Ryan, The Films of Douglas Sirk: Exquisite Ironies and Magnificent Obsessions University Press of Mississippi, 2019 Online ISBN: 9781496822406 Print ISBN:  9781496817983 HB: $99 Pb: $30 320pp (Review copy supplied by University Press of Mississippi) Douglas Sirk is a filmmaker who is widely acknowledged and celebrated for his influential 1950s melodramas All that Heaven Allows (1955), Magnificent Obsession (1954), …

Nicole Brenez, Abel Ferrara (translated from the French by Adrian Martin). Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 252 07411 0 AUD$37.95 (pb) 240pp (Review copy supplied by UniReps) Like many of the colleagues whose work informs Brenez’s – such as Raymond Bellour, Alain Bergala and Charles Tesson – theoretical reflections arise from the work and pleasure …

George Kouvaros, The Old Greeks: Photography, Cinema, Migration. UWA Publishing, 2018. ISBN: 9781742589923 AU$24.99 (pb) 208pp (Review copy supplied by UWA publishing) “To grasp the people and places to which we are closest as no more essential or permanent than the memories that pass in and out of our consciousness: this is our feeling of displacement that defines the story …

Adrian Martin, Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 ISBN: 978-1-137-26994-2 US$96 (hb) 256pp (Review copy supplied by Palgrave Macmillan publishing) My contention is at once more modest and more inclusive: that the contemporary workings of dispositifs can offer us a new entrée into rethinking the field of film …

Andrew Klevan, Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation. (Short Cuts series) London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2005. ISBN: 1 904764 24 X 128pp £12.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) We may well be rewarded for concentrating on a performer as they merely turn a street corner, sit in a chair, touch a wall, move around a bedroom …

Natalie King (ed.), Up Close: Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and William Yang. Melbourne: Heide Museum of Modern Art/Schwartz City, 2010. ISBN: 9 78186395 501 0 AU$59.95 (pb) 241pp (Review copy supplied by Heide Museum of Modern Art/Schwartz City) “(Susan) Sontag once said to me that in all of human history, in only one brief period were people …

Jonathan Auerbach, Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-520-25293-6 US$24.95 (pb) 214pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) …To achieve any sort of conceptual unity…practices of cinema during its first decade came to rely most crucially on the dynamic language of body movement – gestures, comportments, and attitudes which taken together …

Nick James, Heat (BFI Modern Classics). London: BFI Publishing, 2002. ISBN: 0 85170 938 9 96pp UK£8.99 (pb) (Book supplied by BFI Publishing) “Violent crime film, tragic epic, heist movie, realistic thriller, sobering action movie, policier, melodrama – by using all these terms in trying to pin down what I enjoy about Heat (and what disturbs me) I have intimated what a slippery …

Adrian Martin, The Mad Max Movies. Sydney: Currency Press. 2003. ISBN: 0 86819 670 3 Au$14.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Currency Press) There is nothing more admirable than intellect sprinkled with sensibility, except perhaps for sensibility guided by intellect. There is nothing rarer than a mind smitten in equal measure with rigor and fancy except for a temperament that …

Serge Daney, Postcards from the Cinema. Oxford, New York: Berg Publishers, 2007. (Translated by Paul Grant, First published in France, 1994, P.O.L.) ISBN: 978 1 84520 651 2 £12.00 (pb) 368 pp (Review copy supplied by Berg publishers) If you belong to any critical tradition, it’s to that of Bazin and Cahiers, along with Bonitzer, Narboni and Schefer. You’re still looking …