Author Archive for: ‘Thomas Redwood’

Josef Gugler, African Film: Re-Imagining a Continent. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. ISBN 0 253 21643 5 216pp US$24.95(pb) (Review copy supplied by Indiana University Press) Josef Gugler has spent many years teaching and researching in various parts of Africa and is currently Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Connecticut. His …

Ernesto R. Acevedo-Munoz, Bunuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. ISBN: 0520239520 202pp US$60.00 (hb) (Review copy supplied by the University of California Press) If there is a layman’s version of the life and work of Luis Bunuel, it generally follows a variation of the prodigal son story: a young subversive shocks western …

S. S. Prawer, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht. London: BFI Publishing. 2004. ISBN: 1 84457 031 2 96pp £8.99stg (pb) (Review copy supplied by BFI publishing) Bloodsuckers, nightbreed, stalkers of the human soul: no other character quite vies for the affections of western cinema like the vampire. The two seem to have been made for each other. Conceived in the popular …

Michael M. J. Fischer, Mute dreams, blind owls and dispersed knowledges: Persian poesis in the transnational circuitry. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0 8223 3298 1 475pp US$24.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Michael M. J. Fischer’s comprehension of the dynamics inherent in Iranian culture is more than substantial. An anthropologist, Professor Fischer spent …

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 520 25123 6 US$24.95 (pb) 346pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) It’s one of those delectable ironies of film history that the United States’ greatest (that is to say, most interesting) director should have been so profoundly un-American as Orson Welles. Everyone knows …

John E. Bodnar, Blue Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy and Working People in American Film. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0 801 87149 2 320pp US$42.95 (hb) (Review copy supplied by Johns Hopkins University Press) John Bodnar’s recently published work, Blue Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy and Working People in American Film, may be satisfactorily classified as a social history as …

Peter Verstraten (translated by Stefan van der Lecq), Film Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009 ISBN-13: 978 080209 505 3 US$27.95 (pb) 259pp (Review copy supplied by University of Toronto Press) In Film Narratology Peter Verstraten attempts one of film theory’s more ambitious and potentially fatal balancing acts. As a hypothetical outline of …

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, Film and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick and Wong Kar-wai. New York: Lexington, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-0739121870 US$65.00 (hb) 161pp (Review copy supplied by Lexington publications) Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is a scholar of philosophy with a background in formalism, dream theory and cinema studies, so it makes sense that he should be attracted to the work of filmmakers like Andrei …

Michel Ciment, Film World: Interviews with Cinema’s Leading Directors. New York: Berg, 2009 ISBN: 9 781845204 57 0 US$24.95 (pb) 384pp (Review copy supplied by Berg Publishers http://www.bergpublishers.com/Categories/flm/tabid/602/Default.aspx) Reviewing a collection of interviews as a unified book is a strange business, all the more so when the collection in question features 25 different filmmakers, from 19 different countries, interviewed at …