Category Archive for: ‘Issue 11 – Reviews’

Jerome Silbergeld, China into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema London: Reaktion Books, 1999. ISBN 1861890508 352pp AU$59.95(paper) (Review copy supplied by Thames and Hudson (Australia) Pty Ltd) Uploaded 1 November 200 Although the subtitle claims this book to be about contemporary Chinese cinema, its primary focus is on the internationally well-known Chinese film of the mid-1980s to …

Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture London and Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. ISBN 0 262 03265 1 397pp US$39.95 (cloth) (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) Uploaded 1 November 2000 In a class not so long ago, during one of those sessions where I’d decided we were going to do some “close reading,” I noticed that …

Louis and Alan Gordon, American Chronicle: Year by Year through the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press, 1999. ISBN 0 300 07587 1 1,024 pp US$49.95 (Review Copy supplied by Yale University Press) Uploaded 1 November 2000 As a publishing phenomenon, timetables, chronicles and chronologies have been with us since the mid-1970s, when an English translation of a German work, The Timetables …

Naomi Greene, Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in Postwar French Cinema . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. ISBN 0 691 02959 8 234pp US$18.95 (Review copy supplied by Princeton University Press) Uploaded 1 November 2000 This intelligent and thoughtful book looks at the way in which French history and culture has been represented in certain post-war French films, notably …

David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema. Edited & introduced by Lucien Taylor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. ISBN 0 691 01234 2 528pp US$17.95 (Review copy supplied by Princeton University Press) Uploaded 1 November 2000 A vast range of the best filmmaking we now have takes place outside of the recognizeable marketplaces of commercial cinema, with its over-inflated publicity machines, its merchandising …

Klaus Kreimeier, The UFA Story. A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945. London: University of California Press, 1999. ISBN 0-520-22069-2 451pp US$19.95 (Review copy supplied by California University Press) Uploaded 1 November 2000 The story of the Universum-Film A.G., popularly known as UFA, is indelibly bound to the history of Germany’s cinema. As perhaps no other film company in …

Christopher Frayling, Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. ISBN 0-571-16438-2 570pp A$40.00 Uploaded 1 November 2000 Sergio Leone’s career was characterised by a constant desire to be taken seriously as a film director. Leone is most often regarded as a curiosity, usually considered the resuscitator of a “dead” genre (the western) and the father …

Gaye Poole, Reel Meals, Set Meals: Food in Film and Theatre. Sydney: Currency Press, 1999. ISBN 086819 578 2 280pp A$24.95 (Review copy supplied by Currency Press) Uploaded 1 November 2000 “If you can never eat with someone you are never really together with them. It’s a very clever strategy. All over the world, eating is the great symbol of …

Martin Rubin, Thrillers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-521-58839-1, 319 pp, A$33.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Cambridge University Press) Jonathan Munby, Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. ISBN 0-226-55033-8, 263pp, US$16.00 (Review copy supplied by University of Chicago Press) Uploaded 1 November 2000 The “thriller” is perhaps one …

Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa. 3rd Edition. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996. ISBN: 0-520-22037-4 273 pp. (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) Uploaded 1 November 2000 Those who own the second edition of this (once) famous book may want to consider their budget carefully before buying the third. For your considerable outlay you …

Tania Modleski, Old Wives’ Tales: Feminist Re-visions of Film and other Fictions. London: I.B. Tauris, 1999. ISBN 1 86064 386 8 238 pp UK£14.95 (Review copy supplied by I.B. Tauris) Uploaded 1 November 2000 At the outset I should say that I’m personally involved in some of what Tania Modleski is writing about in Old Wives’ Tales: Feminist Re-visions of Film and …

Philip Brophy (ed.), Cinesonic: Cinema and the Sound of Music. Sydney: Australian film, television, and radio school, 2000 ISBN 9 781876 351090 224 pp A$24.95 (Review copy supplied by AFTRS) Uploaded 1 November 2000 In 1929, French filmmaker Rene Clair proclaimed the advent of a new era in film art. Wrote Clair, “The talking film is not everything. There is …

Katherine A. Fowkes, Giving up the Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels in Mainstream Comedy Films Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. ISBN: 0 8143 2721 4 (paper) 202pp US$ 24.95 (Review copy supplied by Wayne State University Press) Uploaded 1 November 2000 The daemonic has been a powerful theme in art, attracting frequent critical attention. In cinema studies writers such …

Peter Lunenfeld, Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media and Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. ISBN: 0 262 12226 X 240pp US$32.95 (cloth) (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) Uploaded 1 November 2000 Between the prophesising of Nicholas Negroponte and dire warnings of Kirkpatrick Sale lies an approach to ways of thinking about the impact of new …

Mark A. Vieira, Sin in Soft Focus Pre-Code Hollywood. New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1999. ISBN 0810944758 (cloth) 240pp A$75.00 (Review copy supplied by Thames and Hudson (Australia) Pty Ltd) Uploaded 1 November 2000 Mark A. Vieira’s Sin in Soft Focus traces a period of profound destabilisation in Hollywood during the early 1930s. It presents an historical account of this volatile …

Harriet Margolis, (ed.), Jane Campion’s The Piano. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN 0 521 59721 8 (paper) 204 pp. A$34.95 (Review copy supplied by Cambridge University Press) Uploaded 1 November 2000 In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera states: “There is a fundamental difference between the ways philosophers and novelists think. People talk about Chekhov’s philosophy, or Kafka’s or …

Pam Cook and Mieke Bernink (eds.), The CInema Book. 2nd ed. London: BFI, 1999. ISBN 085170 726 2 AU$80.00. (Review copy supplied by Peribo) Uploaded 1 November 2000 The fact that a book gets reprinted in a second edition says something about its popularity and usefulness. When that book originates with and is reprinted by the British Film Institute, its profile …

John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2000. ISBN 1 86064 489 9 (paper). 193 pp. UK£12.95 (Review copy supplied by I.B.Tauris) Uploaded 1 November 2000 Television producer and academic John Ellis writes about television at the beginning of the new millenium. Ellis covers a lot of ground in eleven chapters, and all …

Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (eds), Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video. Detroit:Wayne State University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8143-2639-0 656pp US$27.50 (Review copy supplied by Wayne State University Press) Uploaded 1 November 2000 In recent years public interest in the documentary screen has been rejuvenated by the success of feature documentaries such as When We Were …

Cynthia Erb, Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. ISBN 0 8143 2686 2 (paper) 280pp (Review copy supplied by Wayne State University Press) Uploaded 1 November 2000 Reception history of King Kong (1933) is an interesting case study in the effects of the Production Code. During the early 1930s the Motion Picture Producers …