Category Archive for: ‘Issue 17 – Reviews’

Peter B. High, The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931-1945. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. ISBN 0 299 18134 0 544 pp US$24.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by The University of Wisconsin Press) The University of Wisconsin Press is to be congratulated on the publication of Peter High’s The Imperial Screen. For many years …

Nicky Hamlyn, Film Art Phenomena. London, British Film Institute, 2003. ISBN: 0851709729 224pp UK£16.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by BFI publishing) Nicky Hamlyn’s aptly named Film Art Phenomena is a timely and welcome examination of the aesthetic, historical and technical complexities of avant-garde or experimental cinema of the last century. Indeed, Hamlyn’s informative and cogently argued book looks at that other practice, …

Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge, Mass. & London: The MIT Press, 2004. ISBN: 0 262 14084 5 336 pp US$34.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) Angela Ndalianis has provided a fascinating exploration of profound parallels between baroque art and culture and contemporary entertainment media. She identifies her principal subject as the “continuous and contiguous links …

Jennifer M. Bean & Diane Negra. A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2002. ISBN: 0 822 32999 9 584pp US$27.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) The women of silent cinema are in the process of being re-discovered. An international Congress on Women and the Silent Screen was held in Montreal in …

Mark Nicholls, Scorsese’s Men: Melancholia and the Mob. North Melbourne: Pluto Press Australia, 2004. ISBN: 1 86403 156 5 191 pp Au$29.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Pluto Press) The front cover of Mark Nicholls’ Scorsese’s Men: Melancholia and the Mob  features a series of differently shaded silhouettes of male characters from Scorsese’s films. Within the largest of these symptomatically imprecise figures …

Mark Garrett Cooper, Love Rules: Silent Hollywood and the Rise of the Managerial Class. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. ISBN 0 8166 3753 9 US$19.95 (pb) ISBN 0 8166 3752 0 US$59.95 (hb) 304 pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Mark Garrett Cooper’s title could lead one to think that his book is dedicated to the …

Nicolas Tredell (ed), Cinemas of the Mind. Cambridge, Icon Books, 2002. ISBN: 1 840 46354 6 287pp Au$35.00 (hb) (Review copy supplied by Cambridge books) Nicolas Tredell’s Cinemas of the Mind is a critical history of film theory that delineates its subject from the first two decades of the last century till the beginning of this century. The film medium itself has …

Valerie Orpen, Film Editing: The Art of the Expressive. London and New York: Wallflower. 2003. ISBN: 1 903364 53 1 UK£12.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) Claude Chabrol apparently once observed: “Scriptwriting is like cooking. Shooting the part I like the most is like eating. Editing is therefore, well, the washing-up.” Thus the elusive status of this neglected …

Jay David Bolter & Diane Gromala, Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art and the Myth of Transparency. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003. ISBN: 0 262 02545 0 208 pp US$29.95 (hb) (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) The authors of this valuable book have a nice trick on page xi of their introduction. They give a list of some …

Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin and Grant McDonald (eds), Raúl Ruiz: Images of Passage. Rouge Press/Rotterdam International Film Festival, 2004. ISBN: 0 97518 690 6 114 pp Au $24.95 (Review copy supplied by Books @ Manic) “If you can make it complicated, why make it simple?” Thus spoke Raúl Ruiz, the renowned Chilean-born, surrealist director self-exiled for over twenty-five years in …

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 …

Alison McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema. New York and London: Continuum, 2002. ISBN: 0 826 45158 6 384pp US$35.00 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Continuum international publishing group) Alison McMahan’s book analyses the career of Alice Guy Blaché, a cinema pioneer in France and the United States. McMahan’s study also provides a valuable commentary on the …

Irving Singer, Reality Transformed: Film as Meaning and Technique. Cambridge, Mass. & London: The MIT Press, 1998. 216pp US$18.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by The MIT Press) According to Singer, there are two kinds of film theorists – formalists and realists – and since the formative years of film theory their differences have been at the core of controversies in …

Sara Gwenllian-Jones & Roberta Pearson (eds), Cult Television. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ISBN: 0 8166 3831 4 242pp US$22.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Some years ago, the Times Higher Education Supplement published a cartoon which derided the growing study of popular culture in the U.K. In the corner of an oak-panelled University staffroom sat a …

Frank N. Ukadike, Questioning African Cinema: Questioning African Filmmakers. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. ISBN 0 8166 4005 X US$19.95 (pb) ISBN 0-8166-4004-1 US$59.95 (hb) 304pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) The greatest injustice is not the one we think; the greatest injustice is the one that people create by remaining in a state of …

Anita Loos, Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction by Anita Loos. Ed. and annotated by Cari Beauchamp & Mary Anita Loos. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. ISBN: 0 520 22894 4. 322pp US$27.50 (hb) (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) Another lovely book resulting from Cari Beauchamp’s passion for the history of women’s early involvement in US …

Mary Lea Bandy & Antonio Monda (eds), The Hidden God: Film and Faith. Museum of Modern Art, 2003. ISBN:  0 870 70349 8 312pp US$24.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by MOMA) I welcomed this book, because I hoped it would break a certain deadlock within a certain kind of global cinephilia. All matters of faith – including religious belief, spirituality, …

Christine Gledhill, Reframing British Cinema 1919-1928. Between Restraint and Passion. London: BFI Publishing, 2003.ISBN: 0 85170 889 7 214pp UK£17.99(pb) (Review copy supplied by BFI Publishing) I anticipate some difficulty reviewing Professor Gledhill’s revisionist study of British cinema. For one thing, much of her raw material is “new”: it consists of 150-odd films, many of which, I take it, have …

Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect. Cambridge, Massachusetts:The MIT Press. 2004 ISBN: 0 262 03312 7 464 pp Au$69.00 (hb) (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) Sean Cubitt’s book The Cinema Effect is hard work. Reading it involved an intense level of concentration that was akin to climbing Mt.Everest blindfolded (or so I’d imagine). My perceptions shifted from admiration, to agreement, to sheer …

Caryl Flinn, The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style. University of California Press, 2004. ISBN: 0 520 23823 0 331pp US$19.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by the University of California Press) Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, filmmakers of the New German cinema became preoccupied with what at the time was known as the Unmastered …

Ivone Margulies (ed), Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema. Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0 8223 3066 0 360pp US$21.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Editor Ivone Margulies nails her colours to the mast early on in this anthology, stating that it is “inspired by, and pays tribute to, André Bazin’s thoughts …

Anne Morey, Hollywood Outsiders. The Adaptation of the Film Industry 1913-1934. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003. ISBN 0 8166 3733 4 242 pp US $ 22.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) It is perhaps a sign of the maturity of the field of film studies that ever more complex and multi-dimensional models of the film …

Keith Beattie, Documentary Screens Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ISBN: 0 333 74117 X 288pp $A 53.00 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Palgrave) One of the ironies of this “post documentary” era (to use a designation coined by John Corner) has been the significant increase in public awareness of documentary. Evidence for this is provided by the very large cinema audiences …

George Kouvaros, Where Does it Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ISBN: 0 8166 4330 X 264 pp US $18.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Although recent writing on Cassavetes has pointed out that the director was not as critically neglected as has been suggested by his …

Jay Ruby, Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film & Anthropology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN: 0 226 73099 9 339 pp US$20.00 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Chicago University Press) Picturing Culture articulates the development of Ruby’s thinking about the relation between anthropology and film, in which he argues that film is “only marginally related to anthropology and that …

Therese Davis, The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition & Spectatorship. Bristol: IntellectLtd., 2004. ISBN: 1 841500 084 4 192pp UK£19.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Intellect books) The media un-anaesthetisised: face, transience, and the site of meaning The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition & Spectatorship is a surprising and unusual book in its choice of critical object. It invites …

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 …

Thomas Leitch, Crime Films. Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN: 0 521 64671 5 400pp Au$59.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Cambridge University Press) The cover of this academic study presents two immediately arresting qualities. First there is the title, Crime Films, so short and sweet in announcing the topic at hand. Then there is the black and white shot of …

Ryan Gilbey, Groundog Day. London: BFI publishing, 2004. ISBN: 1 84457 032 0 96 pp UK£8.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by BFI publishing) On a certain level, one can hardly disagree with the Sunday Times when it declared years ago that the Film Classics series is “one of the best ideas BFI Publishing has had.” These books are irresistible collector’s items designed …

Ian Pryor, Peter Jackson: From Prince of Splatter to Lord of the Rings. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004. ISBN: 0312322941. 380 pp. US$24.95 (hb) (First published in 2003 by Random House New Zealand). Sean Astin, with Joe Layden, There and Back Again: An Actor’s Tale. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004. ISBN: 0312331460 320 pp. US$24.95 (hb). As I write this …

Peter Geller, Northern Exposures: Photographing and Filming the Canadian North, 1920-45. University of British Columbia Press, 2004. ISBN: 0 7748 0928 0 (pb) 256pp Canadian $29.95 (Review copy supplied by UBC Press) The cover photo of Peter Geller’s Northern Exposures shows a white man and his camera in a kayak on a decontextualized body of water, but a more apt choice might …

Edward Buscombe, Unforgiven. London: British Film Institute, 2004. ISBN: 1 84457 033 9 96pp £8.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by British Film Institute) Perhaps the most interesting critical question about Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) is its place in the western genre. As Edward Buscombe makes overwhelmingly clear in this richly packed, rewarding monograph, “one of the most pleasurable things about Unforgiven is the variety …

Chris Berry (ed), Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: British Film Institute, 2003. ISBN: 0851709869 (pb) £16.99 ISBN: 0851709850 (hb) £55.00 240pp (Review copy supplied by BFI publishing) At the end of his introduction to this anthology, Chris Berry writes: “I hope that readers will be as excited by the variety of the essays and freshness of their …

American history on film Peter C. Rollins (ed), The Columbia Companion to American History on Film: How the Movies have Portrayed the American Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0 231 11222 X 696pp US$85.00 (hb) (Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press) Phyllis R. Klotman (Director), African Americans in Cinema: The First Half Century. Champaign, Ill: University of …

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 …

Michael Temple and Michael Witt (eds), The French Cinema Book. London: BFI Publishing, 2004. 300pp ISBN: 1 84457 012 6 (pb) £16.99 ISBN: 1 84457 011 8 (hb) £48.00 (Review copy supplied by BFI Publishing) The French Cinema Book is divided into three chronological parts: “Hello Cinema!”1890-1930, “Classicism and Conflict” 1930-1960, “A New World” 1960-2004. Each part is divided into seven …

Jason Wood, 100 American Independent Films. London: BFI Publishing, 2004. ISBN: 1 844 57006 1 204 pp UK£13.99 (Review copy supplied by BFI Publishing) Jason Wood’s 100 American Independent Films is one of the first titles to be released in the new BFI Screen Guides series and in its pages represents something of the purpose of the series. It is essentially …

Steve Neale (ed.), Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. London: British Film Institute, London, 2002. ISBN: 0851708870 322 pp £15.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by British Film Institute) The publication of recent books on film genres evinces the popularity and applicability of the classificatory tool. [1]  However, this tool has changed somewhat since Todorov invoked science methodology in an attempt to find …

Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd, Leos Carax. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0 7190 6315 9 244pp UK£11.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press) It’s about time we had a book on Leos Carax. Although he has made only four feature films over the course of a twenty year career, he is a major …

Sarah Street, Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA. New York: Continuum, 2002. ISBN 0 8264 1396 X 280pp UK£18.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Continuum International Publishing Group) Sarah Street has been a major figure in recent studies of the British cinema industries with well-known works such as Cinema and State (1985) and the 1997 British entry in Routledge’s National …