Category Archive for: ‘Issue 21 – Reviews’

Michael M. J. Fischer responds to Thomas Redwood’s review of: Michael M. J. Fischer, Mute Dreams, Blind Owls and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2004. This review was published in Issue 20. Thank you for reviewing my book, Mute Dreams, Blind Owls and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry (Duke 2004) in Screening …

Richard Abel, Americanizing the Movies and “Movie Mad” Audiences: 1910-1914. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. ISBN: 978 0 520 24742 0 (hb) US$65.00 ISBN: 978 0 520 24743 7 (pb) US$29.95 391pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) From outside USA, ‘Americanizing’ is what occurs when the American film industry shapes both public taste and film economics …

Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 231 13377 4 US$19 (pb) 269pp (Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press) Peter Decherney’s book is a very fine institutional history of Hollywood and the culture elite. It details the history of their relationship as the tragic movement from …

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 …

John Bodnar, Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0 8018 7149 2 $US25.00 (pb) 284pp (Review copy supplied by The Johns Hopkins University Press) In some respects, Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film is a lifelong project for Pulitzer prize nominated historian John Bodnar. Bodnar, after …

Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 231 12898 3 (hb) US$69.50 ISBN: 0 231 12899 1 (pb) US$25.50 312pp (Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press) Taiwan Film Directors is a very welcome contribution to the burgeoning literature on Chinese cinemas. Taiwan has contributed strongly to …

Jane Landman, The Tread of a White Man’s Foot: Australian Pacific Colonialism and the Cinema, 1925-62. Pandanus Books, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 2006. ISBN: 1 7407620 61 AUD$34.96 (pb) 268pp This is not an objective review, as I have watched the progress of this project from its inception and I was honoured to be …

Cahiers du Cinéma presents The Hollywood Interviews. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006. ISBN: 9 7818 452044 19 £9.99 (pb) 151pp (Review copy supplied by Berg publshers) This book serves no useful purpose. It is a translation of six interviews with Hollywood filmmakers selected from the 1995 collection of such interviews published under the title 15 ans de cinema américain, which brought …

Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam University Press, 2005. ISBN: 978 90 5356 594 0 (pb) US$32.50 ISBN: 978 90 5356 602 2 (hb) US$80.50 566pp (Review copy supplied by Amsterdam University Press) A book on European cinema by Thomas Elsaesser would be an exciting prospect indeed, but unfortunately this is not it. This is an …

Marnie Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007. ISBN: 0 415 32827 6 (hb) US$90 ISBN: 0 415 32828 4 (pb) US$28.95 218pp (Review copy supplied by Routledge) Marnie Hughes-Warrington is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Macquarie University. Her book is not an historian’s account of how the movies get history wrong, …

Jo Fox, Film Propaganda in Britain and Nazi Germany: World War II Cinema. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007. ISBN: 9 7818 597389 62 £17.99 (pb) 368pp (Review copy supplied by Berg publishers) This book is at once extremely informative and extremely disappointing. For those desiring specific knowledge about the principal Nazi propaganda films produced between 1939 and 1945 and …

Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomenon of Theatre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 8166 4545 0 $US22.50 (pb) 207pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Alice Rayner, associate professor of drama at Stanford University, declares that the project of her book is “making sense of ghosts” (x), which suggests she intends to render …

Robert Brent Toplin, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11: How one film divided a nation. University of Kansas Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 7006 1452 4 US$34.95 (hb) 162pp (Review copy supplied by University of Kansas Press) Robert Brent Toplin’s Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11: How one film divided a nation marshals numerous sources and considerable evidence in the service of a plodding and specious argument. …

Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 691 12730 1 US$24.95 (hb) 248pp (Review copy supplied by Princeton University Press) Scott McMillin’s The Musical as Drama, his last completed book before his death at 71, is a labor of love. Staunchly defending a much-maligned genre, McMillin sets his sights high, writing, “The musical …

Lester D. Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. University of Illinois Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 25203114 8 (hb) US$75.00 ISBN: 0 25207358 4 (pb) US$24.95 376pp (Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press) First things first. The blurb says it all. “Steven Spielberg is the director or producer of over one third of the thirty highest grossing films of all time, yet …

Rosalind Galt, Redrawing the Map: The New European Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 231 13717 6 US$24.50 (pb) 352pp (Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press) Cartography of emotions: History, space and Identity in the New European Cinema In The Art of the Novel Milan Kundera defines Europe not so much as a territory but as a spiritual …

Nicholas Haeffner, Alfred Hitchcock. Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited, 2005. ISBN: 0 582 43738 5 US$14.95 (pb) 125pp (Review copy supplied by Pearson Education Limited) Hitchcock’s cameo appearance in Lifeboat (US 1944) occurs at one remove, in a newspaper advertisement for ‘Reduco, The Sensational New Obesity Slayer’. The ad features two Hitchcocks – fat and thin, ‘Before’ and ‘After’ – who photographically …

Yvonne Rainer, Feelings are Facts: A Life. MIT Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 262 18251 3 US$37.95 (hb) 504pp (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) Feelings are Facts gives all the usual indications of simply being an autobiography – in this case of choreographer-cum-filmmaker Yvonne Rainer – but that is not quite what it is, and for a couple of reasons. First …

Murray Pomerance (ed.), Cinema and Modernity. Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. ISBN: 0 8135 3816 5 US$24.95 (pb) 373pp (Review copy supplied by Rutgers University Press) Edited collections of essays are a sticky proposition. No matter how many such volumes pervade the marketplace, my experience has been that most editors bristle like a wet dog when you mention the …

Annalee Newitz, Pretend we’re Dead. Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 8223 3745 2 US$21.95 (pb) 223pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Remember when intelligent commentary on horror movies was virtually an oxymoron. When mainstream reviewers routinely rejected virtually every release and treated the genre like some kind of failure of …

Geoffrey Cocks, James Diedrick, Glenn Perusek (eds), Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick Film, and the Uses of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. ISBN 0 299 21610 1 (hb) $60.00 ISBN 0 299 21614 4 (pb) $27.95 355pp (Review copy supplied by University of Wisconsin Press) For those to whom this series is new, as it was to me, …

Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for ‘Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon. University of California Press, 2005 ISBN: 0 520 23617 3 US$40.00 (hb) 225pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) The upsurge of animation studies books continues apace. With Yuval Taylor, Daniel Goldmark edited the excellent Cartoon Music Book (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2002). In Tunes for ‘Toons he surveys the entire golden …

Douglas Morrey, Jean-Luc Godard. Manchester University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 7190 6759 6 (pb) £14.99 304pp (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press) In its essentials, my experience with Godard is, I believe, far from unusual. First captivated by the cultural insight in Masculin feminin (France/Sweden, 1966), then awed by the Brechtian method and ideological criticism in La Chinoise (France 1967), I was stunned …

Paul Young, The Cinema Dreams its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 8166 3599 4 ISBN-13: 978 0 8166 3599 3 US$25.00 (pb) 360pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) In The Cinema Dreams its Rivals, Paul Young offers an ambitious and thoughtful, if uneven, contribution to the …

Gabrielle Murray, This Wounded Cinema, this Wounded life: Violence and Utopia in the Films of Sam Peckinpah. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2004. ISBN: 0 2759805 88 US$89.95 (hb) 176pp All they saw was the violence. (Pauline Kael qtd. in Murray, 6) Analyzing the work of Sam Peckinpah is a little like defending Huckleberry Finn or Heart of Darkness; each endeavor endlessly conceals, even as …

Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 8166 4851 US$17.95 (pb) 168pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) In the last few years, the field of game studies has reached critical mass as new and established scholars alike have turned their attention to focus exclusively on digital games. The …

Valeria Belletti, Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from Inside the Studios of the 1920s. (Ed. and annotated by Cari Beauchamp.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 520 24780 9 231pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) Once again Cari Beauchamp has produced a fascinating glimpse into the history of women’s early involvement in …

David A. Gerstner, Manly Arts: Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 8 223377 54 (hb) £58.00 ISBN: 0 8 223376 30 (pb) £14.99 332pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Most studies of masculinity and cinema tend to concentrate on the textual representation of male characters in the films …

David Martin-Jones, Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts. Edinburgh University Press, 2006. ISBN: 10 0 7486 2244 6 US$85 (hb) 244pp (Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press) It was once easier to think about national cinema in clearly delineated terms. Now that major Hollywood studios are in possession of independent arms and films such as Crouching …

Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ISBN: 0-226-98237-8 (hb) US$75 ISBN: 0-226-98238-6 (pb) US$30 488pp (Review copy supplied by University of Chicago Press) As the surging metropolises of contemporary China loom increasingly large for international economies, as international film industries look toward China as a source of production …

David West, Chasing Dragons: An Introduction to the Martial Arts Film. London, New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006. ISBN: 978 1 85043 982 0 £12.99 (pb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by I. B. Tauris) The cover of this book tells us that the author is a martial arts practitioner and manager of “former Ultimate Combat World Champion Pierre Guillet.” With …

Wheeler Winston Dixon (ed.), American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations. Oxford: Berg, 2006. ISBN: 9781845204358 £14.99 (pb) 283pp (Review copy supplied by Berg) As the title suggests, Wheeler Winston Dixon’s American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations applies the now half-century old decades formula to the study of 1940s Hollywood film. The purpose of the book, and of the …

Kathrina Glitre, Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union, 1934-65. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 7190 7079 1 US$27.95 (pb) 199pp (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press) The happy ending of the Hollywood romantic comedy genre can be unstable and contradictory according to Kathrina Glitre’s insightful study of the couple in her book, Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of …