Category Archive for: ‘Issue 22 – Reviews’

The Story of the Kelly Gang DVD and Ina Bertrand and William D. Routt, “The Picture That Will Live Forever”: The Story of the Kelly Gang. National Film & Sound Archive, 2007. The Moving Image 8 ISBN: 1 876467 16 9 AUD$34.94 200pp (Review copy supplied by National Film & Sound Archive) The first thing to note about this ambitious DVD-Book project …

Steve Macek, Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic over the City. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis & London, 2006. ISBN: 0 8166 4361 X US$22.95 (pb) 360pp (Review copy supplied by the University of Minnesota Press) Contemplating ‘urban nightmares’ while residing in a small New Zealand city seems to be a contradiction in terms. Certainly, the …

Graeme Turner, Ending the Affair: The Decline of Television Current Affairs in Australia. University of New South Wales Press, 2005. ISBN: 9 780 86840864 4 AUD$34.95 (pb) 184pp (Review copy supplied by University of New South Wales Press) Affairs to Remember The first thing that should be said about Graeme Turner’s latest contribution to Australian media and television studies appropriately …

Daniel J. Leab, Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 271 02987 8 US$55.00 (hb) 232pp (Review copy supplied by Pennsylvania State University Press) It is a truism of film theory nowadays that a book and a film are separate entities, and that one cannot legitimately be judged in terms …

Rachel Moore, Hollis Frampton (nostalgia). London: Afterall Books, 2006. ISBN: 978 1 84638 001 3 US$16.00 (pb) 88pp (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia), or, ‘Lower case, with parentheses’ Rachel Moore’s eloquent and insightful close-reading of Frampton’s most well-known 1971 film, (nostalgia), is timely given the current status of this seminal American artist and writer who has, during the …

McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 674 02519 6 US$19.95 (hb) 240pp (Review copy supplied by Harvard University Press) In Montevideo, a child explains : ‘I never want to die, because I want to play forever.’ Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces (1992). McKenzie Wark’s new book, Gamer Theory, is a highly inventive, reflexive, refreshingly …

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 …

Robert Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 520 25122 9 US$24.95 (pb) 190pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) In the Introduction to Uncanny Bodies, Robert Spadoni (Assistant Professor, English, Case Western University) claims to have published what amounts to the …

Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction. The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 520 24962 2 US$24.95 (pb) 416pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) This reviewer entered the field of academic film studies in the 1970s, when, at least in the United States, film education was not yet …

Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 226 31606 2 US$30.00 (hb) 419pp (Review copy supplied by the University of Chicago Press) One of my first experiences of photography as something to be looked at in itself was, as …

James Chapman, Mark Glancy & Sue Harper (eds.), The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ISBN: 978 023000169 5 US$85.00 (hb) 288pp (Review copy supplied by Palgrave) The New Film History is an accessible and wide-ranging account of the methods, sources and approaches used by modern film historians. This compilation of essays, drawn together from some of British …

Gene D. Phillips, Beyond the Epic: The Life & Films of David Lean. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 8131 2415 8 US$39.95 (hb) 545pp (Review copy supplied by University of Kentucky Press) What is David Lean’s standing now, I wonder? Filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg claim to revere his later works; he has attracted a couple of …

Alan Cholodenko (ed.), The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation. Sydney: Power Publications, 2007. ISBN: 9 78 0909952 34 1 AUD$59.95 (pb) 576pp (Review copy supplied by Power Publications) In the anthology The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation, Alan Cholodenko has brought together an eclectic array of scholarly approaches to animation. Conceiving of animation as a …

Scott Nygren, Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN-13: 978 0 8166 4708 8 US$25.00 (pb) 304pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Scott Nygren’s prefatory caveats should dispel any expectation that his book title promises a history of film in Japan; an update, say, of Anderson and Richie’s The Japanese …

Gideon Nisbet, Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture. Bristol Phoenix Press, 2006. ISBN: 1 904675 12 3 AUD$43.95 (pb) 170pp (Review copy supplied by Footprint Books) While Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture is hardly the first account of the ancient world in film (books from Solomon, Wyke, Winkler, and Cyrino come to mind), it is surely the first to …

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 …

Elana Levine, Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television. Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 082 233919 9 US$22.95 (pb) 320pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) In 1977 an ‘anonymous TV executive’ described American television as ‘wallowing in sex’ (4), an evocative description of seventies network programming that inspired the title of …

James Morrison (ed.), The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows. London; New York: Wallflower Press, 2006. ISBN: 978 1 904764 77 9 US$25.00 (pb) 224pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) Ordinarily a book of theoretically-besotted essays on the cinema offers little more than a long dull slog through the painfully obvious. You don’t have to have read …

Christine L. Marran, Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0816647279 US$22.50 (pb) 264pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) This book adopts a Cultural Studies approach to Japanese studies It examines the representation of the female criminal in Japan over the last 130 years – from early Meiji …

Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 231 13377 4 US$19.00 (pb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press) The predominant tone of discussion about the US film industry – not only that industry, but also the totality of the US economy – is that it …

Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. ISBN: 978 0 262 06252 7 US$34.95 (hb) 448pp (Review copy supplied by MIT Press)   What counts for the orientation of the spectacle is not my body as it in fact is, as a thing in objective space, but as a system of possible actions, a virtual …

Steven Bach, Leni, The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 375 40400 9 US$30.00 (hb) 386pp Gerd Gemunden and Mary R. Desjardins (eds.), Dietrich Icon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 8223 3819 2 US$25.00 (pb) 420pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) 1967. New York City. …

Melanie J. Wright, Religion and Film: An Introduction. I.B.Tauris, 2007. ISBN: 978 1 85043 886 1 US$26.95 (pb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by I.B.Tauris) The subtitle of Melanie Wright’s study of the treatment of religion in film suggests a textbook, but although Religion and Film has pedantic stretches, it is a mostly thoughtful and often insightful consideration of how film has …

Gail Jones, The Piano. Sydney: Currency Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 86819 799 9 AUD$16.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Currency Press) Flagrant poetics: rendering Jane Campion’s The Piano new Gail Jones’ monograph on Jane Campion’s The Piano is the next in the Australian Screen Classics series published jointly by The AFC/National Film and Sound Archive and Currency Press. Others in the series include a …

Marie-Laure Ryan, Avatars of Story. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ISBN: 978 081664686 9 US$20 (pb) 296pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Marie Laure-Ryan has written and edited a number of books on the subject of narrative theory in new media and interactive media, and her body of work has had some degree of influence; within the …

Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 520 25128 1 US$39.95 (hb) 358pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism is the forty-first title in the …

Laraine Porter and Bryony Dixon (eds.), Picture Perfect: Landscape, Place and Travel in British Cinema before 1930. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007-09-12. ISBN: 1 905 81601 4 £14.99 (pb) 160pp (Review copy supplied by University of Exeter Press) One of the most heartening and, indeed, exciting revelations of film studies in recent years has been the bringing to light …

Jo Fox, Film Propaganda in Britain and Nazi Germany: World War II Cinema. Oxford: Berg, 2007. ISBN: 9 781 85973896 2 £17.99 (pb) 368pp (Review copy supplied by Berg publishers) The Second World War still continues to exert great fascination on scholars and the public alike, and no aspect of the war appears more fascinating than film propaganda. In recent …

Michael Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 520 24117 6 US$29.95 (hb) 393pp (Review copy supplied by the University of California Press) Tom Sito, Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, …

Petra Kupper, The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art. London: University of Minnesota, 2007. ISBN: 978 081664653 1 US$29.95 (pb) 360pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) When I was about eight years old I lay in hospital with a long, thick strip of sticky material across my lower belly. As the young male doctor examined …

J. E. Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. ISBN: 0 81312406 9 US$50.00 (hb) 447pp (Review copy supplied by the University Press of Kentucky) J. E. Smyth’s Reconstructing American Historical Cinema is intended, in the author’s own words, “to question the canons of film studies and American history” (24). This is a bold claim. In …