Category Archive for: ‘Issue 23 – Reviews’

[Screening the Past asked Bill Routt to review this archival DVD set documenting most of the surviving films John Ford directed at (Twentieth-Century) Fox from 1920—1952. More of the review will appear in future issues.] Ford at Fox. Published by Twentieth-Century Fox, 2007. 21 disks. Includes coffee-table photo album, Ford at Fox, 168 pp. with essays by Joseph McBride (“Ford at Fox: …

Jill Julius Matthews, Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydneys Romance with Modernity. Sydney: Currency Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 868 19755 6 Au$32.95 (pb) 342pp (Review copy supplied by Currency Press) This is a tale of modern romance, of heroic adventures and impassioned desire. It is set in the city of Sydney over thirty tumultuous years of prosperity, between the two …

Philip Brophy, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Australian Screen Classics Series). Sydney: Currency Press and the Australian Film Commission, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-86819-821-7 Au$16.94 (pb) 88pp (Review copy supplied by Currency Press) Philip Brophy’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is a most welcome tour de-force addition to Currency Press’s Australian Screen Classics, which is edited by the indefatigable film scholar-activist …

Jay McRoy, Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2008 ISBN: 978 90 420 2331 4 US$67 (pb) 219pp (Review copy supplied by Rodopi) In the opening pages of Nightmare Japan, Jay McRoy outlines his task: to “advance current studies” of Japanese horror cinema, and to answer the call for a “much-needed aesthetic and critical …

Atara Stein, The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004 ISBN-13: 978-0809325863 US$45.00 (hb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by Southern Illinois University Press) Narratives that detail the gradual absorption of subcultures into the mainstream would do well to follow the lead of Atara Stein, an American scholar interested in the interface of Romanticism and …

Guy Westwell, War Cinema. Hollywood on the Front Line. London: Wallflower Press, 2006. ISBN: 978-1-904764-54-0 £12.99stg (pb) 144pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) Despite the number of war films produced by Hollywood each year, there are few (recent) texts that actually analyse the genre from either an historical or cultural-political perspective. There are, of course, books dealing with the …

Jonathan Auerbach, Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-520-25293-6 US$24.95 (pb) 214pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) …To achieve any sort of conceptual unity…practices of cinema during its first decade came to rely most crucially on the dynamic language of body movement – gestures, comportments, and attitudes which taken together …

Jeffrey Sconce (ed.), Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-3964-9 US$23.95 (pb) 352pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Jeffrey Sconce is a terrific smart arse. It’s what makes him such a pleasure to read, and what ensures his ‘Trashing the Academy’ is one of the …

Martin F. Norden (ed.), The Changing Face of Evil in Film and Television. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2007. ISBN: 978 90 420 2324 6 US$77.00 (pb) 244pp (Review copy supplied by Rodopi) The publication of an anthology of essays which strive to probe disciplinary boundaries through rigorous inquiries into specific subjects is an idea whose time has come. This is …

Robin Blaetz (ed), Women’s Experimental Cinema. Critical Frameworks. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2007. ISBN13: 978 0 8223 4044 7 US$25.95 (pb) 412pp (Review Copy supplied by Duke University Press) Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann (eds), Avant-Garde Film. Amsterdan – New York: Rodopi, 2007. ISBN: 978 90 420 2305 5 US$117.00 (hb) 416pp (Review copy supplied by Rodopi) There …

Garrett Stewart, Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77416-9 US$40.00 (pb) 299 pp (Review copy supplied by The University of Chicago Press) In F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (Germany 1922) the vampire Count Orlock meets his end by being exposed to sunlight. We see this death as a lap dissolve where the Count simply …

Emiel Martens, Once Were Warriors: The Aftermath. The Controvery of OWW in Aotearoa New Zealand. Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007. ISBN: 978-90-5260-236-3. €24.90 (pb) 184pp (Review copy supplied by Aksant Publishers) How does one describe Once Were Warriors? In Aotearoa New Zealand it was originally a surprisingly successful first novel by Alan Duff, a man of no particular fame or standing at the …

Eyal Peretz, Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. ISBN-13: 9 780 80475685 3 US$21.95 (pb) 224pp (Review copy supplied by Stanford University Press) Strange days This is a new kind of film book – fittingly enough, in that it dares to grandiosely assert the “birth of a new cinema and a …

Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 7486 2042 5 US$65.00 (hb) 208pp (Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press) Anyone observing the fluctuating trends in recent French cinema will have noticed the emergence of a corpus of films that thrives on unsettling the audience on a …

Steven Jacobs, The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2007. ISBN: 978 90 6450 637 6 €29.50 (pb) 344pp (Review copy supplied by 010 Publishers) ‘Authoritative’ is how I would describe this book. Steven Jacobs, an art historian, lectures on film history at Sint Lukas College of Art, Brussels, and the Academy of Fine Arts in …

András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema 1950-1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-226-45165-7 US$22.50 (pb) 428pp (Review copy supplied by University of Chicago Press) As we approach the end of the 2000s, it is worth remembering that it has been fifty years since that annus mirabilis during which history and aesthetics took a quantum leap. In …

Mark Browning, David Cronenberg: Author or Film-maker? Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Books, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-84150-173-4 US$25.00 (pb) 207pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect Books) After more than half a century of auteur film theory, the title of this book is quite puzzling. Should it be: David Cronenberg: Author and Film-maker? Particularly, in this case, this question seems rhetorical. Cronenberg’s films bear one …

Deane Williams, Australian Postwar Documentary Film: An Arc of Mirrors. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2008. ISBN: 9781841502106 UK£29.95 (hb) 192 pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect Books) Deane Williams re-evaluates Australian documentary film production after World War 2, positioning it as part of an international left culture, which can embrace producers as different as the Realist Film Unit, Cecil Holmes, John …

Michelle Langford, Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2006. ISBN 1-84150-138-7 US$40.00 (pb) 215pp (Review copy supplied by UniReps) Werner Schroeter is a marginal and itinerant (though prolific) figure in the history of New German Cinema, making fleeting but elusive appearances on the festival circuit, for instance, winning the Golden Bear …

Sam Rohdie, Montage (Cinema Aesthetics). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-0719070396 US$19.95 (pb) 146pp (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press) This book treats of montage much as Eisenstein described cinematography at the outset of his chapter on the ideogram in The Film Form. For its author montage is cinema itself. Rather than laboring through the definitions it carries under the …

Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris and Sarah Street, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 1970 ISBN: 978 90 5356 984 9 US$39.50 (pb) 320pp (Review copy supplied by Amsterdam University Press) This is at once a very useful book and a flawed book. Any study that deals seriously with the place of …

John David Rhodes, Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4930-3 US$20.00 (pb) 240pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Pasolini was born in Bologna and spent his early years in a number of northern Italian cities as the family followed the father around in his military postings. He eventually returned to study …

Tom Conley, Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema (new introduction). University of Minnesota Press, 1991; 2006. ISBN 0-8166-4970-7 US$22.50 (pb) 296pp Tom Conley, Cartographic Cinema. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN 0-8166-4357-1 US$25.00 (pb) 336pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) If the increased production of cartographic knowledge in the seventeenth century was one of the earliest achievements of …

Alan Taylor, Jacobean Visions: Webster, Hitchcock, and Google Culture. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-3-631-56227-7 US$41.95 (pb) 201pp (Review copy supplied by Peter Lang) Read from a film-critical perspective, at least, Alan Taylor’s Jacobean Visions: Webster, Hitchcock, and Google Culture is an avowedly and enthusiastically eccentric book. In his ‘Preface: 1993-2007’, Taylor describes the “twenty-first century impetus” of his book as “one …

Robin Nelson, State of Play: Contemporary “High-End” TV Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN: 978-0-7190-7311-3 US$24.95 (pb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press) Even with the continued growth of television studies in the academy and television criticism in the popular press, little has been written about television aesthetics. In the thirteen years since John Thornton Caldwell’s Televisuality (1995), only …

Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin (eds), Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method. Duke University Press, 2007 ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-3821-5 US$24.95 (pb) 400pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) This is a very useful book. It has an introduction which states simply and clearly what it intends to do, and why; then twelve essays which …

Leen Engelen and Roel Vande Winkel, Perspectives on European Film and History. Academia Press, Gent, 2007 ISBN: 97 890 3821082 7 Eur 30.00 (pb) 281pp (Review copy supplied by Gent, Academia Press) Perspectives on European Film and History brings together a number of essays by Dutch, Belgian, British and American scholars interested in the relationship between film and history, and notably …

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 …

Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (Translated by Jeff Fort). New York: Zone Books, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-1-890951-82-5 US$25.95 (hb) 100pp (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) Philosophy adopts the task, usually as the task par excellence, of seeking the meaning of virtue – that is, it asks how judgment is possible, given the finitude of foresight. Human beings face this problem from the moment consciousness …

Geoff King, Donnie Darko (Cultographies Series). London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-905674-51-0 US$15.00 (pb) 118pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) It may be no stretch of the imagination to suggest that, by all accounts, we are now living in a post-cult world. The dark underbelly of genuine cult practice, with its midnight screenings, seedy grindhouse theatres, dodgy …

Roger Beebe and Jason Middleton (eds.), Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones. Durham, Duke University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4162-8 US$23.95 (pb) 360pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) The beat goes on? Medium Cool is in many respects a very timely volume. As its subtitle suggests, it is a book that seeks to chart the progress of the …

D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, Harvard UP, 2007. ISBN 13:978-0-674-02698-8 US$24.95 (pb) 193pp (Review copy supplied by Harvard University Press) Because the digital arts are without substance and therefore not easily identified as objects, no medium-specific ontology can fix them in place. The digital arts render all expressions as identical since they are all ultimately reducible …

Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8166-4942-6 US$22.50 (pb) 257 pages (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) The recent growth of international interest in commercial Hindi cinema has resulted in the publication of a number of books which are important aids to teaching and research in this area. …

Zhang Zhen (ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4074-4 US$26.95 (pb) 447pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) If we know anything at all about China right now, it is that it is the site of ferocious processes of change. One of …

Christine Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-7486-1642-8 Au$49.95 (pb) 308pp (Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press) In the foreword to her new book, Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality, Christine Cornea makes it clear that its fundamental purpose is to “place the thematic and formal concerns raised by science fiction …

Steve Chibnall, Quota Quickies: The Birth of the British ‘B’ Film. London: BFI, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-1844571550 US$28.95 (pb) 329pp (Review copy supplied by BFI Publishing) Steve Chibnall is a well-known and well-regarded film historian who specializes in British cinema, and here he tackles an area that has been ignored by many other film scholars, and does it magnificently. In Quota Quickies: …

Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8020-9189-5 US$29.95 (pb with dvd) 224pp (Review copy supplied by University of Toronto Press) Millicent Marcus has taught Italian film and literature, and co-taught courses on Holocaust literature and film, at the University of Texas, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Toronto, …

Steven Ricci, Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922-1943. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. ISBN: 0 520 23310 7 US$24.95 (pb) 233pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) The recent wave of scholarly monographs about cinema in Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain, and Fascist Italy suggest two things: that European cinema in the interwar period can no …

Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Gothic. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. ISBN: 978 0 415 39843 5 $US30.95 (pb) 290pp (Review copy supplied by Routledge) Showing no signs of releasing its grasp on the popular or critical imagination, the Gothic has confirmed its longevity with a spate of academic titles over the past few years. …

Abé Mark Nornes [Markus Nornes], Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema. Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press: 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8166-5042-2 US$22.50 (pb) 304pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Officially, Nornes’ fascinating book, about language-translation in the export and import of films, consists of 8 main segments: 6 ‘chapters’ plus ‘Introduction’ and ‘Conclusion’, the eight of which average …

Vanessa Schwartz, It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture. The University of Chicago Press, 2007 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74243-4 US$25.00 (pb) 272 pp (Review copy supplied by University of Chicago Press) The moment that I opened the envelope containing, It’s So French, I knew that I would be completely mesmerized by the subject matter. Before reading a single …

Cindy Patton, Cinematic Identity: Anatomy of a Problem Film. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN: 0-8166-3412-2 US$19.50 (pb) 232pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) From the title, subtitle, and the advertising blurbs, I was expecting from this book an anatomy of a problem film, namely Elia Kazan’s Pinky (USA 1949). But that’s not what the book is. Only a …

Scott Anthony, Night Mail. London: British Film Institute, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-1-84457-229-8 £9.99 stg (pb) (Review copy supplied by British Film Institute) Night Mail, the GPO Film Unit’s 1936 paean to the British rail-based mail delivery system, occupies an ambivalent place in documentary history. It is almost always cited as a seminal film, but its influence on modern documentary form is …

Barbara Creed, Phallic Panic. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005. ISBN:0 52285 172 X Au$34.95 (pb) 200pp (Review copy supplied by Melbourne University Press) In his essay on the uncanny, Freud describes this phenomenon as an experience of terror or dread. He argues that all such experiences originate with the figure of the paternal castrator, who represents the threat of dismemberment …

Jeffrey Weinstock, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Cultographies). London: Wallflower Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-905674-50-3 US$15.00 (pb) 144pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) Some might say that a film like The Rocky Horror Picture Show (UK/USA 1975) is not worthy of serious criticism. Jeffrey Weinstock is not one of them. In The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Cultographies), Weinstock offers a deep look into the film …

Jonathan Rayner, The Naval War Film: Genre, History, National Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-0-7190-7098-3 US$84.95 (hb) 275pp (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press) A great deal of critical attention has been lavished on the war film by practitioners of film and history, but while films dealing with the doings of armies and air forces, have been …

Takayuki Tatsumi, Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. Duke University Press, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-3774-4 US$22.95 (pb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Full Metal Apache is not a book about Japanese cinema for two reasons. Literally speaking, it is more accurately a work about Japanese national discourse, culture and identity. Takayuki Tatsumi’s meditations on the …

Paul Grainge, Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age. London & New York: Routledge, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-415-35405-9 US$34.95 (pb) 224pp (Review copy supplied by Routledge) The brand is the new black. It is related to that last-millenium term synergy, but not simply reducible to synergy. The brand can refer to both the company and the way that companies …

Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr, and Takayuki Tatsumi (eds.), Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8166-4974-7 US$20.00 (pb) 288pp (Review copy supplied by the University of Minnesota Press) Being a fan of anime and manga in the west inevitably involves seizing works out of their …

Dorota Ostrowska, Reading the French New Wave: Critics, Writers and Art Cinema in France. London: Wallflower, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-905674-57-2 £16.99 (pb) 207pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) The links between the literary and cinematic avant-gardes of the 1950s and 1960s are often hinted at in scholarly studies of the period, but rarely examined in detail. It is the first …