Category Archive for: ‘Issue 24 – Reviews’

Ford At Fox Part Two (a) A Brief(er) Introduction Born Reckless (1930) – Addendum: Cast and Character Issues Up The River (1930)   What would you think of an architect who arrived at his building wondering where to put the staircase? You don’t ‘compose’ a film on the set, you put a predesigned composition on film. It is wrong to liken a director …

James Herrick, Scientific Mythologies: How Science and Science Fiction Forge New Religious Beliefs. InterVarsityPress Academic, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-0830825882 US$23.00 (pb) 288pp (Review copy supplied by IVP Academic) It was perhaps inevitable that at some point in the process of trading religion for science as our window on the universe, science would become religious. We thus find ourselves with new mythologies …

Adrian Martin, “What is Modern Cinema?”. Santiago: Uqbar, 2008 ISBN: 9 78999568 601256 $18900 Chile Pesos (pb) 278pp This book Que es el cine moderno?, I see it as a kind of Ruizian maleta. Strange things come out of it – strange objects, strange films, strange bodies – for our strange new modern world.[1] (Adrian Martin) A new book by Adrian …

Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-231-12988-6 US$45.00 (hb) 392pp (Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press) Alison Griffiths’ very handsome new book Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View aims to “explore an expanded paradigm of spectatorship, beyond the seated spectator in the darkened auditorium” …

Louis Kaplan, The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 ISBN: 978 0 8166 5156 6 US$24.95 (pb) 264pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer uses primary source documents – including prints of original photographs – to tell the fascinating story of a Boston jewel …

Richard Allen, Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-231-13575-7 US$24.50 (pb) 295pp (Review copy supplied by Footprint Books) Looking over the history of film theory and criticism during the past fifty years, one cannot help being struck by the way nearly every methodology, from auteurism to psychoanalysis to feminism to industrial history, has found the films …

Joanna Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present. Virago Press, 2007 ISBN-13: 978 184408154 7 UK£12.99 (pb) 576pp In the introduction to her exhaustive Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present (2007), history professor and self-defined “socialist feminist”[1]  Joanna Bourke presents statistics that chillingly demonstrate just how pervasive the reality of rape is. She cites evidence claiming approximately 47,000 …

Jennifer Fay, Theatres of Occupation. Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany. London / Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4744-6 US$22.50 (pb) 228pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) The history of German film culture in the immediate post-World War II period, when the defeated nation was occupied by American, British, French, and Soviet armed …

Alistair Phillips and Julian Stringer (eds.), Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts. Oxford: Routledge, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-415-32848-7 US$35.95 (pb) 363pp (Review copy supplied by Routledge) The study of Japanese cinema has typically held a high place among national cinema studies for a couple of reasons. The first is, of course, the quality of the films, but beyond this, there has always …

Abé Mark Nornes, Forest of Pressure – Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary. University of Minnesota Press, 2007 ISBN: 0 8166 4908 1 US$25.00 (pb) 317pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Abé Mark Nornes has become, with the publication of this book, an author with a considerable range, with a recent book on film translation – the …

Joseph Epstein, Fred Astaire. Yale University Press, 2008 (Review copy supplied by Yale University Press) The question that engages Joseph Epstein concerns Fred Astaire’s enduring magic: why his movies still shimmer with glamour, 50 years after his time, when what he did may not have been all that worth doing in the first place. (The question may likewise be asked …

Marvin D’Lugo, Pedro Almodóvar. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006 ISBN-10: 0-252-07361-4 US$19.95 (pb) 192pp (Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press) Auteur on the Global Scene: Pedro Almodóvar’s Geocultural Strategies It is no secret that the public persona of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar is built on a series of oxymorons. An enfant terrible of Spanish cinema, he is also …

Charles R. Acland (ed), Residual Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007 ISBN-10: 0-8166-4472-1 US$25.00 (pb) 400pp (Review copy supplied by the University of Minnesota Press) Obituaries for old media, as standard news practice dictates for superannuated or terminally ill celebrities, have the peculiar fate of being written prior to the actual consummation of death. Prophets of the digital revolution …

Paul Meehan, Tech-Noir: The Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2008 ISBN: 978 0 7864 3325 4 US$55.00 (hb) 272pp (Review copy supplied by McFarland & Co.) The similarities between the popular family comedy Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (USA 1988) and 1930s mad scientist movies such as Doctor X (USA 1932) and The Raven (USA 1935) may not be instantly …

Lisa Downing and Sue Harris, eds., From Perversion to Purity: The Stardom of Catherine Deneuve. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-7190-7338-0 Au$152.00 (hb) 188pp (Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press. Available from Footprint Books) I have a cherished memory of Paris from what I suppose must have been the winter of 1998. Turning a corner one …

Geneviève Sellier, Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema (trans Kristin Ross). Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-0822341925 US$22.95 (pb) 280pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Anyone interested in the French cinema will want to own this book. It offers a radical and provocative account of the New Wave and its immediate precursors from a feminist perspective. …

Michel Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Colour (trans Jody Gladding). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-691-13930-2 US$35.00 (hb) 216pp (Review copy supplied by Princeton University Press) Every colour has its history, but few more so than black, and there are few so well placed to describe its trajectory through Western civilisation as Michel Pastoureau, mediaevalist, scholar of color history …

Joram ten Brink (ed), Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch (Preface by Michael Renov). London: Wallflower Press, 2007 ISBN: 978-1-905674-47-3 US$29.50 (pb) 324pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) The film returns to past people and places, but in fact it does not seem to be a film in search of the past. … Is it Rouch’s way of refusing …

Stephen J. Nichols, Jesus: Made in America. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-8308-2849-4 US$20.00 (pb) 237pp (Review copy supplied by InterVarsity Press) From the rise of the Christian Right in the 1970s and 1980s to the Bush administration and the Passion of the Christ (USA 2004) phenomenon in the 2000s, so-called “culture wars” between evangelical Christianity and secular liberalism have …

Linda Williams, Screening Sex. A John Hope Franklin Book, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-8223-4285-4 US$25.00 (pb) 412pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Linda Williams is Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. She is known for her breakthrough 1989 book, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the …

Gerd Gemünden, A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder’s American Films. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008 ISBN: 978-1-84545-419-7 US$27.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Berghahn Books) When asked about the meaning of one of his paintings, Picasso reportedly shrugged, “Don’t ask me. I’m the artist.” I thought of this quote when pondering Gerd Gemünden’s book on Billy Wilder. Gemünden says his premise …

Anna Powell, Deleuze and Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005 ISBN: 0-7486-1747-7 US$36.00 (pb) 232pp (Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press) The rhizome has bloomed. The leaves now push up. Even in many undergraduate film programs, the multiplicity of Deleuze (or Deleuzoguattarian, or schizoanalytical) film scholarship has begun to variegate, differentiate and change. At the arrival of Anna …