Category Archive for: ‘Issue 26 – Reviews’

Raymond Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke: The Restored Version. Madman/NFSA/ATOM, 2009 (Review copy supplied by ATOM http://www.metromagazine.com.au/shop/product.asp?pID=1864) The Sentimental Bloke is a classic of Australian – and even world – silent cinema: Bill Routt and I are quoted on the cover of this package, calling it “among the very best films made anywhere before 1920”. So I welcome this package, which hopefully …

Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley (ed.), Hollywood in the Neighbourhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing. University of California Press, 2008 ISBN: 9 780520249 73 8 US$27.95 (pb) 290pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9480.php) Not so long ago – when serious film study meant the textual analysis of films – this book could not have been published. Post-structuralism and …

Jane Mills, Loving and Hating Hollywood: Reframing Global and Local Cinemas. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2009 ISBN: 9 781741756 647 Aud$39.99 (pb) 249pp (Review copy supplied by Allen & Unwin) Jane Mills begins her monograph by calling for a widespread film education. Based on her observations of the Australian film industry, she asks why its domestic audience is so …

Sabine Nessel, Winfried Pauleit, Christine Rüffert (eds), Wort und Fleisch: Kino zwischen Text und Körper/ Word and Flesh: Cinema between Text and the Body, German edition. CD with English version and clips. Berlin: Bertz and Fischer ISBN: 978-3-86505-182-0 €19,90 158pp (Review copy supplied by Bertz+Fischer http://www.bertz-fischer.de/wortundfleisch.html) This collection of essays on film and media studies is published by the editors …

Matthew H. Bernstein, Screening a Lynching: The Leo Frank Case on Film and Television. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-8203-3239-0 US$24.95 (pb) 332pp (Review copy supplied by University of Georgia Press) Matthew H. Bernstein’s Screening a Lynching: The Leo Frank Case on Film and Television is an exhaustively researched historical study that introduces a famous case of lynching …

Alexander Jacoby, A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors: From the Silent Era to the Present Day. Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, California, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-1933330 53 2 US$22.95 (pb) 398pp Aaron Gerow, A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan. Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2008 ISBN: …

Kristen Whissel, Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4201-4 US$22.95 (pb) 288pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Kristen Whissel’s Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema takes us deep into the world of cinema and cultural modernity at the turn of the twentieth century, a world that …

Rob King, The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009 ISBN 978-0-520-25537-1 $24.95 (pb) 355pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) Frankly, I’ve never been a huge connoisseur of slapstick comedy, having inherited an innate prejudice of all low-brow culture from my European parents. With the …

Steven Maras, Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice. Wallflower Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-1-905674-81-7 UK£16.99 (pb) 227pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press http://www.wallflowerpress.co.uk) From his initial point which suggests a problematic arising from the separating out of (manuscript based) screenwriting and screen writing (“writing” for the screen through cinematography and sound for example), it becomes evident that what Steven Maras is …

Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging. London: Reaktion, 2008 ISBN: 978-1-86189-370-3 US$35.00 (pb) 268pp (Review copy supplied by Footprint Books http://www.footprint.com.au/) Gönül Dönmez-Colin’s Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging provides an historical overview of Turkish cinema from the perspective of the framework indicated by the book’s subtitle. While identity is a broad concept, the author has developed it into workable …

Deb Verhoeven, Jane Campion. London: Routledge, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-415-26275-0 US$31.95 285pp (Review copy supplied by Routledge http://www.routledge.com/) Over a decade ago, when I began working on Jane Campion’s The Piano, the amount of material a web search on the director’s name generated was overwhelming. So I appreciate Deb Verhoeven’s reference to “a time ‘BC’ (‘Before Campion’)” (xii); for female film scholars in …

Tony Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War. Baltimore: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007 ISBN: 978-1-55849-612-5 US$29.95 (pb) 352pp (Review copy supplied by University of Massachusetts Press http://www.umass.edu/umpress/about.html) In the forty-plus years that the Cold War dominated international politics, cinema became party to what Tony Shaw describes as “the longest of all national cinematic propaganda wars” (p. 2). Shaw’s meticulously researched book, Hollywood’s Cold …

André Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009 ISBN: 9 780802095 86 2 US$27.95 (pb) 224pp (Review copy supplied by University of Toronto Press http://www.utpress.utoronto.ca) This translation of Gaudreault’s seminal French text, Du littéraire au filmique (1988) is of great significance to the English speaking population because the narrative theories …

Michel Ciment, Film World: Interviews with Cinema’s Leading Directors. New York: Berg, 2009 ISBN: 9 781845204 57 0 US$24.95 (pb) 384pp (Review copy supplied by Berg Publishers http://www.bergpublishers.com/Categories/flm/tabid/602/Default.aspx) Reviewing a collection of interviews as a unified book is a strange business, all the more so when the collection in question features 25 different filmmakers, from 19 different countries, interviewed at …

Dina Iordanova with Ragan Rhyne (eds), Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit. St Andrews, Scotland: St Andrews Film Studies, 2009 ISBN: 978-1-906678-04-3 UK£16.99 (pb) 225pp (Review copy supplied by St Andrews Film Studies) In 1932, only five years after the release of the first film with sound, an event held in Venice Italy marked the genesis of the Film …

Joe McElhaney (ed.), Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment. Detroit: Wayne State University, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-8143-3307-5 US$29.95 (pb) 472pp (Review copy supplied by Wayne State University Press http://wsupress.wayne.edu/) For a discipline which frequently stresses the importance of a historical perspective, film studies has rarely reflected on its own history. Last year we were reading Deleuze, this year we are “doing” …

Catherine Russell, The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-8223-4312-7 US$47.95 (pb) 465pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the great breakthrough for film historians was the increased availability of films made before 1910. In the new century, the availability …

Jacob Smith, Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008 ISBN: 9 780520254 94 7 US$24.95 (pb) 304pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press http://www.ucpress.edu/) Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media begins with a description of a phonograph record from 1908 called The Laughing Spectator in which a talented comedian plays multiple speaking parts in a performance …

Pak Tong Cheuk, Hong Kong New Wave Cinema (1978-2000). Bristol: Intellect Books, 2008 ISBN: 9 781841501 48 2 UK£19.95 (pb) 264pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect Books http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk) From the perspective of Anglophone cinema studies, we often share the assumption that Hong Kong cinema is fundamentally “mass-produced” and industry-driven.[1] With this presupposition in mind, however, what does it mean to …

Brian McFarlane (ed), The Encyclopedia of British Film (Third Edition). Methuen, London, 2008 ISBN: 9780413776600 UK £24.99 (pb) 816pp (Review copy supplied by Methuen) Twenty years ago in a television series titled Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future a character defined ‘book’ as ‘a non-volatile database’. The ‘non-volatility’ of such a database means that if the creator wants to add/subtract/amend or …

Joe McElhaney, Albert Maysles. University of Illinois Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-252-07621 US$19.95 (pb) 206pp (Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press) Joe McElhaney, associate professor of film and media studies at Hunter College of the City University of New York has written a detailed and insightful study of the work of the pioneering documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles. The volume …

Brooke Erin Duffy and Joseph Turow (eds), Key Readings in Media Today: Mass Communication in Contexts. London: Routledge, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-415-99205-3 Au$45.00 (pb) 496pp (Review copy supplied by Palgrave MacMillan http://www.palgravemacmillan.com.au/) For students new to the world of media studies, searching for books that elucidate the many different facets of a rapidly changing media environment can often be an arduous …

Barry Curtis, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2009 ISBN: 9 781 86189389 5 US$16.00 (pb) 256pp (Review copy supplied by Footprint Books http://www.footprint.com.au/) Even a preliminary venture into the field of horror scholarship suggests that filmic manifestations of the haunted house function as much as characters as they do as mere locations or hackneyed plot …

Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-8166-4036-2 US$25.00 (pb) 384pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/B/betz_beyond.html) This book aptly starts with Susan Sontag and cinephilia, but any danger of retro wallowing in nostalgia is dispelled by p. 3: “What is dead…is…European art cinema as an …

Philip Gillett, Movie Greats: A Critical Study of Classic Cinema. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2008 ISBN: 978 1 84520 653 6 US$29.95 (pb) 256pp (Review copy supplied by Berg Publishers) Philip Gillett is obsessed with canons. He doesn’t like any of the existing ones. His ostensible intent in this book is to establish a fresh set of criteria by which to …

Bert Cardullo, Out of Asia: The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Abbas Kiraostami, and Zhang Yimou; Essays and Interviews. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008 ISBN: 1443800252 UK£14.99 (pb) 200pp (Review copy supplied by Cambridge Scholars Publishing) The title of this book is long enough for me to pick an argument with before I start. Its length, I suppose, is the …

Roger Ebert, Scorsese by Ebert. Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-226-18202-5 Au$25.00 (hb) 297pp (Review copy supplied by Footprint Books http://www.footprint.com.au/) Scorsese by Ebert opens with a prophetic claim that the Chicago Sun-Times film critic made in 1973, where he declared that, “in ten years Martin Scorsese will be a director of world rank”. I can imagine at …

Joanna Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema. Duke University Press, 2009 ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-4472-8 US$22.95 (pb) 248pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press http://www.dukeupress.edu/books/) In 1993, influential Argentine social theorist Néstor García Canclini asked the question: “¿Habrá cine latinoamericano en el año 2000?” (will there be Latin American Cinema in the year 2000?). Considering this question almost a …

Jane Stadler with Kelly McWilliam, Screen Media: Analysing Film and Television. Crow’s Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2009 ISBN: 978 1 74175 448 3 AU$49.95 (pb) 390pp (Review copy supplied by Allen & Unwin) The authors of Screen Media do a highly commendable job of making a wide array of information about media analysis accessible to a reader with little or no …

Amit Sarwal and Reema Sarwal (eds), Creative Nation: Australian Cinema and Cultural Studies Reader. New Delhi: SS Publications, 2009 ISBN: 81 902282 0 X AU$55 (hb) 600pp (Review copy supplied by New Delhi: SS Publications) In the past year, Australia has received some negative media coverage in India. This coverage has resulted largely from a spate of attacks against Indian …

Michael Ingham, Johnnie To Kei-fung’s PTU. Hong University Press, Hong Kong, 2009 ISBN: 978-962-209-919-7 HKD135.00 (pb) 149pp (Review copy supplied by Hong Kong University Press hkupress@hkucc.hku.hk) It has become something of a commonplace to observe that, by the time cinema studies discovers a film movement, it is generally over. For the past couple of years, even as the books have …

Stella Hockenhull, Neo-Romantic Landscapes: An Aesthetic Approach to the Films of Powell and Pressburger. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008 ISBN (13): 9781847187444 US$69.99 (hb) 220pp (Review copy sent by Cambridge Scholars Publishing) Aesthetically and culturally, the Archers are often regarded as the great outsiders of British Cinema, who followed European and Hollywood models rather than belonging to any …

Jane Blocker, Seeing Witness: Visuality and the Ethics of Testimony. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-8166-5476-5 US$25.00 (pb) 153pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press http://www.upress.umn.edu/) A wedding is an allegorical event for the vertiginous mise en abyme that witnessing is. Frankenstein becomes a symbol of the monstrous burden of representing our invisibility. Blushing is the skin’s way …