Category Archive for: ‘Issue 28 – Reviews’

  Introduction When it is completed, Part Three will be the fifth instalment of a review of the lesser John Ford films contained in the gigantic Ford At Fox box set. It will cover most of the movies Ford directed at Twentieth-Century Fox from 1937 until he enlisted in the United States Navy after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. This segment, Part …

Chris Fujiwara, Jerry Lewis (Contemporary Film Directors). University of Illinois Press, 2009 ISBN-13: 978-0252076794 US$19.95 (pb) 176pp (Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press) This brief but pithy volume increases the count of English language books about the films of Jerry Lewis to One. Lewis’ own books The Total Filmmaker(1971), and his memoirs Jerry Lewis: In Person (1982) and Dean and Me (A Love …

Warren Buckland (ed.), Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies. New York: Routledge, 2009 ISBN: 978 0 415 96262 9 US$26.96 (pb) 358pp (Review copy supplied by Routledge) How can we map out a topos, by which scholars of contemporary Hollywood cinema with contesting agendas may reach some form of mutual understanding, or, as Thomas Elsaesser proposes, constructive mutual interferences?[1]  This is …

Heide Schlüpmann, The Uncanny Gaze: The Drama of Early German Cinema. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010 ISBN: 3-87877-373-0 US$30.00 (pb) 273pp Mark Garrett Cooper, Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-252-07700-5 US$25.00 (pb) 230pp (Review Copies supplied by University of Illinois Press) ‘Women and Film History International’ is a …

Roger Hallas, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image. Duke University Press, 2009 ISBN 978-0-8223-4601-2 US$24.95 (pb) 336pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) As HIV/AIDS reaches its third decade, the once-flourishing field of AIDS cultural criticism, an interdisciplinary amalgam of gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, film and media studies, memory and trauma studies – …

Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner (eds), Cinema and Landscape. Bristol: Intellect, 2010 ISBN: 978-1-84150-309-7 US$25.00 (pb) 315pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect) Presumably anyone interested in reading Cinema and Landscape, an anthology of eighteen essays edited by Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner, is interested in considering landscape and cinema in tandem in order to practice a reading strategy that will reveal …

Brian McFarlane and Deane Williams, Michael Winterbottom (British Film Makers). Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-7190-7422 6 AU$89 (hb) 152pp (Review copy supplied by Footprint Books) Michael Winterbottom has good reason to feel like an unsung figure of contemporary British cinema. Despite his prolific output (eighteen films in the last fifteen years), eclectic use of genre and …

Scott MacDonald, Adventures of Perception: Cinema as Exploration. University of California Press, 2009 ISBN: 9780520258563 US$29.95 (pb) 440pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) Scott MacDonald’s Adventures of Perception: Cinema as Exploration is a category defying collection of eight essays and eight interviews produced between 1983 and 2009. It unfolds as a series of pairings exploring independent and avant-garde cinema …

D. N. Rodowick (ed.), Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 ISBN: 978 0 8166 5007 1 US$27.50 (pb) 396pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) In Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (1997), one of D.N. Rodowick’s primary aims was to reposition Deleuze’s cinema books from the margins to the centre of both film theory and …

Joan Grossman, Blackout: On Memory and Catastrophe. New York and Dresden: Atropos Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-9819972-3-0 US$16.95 (pb) 112pp (Review copy supplied by Atropos Press) Philosophers from Aristotle to Jacques Derrida have attempted to theorize how individuals and communities recall and represent important events. In her book, Blackout: On Memory and Catastrophe, Joan Grossman builds on the work of classic and …

Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-8223-4411-7 US$25.95 (pb) 372pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Mourning the Nation is an important and timely book that seeks to explore the impact of the 1947 partition of British India on Indian filmmaking. In order to grasp the …

Jackie Stacey, The Cinematic Life of the Gene. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010 ISBN-13: 978-0822345077 US$23.95 (pb) 328pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Jackie Stacey’s book forms part of a new wave of cinema criticism which investigates the representation of medical imaging technology and scientific discourse in popular and avant-garde production. It is a fascinating area …

James Chapman and Nicolas Cull, Projecting Empire: Imperialism and Popular Cinema. London New York: I.B. Tauris 2009 ISBN: 978 1 84511 940 9 UK£15.99 240pp (Review copy supplied by I.B. Tauris) The release of historical epics such as The Young Victoria (UK/USA 2009) and recent revivals of imperial adventures on the small screen with the fourth adaptation of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps (UK …

David Welky, The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-0801890444 US$45.00 (pb) 448pp (Review copy supplied by John Hopkins University Press) This is a superb book, smoothly written, skillfully designed and researched, and is easily the text on the subject of the Hollywood studios’ reaction in the …

Steven M. Sanders, Miami Vice (TV Milestones series). Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-8143-3419-5 US$14.95 (pb) 128pp (Review copy supplied by Wayne State University Press) “Why does Miami Vice matter?” is at once historical, sociological, aesthetic and philosophical. (p. 85) The Wayne State University Press books in the TV Milestone series remind me of the great BFI books on single …

Dina Iordanova and Ruby Cheung (eds), Film Festivals and Imagined Communities. Dundee: St Andrews Film Studies, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-9563730-1-4 AU$37.00 (pb) 286pp (Review copy supplied by St Andrews Film Studies) The second edition of the Film Festival Yearbook series is another vital contribution to the developing field of film festivals studies. Published by St Andrews Film Studies and edited by …

Charles Maland, City Lights (BFI Film Classics). London: BFI Publishing, 2007 ISBN-13: 978-1844571758 US$14.95 (pb) 128pp (Review copy supplied by Macmillan) Charles Maland’s Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image (1989) studies the rise of Chaplin both as an actor and an icon, as well as his decline in popularity later in his career. His study of Chaplin’s City Lights (USA 1931) …

Jerad Walters and Marco Lanzagorta (eds), Studies in the Horror Film: Night of the Living Dead. Lakewood: Centipede Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-1-933618-32-6 US$125 (hb) 368pp (Review copy supplied by Centipede Press) Centipede Press’ Studies in the Horror Film series shows little signs of losing the momentum propelling its rigorous dedication to the genre with the release of this volume on George A. …

Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker and Ezra Winton (eds), Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010 ISBN 9780773536630 CA$34.95 (pb) 574pp (Review copy supplied by McGill-Queen’s University Press) One indication of the inordinate influence the National Film Board of Canada has had on documentary film is the number of units or …

Giorgio Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape and the Picturesque. Indiana University Press, 2009 ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22128-5 US$24.95 (pb) 464pp (Review copy supplied by Indiana University Press) “Southernism: The answer to the Southern Question?” Giorgio Bertellini’s Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape and the Picturesque fills a much needed void in our understanding of the role that Italians and Italian …

Tom De Haven, Our Hero: Superman on Earth (Icons of America). Yale University Press, 2010 ISBN: 9780300118179 US$24.00 (hb) 240pp (Review copy supplied by Yale University Press) The final chapter of Tom De Haven’s 2005 novel, It’s Superman, begins like this: “And here, at last, is the point where our version of the story merges with all of the others…” (p. 424) …

Barbara Creed, Darwin’s Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema. Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-522-85709-2 AU$49.99 232pp (Review copy supplied by Melbourne University Press) In the century and a half since the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, interpretations of Darwin’s ideas have informed, shaped, and, in some cases, tragically distorted …

CineBlitz, Love and Longing in Hindi Cinema. VJM Media: Mumbai, 2009 ISBN: 978-81-908829-0-5 US$40 (hb) 206pp (Review copy supplied by D.K.Agencies) Love and Longing in Hindi Cinema (hereafter LLHC) is a glossy coffee table book comprising a fabulous collection of stills from a variety of Hindi films over a period of time, a selection of quotes on the topics of love, lust …

Steven Mintz and Randy W. Roberts (eds.), Hollywood’s America: Twentieth Century America Through Film (Fourth Edition). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 ISBN: 978-1-4051-9003-9 AU$47.95 (pb) 370pp (Review copy supplied by Wiley-Blackwell publishers) “Anyone who wishes to know about the twentieth-century United States would do well to go to the movies”. So begins the first line in the Preface of this very readable …

Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009 (first published 2002) ISBN 1 86064 749 9 UK£18.99 (pb) 296pp (Review copy supplied by I.B. Tauris) All the action here is after the colon. The label “An Introduction” should alert you to the ambitions and purpose of this book. Do not look here for new primary research or …

Rebecca M. Schreiber, Cold War Exiles in Mexico: US Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-8166-4308-0 US$22.50 (pb) 320pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) McCarthyism and the American Blacklist (or “Inquisition” as Cedric Belfrage so aptly termed it decades ago) had a devastating effect on progressive ideals in the …

John Berra (ed.), Directory of World Cinema: Japan. Bristol: UK: Intellect Books, 2010 ISBN-13: 978-1841503356 UK£16.00 (pb) 350pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect Books) According to the editorial introduction, this volume “is intended to be informative rather than exhaustive. Instead of providing a general overview of Japanese Cinema, past and present…this volume aims to offer readers both familiar and unfamiliar …