Category Archive for: ‘Issue 29 – Reviews’

Sharon Lin Tay, Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-230-21776-8 US$80.00 (hb) 208pp (Review copy supplied by Palgrave Macmillan) Contemporary feminist media scholarship is indebted to the significant intellectual contributions of 1970s and 80s feminist theorists. Indeed, decades-long scholarly discussions surrounding conceptual frameworks such as “the gaze” and “women’s films” have had so great …

Natalie King (ed.), Up Close: Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and William Yang. Melbourne: Heide Museum of Modern Art/Schwartz City, 2010. ISBN: 9 78186395 501 0 AU$59.95 (pb) 241pp (Review copy supplied by Heide Museum of Modern Art/Schwartz City) “(Susan) Sontag once said to me that in all of human history, in only one brief period were people …

Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Hollywood Catwalk: Exploring Costume and Transformation in American Film. London: I.B. Tauris, 2010 ISBN-13: 978-1848850408 US$28.00 (pb) 256pp (Review copy supplied by I.B. Tauris) Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s latest book Hollywood Catwalk: Exploring Costume and Transformation in American Film attempts to pick apart one of the most peculiar, enduring and stupidly satisfying film tropes – the makeover. It …

Robin Visser, Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010 ISBN: 978 0 8223 4728 6 US$24.95 384pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) An unpronounced keyword in Robin Visser’s Cities Surround the Countryside is “intersubjectivity,” not so much as in how human beings interact and interfere with each other, but how space, …

Linda Aronson, The 21st Century Screenplay. Allen and Unwin, 2010 ISBN: 978-1-74237-136-8 Au$49.99 (pb) 512pp (Review copy supplied by Allen & Unwin) Patrick McGilligan, Backstory 5: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1990s. University of California Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-520-26039-9 US$24.95 (pb) 264pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) In this fifth volume of the Backstory series, Patrick McGilligan …

Christopher Shannon, Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classic Hollywood Cinema. University of Scranton Press, Scranton & London, 2010 ISBN: 978-1-58966-200-1 US$25.00 (hb) 220pp (Review copy supplied by Scranton University Press) Priests promoting a down-to-earth muscular Christianity; good-natured boozing fathers; saintly mothers working finger to the bone; pixilated soothsayer types: these were some of the ill-considered images of the …

Peter Verstraten (translated by Stefan van der Lecq), Film Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009 ISBN-13: 978 080209 505 3 US$27.95 (pb) 259pp (Review copy supplied by University of Toronto Press) In Film Narratology Peter Verstraten attempts one of film theory’s more ambitious and potentially fatal balancing acts. As a hypothetical outline of …

Amy Herzog, Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-8166-6088-9 US$25.000 (pb) 296pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Skipping Along the Groove: Landscaping with Amy Herzog’s Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same Rareness unlike originality defines itself. Originality escapes definition by taking flight, rareness …

George Kouvaros, Famous Faces Not Yet Themselves: The Misfits and Icons of Postwar America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-8166-4747-7 US$24.95 (pb) 304pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) My first experience of John Huston’s The Misfits (USA 1961) was not of the film itself, but of an Eve Arnold photograph of Marilyn Monroe on set. …

Reynold Humphries, Hollywood’s Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-7486-2456-0 UK£19.99 (pb) 184pp (Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press) Fear and anxiety loomed over the offices and back lots of Hollywood studios throughout the early 1950s. Following World War II and the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, American politics shifted away from left-leaning …

Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman (eds), Wagner and Cinema. Indiana University Press, 2010 ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22163-6 US$27.95 (pb) 504pp (Review copy supplied by Indiana University Press) The scholarly book Wagner and Cinema presents the reader with what is perhaps an uneven sequence of some very interesting writing. Edited by Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman, Wagner and Cinema is not …

Brian McFarlane, Real and Reel: The Education of a Film Obsessive. Glen Waverley: Sid Harta Publishers, 2010 ISBN: 1-921642-58-0 AU$29.95 (pb) 187pp (Review copy supplied by Sid Harta Publishers) There’s a lot of information packed into Brian McFarlane’s “‘rather specialised memoir’”. It contains multiple references to films, to film celebrities and it documents the evolution of the author’s staggering output …

Barbara Hammer, Hammer! Making Movies out of Sex and Life. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. ISBN 9 781558616 12 7 Au$19.95 (pb) 281pp (Review copy supplied by The Feminist Press) At first glance, I thought that Hammer! would be an overview of the famous British horror film studio. A closer inspection revealed that …