Category Archive for: ‘Issue 30 – Reviews’

Four Men and a Prayer (1938) Let’s get this straight first off: Four Men and a Prayer is not a religious picture. Far from it. Or, at least, given the angelic overtones of this last shot, it is no more a religious picture than Doctor Bull is. The print on the DVD is excellent. There are no extras. It shares …

(Canyon Cinema.www.canyoncinema.com) US$50 (individual) US$150 (institution) Some films move you, some films entertain you, and some films enlighten you. Watching Gordon Ball’s films is a transcendent experience, and I’m sure that’s just what Ball intended; viewing them in sequence is to follow the trajectory of a life from ecstatic youth and endless possibility into the more circumscribed and difficult terrain …

Maitland McDonagh, Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 ISBN 978-0-8166-5607 US$22.95 (pb) 328pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Towards the end of ‘An Interview with Dario Argento’, Maitland McDonagh suggests to the director that only he “could take the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and make a …

Mark A. Vieira, Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince Berkeley, University of California Press, 2010 ISBN: 9780520260481 US$34.95 (hb) 528pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) Irving Grant Thalberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1899 with a congenital heart condition that would kill him 37 years later. By the time of his death he had …

Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4759-0 US $22.95 (pb) 216pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier develops an analytical framework for attending to a broad range of visual texts, from cinema to art installations. Homay King is equally expansive in terms of the historical periods and genres from which she …

London: Wallflower Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-906660-26-0 UK£12.99 (pb) 144pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) Upon first receiving a copy of James Kendrick’s Film Violence: History, Ideology, Genre, the thought of a book consisting of only one hundred and thirteen pages (plus notes) that deals with the broad concept of film violence instantly flagged suspicion.  This book is part of …

Lanham/Toronto/Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2010 ISBN 978-0-8108-7680-4 US$50 (pb) 243 pp (Review copy supplied by The Scarecrow Press, Inc) The afterlife of silent films has lasted much longer than anyone would have predicted in 1930, the year most industry people declared the medium dead.  In transitioning from commercial product to historicized, aesthetic object, silent film has survived more than …

(Short Cuts)London: Wallflower Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-1-906660-25-3 UK£12.99 (pb) 135pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves reads as a series of vignettes through which the reader glimpses the turmoil of the last three decades of South Korean history. The glimpses are in fact iconic scenes from the films of New Korean Cinema that the …

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780520257078 US$21.95 (pb) 312pp (review copy supplied by University of California Press) Were Tom Kemper naming his book right now, he might be tempted to title it ‘The Social Network’,d befitting the nexus of personal connections that formed the basis for the rise of Hollywood talent agents in the 1930s. …

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. ISBN-13: 978-1-4438-1734-9 US$67.99 (hb) 310pp (Review copy supplied by Cambridge Scholars Publishing) As Laurel Forster and Sue Harper relate in their Acknowledgments and Preface, the scholarship in British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade was borne out of a multi-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research project on British cinema in the …

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota PressISBN: 978-0-8166-5641-7 US$18.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) In this essay, prolific French anthropologist Marc Augé uses the means of autobiography to investigate the traumatic collective history of France during the second World War.  What sets this elegant work apart from mere remembrance or dry theory is Augé’s use of the film …

Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University press, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-253-22177-3 US$24.95 (pb) 376pp (Review copy supplied by Indiana University Press) The founding argument of this book is stated on the first page: “(The author) is obliged to take literary connections into account…” Why is he obliged to do so? Because: “English filming turns out to have a great deal to do …

Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8166-4914-3 US$22.50 (pb) 282pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) For anyone interested in the representation of crime, Kathleen Battles’ study of the radio crime drama in the 1930s is essential reading.  While Battles admits that she is primarily concerned with addressing a gap in the cultural history of …

Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2010 ISBN: 978 0 8108 7651 4 US$70.00 (hb) 328pp (Review copy supplied by The Scarecrow Press) James M. Welsh, in his Introduction (“So Why Does Francis Coppola Deserve His Own Encyclopedia”) to The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclopedia, writes that the main function of the text could be worded as explaining “why Coppola matters.” …

Berghan books, 2010 ISBN 978-1-84545-660-3 US$95.00 (hb) 314pp (Review copy supplied by Berghan Books) The work of Béla Balázs (1884-1994) belongs to the classical film theory period, a period which came to an end around the mid-1960s. The two most prominent figures of classical film theory are Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) and André Bazin (1918-1958), whose works have not only overshadowed …

New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-8135-4732-9 US$25.95(pb) 328pp (Review copy supplied by Rutgers University Press) This excellent volume, part of the series Star Decades: American Culture/American Cinema, edited by Murray Pomerance and Adrienne L. McLean for Rutgers University Press (five volumes published, five more forthcoming, covering each decade of the 20th century in American cinema from the perspective of …

Sydney: Currency Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-86819-864-4 AU$16.95 (pb) 71pp (Review copy supplied by Currency Press) “It’s death to farm out here, it’s worse than death in the mines; you want them to sing bloody opera as well?” Doc (played by Donald Pleasance, qted by Kaufman, p. 26). Tina Kaufman notes in her study of Wake in Fright (Australia/USA 1971) that …

London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-1-906660-17-8 (pbk) UK   16.14 ISBN 978-1-906660-18-5 (hbk) UK   45 267pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) It is hard to believe that that the term neo-noir has been in common currency for approximately the past forty years. Bu, t with the exception of the pioneering works of Alain Silver and James Ursini, …

Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010 ISBN: 978 1 4384 3030 0 US$ 29.95 (pb) 264 pp. (Review copy supplied by SUNY Press) Second Takes examines a proliferating cinematic mode of production that increasingly informs film release schedules: the sequel. As Michael Cieply states in a 2007 New York Times article, “In the last five years, only about 20 percent of …

Detroit, Wayne State University Press ISBN: 978-0-8143-3405-8 US$29.95(pb) 304pp (Review copy supplied by Wayne State University Press) Introducing their edited collection of work on Michael Haneke, Brian Price and John David Rhodes describe the director as “one of the most innovative filmmakers of this or any other moment of film history” (p. 8). This type of declaration, common to many …