Category Archive for: ‘Issue 34 – Reviews’

Philip C. Logan, Humphrey Jennings and British Documentary Film: A Re-Assessment Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011 ISBN: 978-0-7546-6726-1 £70.00 (hb) 375 pp (Review copy supplied by Ashgate publishers) This is the latest in a sizeable body of work focusing on Humphrey Jennings, perhaps the most celebrated of the British Documentary filmmakers, and maker of works of the documentary canon …

David Martin-Jones Deleuze and World Cinemas London: New York; Continuum, 2011 ISBN: 9780826436429 US$34.95 (pb) 288pp (Review copy supplied by Continuum publishers) The reception of Deleuze’s Cinéma books in academia has, in recent times, definitively entered a new stage. Having swept through the field of Film Studies in the 1990s – and in the process supplanting the earlier semiotic/psychoanalytic paradigm …

Gaetano Rando and Gino Moliterno, Celluloid Immigrant: Italian Australian Filmmaker Giorgio Mangiamele (The Moving Image Number 10, 2011) St.Kilda: ATOM and The National Film and Sound Archive, 2011. ISBN: ISBN: 9781876467210 Au$33.50 (pb) 146pp (Review copy supplied by ATOM) Southern Italians emigrated to Australia in significant numbers for much of the 20th century. Negative attitudes developed towards them from the …

Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-8223-4854-2 US$26.95 (pb) 364pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Despite almost forty years having passed since the withdrawal of ground troops from the country and the subsequent political work aimed at healing the hearts and …

Martha Ansara, The Shadowcatchers: a history of cinematography in Australia Austcine Publishing, Sydney 2012 ISBN: 9780987225214 Au$66.00 (pb) 288pp http://www.shadowcatchers.com.au/ (Review copy supplied by Australian cinematographers society) Cinematography captures images, playing with light and shade, mood and texture, distance and what is right under our noses.  It is very appropriate to call the people who do such work ‘shadowcatchers’, and …

Paola Voci, China on Video: Smaller-screen realities New York: Routledge, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-415-46452-9 US$140 (hb) 259pp (Review copy supplied by Routledge) Twelve years into the 21st Century, most members of Western society would agree that new technologies have changed their lives immensely. Through technological devices like smartphones and computers, as well as social network platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, …

Steven Rybin, Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2012. ISBN 978-0-7391-6675-8 US$65 (hb) 236pp (Review copy supplied by Lexington books) For a filmmaker renowned for his reticence and lack of haste, Terrence Malick has been undergoing a burst of creativity of late. With a number of films either completed or in production (To the Wonder, …

John Markert, Post – 9/11 Cinema: Through a Lens Darkly The Scarecrow Press, Inc, 2011 ISBN: 978-0-8108-8134-1 US$59.95 (hb) 392pp (Review copy supplied by The Scarecrow Press) Should we expect films about 9/11 to be more enlightening than books, journalism or the internet? Little in John Markert’s comprehensive account suggests 9/11 cinema adds any deeper understanding of the religious terrorism …

Felicity Colman, Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts Oxford; New York: Berg, 2011 ISBN: 978-1-84788-053-6 US$29.95 (pb) 280pp (Review copy supplied by Berg) Felicity Colman’s Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts (2011) explores, as the author has done before, the relationship between cinema and philosophy.  As the title suggests, this book looks specifically at Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy explored in his two …

Kyung Hyun Kim, Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011 ISBN978-0-8223-5101-6 US$24.95(pb) 256pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Kyung Hyun Kim seems well placed to write an interesting study of contemporary Korean cinema. The UC Irvine professor has already written one book on the subject, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema …

Part 3c[1] Introduction to Part 3c [Young Mr Lincoln (1939)] [Drums Along The Mohawk (1939)] [The Grapes of Wrath (1940)] Tobacco Road (1941) – The question of mode – The novel – The play – The screenplay – Lindsay Anderson – Not resolved – Characters and their treatment – Two wrong directions – Addendum askew: The Primrose Path – Honi …

Michele Pierson, David E. James, Paul Arthur (eds.), Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2011 ISBN-13: 978-0195384987 US$39.95 (pb) 312pp (Review copy supplied by Oxford University Press) 2 or 3 Things I Remember or Should Have Known About Him. Politically, we were beaten  (Ken Jacobs, 52) Optic Antics celebrates the work of …

A Review Essay on Chris Dumas, Un-American Psycho: Brian De Palma and the Political Invisible (London: Intellect, 2012) [I]t’s not really a book about De Palma, it’s a book about Film Studies as an American institution that uses De Palma as a focal point or case study. I’m definitely not trying to say that De Palma is a Tarkovsky figure …

Marcelline Block (ed.), World Film Locations: Paris London: Intellect, 2012 ISBN: 9781841505619 US$19.00 (pb) 128pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect) As Keith Reader explains in the opening essay to Intellect’s World Film Locations: Paris, the cinematic Paris is not one of monuments, but of flânerie. Like Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin strolling the arcades, the shots float along cobbled streets, through …

Gabriel Solomons (ed), World Film Locations: Los Angeles London: Intellect Books, 2011, ISBN-978-1-84150-485-8 US$18 (pb), 128ppNeil Mitchell (ed), World Film Locations: London London: Intellect Books, 2011, ISBN-978-1-84150-484-1 US$18 (pb), 136pp(Review copies supplied by Intellect Publishing)   According to Gabriel Solomons, the series editor of World Film Locations and editor of the volume devoted to Los Angeles, “[w]hether as an elaborate …

Wayne Koestenbaum, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780520269019 US$29.95 (pb) 336pp (Review copy supplied by University of California Press) This is an eccentric, or perhaps concentric book, in the best possible sense of both words, an extended meditation on the on-screen persona of Harpo Marx, circling around a framing quote from Roland Barthes …