Category Archive for: ‘Issue 38 – Reviews’

Alain Badiou, Cinema Cambridge, Maiden, ma: Polity, 2013 ISBN: 978-0-7456-5568-0 AUD$34.95 (pb) 320pp (Review copy supplied by Polity publishers) “Alain Badiou’s Cinema: From Stupidity to Hope” For Badiou our society is one of “democratic materialism”, whose constitutive principle is that there are only bodies and languages. This world is the reign of clichés and stereotypes, of common images and of …

Saitō Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl, (trans. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011 ISBN: 978 0 8166 5451 2 US$19.95 (pb) 213pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson’s lucid translation of Saitō Tamaki’s flawed but engaging and sophisticated book Beautiful Fighting Girl may have been intended as a contribution …

Steve McQueen: Schaulager, Basel, Switzerland 16 March – 1 September 2013 ‘Steve McQueen’ at the Schaulager, Basel was a major survey exhibition of nearly all the artist’s work in moving image installations from the 1990s until now. Several installations were freshly reconfigured in different ways to their previous incarnations, making full use of the Schaulager’s capacious exhibition spaces designed by …

Tony Lee Moral, Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie (revised edition) The Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Toronto & Plymouth, UK, 2013 ISBN:  978-0-8108-9107-4 283pp (Review copy supplied by Scarecrow Press) It is one of the great ironies that Alfred Hitchcock, the so-called Master of Suspense, couldn’t stand suspense in his own life, so much so that it would make him physically …

Andrew Dawson and Sean P. Holmes (eds.) Working in the Global Film and Television Industries: Creativity, Systems, Space, Patronage Bloomsbury publishers, 2012 ISBN 13: 9781780930237 US$32 (pb) 224pp (Review copy supplied by Bloomsbury publishers) In one of the first collections of its kind, Andrew Dawson and Sean P. Holmes’ Working in the Global Film and Television Industries brings together essays that …

Daisuke Miyao, The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013 ISBN 978 0 8223 5422 2 US$27.95 (pb) 400pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Perhaps the most important achievement in cinema history in the 21st century has been the amount we have learned about Japanese cinema during the silent and studio …

John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel (eds.) Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image Minneapolis London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-0-8166-6517-4 (Paperback) 376 pp US$27.50 (pb) (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) In a couple of ways John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel have assembled what is an ideal collection of writings on location and the …

Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture New York: NYU Press, 2013 ISBN: 9 7808 1474350 8 $29.95 (US) 352 pp (Review copy supplied by NYU press) The post Web 2.0 world is a messy and fragmented place. It presents unlimited possibilities for brands and media companies to reach audiences. …

Jacques Rancière, Béla Tarr, The Time After , Translated from French by Erik Beranek, Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013 ISBN: 9781937561154 US$19.95 (pb) 81pp Erik Beranek’s translation of Jacques Rancière’s Béla Tarr, The Time After could not have been published at a better time. What a great feat to accomplish – to decode the thoughts of a Marxist philosopher on the complex oeuvre of …

Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams. Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2013 ISBN 978 0 8223 5453 6 US$27.95 (pb) 369 pages (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) One can easily argue that travelogues were present at the very birth of cinema, given that the Lumiére Brothers’ first film program in the …

Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013 ISBN: 978 0 8166 7767 2 US $25.00 (pb) 265pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) We should understand the title of Wolfgang Ernst’s collection of essays, Digital Memory and the Archive, as the literal subject of analysis. That is, Ernst regards computers (and analog …

Marc Raymond, Hollywood’s New Yorker: The Making of Martin Scorsese. Albany: SUNY Press, 2013. ISBN13: 978-1-4384-4572-4 US$26.95 (pb) 261pp (Review copy supplied by SUNY Press)    Few contemporary Hollywood directors are as skillful as Martin Scorsese at activating an auteurist fable with the release of each new film. Lifetime cinephile, passionate preservationist and informal film historian, Scorsese has remained uncommonly eager …

Noel King, Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams, Australian Film Theory and Criticism, volume 1, Critical Positions Bristol: Intellect Books, 2013. ISBN 978-1-84150-581-7 US$30 (pb) 192pp (Review copy supplied by Intellect publishers) In Australian Film Theory and Criticism, King, Verevis and Williams examine “the circumstances in which film studies arrived and for a time prospered in Australian tertiary education between 1975 …

Christopher Pavsek, The Utopia of Film: Cinema and its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik New York: Columbia University Press, 2013 ISBN: 978-0-231-16099-5 $29.50 (pb) 304pp (Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press) With a global financial crisis, austerity measures, and bankrupt cities and countries defining this historical moment, the question of utopia seems especially urgent. In the humanities, this question …

Timothy D. Taylor, Mark Katz, Tony Grajeda (eds.) Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio Duke University Press, 2013 US$27.95 (pb) 432pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) It was once a cliché to remark on the absence of sound from scholarly discussion. Now it is not only tiresome to keep …

Alex Fischer, Sustainable Projections: Concepts in Film Festival Management St Andrews, Scotland: St Andrews Film Studies, 2013 ISBN: 978-0-9563730-8-3 UK£17.99 (pb) 157pp Available from www.stafs.org (Review copy supplied by St. Andrews Film Studies publishing house) The sustained and systematic study of film festivals has expanded rapidly in recent years. Over the past decade the volume of rigorous academic research on …