Category Archive for: ‘Issue 4 – Reviews’

Guy Austin, Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester University Press, 1996 ISBN 0-7190-4610-6 Hb £35.00 / 0-7190-4611 Pb £9.99 Uploaded 15 September 1998 Generally speaking, one extends a certain, Platonic generosity towards accounts of national cinemas – just as one does to written cinema histories, various official “canonical” lists of the Great Films, and so forth. One innocently imagines, or …

Adrian Martin, Once Upon a Time in America BFI Publishing, 1998 ISBN 0-85170-544-8 Uploaded 15 September 1998 Adrian Martin’s monograph on Sergio Leone’s last and greatest film is one of the best entries in the BFI’s distinguished Classics and Modern Classics series, which already boasts volumes by the likes of Salman Rushdie, Richard Corliss, fellow Aussie Sam Rohdie, Jonathan Rosenbaum …

Duncan Petrie, The British Cinematographer. London: BFI, 1996. ISBN 0-85170-581-2, 0-85170-582-0 pbk. 182pp. Uploaded 15 September 1998 This is a very well researched and worthy presentation of a much-neglected aspect of cinema history and certainly will increase appreciation of the important contribution made by British cinematographers. However, the book does not start well. In the introduction, Duncan Petrie presents what …

Uploaded 15 September 1998 Situated in downtown Taipei, five minutes walk from the central train station, the Taipei Archive is an invaluable resource for scholars interested in Chinese Film. The Archive was founded by the Motion Picture Development Foundation with the assistance of the Government Information Office in 1978, and then the archive became a foundation itself in 1991. It …

Jeffrey Richards (ed) The Unknown Thirties: An Alternative History of the British cinema, 1929-1939 London: I.B. Taurus, 1998 ISBN 186064 303 5 pp. 276 Uploaded 15 September 1998 In his introduction to The Unknown Thirties, editor Jeffrey Richards states that the book aims to chart a “new map” of British cinema, revising established histories’ emphasis on particular producers, directors, stars and …

Ronald Genini, Theda Bara: A Biography of the Silent Screen Vamp, with a Filmography. Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publisher 1996 ISBN: 0-7864-0202-4. 158 pp Uploaded 15 September 1998 Theda Bara, the best known of a large number of screen vamps, was born in the Sahara Desert. “Weaned on serpents’ blood,” she grew into “a crystal-gazing …