Introducing Occasional Papers
Welcome to Screening The Past’s series of Occasional Papers, an initiative to extend the space of the journal and publish essays and articles longer than the customary 5000 word length.…
‘Give It a Go You Apes’: Relations Between the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, and the Early Australian Film Industry (1954–1970)
This paper extends our previous analyses of the early history of the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, by examining the relations between the festivals and the Australian film industry, from…
China’s New “Women’s Cinema”
Chris Berry, “China’s New Women’s Cinema” originally appeared in Camera Obscura, Volume 18. Copyright 1989 Camera Obscura. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. “Women’s…
Ford At Fox Part 3b
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…
Films by Gordon Ball (dvd review)
(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…
Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, Maitland McDonagh
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…
Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince, Mark A. Vieira
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…
Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier, Homay King
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…
Film Violence: History, Ideology, Genre, James Kendrick
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…
The Last Silent Picture Show: Silent Films on American Screens in the 1930s, William M. Drew
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…
New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves, Darcy Paquet
(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…
Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents, Tom Kemper
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,…
British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade, Laurel Forster and Sue Harper (eds)
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…
Casablanca: Movies and Memory, Marc Augé (Translated and with an Afteword by Tom Conley)
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…
English Filming, English Writing, Jefferson Hunter
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…
Calling All Cars: Radio Dragnets and the Technology of Policing, Kathleen Battles
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…
The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclopedia, James M. Welsh, Gene D. Phillips, and Rodney F. Hill (eds)
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…
Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory – Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, (Edited by Erica Carter, Translated by Rodney Livingstone)
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…
Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s, Patrice Petro (ed.)
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…
Wake in Fright, Tina Kaufman
Sydney: Currency Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-86819-864-4 AU$16.95 (pb) 71pp (Review copy supplied by Currency Press) “It’s death to farm out here, it’s worse than death in the mines; you want…
Neo-Noir, Mark Bould, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck (eds.).
London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-1-906660-17-8 (pbk) UK 16.14 ISBN 978-1-906660-18-5 (hbk) UK 45 267pp (Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press) It is hard to believe that…
Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel, Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis (eds.)
Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010 ISBN: 978 1 4384 3030 0 US$ 29.95 (pb) 264 pp. (Review copy supplied by SUNY Press) Second Takes examines a proliferating cinematic mode of…
On Michael Haneke, Brian Price and John David Rhodes (editors)
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…
Introduction to Reprints of Two Essays on Blake Edwards
Years ago we were sitting in Blake Edwards’s bungalow on the Culver Studios lot. When he walked in to begin a long interview, he remarked that he had just come…
Detecting, Defecting & Whistling in the Dark: The Films of Blake Edwards
This article was originally published in Velvet Light Trap no. 13 Fall 1974. It is published here with the kind permissions of the authors. A woman enters a bar where…
“Crazy World Full of Crazy Contradictions”, Blake Edwards’ Victor/Victoria
This article was originally published in Wide Angle vol. 5 no. 4 1983. It is published here with the kind permissions of the authors. When we first see Victoria Grant…
On Blake Edwards
This article was originally published in American Directors Volume II, edited by Jean-Pierre Coursoson and Pierre Sauvage (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1983). It is published here with the kind permission of…
The Bitter Essence of Blake Edwards
This article was first published in the Village Voice, 5 May 1987. It is published here with the kind permission of the author. Let’s talk bottom line for a sec.…
Sophisticated Naturalism
Interview with Blake Edwards by Jean-Francois Hauduroy This interview with Blake Edwards was first published in English in Cahiers du cinéma in English, Number 3, 1966. Every effort has…
Ridicule and Panic: On Blake Edwards
This article was originally published in the French monthly cinema journal Positif, no. 290, April 1985. It is published here with the kind permission of the author. Translated from…
Blake Edwards, Switch, and the Price of a New Man
Cinephiles have a remarkable capacity to abstract the films that they love. If, as Laura Mulvey once put it, narrative cinema is ‘an illusion cut to the measure of desire’,…
Topping the Topper: Blake Edwards
Interview by Raffaele Caputo This interview was originally published in Cinema Papers no. 85, November 1991. Leslie Halliwell once wrote of Blake Edwards, “a man of many talents, all of…
Strange Bodies: On The Great Race
This article was first published in English in Cahiers du cinéma in English, Number 3, 1966. Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holder of the following…
The Party
This article was originally published in Movie no. 17 (Winter 1969 – 70). It is published here with the kind permission of the author. Nothing to lose— If we are…
You Can’t Keep A Good Auteur Down / Cruel To Be Kind
You Can’t Keep A Good Auteur Down This article was originally published in The Chicago Reader 23 August 1974. It is published here with the kind permission of the author.…
The Party
“In India we don’t think who we are, we know who we are.” Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party (1968) In film after film Blake Edwards explored the various ways…
“The China Film”: Madame Chiang Kai-shek in Hollywood
The time is short; the enemy is sly; And all who once loved peace and sorely tried; But she shall take her people this reply: “Our cause is common, and…
Tokens of Exchange, or The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Lover: Marginal Asian Characters in 1920s Australian Cinema
Since Australia’s film renaissance from the mid-1970s, there have been numerous films featuring Asian characters in both leading and marginal roles. This paper traces the historical representation of Asian characters…
Working Within the System: An Interview with Gerry O’Hara
Gerry O’Hara is a true original, and if he never really got the chance to definitively climb out of the ranks of assistant directors into the realm of full-fledged feature…
Two Channels, Two Truths: Reporting the Iraq War in Control Room
The image we make ourselves of history is, more than ever, shaped by the audiovisual record. But the documentary image and sound cannot provide a transparent view on reality; it…