The Depths of Empiricism: Werner Herzog: Ecstatic Truth and Other Useless Conquests, by Kristoffer Hegnsvad Tony McKibbin January 2022 Book Reviews A beautifully presented account of Herzog’s work, Kristoffer Hegnsvad’s book finds its purpose in both its design and in its sense of affiliation. Hegnsvad is a documentary filmmaker as well as a writer, and so...
The Perfect Conditional: Philippe Garrel by Michael Leonard Tony McKibbin October 2020 Book Reviews Philippe Garrel is now in his seventies and has behind him a body of work that looked initially like it might have become no more (and no less) than an avant-garde skeleton. Those early films which included Cic...
Creating the Appearance of Being: The Art of American Screen Acting 1960 to Today, by Dan Callahan Tony McKibbin July 2020 Book Reviews There are very good books and articles on actors, about stardom, about performance, on acting and about acting. David Thomson and Pauline Kael have often been astute concerning the thin line between the person ...
The Past Is Not Even Past: Afterimages, by Laura Mulvey Tony McKibbin April 2020 Book Reviews It could almost be a parlour game to try to talk about Laura Mulvey without mentioning her famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, with its more than fifteen thousand citations and the phrase the m...
Styles of Substance: The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and the Reimagining of Cinema, by Robert P. Kolker Tony McKibbin June 2018 Book Reviews Robert Philip Kolker has given us two very useful film books: The Altering Eye and A Cinema of Loneliness are excellent accounts of post-war European cinema (which take in other parts of the world too), and 197...
Speaking of the Dead Tony McKibbin June 2018 Stardust Memories: Cinephilia and Nostalgia Cinema certainly has many films that are happy to fall under the nostalgic, and even has plenty of devices to convey it. The use of songs from the period, a fond voice-over recollecting in tranquillity, the tri...
The Cinema Hypothesis: Teaching Cinema in the Classroom and Beyond, by Alain Bergala Tony McKibbin March 2018 Book Reviews If Bazin's classic essay collection was titled What is Cinema?, along comes contemporary French critic Alain Bergala asking how the subject should be taught. The answer would rest partly in one of the many conc...
Sceptical Oscillations: Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy, by Matthew Abbott Tony McKibbin September 2017 Book Reviews Abbas Kiarostami would seem to make films that suggest philosophical enquiry. But, in his fine book, Matthew Abbott makes clear that the philosophical content of the director's work does not mean this is where ...
Archiving the Unforgettable: “Night and Fog”: A Film in History, by Sylvie Lindeperg Tony McKibbin December 2015 Book Reviews There have been numerous books about the making of a film: from Final Cut, a book detailing the production history of Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980), to Picture, about the making of The Red Badge of Coura...
Size Matters: The Aesthetics of the Small Screen: André Bazin’s New Media by Dudley Andrew (ed.) Tony McKibbin June 2015 Book Reviews A glance at the title of André Bazin’s New Media might make us think that the writer has been resurrected, but the truth is that, since his death in 1958, this most important of French critics and theorists h...
Confronting the Future: Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, by Miriam Bratu Hansen Tony McKibbin December 2014 Book Reviews Halfway through Cinema and Experience, Miriam Bratu Hansen quotes László Moholy-Nagy’s comment: “It is not the person ignorant of writing but the one ignorant of photography who will be the illiterate of the fu...
Alain Robbe-Grillet:Teasing the Real Tony McKibbin October 2014 Feature Articles In the DVD extras to the new BFI Alain Robbe-Grillet box set, the interviewer Frédéric Taddeï asks the novelist and filmmaker what it felt like filming his fantasies as Robbe-Grillet shows in Trans-Europ-Expres...