Goldsmith B, Ward S and O’Regan T, 2010, Local Hollywood: Global Film Production and the Gold Coast Nick Herd March 2013 Book Reviews In 1988 Warner Roadshow Studios opened on the Gold Coast in south-east Queensland, with four soundstages and other facilities to support film and tele...
Jedda by Jane Mills Lia McCrae-Moore March 2013 Book Reviews In her new book Jane Mills reinterprets and critiques one of Australia’s most controversial film classics, Jedda (Charles Chauvel, 1955).This book bel...
Alexander Kluge: ‘something almost monstrous in so much talent’ Daniel Fairfax March 2013 Book Reviews Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination by Tara Forrest (ed.) Is there anybody on the face of the Earth, in any field of the arts or scien...
The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn From Contemporary French Actresses by Mick LaSalle Kath Dooley March 2013 Book Reviews In 2008 French actress Catherine Deneuve (then aged sixty-four) made her 100th screen appearance in Arnaud Desplechin’s Un Conte de Noel/A Christmas T...
The Confessions of a Justified Filmgoer Tony McKibbin March 2013 Book Reviews J. Hoberman's Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema? In Totally, Tenderly, Tragically, critic and essayist Phillip Lopate says,...
Book Reviews the editors December 2012 Book Reviews Contents Nicholas Godfrey on The long game: Conversations with independent iconoclasts Roger Corman, George A. Romero, and Charles Burnett Do...
Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution by Roman Lobato Ravi Sundaram November 2012 Book Reviews In her powerful story of early cinema, the scholar Jaine Gaines suggested that informal and pirate duplication was essential to the film form even as ...
Greek Cinema, Texts, Histories, Identities by Lydia Papadimitriou & Yannis Tzioumakis Vrasidas Karalis November 2012 Book Reviews Greek Cinema is something which, as they say in advertising, is ‘to be discovered’. Indeed, despite the fact that many Greek films have received ample...
Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada Martin Potter November 2012 Book Reviews "The films and tapes were not important in themselves. It was the process and the ideas". George Stoney Executive Producer, Challenge for Change/ Soci...
Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America by Stacy Takacs Ryan Taylor November 2012 Book Reviews One of the most pervasive forms of communication, television not only provides an immediate eye witness to history but also enables society to speak t...
Deleuze and World Cinemas by David Martin-Jones Cassandra Lovejoy November 2012 Book Reviews Creative betrayal can be a genuine form of fidelity: ‘one has to betray the letter of Kant,’ as Slavoj Žižek argues, ‘to remain faithful to (and repea...
The Psychology of Seeing and the Cinema of Roman Polanski by Davide Caputo Tessa Chudy November 2012 Book Reviews The films of Roman Polanski make a provocative and challenging body of work, but one which is also difficult to separate from the almost melodramatic ...
The Uses of Guilt: The Cinema of Michael Haneke: Europe Utopia edited by Ben McCann and David Sorfa Richard Martin November 2012 Book Reviews There’s a scene in Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown (2000) that epitomises both the brilliance and the frustrations that mark his entire body of work. It...
America’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures by Jerome Christensen Douglas Gomery November 2012 Book Reviews Using concepts of studio allegory and corporate identity, with a touch of business magazine writing, Jerome Christensen, Professor of Literature a...
The Long Game: Conversations with Independent Iconoclasts Roger Corman, George A. Romero, and Charles Burnett Nicholas Godfrey November 2012 Book Reviews The ongoing University of Mississippi Press Conversations with Filmmakers series compiles carefully curated, career-spanning interviews with notab...
Book Reviews the editors September 2012 Book Reviews Peter Lorre: Face Maker Contents: Mary Harrod on Richard Linklater Mike Walsh on The Shadowcatchers: A History of Cinematography in Australia ...
Richard Linklater by David T. Johnson Mary Harrod September 2012 Book Reviews In her 2006 summary of the history of debates on authorship in general and in cinema in particular, Pam Cook observes that ‘the function of the author...
The Shadowcatchers: A History of Cinematography in Australia by Martha Ansara Mike Walsh September 2012 Book Reviews The first thing to say about Martha Ansara’s book is that it is a gorgeous object, perhaps the best argument against e-books that I have seen this yea...
Designs for Life: David Lynch by Justus Nieland Richard Martin September 2012 Book Reviews If Inland Empire, released in 2006, has proved one of the strangest films of the last decade, David Lynch’s activities since then have only increased ...
‘Are you by any chance a sad-eyed, innocent villain in pictures?’ / ‘Yes, I’m afraid I am’ (1) Peter Lorre: Face Maker by Sarah Thomas Todd Herzog September 2012 Book Reviews In the 1930s Charlie Chaplin referred to Peter Lorre as ‘the greatest living actor’ (p. 60). Fifty years later, Vincent Price claimed that Lorre was ‘...
Showing Australia itself: Australian Documentary: History, Practices, and Genres by Trish Fitzsimons, Pat Laughren, and Dugald Williamson Trent Griffiths September 2012 Book Reviews Coinciding with the emergence of documentary studies as a more or less distinct academic discipline over the last 20 years, broader interest in docume...
Miniaturist Manoeuvres: Noriko Smiling by Adam Mars-Jones Tony McKibbin September 2012 Book Reviews One can be an expert of many things, but what about becoming the world’s expert not on a particular filmmaker, a filmmaking movement or a national cin...
Rape in Art Cinema edited by Dominique Russell Claire Henry September 2012 Book Reviews The representation of rape is a fascinating site for exploring a range of ethical and political issues in cinema studies. Sexual violence on screen ha...
Determining Transnationalism in Serena Formica’s Peter Weir: A Creative Journey from Australia to Hollywood Lia McCrae-Moore September 2012 Book Reviews Peter Weir is an iconic Australian director who is celebrated for his comprehensive body of cinematic work both locally and abroad. His infamous adapt...
Lisa K. Stein’s Syd Chaplin: A Biography James L. Neibaur September 2012 Book Reviews Syd Chaplin is often dismissively referred to as Charlie's half-brother, or given some marginal attention for having helped secure Charlie Chaplin's h...
Book Reviews the editors July 2012 Book Reviews Contents: Michelle Langford on A Social History of Iranian Cinema: volumes 1 & 2 Daniele Rugo on Les Ècarts du Cinema Justin Owen Rawlins on ...
Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Michelle Langford June 2012 Book Reviews Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897–1941 and Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978 As I turn over the last page of volume two of Hamid Nafi...
The logic of the unauthorized lover:Jacques Rancière’s Les écarts du cinema Daniele Rugo June 2012 Book Reviews Cinephilia – the very specific love inspired by cinema – has been repeatedly declared deceased. However, whether one takes cinephilia as a historical ...
The Afterlives of Acting: Famous Faces Yet Not Themselves: The Misfits and Icons of Postwar America by George Kouvaros Justin Owen Rawlins June 2012 Book Reviews Writing in the midst of the Method’s postwar ascension within the public consciousness, Philip Hope-Wallace observes that “it is fair to remember that...
Wizards and Robots and Movies, Oh My! A comparative review of Keith M. Johnston’s Science Fiction Film and James Walter’s Fantasy Film Daniel Eisenberg June 2012 Book Reviews Keith M. Johnston’s Science Fiction Film: a Critical Introduction is dedicated to his parents because they helped him become a science fiction fan a...
Irreverent Irrelevancies: Zona by Geoff Dyer Tony McKibbin June 2012 Book Reviews Few writers seem to do facetious erudition with the obtrusively self-aggrandizing more completely than Geoff Dyer. Whether it is calling a novel Jeff ...
Pretty, Film and the Decorative Image by Rosalind Galt Lauren Bliss June 2012 Book Reviews Is prettiness, the less-than-beautiful category of superficiality and surface, derided in film studies? Rosalind Galt’s Pretty teases out the politica...
Teen Film: A Critical Introduction by Catherine Driscoll Athena Bellas June 2012 Book Reviews In the final section of her 2002 book, Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (1), Catherine Driscoll begins exploring tee...
Pride and Prejudice: Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow Graham Daseler March 2012 Book Reviews Not long after joining the staff of The New Yorker in 1968, Pauline Kael wrote a review of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969),...
Wild/Lives: Trickster, Place and Liminality on Screen by Terrie Waddell Susan Rowland March 2012 Book Reviews In the late 19th century, film as a technology, art form and social phenomenon and psychoanalysis as theoretical and practical working with untamed pa...
Timeless or Timely – The Perils of Editing a Queer Film Classics Series: Word is Out by Greg Youmans; Montreal Main by Thomas Waugh and Jason Garrison; Zero Patience by Susan Knabe and Wendy Gay Pearson Marcin Wisniewski March 2012 Book Reviews I imagine editing a book series is somewhat akin to curating an art show or even a film retrospective: in all three cases the curators/editors need to...
