In Bigger Than Life (1956) schoolteacher Ed Avery fragments in the broken medicine-cabinet mirror that his wife Lou furiously slams shut when in a pharmaceutically induced delusion he imperiously gives her an order and crosses a line of civility. For only a few frames just moments before, in accidental confluence the blurred face of director [...]
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One night, in the autumn of 1929, Raoul Walsh was driving along a desolate highway in the Utah desert, scouting locations for his next movie. Suddenly, a jackrabbit skittered across the road. Hurtled into the air by the force of the speeding jeep, the rabbit crashed through the windshield, spraying Walsh’s face with glass. When [...]
The idea that Michael Mann’s films are different from those of Anthony Mann or that Paramount Pictures under Sumner Redstone might share little more than its trademarks and maybe its library with the company controlled by Adolph Zukor inevitably gives rise to the search for social, industrial and/or textual turning points. However, the broader notion [...]
Australian screen classics are seminal for a range of reasons: whether it is a particular title’s popularity and impact upon popular culture, its cultural and textual meaning, or what the film tells us about the social, political and cultural climate from which it emerged. Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005) is undoubtedly an Australian screen classic. [...]
A few years back in The Cinema Book, Rob White proposed that one reason why it took so long for Anglo-American academics to absorb Gilles Deleuze was theory “fatigue”(1). After working their way through structuralism and semiotics, psychoanalysis and so on, who needed yet another thinker on the stage? Some might well feel the same [...]
To keep one’s words to a minimum whilst also maintaining intellectual authority over a subject is a true skill: to know one’s subject intimately and to distinguish with certainty what is and what is not essential for the reader’s elementary understanding. Birgit Beumers displays this skill in A History of Russian Cinema. With a main [...]
I have been a David Lynch fan for many years. His cryptic narratives and the sense of dread that pervades his films have always gripped me. As a former cinema studies student, I have also enjoyed his intertextual references to classic Hollywood movies (particularly films noir from the 1940s and 1950s). So you can imagine [...]
David Bordwell is undeniably one of the great “quantitative” critics in the world, one of those writers who trust strongly in common sense and what is in front of his eyes, and yet to call Bordwell a critic seems like a misnomer. Though you’ll find plenty examples of Bordwell’s cinematic recommendations, we might wonder exactly [...]
Jacques Rivette: Phantom of the Cinema could well be an alternative title for this book, the long overdue first English-language monograph on the enigmatic French director. Seldom in the history of the cinema has there been such a crying disparity between the frequency with which a filmmaker’s name has been invoked and the rarity of [...]
Baz Luhrmann’s fifth feature film, an adaptation in 3D of The Great Gatsby, will begin production in Sydney this month. Although the story may be familiar from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, if past experience is any guide, mysteries and surprises will abound before the film actually reaches audiences in a year or two. When it [...]
If I had to claim one area of development that signified the importance of cinema studies in the last two decades of the twentieth century, I would argue for the work done on early cinema. Film history once skipped quickly from the Lumière/Méliès distinction to The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915), but following [...]
Dennis Bingham’s recently published volume, Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre, illustrates the author’s versatility. Bingham takes the biographical film, or “biopic”, quite seriously, and he uses the paradigms of advanced cinema studies to investigate the genre in its historical and social context, while exploring a variety of cultural discourses. [...]
Film historians have long shown an interest in the economic, technical, and aesthetic aspects of widescreen film formats. When widescreen became popular in the 1950s, André Bazin and other critics at Cahiers du cinèma immediately recognised that formats like Cinerama and CinemaScope would have implications for the ways filmmakers could manipulate mise en scène. The [...]
Critical study of the oeuvre of Billy Wilder is still surprisingly scant almost a decade following his death. Rather than cogent analysis that reaches beyond the director’s often self-deprecating commentary, staple biographies still hold sway. This new collection by Karen McNally which relegates the director to “Movie-Maker” (as opposed to filmmaker – Wilder’s own description [...]
In Billy Wilder’s hilariously acid The Fortune Cookie (1966), sports cameraman Harry Hinkle (Jack Lemmon) gets clobbered by football star Luther “Boom Boom” Jackson (Ron Rich) when Jackson is tackled along the sidelines. Conniving lawyer Willie Gingrich (Walter Matthau) convinces Harry, his hapless brother-in-law, to fake a more serious injury so they can make a [...]
By 1997, when the first edition of Joseph McBride’s Steven Spielberg: A Biography was published, its author’s previous subjects included Orson Welles, John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Frank Capra. To add Steven Spielberg to that list was, McBride surely must have realised, something of a statement. In effect, McBride, with a formidable reputation as a [...]
Comedy is a notoriously slippery subject. Kant called laughter “an affect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing” (1), and theories of the comic usually share this fate, critical expectation dissolving into a void of counter-example and, well, laughter. Humour seems to resist the assignation of depth, even to parody the language [...]
Darwin’s Screens opens with a quote from the man himself: “I was in those days a very great storyteller” (unpaginated). In the following 232 pages, Barbara Creed explores the influence of Charles Darwin’s work upon a selection of cinematic “stories”. Creed is Professor of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne, and one of Australia’s [...]
We all have an idea in our head that pops up whenever we think of the Western. Certain characteristics come to mind, such as horses, six-guns, ten-gallon hats, dusty streets or savage wilderness, all of which is set in the mid to late 1800s. Of course, this is what usually makes up the genre’s Golden [...]
Self-identified “filmophile” Brian McFarlane opens his “touch of the memoirs” at age ten, reminiscing about reviewing films he had never seen – something he never let stand in his way. I must state, at the opening of this review, until reading Real and Reel: The Education of a Film Obsessive and Critic, I had encountered [...]
Peter Weir is one of Australia’s best-known and most prolific directors. In The Mystical Gaze of the Cinema, Richard Leonard explores the theme of mysticism that runs through Weir’s work. During the following review of Leonard’s text, I will make reference to Weir’s most recent film, The Way Back (2010). This film was released a [...]
At some point, most discussions of the representation of marginalised groups in cinema (and the media in general) lament the absence of whichever group is under consideration. For example, Colin Barnes suggests that the absence of characters with disability in the media has resulted in the widespread cultural belief that people with disability can not [...]
“Cinematic beauty,” Akira Kurosawa told Bert Cardullo in 1992, “must be present in a film for that film to be a moving work.” (1) And Kurosawa’s films certainly were moving. He had a reputation for being an authoritarian director, but not one lacking in wisdom or humility. At the heart of Kurosawa’s oeuvre lay the [...]
The fabulous and fascinatingly contested thing that is film noir is not only alive and kicking, it appears to be undergoing something of a re-evaluation in critical thought. Gone is the stubborn insistence that film noir was purely a product of post-war American culture influenced by German Expressionism and cultural instability; in its place is [...]
In a recent conversation with a friend, the question was raised, “What exactly constitutes an Australian film?”The subject matter in combination with the cast, crew, and filmmaker, I argued.By his definition, the combination of Australian stars and filmmakers made a film Australian.By such reckoning, he informed me, Moulin Rouge! (BazLuhrmann, 2001) was an Australian film.I [...]
In terms of theoretical scope, the book I currently hold in my hands could hardly be more comprehensive; in terms of ambition, it could hardly be more colossal. With Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers, editor Felicity Colman has mustered a clutch of figures from the academy to gloss the contributions of 32 of [...]
Towards the end of Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces (Los abrazos rotos, 2009) – his sad, playful, colour-saturated tribute to his own and so many others’ films – Harry Caine/Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar) caresses the screen upon which images from a surreptitiously shot surveillance video play. The images are of Harry and Lena (Penélope Cruz) exchanging [...]
In January 2010, Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, the first in several stops on the festival circuit before its theatrical release in June of that year. With a cast including three mid-level American stars (Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson and Jessica Alba) and, by the director’s accustomed standards, a [...]
Advances in digital technology have caused a radical shift in moving image culture. This has occurred in both modes of production and sites of exhibition, resulting in a blurring of boundaries that previously defined a range of creative disciplines. Re-Imagining Animation: The Changing Face of the Moving Image, by Paul Wells and Johnny Hardstaff, argues [...]
Keith Beattie’s monograph on the seminal British documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings is a significant contribution to the scholarship on this fascinating, mercurial and multi-faceted artist, as well as on British documentary cinema itself. Like Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Jennings is both central to the canon of British cinema and a figure who is difficult [...]
Perhaps the most outrageously beautiful man ever to step in front of a camera, the 1920s and ’30s star Ramon Novarro is remembered today for the ghastly manner of his death – and the rumours (more ghastly still) that have sprung up around it. On 30 October 1968, the ageing matinee idol was tortured and [...]
The cinematic legacy of European modernism is both fascinating and elusive. Not least because the term modernism itself means so many things to so many people: David Bordwell’s surrogate “art-cinema narration” is equally malleable and may be even more bewildering (1). Two books just published, however, help to clear up the picture and shed new [...]
Pick up the two books and hold one in each hand. Just looking, you can learn a lot. Latin American Melodrama is a slender, grey volume, barely thicker than a child’s school notebook. All About Almodóvar is a hefty tome in garish colours, comparable in girth to a Victorian family Bible. Lift it for any [...]
How do you solve a problem like Richard Lester? Typically, analysts have taken one or another extreme position: either to extol the American-born, long-term English resident as an overlooked, underestimated purveyor of elegantly articulated, visually dense narratives, or to excoriate him as an oxymoronically sophisticated yet superficial addict of sensory overkill, all flash and no [...]
This valuable resource book begins in London, in late September 1960, where two films were shooting at Pinewood Studios. One was the notorious 20th Century-Fox production of Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the most famous film couple at that time. The other film was Alfred Shaughnessy’s modest thriller The [...]
In Conversations with Directors, Elsie Walker and David Johnson bring together a collection of 26 interviews with a wide range of directors from various periods, nationalities, and backgrounds. The interviews are selected from the archives of Literature/Film Quarterly, a journal that focuses on the intimate relationship between literature and film, and the process of adapting [...]
Since the mid-1970s, Clint Eastwood’s life and career have provided material for innumerable books, documentaries and magazine articles. While writers initially focused upon his role as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, more recent years have seen a growing number of scholarly studies which have variously evaluated his work as a director, analysed his role as [...]
“Some strange destiny”, John Thompson claims in The Cinema Book, “seems to have determined that the cinema is written about in France with superior perceptiveness and intelligence than elsewhere.” (1) Part of this strange destiny surely resides in the freedom the writer possesses over the material. While it is certainly true that there was a [...]
It’s tough being an archivist these days. The digital revolution has shaken the profession to its very foundations. All those hallowed archival values like originality, uniqueness, provenance, and protection of the material object, have become irrelevant, as the digital turns all material culture into infinitely reproducible data. Gone are the specialised areas of knowledge concerning [...]
There have always been earnest concerns for the relevance and representativeness of the Australian cinema: over the past few decades since feature production was re-established, it has at turns been castigated for being too commercial, too conservative, then not contemporary or consensual enough. One of the great strengths which is displayed from the outset by [...]
It is difficult to overstate the impact the British journal Screen has had on the discipline of film and television studies. For the past 50 years, the journal has consistently been at the centre of debates around how we watch, why we watch, and what all this watching actually means. Moreover, when it came to [...]
One of the more interesting developments in the cinema of the past 15 years or so has been the surge of mainstream films with complex narratives. Consider Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), or Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006) for instance, each of which employs a narrative [...]
WALDO PEPPER [Robert Redford]: Do you like movies? MARY BETH [Susan Sarandon]: Mmm-hmmm. – The Great Waldo Pepper (George Roy Hill, 1975) … perhaps one must become the films one loves. – Murray Pomerance (1) A moment in Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock’s dark and grisly comedy about the dangers of being too close to your [...]
“I like reading interpretations of my films”, says Apichatpong Weerasethakul. “In Thailand there is mostly film description but not criticism, so I find it refreshing to read what others think my films mean” (p. 131). It’s a convenient disposition, considering the verbiage that has amassed around the Thai filmmaker and video artist’s extraordinary output over [...]
Lisa Dombrowski’s The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I’ll Kill You! is an important contribution to the growing scholarship on and broader cultural fascination with the work of the self-consciously iconoclastic filmmaker Samuel Fuller. It positions itself squarely as a novel addition to the existing critical and analytical work so far produced on [...]
Over the past two decades, Rolf de Heer has arguably emerged as Australia’s leading active narrative filmmaker: excepting one or two figures working mostly outside this country, none of his contemporaries can match him for ambition, productivity and range. Yet few would deny there is frequently something “off” about his work, which too often relies [...]
Martin Scorsese must be one of the most omnipresent filmmakers today. As well as an impressive roster of cinema productions, he has made documentaries, shorts, television pilots, and advertisements. He has produced many works for other filmmakers, promoted the preservation of major cinema classics, and, it seems, appeared on more DVDs than any other person [...]
The title of this anthology, Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance, edited by Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti, is written on the book’s front cover in a font traditionally used for Urdu, Pakistan’s national language. While at first this seems an unnerving introduction to a collection of essays centred on the Hindi film [...]
This is an essential book on one of the most explosive film movements in recent memory, rivalling the prodigious output of Iranian films in the 1990s; the Nigerian feature film industry, which, working almost entirely in video (both digital and analogue) has racked up an astounding 9,000 full-length feature productions between 1992 and 2007. In [...]
Joram ten Brink’s interest in French Ethnographer-Cinéaste Jean Rouch’s (1918-2004) work “resurfaced” after the latter’s death in Africa. In October 2004, he organised the highly successful conference Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch at London’s Institut Français. The conference attempted to remedy the Anglophone world’s unawareness of Rouch by juxtaposing and interfacing past and [...]
