For a Double-Edged Theory: Christian Metz’ Essais sur la signification au cinéma at 50 Abel Muñoz Hénonin January 2023 Book Reviews The problem we face here is self-evident: how to address an unquestionable classic of film theory yet again? At a first glance, it might seem like ...
Dennis Lim’s Tale of Cinema: A Meta-Monograph Marc Raymond January 2023 Book Reviews The Australian publisher Fireflies Press has created a ten-book series of Decadent Editions, ten takes on a different film from each year of the 2000s...
In search of a Global Filipino Auteur: Sine ni Lav Diaz, edited by Parichay Patra and Micheal Kho Lim Pujita Guha January 2023 Book Reviews “Sine ni Lav Diaz”, roughly translated as “The cinema of Lav Diaz”, appears at the end of every Diaz film, signalling the auteur’s presence, as it wer...
Philosophy for the Blockbuster Audience: Christopher Nolan: Filmmaker and Philosopher, by Robbie B. H. Goh Tom Boniface-Webb October 2022 Book Reviews Bloomsbury Academic chooses for the most recent entry to its Philosophical Filmmakers series, the British/American writer, producer, director, Christo...
Do we need Digital Tarkovsky? Corey P. Cribb October 2022 Book Reviews In Digital Tarkovsky, Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden (who publish, exhibit and campaign collectively under the moniker Metahaven: a self-describ...
Trafic at 30, End of a Film Journal Emmanuel Bonin July 2022 Book Reviews Being a French speaker brings many advantages in this world, but few so dear to my heart as being able to read through any release of Trafic, the cine...
How to Do Things with Camera Movement: The Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera, by Daniel Morgan Kyle Barrowman May 2022 Book Reviews To say that a book devoted to analysing camera movement is an exemplary instance of ordinary language philosophy may raise a few eyebrows. Indeed, it ...
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. Heg...
Hollywood, Reinvented: Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic, by Glenn Frankel Elroy Rosenberg January 2022 Book Reviews “It’s my idea,” said Ken Kesey while held in the visitation of a California jail in 1966, “that it’s time to graduate from what has been going on, to ...
Rhythm and Light: Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz, by Laleen Jayamanne Steven Shaviro July 2021 Book Reviews Laleen Jayamanne’s beautiful new book, Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gify, enlivens the spirits of its readers every bit as much as the movies i...
West Side Story Redux: West Side Story: The Jets, the Sharks, and the Making of a Classic, by Richard Barrios Adrian Schober July 2021 Book Reviews Later this year will mark the 60th anniversary of the release of West Side Story (Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins, 1961), the landmark American music...
Foraging in a Transforming Mediascape: Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India, by Lalitha Gopalan Megan Carrigy July 2021 Book Reviews In Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India Lalitha Gopalan brings to life the complexities of contemporary independent feature production in India. She...
Time Machines: After Kubrick: A Filmmaker’s Legacy, edited by Jeremi Szaniawski Joy McEntee May 2021 Book Reviews Interviewed in Jeremi Szaniawski’s After Kubrick: a Filmmaker’s Legacy, Gaspar Noé is asked about his relationship to Stanley Kubrick: I am a dwarf ....
The Politics of Ambiguity: After Authority: Global Art Cinema and Political Transition, by Kalling Heck Jennifer Ruth May 2021 Book Reviews When Mao died in 1976, the Great Proletarian Chinese Cultural Revolution drew to a close and a paralysed film industry began to function again. For a ...
Revising a Concept: Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia, by Jonathan Walley Holly Willis January 2021 Book Reviews “Expanded cinema” as a term is invitingly grandiose, connoting expansion, breadth, inclusivity, even possibility. Something bigger. Something better. ...
When Everything Seemed Possible: London’s Arts Labs and the 60s Avant-Garde by David Curtis Wheeler Winston Dixon January 2021 Book Reviews In the 1960s, the experimental cinema scene was exploding on a world wide basis. In the era before digital technology, cellphones and email, film was ...
“Memories Are Made of This”: Juliane Lorenz and Lothar Schirmer’s R.W. Fassbinder: Film Stills, 1966-1982 Eric Gudas January 2021 Book Reviews Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who would have turned 75 this past May, used the frames of the movie and television screen to create a pervasive sense of en...
Beneath the Tuxedo Elegance: Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend, by Mark Glancy Tom Ryan January 2021 Book Reviews Film stars are like mirages: although we can see them, we know that they’re not really what they appear to be. They play characters born of scripts, b...
Anarchist Cinema: A Dream of Resistance: The Cinema of Kobayashi Masaki by Stephen Prince Karthick Ram Manoharan January 2021 Book Reviews To the rest of the world, Japanese cinema is mostly identified with three big names – Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi. For Japanese c...
Trade Follows the Film: Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System by Lee Grieveson Daniel Fairfax October 2020 Book Reviews Few recent books in film and media studies can match the ambition Lee Grieveson set himself with Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and...
War, Community, and the Cinema: Front Lines of Community: Hollywood Between War and Democracy by Hermann Kappelhof and Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War by Mark Harris Joshua Sperling October 2020 Book Reviews War is a limit-experience for human communities. In the modern era this has often meant nation states, which during periods of total conflict become c...
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 a...
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 of...
The Restless Spectator: Anxious Cinephilia: Pleasure and Peril at the Movies, by Sarah Keller Joshua Heaps July 2020 Book Reviews In a recent blog post for Columbia University Press – “Anxious Afterthoughts on Anxious Cinephilia” – Sarah Keller provides her latest book with a cas...
Engaged Vision: Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave, by Steven Ungar Ivan Cerecina July 2020 Book Reviews Steven Ungar’s Critical Mass groups together and examines three-and-a-half decades worth of non-fiction filmmaking in France, making a compelling case...
Reagan at the Movies: Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, by J. Hoberman Nafis Shafizadeh July 2020 Book Reviews My concern is with a general movement of reaction and conservative reassurance in the contemporary Hollywood cinema. — Andrew Britton in Blissing O...
Hidden Faces, Hidden Identities: Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes without Faces, by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas Shannon Scott July 2020 Book Reviews Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ Masks in Horror Cinema does not begin like a horror film, at least not in the sense of an attention-grabbing opening scene ...
The Big Goodbye: “Chinatown” and the Last Years of Hollywood, by Sam Wasson Fabrice Ziolkowski April 2020 Book Reviews I’ve had a quasi-symbiotic relationship to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown ever since I first laid eyes on it in May 1974. It was at a preview screening of...
Reading Film: Light into Ink: A Critical Survey of 50 Film Novelizations, by S. M. Guariento Deborah Allison April 2020 Book Reviews Film novelisations have been circulating in substantial numbers for well over a century. To say they have been underrepresented in critical studies of...
A meet and happy conversation: Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema by Catherine Wheatley Dominic Lash April 2020 Book Reviews The philosopher Stanley Cavell (1926-2018) was the author of a relatively small but extremely rich collection of books and articles on film, mostly co...
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 i...
This Is Not Another Reading of a Master: The Invention of Robert Bresson: the Auteur and his Market, by Colin Burnett Dudley Andrew October 2019 Book Reviews The Invention of Robert Bresson is a book to take as seriously as its subject demands. Guided by a natural sensitivity to the films – something shared...
From April! April! to Imitation of Life: The Films of Douglas Sirk, by Tom Ryan Bruce Hodsdon October 2019 Book Reviews The book length interview by Jon Halliday with Douglas Sirk published in 1971 was the catalyst for the reappraisal of his contributions to the cinema....
“Mesdames, mesdemoiselles, messieurs: un classique!”: Eric Rohmer’s Film Theory (1948-1953) – From ‘École Scherer’ to ‘Politique des Auteurs’ by Marco Grosoli Jeremi Szaniawski October 2019 Book Reviews In 1987, when his book, which serves as one of the first efforts in English to reassess and appraise the films and legacy of Roberto Rossellini (1987)...
Political Gestures: Cinema/Politics/Philosophy, by Nico Baumbach Daniel Fairfax July 2019 Book Reviews There is a slight retro effect to the triple-barreled title of Nico Baumbach’s book, with the pair of solidi separating-conjoining the terms “cinema”,...
Mythologicals Matter: A Review of Deities and Devotees, by Uma Maheswari Bhrugubanda Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil July 2019 Book Reviews One of the great rescue acts of the popular turn in Indian academia of the late 1990s has been to recuperate the Indian film viewing masses from the c...
