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...