A Partial World Viewed: Film Fables and The Future of the Image by Jacques Rancière Tony McKibbin March 2008 Book Reviews Jacques Rancière’s books, Film Fables and The Future of the Image, are really trying to do what his work in politics often does. If his collection of ...
The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand edited by Geoff Mayer and Keith Beattie Katherine Fry March 2008 Book Reviews For a reader like myself, The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand served as an opportunity to revisit films and filmmakers not thought of for some tim...
America First: Naming the Nation in US Film edited by Mandy Merck John Fidler November 2007 Book Reviews WILLIE (eating a TV dinner): Eva, stop bugging me, will you? You know, this is the way we eat in America. I got my meat, I got my potatoes, I got my ...
Rising in the East? Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: the Globalization of Chinese Film and TV by Michael Curtin Ramon Lobato November 2007 Book Reviews Books on Asian media with “globalisation” in their titles often address a familiar set of topics, such as the migration of Hong Kong film stars to Hol...
“Cinema as I see-I hear-I feel”: The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film by Brigitte Peucker Saige Walton November 2007 Book Reviews The shift towards more sensuous modes of scholarship has been producing exciting interdisciplinary work across the fields of cultural anthropology, fi...
Sensations of Cinema: Deleuze, Altered States and Film by Anna Powell David Martin-Jones November 2007 Book Reviews The publication of Anna Powell’s second book on Gilles Deleuze and cinema immediately illuminates two very important points. Firstly, the continued gr...
Passionate Encounters with Jane Campion’s “Cinematic Consciousness”: Jane Campion by Kathleen McHugh and The Piano by Gail Jones Lisa French October 2007 Book Reviews Research into female authorship in the cinema was a neglected area in cinema studies until the 1990s (1). Since then, there has been an increased inte...
Abigail Child’s This is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film Tina Wasserman August 2007 Book Reviews Tina Wasserman discusses a treasure trove of illuminating ideas found in this collection of essays by experimental filmmaker and writer Abigail Child.
The Remote Control as Political Weapon: Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image by Laura Mulvey Jeroen Gerrits August 2007 Book Reviews In the preface to her most recent book, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, Laura Mulvey describes and comments on a shift in her own ...
In Search of Anxious Time: Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts by David Martin-Jones Felicity. J. Colman August 2007 Book Reviews CLEMENTINE KRUCZYNSKI : You're not a stalker or anything, right? JOEL BARISH : I'm not a stalker. You're the one that talked to me, remember? CLEMEN...
American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now edited by Phillip Lopate John Fidler August 2007 Book Reviews The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us. The fu...
“Africa is a Revolutionary Country”: Sally Shafto’s Zanzibar: The Zanzibar Films and the Dandies of May 1968 Keith Reader August 2007 Book Reviews Keith Reader reviews Sally Shafto’s stimulating and indispensable book on one of the most overlooked radical filmmaking collectives.
In Search of a (Reluctant) Feminist: Women in Polish Cinema by Ewa Mazierska and Elzbieta Ostrowska Renata Murawska August 2007 Book Reviews With the defiance expected in the greatest of social causes, Polish female filmmakers have insisted for years that they do not make women’s cinema. Th...
The Grocer Who Dreams: Postcards from the Cinema by Serge Daney Tony McKibbin August 2007 Book Reviews In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre says a grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. Etiquett...
Simple Acts of Annihilation: La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film by Mikel J. Koven Alexia Kannas August 2007 Book Reviews What is an Italian giallo film? Mikel J. Koven’s latest book La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film attempts to illuminate this...
Reinventing European Cinema Studies? The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map by Rosalind Galt and Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie by Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli Polona Petek May 2007 Book Reviews The focus on European cinema is hardly a new development in film scholarship. European filmmakers and European national cinemas have been on the agend...
What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career by Joseph McBride Peter Tonguette May 2007 Book Reviews In his excellent 1996 review of several Orson Welles books which had just been published, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote the following about the revised and...
Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film: Locating the Cinematic Unconscious by Fabio Vighi Luana Ciavola May 2007 Book Reviews With his book, Fabio Vighi has accomplished something that has been eagerly awaited by those familiar with Italian cinema and psychoanalysis: an exami...
Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny by Barbara Creed Anneke Smelik May 2007 Book Reviews What are monsters? What role do they fulfil in modern society? These are the leading questions that Barbara Creed addresses in Phallic Panic. Cinema i...
A Hard Act to Follow: In Search of Cinema: Writings on International Film Art by Bert Cardullo Dan Harper May 2007 Book Reviews I write about the cinema because I believe that it is the true Gesamtkunstwerk (or total work of art) and therefore has greater expressive capacity th...
Garland is to Glamour as Water is to Witches of the West: Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical by Steven Cohan Diana Sandars May 2007 Book Reviews Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical is a beautifully crafted book which seamlessly blends wit, entertainment and acad...
Filmosophy by Daniel Frampton Tony McKibbin May 2007 Book Reviews Sometimes when reading Daniel Frampton’s book about a brave new frontier called “filmosophy” you get the feeling it’s yesterday’s news offering itself...
Bombay by Lalitha Gopalan Megan Carrigy February 2007 Book Reviews There’s something particularly charming about the size and strategy of the books in the BFI Modern Classics series. Their compact nature and the speci...
The Modern Amazons: Warrior Women On-Screen by Dominique Mainon and James Ursini Catherine Gomes February 2007 Book Reviews The commercial and critical success of films and television shows featuring warrior women has been phenomenal. The film and television industries, par...
Jean Cocteau by James S. Williams Patrick Ellis February 2007 Book Reviews In his article, “Resurrecting Cocteau: Gay (In)visibility and the Clean-up of French Culture” (1), James S. Williams argues that there has been a conc...
figures traced in light: On Cinematic Staging and The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies by David Bordwell John Orr February 2007 Book Reviews I come to praise Bordwell, not to bury him. He is the greatest academic film critic writing in the English language and his latest brace of books, com...
The Encyclopedia of British Film and Cinema of Britain and Ireland edited by Brian McFarlane Daniel Gritten February 2007 Book Reviews For much of its history, British cinema was deemed second-rate and unworthy of critical and popular attention. The resultant lack of care and research...
Film Remakes by Constantine Verevis Brian McFarlane November 2006 Book Reviews “Not a patch on the old film” is likely to be the common response to most remakes, perhaps without too much thought going into the opinion. Or into wh...
Theorising National Cinema edited by Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen Elizabeth Avram November 2006 Book Reviews National cinema theorists in the 1960s and ’70s narrowly defined national cinemas within prescriptive text-based criteria. However, since the onset of...
Sheep and the Australian Cinema by Deb Verhoeven Ross Gibson November 2006 Book Reviews Some readers will have encountered portions of Deb Verhoeven’s book scattered through time and across the publishing landscape, in the form of several...
Jean Vigo by Michael Temple Patrick Ellis November 2006 Book Reviews Accompanying the Jean-Luc Godard show at the Centre Georges Pompidou – detailed last issue by Alex Munt – is an exhibition catalogue co-edited by Mich...
Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures by Alexander Nemerov Saige Walton November 2006 Book Reviews In Bedlam (Mark Robson, 1946), Val Lewton’s last production for RKO-Radio Pictures, there is a justly famous sequence in which a young boy – his body ...
Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953-1968 by Kevin Heffernan Louise Sheedy November 2006 Book Reviews If one of the benchmarks for the success of a historical analysis is its conceptual transferability onto contemporary situations, then Kevin Heffernan...
Close-Up #1 edited by John Gibbs and Douglas Pye Deborah Allison July 2006 Book Reviews Close-Up is a stimulating new idea from Wallflower Press who, through their varied, audacious and prolific line-up of titles, have rapidly become one ...
Thinking in Images: Film Theory, Feminist Philosophy and Marlene Dietrich by Catherine Constable Felicity. J. Colman July 2006 Book Reviews Shameless. That’s the word that comes to mind when I think of women like Marlene Dietrich – clever, strong, and defiantly erotic in the face of the hy...
Mizoguchi and Japan by Mark Le Fanu Freda Freiberg July 2006 Book Reviews Kenji Mizoguchi is acknowledged as one of the masters of classic Japanese cinema, but his films are rarely exhibited or studied in film courses. One o...