European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood by Thomas Elsaesser Richard Misek July 2006 Book Reviews Over recent years, Thomas Elsaesser has published so prolifically that one might be forgiven for occasionally wondering if “Thomas Elsaesser” is the n...
Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker edited by David E. James Brian L. Frye July 2006 Book Reviews Stan Brakhage didn’t invent the avant-garde cinema. But he certainly reinvented it. Under his tutelage, it finally became a fine art. Joseph Schumpete...
The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man and The Stars by Edgar Morin Karl Schoonover May 2006 Book Reviews I first came across Edgar Morin’s writings almost a decade ago. Having just finished a graduate seminar in classical film theory, I was eager to help ...
100 Anime by Philip Brophy Lucy Wright May 2006 Book Reviews If Philip Brophy was an anime character, he would have tentacles growing out of his eyes. Seriously. He would use them to pick up on the strange ki...
Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers by Michael Berry Ruby Cheung May 2006 Book Reviews Published in late 2005, Michael Berry’s Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers is a groundbreaking English-language volum...
Short Site: Recent Australian Short Film edited by Emma Crimmings and Rhys Graham Louise Sheedy May 2006 Book Reviews Short films roam the Australian landscape in packs. While largely a nomadic species, their chosen habitats consist of festivals and specialist scr...
Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema edited by Matthew Caley and Steve Lannin Diana Sandars May 2006 Book Reviews The study of sound in film has proven to be an increasingly stimulating and diverse field of academic endeavour. Particularly exciting and invigoratin...
New Punk Cinema edited by Nicholas Rombes Claire Perkins May 2006 Book Reviews Each year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Independent Feature Project stage awards ceremonies at the beginning of March which...
The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami by Alberto Elena Hamish Ford February 2006 Book Reviews It seems extraordinary that Alberto Elena’s The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami is the first book in English devoted to a reference-style coverage of Kiaro...
Cary Grant: A Biography by Marc Eliot Anthony D’Amato February 2006 Book Reviews “The best movie actor that ever was” (said Alexis Smith). “The most handsome, witty, and stylish leading man” (Eva Marie Saint). “What he did, he did ...
Not Reconciled: Australian Cinema after Mabo by Felicity Collins and Therese Davis Eva Rueschmann February 2006 Book Reviews Felicity Collins and Therese Davis’ Australian Cinema after Mabo joins other recent books on Australian film, such as Ian Craven’s essay collection Au...
Le Varianti Trasparenti: I Film con Ingrid Bergman di Roberto Rossellini by Elena Dagrada Geoffrey Nowell-Smith February 2006 Book Reviews The story begins with a letter sent, speculatively, by Ingrid Bergman to the Italian director Roberto Rossellini. “Dear Mr Rossellini,” it began: ...
Shepperton Babylon by Matthew Sweet Daniel Gritten February 2006 Book Reviews The rediscovery of British cinema is underway. The BBC’s recent series The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon was an admirable success. Modules on the ...
Close Up: An Actor Telling Tales by John Fraser David Melville February 2006 Book Reviews A quite ridiculously handsome leading man in British films of the 50s and 60s, John Fraser worked at the top of his profession without ever quite beco...
Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies, Volume 1: Secret Agents by Tom Cohen Polona Petek February 2006 Book Reviews American scholar Tom Cohen, whose areas of expertise include literature, cinema and cultural studies, gained international reputation with the publica...
Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood by Jim Kitses Saige Walton February 2006 Book Reviews The original publication of Jim Kitses’ Horizons West in 1969 revealed the heavy impact of auteurism on the development of genre criticism. Thanks to ...
Brain Sculpting and Cinema: Blow-Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain by Warren Neidich Ove Christensen October 2005 Book Reviews We all take in the world through our bodily perceptions and the inferences these perceptions give rise to. The shape and colour of a tree are understo...
Claire Denis by Martine Beugnet John Orr October 2005 Book Reviews Martine Beugnet's study of Claire Denis is a highlight of the lively Manchester series on French film directors, and well worth an uninterrupted read ...
The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to “Reality” TV and Beyond edited by Geoff King Christian McCrea October 2005 Book Reviews I first opened the pages of The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to “Reality TV” and Beyond, edited by Brunel University's Geoff King, dreading a...
This Wounded Cinema, This Wounded Life: Violence and Utopia in the Films of Sam Peckinpah by Gabrielle Murray Claire Perkins October 2005 Book Reviews The utopian impulse at work in Gabrielle Murray's contemporary account of Sam Peckinpah's films is given away by her book's striking title. Our curren...
Lethal Weapons, Die Hards and Terminators: Exploring Action-Adventure Cinema in Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie by Eric Lichtenfeld and Action and Adventure Cinema edited by Yvonne Tasker Donna Peberdy October 2005 Book Reviews Lorna Cole : What happened last night? Martin Riggs : Oh, gunfight, explosions, sharks, you know, the usual. – Lethal Weapon 4 (Richard Donner, 1998...
History Films, Women, and Freud’s Uncanny by Susan E. Linville Polona Petek July 2005 Book Reviews In her second monograph, Susan E. Linville, the author of Feminism, Film, Fascism: Women's Auto/Biographical Film in Postwar Germany (1), takes on a t...
A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965 by Paul Arthur Brian L. Frye July 2005 Book Reviews If reporters write the first draft of history, critics write the second. And like reporters, critics have one signal advantage over historians and the...
The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film by Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp Christian McCrea July 2005 Book Reviews The Midnight Eye website is a common sight when peering over the shoulder of fans of Japanese cinema. Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp edit a formidable resou...
Polish Film: A Twentieth Century History by Charles Ford and Robert Hammond, with additional material by Grazyna Kudy Alan Pavelin July 2005 Book Reviews Polish cinema is distinctive in two ways which make it, for me, particularly interesting. First, the country’s turbulent history (the 123 years to 191...
Coming up for Air: Andy Warhol’s Blow Job by Roy Grundmann Cheryl-Anne Panlilio July 2005 Book Reviews A brief scan of Roy Grundmann’s book on the film Blow Job (Andy Warhol, 1964) brings the reader the promise of future bouts of fascination, intrigue, ...
Chasing the Runaways: Foreign Film Production and Film Studio Development in Australia 1988-2002 by Nick Herd Ben Goldsmith July 2005 Book Reviews Is domestic production being “swamped” by international production? Where does creative control lie? Which sectors of the industry and the economy mor...
Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit Bill Schaffer July 2005 Book Reviews This book approaches cinema as a domain in which possibilities of being are potentially at stake. Although often referring to the work of Lacan, Forms...
Views From Beyond the Mirror: The Films of Jane Campion by Sue Gillett Martha P. Nochimson April 2005 Book Reviews Sue Gillett's monograph on Jane Campion's films establishes Campion as a cinematic poet of heterosexuality, “warts and all”. Gillett's intention i...
Paul Wegener: Frühe Moderne im Film by Heide Schönemann Thomas Elsaesser April 2005 Book Reviews This review was originally published in Cinema & Cie, no. 5, Fall 2004, 54–56. It has always been axiomatic – and not only thanks to Lotte Eisn...
Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System by Sharon Waxman Lee Hill April 2005 Book Reviews Like Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures in 2004, Sharon Waxman's Rebels On The Backlot was launched by its publisher at this year's Sundance Film...
Resonant Textuality: Visualising and Conceptualising the Cinema of Wong Kar-wai: Wong Kar-wai by Stephen Teo Dana Polan April 2005 Book Reviews A while back, Senses of Cinema offered a mini-dossier on Wong Kar-wai's cinema on the occasion of the release of his In the Mood for Love (2000). A nu...
The Cinema Effect by Sean Cubitt Roger Dawkins April 2005 Book Reviews Sean Cubitt's book, The Cinema Effect, is an intricate philosophical analysis of film. Following from studies like Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 1 and Cinem...
Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Essential Critic: Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons by Jonathan Rosenbaum Stephen Teo April 2005 Book Reviews Jonathan Rosenbaum's Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University, 2004), takes a canonical view ...
Support Your Local Filmmaker: Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision by Brad Stevens Maximilian Le Cain February 2005 Book Reviews The '90s was an extraordinary decade for the cinema. As the elephantine decadence of the mainstream increased in grossness, a dizzying constellation o...
Cinema and Culture Theory: Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies edited by Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson and K.J. Shepherdson Ove Christensen February 2005 Book Reviews Before cinema studies was established as an academic enterprise there existed already a fair pile of theoretical writing on cinema. Hugo Münsterberg, ...