Womenvision: Women and the Moving Image in Australia edited by Lisa French Michelle Langford July 2003 Book Reviews (Melbourne: Damned Publishing, 2003) In her introduction to Womenvision, the editor Lisa French pays homage to an event that took place in Sydney i...
Coming in from the Culled: A Review of A Postmodern Cinema: The Voice of the Other in Canadian Film by Mary Alemany-Galway Dirk de Bruyn July 2003 Book Reviews (Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2002) I was drawn to this book by the mention of the Other and Canadian film in the one sentence. I had an interest, ha...
Emir Kusturica by Dina Iordanova Daniel J. Goulding May 2003 Book Reviews (London: British Film Institute, 2002) Dina Iordanova's imaginative analytical investigation of the films of Emir Kusturica is a distinguished cont...
New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction by Geoff King Michael Cohen March 2003 Book Reviews (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) Geoff King's new book, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction, sets his project out in plain English and...
Positif Fifty Years: Selections From The French Film Journal edited by Lawrence Kardish and Michel Ciment Steve Erickson March 2003 Book Reviews (Museum Of Modern Art: New York, 2002) While four anthologies of writing from Cahiers du Cinéma have been published in English, it's taken 50 years...
The Young Desire It: A Review of The Devil’s Playground by Christos Tsiolkas Jake Wilson March 2003 Book Reviews The first in the Australian Screen Classics series by Melbourne novelist, playwright, commentator and filmmaker, Christos Tsiolkas, is here reviewed.
English Hitchcock by Charles Barr Tony Williams January 2003 Book Reviews Barr's book does a fine job at exploring a traditionally neglected area: Hitchcock's English films and their indebtedness to English national culture.
Trafic Issue No. 41: Hitchcock/Lang (Printemps 2002) David Ehrenstein January 2003 Book Reviews Ehrenstein reviews this special double issue of French film magazine Trafic, published in 2002.
A Certain Familiar Woundedness – A Review of Third Take: Australian Filmmakers Talk edited by Raffaele Caputo and Geoff Burton Jake Wilson January 2003 Book Reviews Wilson unearths the undercurrents and biases of this recent Australian book.
Lars von Trier by Jack Stevenson Mette Hjort January 2003 Book Reviews (London: BFI Publications, 2002) Highly visible on the international scene during the silent film era, Danish cinema is once again generating inter...
The Felliniesque Besieged: Fellini Lexicon by Sam Rohdie Benjamin Halligan January 2003 Book Reviews (London: BFI Publications, 2002) “I first met your name in the Pasquino cinema in Rome. In Trastevere. They show films in English there. You had writ...
Hitchcock’s Films Revisited by Robin Wood, Revised Edition, Joe McElhaney January 2003 Book Reviews McElhaney considers this revised edition of Wood's earlier 1965 classic, and the continuities and changes it brings in regards to Wood's body of work on Hitch.
A Long Hard Look at ‘Psycho’ by Raymond Durgnat Ken Mogg January 2003 Book Reviews A comprehensive, substantial appraisal of Durgnat's posthumously published Psycho.
A Long Hard Look at ‘Psycho’ by Raymond Durgnat Charles Barr January 2003 Book Reviews Whilst Barr praises Durgnat's pluralist approach and astute feeling for cinematic texture, he laments the number of errors throughout the book.
Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen by Alison Butler Natalie Neill December 2002 Book Reviews (London: Wallflower, 2002) Published in June 2002, Women's Cinema is one of the most recent books in the Short Cuts series by Wallflower Press. Aim...
Mother India by Gayatri Chatterjee Laleen Jayamanne December 2002 Book Reviews (London: British Film Institute, 2002) Gayatri Chatterjee's book on the Indian epic film Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957) is one of a series of bo...
The Girls in the Back Room: Looking at the Lesbian Bar by Kelly Hankin Gaye Naismith October 2002 Book Reviews (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) This book explores the representation of lesbian bars across various genres of film and i...
Ivan the Terrible by Yuri Tsivian (BFI Classics, 2002); October by Richard Taylor (BFI Classics, 2002) Helen Grace July 2002 Book Reviews In the concluding paragraph of Citizen Kane (BFI Classics, 1992), Laura Mulvey argues that this film has, built into its structure, the need to think ...
Unpacking Clothes: A Review of Costume and Cinema: Dress Codes in Popular Film by Sarah Street Tamar Jeffers July 2002 Book Reviews It is only shallow people who fail to judge by appearances. - Oscar Wilde Wilde's epigram is apt when considering Sarah Street's Costume and cinema ...
Moved By Animation – Animation: Genre and Authorship by Paul Wells Bill Schaffer July 2002 Book Reviews (London: Wallflower, 2002) As Chuck Jones reminds us on the back cover of Norman Klein's Seven Minutes (for my money, still the best book on the ar...
Left in the Dark: Film Reviews and Essays, 1988-2001 by Stuart Klawans Julien Lapointe July 2002 Book Reviews (Nation Books/Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002) Tension marks the allure of superior criticism – ideally, there should be a conflict between text and su...
The Film Minister – Goebbels and the Cinema in the ‘Third Reich’ by Felix Moeller Jonathan Dawson July 2002 Book Reviews (Stuttgart/London: Edition Axel Menges, 2000) “It is my ultimate goal to establish the German film as the dominant cultural world power.” - Joseph G...
For the Sake of Argument: Responding to Jake Wilson Sylvia Lawson July 2002 Book Reviews I write to thank Senses of Cinema and Jake Wilson for giving my current book, How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia, the kind of serious and ex...
Tsai Ming-Liang by Jean-Pierre Rehm, Olivier Joyard, and Danièle Rivière Tara Forrest May 2002 Book Reviews In the opening article of the first book to date dedicated to the work of Taiwan-based filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang, Jean-Pierre Rehm claims that the tit...
Atom Egoyan by Carole Desbarats, Jacinto Lageira, Danièle Rivière, Paul Virilio Maria San Filippo May 2002 Book Reviews It seems nothing short of extraordinary that no book-length study of Atom Egoyan by English-language scholars has been published to date. Exhibit A: F...
A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to Videos and DVDs by Donald Richie Darrell William Davis May 2002 Book Reviews Donald Richie's long-awaited new book, A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to Videos and DVDs (Tokyo: Kodansha...
Far from Woomera: Reading Sylvia Lawson in Australia: A Response to How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia – Stories and Essays by Sylvia Lawson Jake Wilson May 2002 Book Reviews A revealing, sensitive response to Lawson's latest work of stories and essays.
“Crossing cultures, cinematic and other”: A Review of Laleen Jayamanne’s Toward Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis Therese Davis May 2002 Book Reviews Davis praises this recent book, and its rethinking of the relation between film and film criticism.
Cultural Interfaces and the Aesthetics of (Dis)continuity – A Review of Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media Darren Tofts March 2002 Book Reviews (Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2001) Hmm. Another book about “new media”. I'd like to think that one day I'll be remembered as the scrooge w...
Belle de Jour (BFI Film Classics, London, 2001), by Michael Wood Jonathan Dawson March 2002 Book Reviews Luis Buñuel's movies, beginning of course with Un Chien Andalou (1928), that ur-surrealist film for all seasons, defy category, logic, good taste and ...
Reading The Funnies: Essays on Comic Strips (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books 2001) by Donald Phelps William D. Routt March 2002 Book Reviews A lively appreciation of Phelps' latest book on early American comic strips and an astute appraisal of his unique and stylised prose.
Bruno Dumont (Dis Voir, 2001) by Philippe Tancelin, Sébastien Ors and Valérie Jouve Maximilian Le Cain March 2002 Book Reviews Though Dumont's current filmography comprises only two films, Max argues a book length study is certainly not premature.
Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (BFI 2001) by Malcolm Le Grice Brian L. Frye March 2002 Book Reviews Ever since 1891, when Thomas Alva Edison – the quintessential American – became the inventor of the motion picture rather than his brilliant English e...
Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey by Michael Chion (BFI Publishing: London, 2001) Trans. by Claudia Gorbman Lee Hill March 2002 Book Reviews As a lapsed science fiction fan, I find it frustrating (and not a little depressing) that in spite of the genre's dominance of Hollywood and the incre...
John Ford Made Westerns: Filming the Legend in the Sound Era (Indiana University Press, 2001) eds. Gaylyn Studlar and Matthew Bernstein David Boyd December 2001 Book Reviews The title of this volume alludes to what is probably the best-known anecdote of John Ford's career. Rising at a Directors Guild meeting in 1950 to spe...
American Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2000) by Peter Lev Maria San Filippo November 2001 Book Reviews The 1970s have rightly been called the last golden age of American cinema, a reference not only to Hollywood and independent movies of this era but al...
