A Mensch’s Moviemaking: Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual, by Nathan Abrams Jeremi Szaniawski July 2019 Book Reviews Stanley Kubrick belongs to the category of select filmmakers to have elicited a massive body of critical work as well as gained a cult following among...
A Multitude of Meanings: The Long Take: Critical Approaches, ed. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye Nicholas Bugeja March 2019 Book Reviews In the cinema, the long take is an instrument of multifaceted – sometimes paradoxical – power. In a film like Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, Vi...
Revealing the Soul of a Cinematic Passeur: Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982-2016, by Adrian Martin Felicity Chaplin March 2019 Book Reviews Mysteries of Cinema, an anthology of the major essays by prolific and internationally-recognised Australian-born film critic Adrian Martin, takes its ...
“The nascent US movie industry through the prism of the Triangle Film Corporation”: Ainsi naquit Hollywood, by Marc Vernet Jean Paul Simon March 2019 Book Reviews With his last book devoted to the formation of the first cinema studios and to the early beginnings of the organisation of Hollywood, Marc Vernet offe...
The Ontological Truth of Film-as-Philosophy: Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience, by Shawn Loht James Magrini March 2019 Book Reviews Whereas the majority of film-philosophy essays incorporating the thinking of Martin Heidegger are limited to reading specific films from one or anothe...
Beyond Thumbs Up or Down: Aesthetic Evaluation and Film, by Andrew Klevan Dominic Lash December 2018 Book Reviews In 1996 Guitar Player magazine ran a feature on the future of heavy metal which included a short section on the pros and cons of the guitar solo. A nu...
Film in a Multiple Mirror: Reframing Luchino Visconti: Film and Art by Ivo Blom Hajnal Király December 2018 Book Reviews By promising a new approach to a director whose work has been and still is – as the author himself admits – largely discussed by film scholars, the ti...
McCarthyism’s Hollywood Year: Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist, by Thomas Doherty Michael Kitson December 2018 Book Reviews Thomas Doherty, the author of Show Trial, is professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, Massachusetts, associate editor of Cineaste, as wel...
The Semiotics of Wes Anderson: Wes Anderson’s Symbolic Storyworld: A Semiotic Analysis, by Warren Buckland Francesco Sticchi December 2018 Book Reviews D. H. Lawrence believed that the proper function of the critic was to trust the tale instead of the artist, and ultimately to save the tale from the a...
Cinema Affairs: Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945, by Weihong Bao Hiu M. Chan October 2018 Book Reviews Although it is full of potential, research on the cultural history of cinema in China has traditionally been a marginal practice. Weihong Bao’s book (...
Declaring the ‘End’, Signaling a Renewal: The End of National Cinema: Filipino Films at the Turn of the Century, by Patrick Campos Katrina Ross Tan October 2018 Book Reviews It is notable that in his first book, Patrick Campos declares the “end of national cinema” – not to signal Philippine cinema’s death, but to revaluate...
The Aesthetic Mobilities of Lyotard’s Film-Philosophy: Acinemas: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Film, by Graham Jones and Ashley Woodward (eds.) Sharon Jane Mee October 2018 Book Reviews Acinemas: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Film is an anthology compiled and edited by Graham Jones and Ashley Woodward from papers presented at the “Acinemas:...
The Said and the Unsaid (Part I): Australian Film Theory & Criticism (3 vols.), ed. Noel King, Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams Barrett Hodsdon October 2018 Book Reviews The ambition and scope of this project, as indicated by its all-encompassing title, was clearly designed to cover the explosion in critical and concep...
The Said and the Unsaid (Part II): Australian Film Theory & Criticism (3 vols.), ed. Noel King, Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams Barrett Hodsdon September 2018 Book Reviews Further Reflections and Omissions In line with my heading “Further Reflection and Omissions”, I want to briefly note and emphasise the problems of th...
Styles of Substance: The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and the Reimagining of Cinema, by Robert P. Kolker Tony McKibbin June 2018 Book Reviews Robert Philip Kolker has given us two very useful film books: The Altering Eye and A Cinema of Loneliness are excellent accounts of post-war European ...
Mind of a Movie Critic: Two Cheers for Hollywood, by Joseph McBride Adrian Schober June 2018 Book Reviews In Two Cheers for Hollywood, film historian and critic Joseph McBride is on a mission: to recover the marginalised or unsung reputations of screenwrit...
Face, Flesh, Film: The Face on Film by Noa Steimatsky Tyson Stewart June 2018 Book Reviews Noa Steimatsky’s intriguing book The Face on Film oscillates between straightforward history of various cinematic tropes of the face and theoretical t...
Cinema, the Art of Artificial Darkness: Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media, by Noam Elcott Eugene Kwon June 2018 Book Reviews How does a history of cinema begin? Perhaps with cinema, one can say something along the lines of: “In the beginning was darkness.” But what kind of d...
The Forgotten Auteur: Julien Duvivier by Ben McCann Felicity Chaplin June 2018 Book Reviews “Duvivier is ripe for rediscovery”, declares Ben McCann in the opening to his book on French filmmaker Julien Duvivier and indeed the cineaste is a we...
An Alternative to Haptic Cinema: Philippe Grandrieux: Sonic Cinema, by Greg Hainge Troy Michael Bordun June 2018 Book Reviews In the first book-length study of French filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux, Greg Hainge meticulously outlines and details the director’s œuvre, in a study...
Subjectivity, Spectatorship and Social Change: The Act of Documenting: Documentary Film in the 21st Century, by Brian Winston, Gail Vanstone and Wang Chi Katherine Balsley June 2018 Book Reviews In the fall of 2017, I was approached by a colleague at the public liberal arts college where I teach film studies and production. My colleague, a pol...
Road Trip Through A Cinematically-Constructed America: The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema, 1960-2000 by Christian B. Long Shannon Scott June 2018 Book Reviews For film scholars interested in the narrative settings of cinema examined through a “cultural materialist approach to film history” (p. 4), combined w...
Iron Roses: Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorgical Cinema of Jean Rollin, ed. Samm Deighan Dean Brandum March 2018 Book Reviews Like many, I was aware of the films of the French director Jean Rollin long before I viewed any of his work. It would have been some time in the mid-1...
From the Banal to the Extreme… and Back Again: Troubled Everyday: The Aesthetics of Violence and the Everyday in European Art Cinema by Alison Taylor Felicity Chaplin March 2018 Book Reviews The sustained critical success of auteur directors like Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier, the emergence in the 1990s and 2000s of the “new extremism”...
The Cinema Hypothesis: Teaching Cinema in the Classroom and Beyond, by Alain Bergala Tony McKibbin March 2018 Book Reviews If Bazin's classic essay collection was titled What is Cinema?, along comes contemporary French critic Alain Bergala asking how the subject should be ...
Re-framing the city: Slums on Screen: World Cinema and the Planet of Slums, by Igor Krstić Tim O’Farrell March 2018 Book Reviews Most academic literature on cinema uses familiar framing mechanisms such as author studies, national cinema or genre lenses. A less typical organising...
Against Auteurism: Cinéma Militant: Political Filmmaking and May 1968, by Paul Douglas Grant Michael Sandlin March 2018 Book Reviews Cinéma Militant is academic and film historian Paul Douglas Grant’s admirable attempt to recover and reconsider the long-overlooked cadre of hard-left...
Thinking Back, Thinking Forward: Utopian Television: Rossellini, Watkins, and Godard Beyond Cinema, by Michael Cramer Jonathan Wright March 2018 Book Reviews Michael Cramer’s new book, Utopian Television, is an impressively constructed work of scholarship that does more than display certain utopian trends i...
Defining the Cinematic Essay: The Essay Film by Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades, and Essays on the Essay Film by Nora M. Alter & Timothy Corrigan Katherine Balsley December 2017 Book Reviews From 2011 until 2015, I taught a course entitled “Documentary Production” at a small liberal arts college north of Chicago. Rather than basing the ...
Ici et ailleurs: Decentring France by Gemma King James Waters December 2017 Book Reviews “Cinema is the art of ghosts, the battle of phantoms. That’s what I think cinema is about, when it’s not boring. It’s the art of allowing ghosts to co...
The Toad and the Insect: On Mark Bartholomew’s Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing Nafis Shafizadeh December 2017 Book Reviews Several years ago, my wife and I spent a fall week in a remote cabin in the hills of Big Sur. We spent the time mostly enjoying the seclusion of the c...
The Railroad Man: Hollywood’s First Australian. The Adventurous Life of J.P. McGowan by John J. McGowan Geoff Mayer December 2017 Book Reviews In 1918 Australian born actor, writer, producer and director J.P. (Jack) McGowan joined Universal, starting a collaboration that lasted nearly fou...
The Obsolescence of Poetics: Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema by Thomas Elsaesser Daniel Fairfax December 2017 Book Reviews Should a space alien come down to Earth and ask for guidance on the state of film and media studies, I could hardly think of better advice for this in...
A life with no story: Eric Rohmer: A Biography, by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe Tamara Tracz September 2017 Book Reviews One hundred and twenty-seven pages into this substantial biography of Eric Rohmer, Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, having described their subject’s...
Sceptical Oscillations: Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy, by Matthew Abbott Tony McKibbin September 2017 Book Reviews Abbas Kiarostami would seem to make films that suggest philosophical enquiry. But, in his fine book, Matthew Abbott makes clear that the philosophical...
Towards a History of Visceral Cinema: Flesh and Excess: On Underground Film, by Jack Sargeant Giuliano Vivaldi September 2017 Book Reviews Jack Sargeant’s latest book Flesh and Excess: On Underground Film is, as he says in the introduction to the volume, a return to, or re-articulation of...
