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...
Bresson in the Marketplace: The Invention of Robert Bresson, by Colin Burnett Hayashi Umineko September 2017 Book Reviews When François Truffaut wrote “Une crise d’ambition du cinéma francais” (1955) in his characteristically inflammatory tone, he was reacting against dir...
“Whose place is this?”: The Architecture of David Lynch, by Richard Martin Troy Michael Bordun September 2017 Book Reviews Richard Martin’s The Architecture of David Lynch arrived just ahead of the director’s return to television. The reviews of Season 3 of Twin Peaks (201...
From Reverence to Spielberg: Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films by Molly Haskell Adrian Schober June 2017 Book Reviews “The fact that I consider myself a film critic first and a feminist second means that I feel an obligation to the wholeness and complexity of film his...
Western/Non-Western Approaches: Refocus: The Films of Budd Boetticher by Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer (eds.) Dean Brandum June 2017 Book Reviews In 1969 Jim Kitses’ Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies in Authorship within the Western was published. The three fi...
Actively Retroactive: On the Couch with Film Noir: Out of the Past: Lacan and Film Noir by Ben Tyrer Shannon Scott June 2017 Book Reviews Ben Tyrer’s Out of the Past: Lacan and Film Noir forms a “Borromean Knot” of Lacanian film theory, Freudian psychoanalysis, and film noir, which makes...
Cinema against Cinema: Daech, le cinéma et la mort by Jean-Louis Comolli Daniel Fairfax June 2017 Book Reviews Outside of France, Jean-Louis Comolli is principally known in the film studies world for his stint as the editor of Cahiers du cinéma in the years 196...
The Critic as Creator: Better Living through Criticism, by A.O. Scott Joshua Sperling June 2017 Book Reviews A.O. Scott is one of the few film critics working today whose fuller personality comes through in their prose. From his weekly reviews for the New Yor...
Other Criteria: Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice, by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer (eds.) Swagato Chakravorty March 2017 Book Reviews Edited by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer, Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice comprises a series of reflections by an impressive sel...
Concrete Passages: Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement, by Saige Walton John Edmond March 2017 Book Reviews The merits of Saige Walton’s Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement lie in the parallels between baroque thinking and...
Revisiting Film Ontology: Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory, by Victor Fan Hiu M. Chan March 2017 Book Reviews Victor Fan’s Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory encourages a concept that has been long forgotten in studies of aesthetics and f...
Of Myth and Madness: Mad Dog Morgan (Australian Screen Classics), by Jake Wilson Stephen Morgan December 2016 Book Reviews If Mad Dog Morgan (Philippe Mora, 1976) is one of the grubbiest films of the first phase of Australia’s post-1970 feature film revival, it also stands...
Ethical Encounters: Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy, by Katarzyna Marciniak and Bruce Bennett (eds.) Shabnam Piryaei December 2016 Book Reviews In the context of incessant war and war-rhetoric, state-sanctioned torture, refugee crises, fear of terrorism, and increasing animosity toward immigra...
Two or Three Things I Know About Her: Violent Women in Contemporary Cinema, by Janice Loreck Alison Taylor December 2016 Book Reviews There’s a moment in Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) when Dr. Beth Garner tries to warn her on-again off-again lover, Detective Nick Curran, of t...
Entering the Chiastic Multimedia: Encounters with Godard: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics, by James S. Williams Jonathan Wright December 2016 Book Reviews Much of Jean-Luc Godard’s most innovative intriguing work occurred after his period of militant Marxism in the late 1960s. Although far fewer of his “...
Public, Politics and Independent Documentaries in China: Independent Chinese Documentary: Alternative Visions, Alternative Publics, by Dan Edwards Judith Pernin December 2016 Book Reviews In this volume, adapted from his PhD dissertation defended at Monash University in 2014, Dan Edwards introduces the reader to Chinese independent docu...
Dead? Far From It: The End of Cinema?: A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age by André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion Kate Balsley September 2016 Book Reviews André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion’s The End of Cinema?: A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age demonstrates that cinema has still not reached its e...
What is New about “New Europe” in Contemporary European Cinema?: East, West and Centre:. Reframing Post-1989 European Cinema by Michael Gott and Todd Herzog (eds.) Lukas Brasiskis September 2016 Book Reviews Despite the fact that twenty-six years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and thirteen years have passed since the first group of for...
No Appeasement: Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet: Writings by Sally Shafto (ed.), and Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet by Ted Fendt (ed.) Daniel Fairfax September 2016 Book Reviews A touchstone for the highly politicised debates in film criticism during the 1960s and 1970s, the work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet appea...
Francomania Exposed!: Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco by Stephen Thrower Whitney Strub September 2016 Book Reviews When Jesús “Jess” Franco won a prestigious Spanish Goya Award in 2009, it represented a victory from below, a truly grassroots push from fan communit...
Filmmaker, musician and poet: Jim Jarmusch: Music, Words and Noise by Sara Piazza Adriano Tedde September 2016 Book Reviews A student of literature at Columbia University coming from small-town Ohio, in the 1970s the young Jim Jarmusch embraced New York’s urban culture, bec...
Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art, by Adrian Martin Hamish Ford July 2016 Book Reviews This is a compact, dense, magisterial book. The scholarly coverage and detailed analysis of select sequences from films, television and new media art,...
Audiences at the Time of the “Two Churches”: Political Audiences: A Reception History of Early Italian Television, by Damiano Garofalo Luca Peretti July 2016 Book Reviews Damiano Garofalo’s Political Audiences. A reception history of early Italian television is a history of TV consumption in Italy during the 1950s and 1...
Constructing An African-American Film History In the Absence of Films: Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity, by Allyson Nadia Field Tanya Goldman July 2016 Book Reviews Allyson Nadia Field’s Uplift Cinema excavates the lost history of African-American filmmaking in the first half of the 1910s, uncovering a surprisingl...
The Two Johns: The Films of John Hughes: A History of Independent Screen Production in Australia, by John Cumming Jake Wilson July 2016 Book Reviews Aspiring filmmakers in Australia and elsewhere stand to learn a lot from John Cumming’s The Films of John Hughes, not least about how to deal with fun...
Cinema’s Ontological Violence: Hamish Ford’s Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time Michael Goddard July 2016 Book Reviews The emergent arena of film philosophy, or rather “film-philosophy” has, over the last decade, given rise to, in roughly sequential order, a popular di...
In Dreams. David Lynch: The Man From Another Place, by Dennis Lim Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs July 2016 Book Reviews Given the copious amounts of material already published exploring David Lynch’s artistic landscape, it is not without foundation to wonder what Dennis...
Screening Life/Death: Deathwatch: American film, technology, and the end of life by C. Scott Combs Tyson Stewart March 2016 Book Reviews Deathwatch presents a sweeping history of on-screen death, from the silent film era to recent Hollywood blockbusters. Historically, American film has ...
The Mythographer and the Poet: On Marina Warner’s L’Atalante Nafis Shafizadeh March 2016 Book Reviews Film criticism from literary writers is a tricky business. I am of course using literary as a discursive term rather than a hard and fast category; on...
Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema by Daniel Yacavone Reno Lauro March 2016 Book Reviews Imagine a reality where Terrence Malick, possibly one of the brightest philosophical minds of his generation, completes a doctoral dissertat...
Returning to the Movie Theatre: Roland Barthes’ Cinema by Philip Watts and La nuit sera noire et blanche by Jean Narboni Daniel Fairfax March 2016 Book Reviews Roland Barthes was notorious for his self-proclaimed “resistance” to the cinema. In fact, he hated the medium so much he could only bring himself to g...
