The Past Is Not Even Past: Afterimages, by Laura Mulvey Tony McKibbin April 2020 Book Reviews It could almost be a parlour game to try to talk about Laura Mulvey without mentioning her famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, with i...
This Is Not Another Reading of a Master: The Invention of Robert Bresson: the Auteur and his Market, by Colin Burnett Dudley Andrew October 2019 Book Reviews The Invention of Robert Bresson is a book to take as seriously as its subject demands. Guided by a natural sensitivity to the films – something shared...
From April! April! to Imitation of Life: The Films of Douglas Sirk, by Tom Ryan Bruce Hodsdon October 2019 Book Reviews The book length interview by Jon Halliday with Douglas Sirk published in 1971 was the catalyst for the reappraisal of his contributions to the cinema....
“Mesdames, mesdemoiselles, messieurs: un classique!”: Eric Rohmer’s Film Theory (1948-1953) – From ‘École Scherer’ to ‘Politique des Auteurs’ by Marco Grosoli Jeremi Szaniawski October 2019 Book Reviews In 1987, when his book, which serves as one of the first efforts in English to reassess and appraise the films and legacy of Roberto Rossellini (1987)...
Political Gestures: Cinema/Politics/Philosophy, by Nico Baumbach Daniel Fairfax July 2019 Book Reviews There is a slight retro effect to the triple-barreled title of Nico Baumbach’s book, with the pair of solidi separating-conjoining the terms “cinema”,...
Mythologicals Matter: A Review of Deities and Devotees, by Uma Maheswari Bhrugubanda Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil July 2019 Book Reviews One of the great rescue acts of the popular turn in Indian academia of the late 1990s has been to recuperate the Indian film viewing masses from the c...
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...