Understanding Genre in a Globalized World: World Cinema through Global Genres, by William V. Costanzo Katherine Balsley December 2015 Book Reviews William V. Costanzo’s World Cinema through Global Genres is comprehensive and truly enjoyable. At 431 pages it never becomes dull or opaque, and inste...
I Like Your Early, Scary Films: Consumed: A Novel, by David Cronenberg Dan Erdman December 2015 Book Reviews For a director who is so indelibly associated with the “body horror” genre, what is often overlooked about David Cronenberg’s film work is the fact th...
Two Books on Alfred Hitchcock: Alfred Hitchcock by Peter Ackroyd and Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, Volume 2 by Sidney Gottlieb (ed.) Ken Mogg September 2015 Book Reviews Discussing Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936), Peter Ackroyd likens its director “to another great London visionary, Charles Dickens.” In a few deft line...
Two More Books on Hitchcock: Hitchcock Lost and Found: The Forgotten Films by Alain Kerzoncuf and Charles Barr, and Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock by William Rothman Ken Mogg September 2015 Book Reviews Early in Hitchcock Lost and Found (p. 2) Alain Kerzoncuf and Charles Barr note the unique “enthusiasm” that has surrounded the director's films –...
Three Books from Kino-Agora: Mise en Scène by Frank Kessler, Découpage by Timothy Barnard, and Montage by Jacques Aumont Paul Macovaz September 2015 Book Reviews Three recent additions to Caboose’s Kino-Agora series are dedicated to fundamental terms in the history of film theory and criticism: Frank Kess...
Labour Intensive: The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and their Guild by Miranda J. Banks Michael Sandlin September 2015 Book Reviews In the immediate aftermath of the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike, the unfailingly myopic New York Times directed its geriatric Grey L...
All the Histories: A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard by Tom Conley and T. Jefferson Kline (eds) Adrian Danks September 2015 Book Reviews In the opening paragraph of their introduction to A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard, Tom Conley and T. Jefferson Kline situate a particular cinephilic re...
Figure of Light: On Persistence of Vision: The 21st-Century Film Criticism of Stanley Kauffmann by Bert Cardullo (ed.) Gary Bettinson September 2015 Book Reviews Feature image: Stanley Kauffmann, photographed in 1998. Credit: Jack Manning/The New York Times. For admirers of Stanley Kauffmann – chief film criti...
Godard after Farocki: Questions left open and questions unasked in Volker Pantenburg’s Film as Theory Toni Hildebrandt June 2015 Book Reviews “With Godard, and with Brecht, it seems to me as if they had only proclaimed a method, without having begun to work with it. In fact, even Godard issu...
Then and Now: On Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Nafis Shafizadeh June 2015 Book Reviews Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the brea...
Beyond the Fugue State: The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art by Dirk de Bruyn David Ritchie June 2015 Book Reviews In this original and dense cinema study, Dirk de Bruyn redefines the experimental and the avant-garde as “materialist film”, but in a much broader way...
Between Poetry and Film: A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film by Joseph Luzzi Luca Peretti June 2015 Book Reviews Joseph Luzzi’s A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film is a dense and layered book that focuses on different aspects of post-war Italia...
Size Matters: The Aesthetics of the Small Screen: André Bazin’s New Media by Dudley Andrew (ed.) Tony McKibbin June 2015 Book Reviews A glance at the title of André Bazin’s New Media might make us think that the writer has been resurrected, but the truth is that, since his death in...
The Life of the Cinephile Party: The Essential Raymond Durgnat by Henry K. Miller (ed.) Geoff Gardner June 2015 Book Reviews A long, long time ago English film magazines arrived in Melbourne after a journey by boat that often took several months. They could arrive in a rush,...
“…what I was seeking in my history of cinema was to be less alone”: Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television by Jean-Luc Godard (trans. and ed. Timothy Barnard) Michael Cramer June 2015 Book Reviews Caboose Books’ edition of Jean-Luc Godard’s Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television, translated and edited by Timothy Barnard, collect...
“Still an object to be discovered”: The Lumière Galaxy by Francesco Casetti Daniel Fairfax March 2015 Book Reviews A disclosure is in order. The author of The Lumière Galaxy – Italian-born, Connecticut-based film studies professor Francesco Casetti – teaches in my ...
Rerouting Early Cinema History: Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film by Jennifer Lynn Peterson Tanya Goldman March 2015 Book Reviews In the first decade of the twentieth century, moving images were a ubiquitous popular culture form, a fixture of fairgrounds, vaudeville houses, and e...
Mapping Artists’ Films: Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art by Erika Balsom Paolo Magagnoli March 2015 Book Reviews Feature image: Film (Tacita Dean) Variously designated as “gallery film”, “video art”, and “projected image”, the field of the moving image installat...
The Sinuous Line of World and Screen: On D.N. Rodowick’s Elegy for Theory and Philosophy’s Artful Conversations Reno Lauro March 2015 Book Reviews Feature image: Star Wars: The Phantom Menace In the final pages of Cinema 2: The Time-Image, published in 1985, Gilles Deleuze concludes by saying, “...
Penetrating Epstein: Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations by Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (eds.), and Une vie pour le cinéma: Jean Epstein by Joël Daire David A. Gerstner March 2015 Book Reviews The Jean Epstein renaissance currently underway has yielded two significant books from both sides of the Atlantic: French historian Joël ...
Confronting the Future: Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, by Miriam Bratu Hansen Tony McKibbin December 2014 Book Reviews Halfway through Cinema and Experience, Miriam Bratu Hansen quotes László Moholy-Nagy’s comment: “It is not the person ignorant of writing but the one ...
Films for the Senses: Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality, by Tiago de Luca Troy Michael Bordun December 2014 Book Reviews In this work, Tiago de Luca aims to update the concept of cinematic realism by linking classical accounts of realism, as articulated by André Bazin an...
Tertium Datur: The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov by Jeremi Szaniawski Marco Grosoli December 2014 Book Reviews To write about Alexander Sokurov is no easy task. The manifold hurdles in the way of such an endeavour ultimately all converge into one single feature...
Master Curator of Readymades: Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel by Peter L. Winkler Joanna Elena Batsakis December 2014 Book Reviews Dennis Hopper was a master curator. While known across the globe for his extremely surrealist, wild, hip and very “method” acting capabilities in both...
Rewriting Japanese Cinema for the Global Age: The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema by Daisuke Miyao (ed.) Rea Amit December 2014 Book Reviews This is not a typical scholarly handbook, and will not necessarily provide an overview of the history of Japanese cinema. Instead, it seeks to reasses...
Marking Time, Duration as Subject: Tony Woods: Archive by Andrew Gaynor (ed.) Dirk de Bruyn October 2014 Book Reviews I like boring things. When you sit and look out of a window, that’s enjoyable. It takes up time. Yeah. Really, you see people looking out of their win...
Portrait of an Eternal Outsider: The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov by James Steffen Giuliano Vivaldi September 2014 Book Reviews In light of the reputation of Parajanov as one of the giants of late Soviet cinema, and the canonical status of at least two of his most well-known wo...
Evaluating Ecocinema: Green Documentary: Environmental Documentary in the Twenty-First Century, by Helen Hughes Ila Tyagi September 2014 Book Reviews In this clearly written and structured work, Helen Hughes offers us the first book-length survey of the eco-conscious documentaries that crammed theat...
Towards a Single Cinephilia: On An Invention Without a Future: Essays on Cinema by James Naremore Nafis Shafizadeh September 2014 Book Reviews I’m a sucker for a good epigraph. A good epigraph can put the reader in the right state of mind for what follows, creating in her consciousness what f...
Innocence Lost: Darkness in the Bliss-Out: A Reconsideration of the Films of Steven Spielberg, by James Kendrick Adrian Schober September 2014 Book Reviews In his 1987 book-length study, UK film writer and academic Neil Sinyard attempted to sum up the essential qualities of Steven Spielberg’s films that m...
Cinematic Spectatorship by way of Architecture: Gabriele Pedullà, In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators After the Cinema Swagato Chakravorty September 2014 Book Reviews Clocking in at barely 171 pages and change (including front and back matter), Gabriele Pedullà’s In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators After the Ci...
“The Image Will Come at the Time of the Resurrection”: Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian by Michael Witt Daniel Fairfax July 2014 Book Reviews On the concluding page of his study of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), Michael Witt tells us of the publication of a collection o...
Making Sense of Censorship: Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity, by William Mazzarella Erin O’Donnell June 2014 Book Reviews The publication of Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity by William Mazzarella, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago...
Representing Identity: Finding Ourselves at the Movies: Philosophy for A New Generation, by Paul W. Kahn Tony McKibbin June 2014 Book Reviews Like Stanley Cavell’s relatively recent Cities of Words and Robert B. Pippin’s Hollywood Westerns, Paul W. Kahn’s Finding Ourselves at the Movies is a...
Threatening Platforms: Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing by Caetlin Benson-Allott Laura Henderson June 2014 Book Reviews We live in an age of constant media access, of Netflix, Youtube, and an unprecedented shift towards “extreme” content. It is easy to forget that once,...
Falling Down by Jude Davies Deborah Allison March 2014 Book Reviews Falling Down is one of the latest entries in the ‘Controversies’ series, edited by Stevie Simkin and Julian Petley, and continues its project of study...
