Re-framing the city: Slums on Screen: World Cinema and the Planet of Slums, by Igor Krstić Tim O’Farrell March 2018 Book Reviews Issue 86 Most academic literature on cinema uses familiar framing mechanisms such as author studies, national cinema or genre lenses. A less typical...
Against Auteurism: Cinéma Militant: Political Filmmaking and May 1968, by Paul Douglas Grant Michael Sandlin March 2018 Book Reviews Issue 86 Cinéma Militant is academic and film historian Paul Douglas Grant’s admirable attempt to recover and reconsider the long-overlooked cadre of...
Thinking Back, Thinking Forward: Utopian Television: Rossellini, Watkins, and Godard Beyond Cinema, by Michael Cramer Jonathan Wright March 2018 Book Reviews Issue 86 Michael Cramer’s new book, Utopian Television, is an impressively constructed work of scholarship that does more than display certain utopian...
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 Issue 85 From 2011 until 2015, I taught a course entitled “Documentary Production” at a small liberal arts college north of Chicago. Rather than...
Ici et ailleurs: Decentring France by Gemma King James Waters December 2017 Book Reviews Issue 85 “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...
The Toad and the Insect: On Mark Bartholomew’s Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing Nafis Shafizadeh December 2017 Book Reviews Issue 85 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...
The Railroad Man: Hollywood’s First Australian. The Adventurous Life of J.P. McGowan by John J. McGowan Geoff Mayer December 2017 Book Reviews Issue 85 In 1918 Australian born actor, writer, producer and director J.P. (Jack) McGowan joined Universal, starting a collaboration that lasted nearly...
The Obsolescence of Poetics: Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema by Thomas Elsaesser Daniel Fairfax December 2017 Book Reviews Issue 85 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...
A life with no story: Eric Rohmer: A Biography, by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe Tamara Tracz September 2017 Book Reviews Issue 84 One hundred and twenty-seven pages into this substantial biography of Eric Rohmer, Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, having described their...
Sceptical Oscillations: Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy, by Matthew Abbott Tony McKibbin September 2017 Book Reviews Issue 84 Abbas Kiarostami would seem to make films that suggest philosophical enquiry. But, in his fine book, Matthew Abbott makes clear that the...
Towards a History of Visceral Cinema: Flesh and Excess: On Underground Film, by Jack Sargeant Giuliano Vivaldi September 2017 Book Reviews Issue 84 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...
Bresson in the Marketplace: The Invention of Robert Bresson, by Colin Burnett Hayashi Umineko September 2017 Book Reviews Issue 84 When François Truffaut wrote “Une crise d’ambition du cinéma francais” (1955) in his characteristically inflammatory tone, he was reacting...
