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...
“Whose place is this?”: The Architecture of David Lynch, by Richard Martin Troy Michael Bordun September 2017 Book Reviews Issue 84 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...
From Reverence to Spielberg: Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films by Molly Haskell Adrian Schober June 2017 Book Reviews Issue 83 “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...
Western/Non-Western Approaches: Refocus: The Films of Budd Boetticher by Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer (eds.) Dean Brandum June 2017 Book Reviews Issue 83 In 1969 Jim Kitses’ Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies in Authorship within the Western was published. The...
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 Issue 83 Ben Tyrer’s Out of the Past: Lacan and Film Noir forms a “Borromean Knot” of Lacanian film theory, Freudian psychoanalysis, and film noir,...
Cinema against Cinema: Daech, le cinéma et la mort by Jean-Louis Comolli Daniel Fairfax June 2017 Book Reviews Issue 83 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...
The Critic as Creator: Better Living through Criticism, by A.O. Scott Joshua Sperling June 2017 Book Reviews Issue 83 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...
Other Criteria: Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice, by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer (eds.) Swagato Chakravorty March 2017 Book Reviews Issue 82 Edited by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer, Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice comprises a series of reflections by an impressive...
Concrete Passages: Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement, by Saige Walton John Edmond March 2017 Book Reviews Issue 82 The merits of Saige Walton’s Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement lie in the parallels between baroque...
