An Alternative to Haptic Cinema: Philippe Grandrieux: Sonic Cinema, by Greg Hainge Troy Michael Bordun June 2018 Book Reviews Issue 87 In the first book-length study of French filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux, Greg Hainge meticulously outlines and details the director’s œuvre, in a...
Subjectivity, Spectatorship and Social Change: The Act of Documenting: Documentary Film in the 21st Century, by Brian Winston, Gail Vanstone and Wang Chi Katherine Balsley June 2018 Book Reviews Issue 87 In the fall of 2017, I was approached by a colleague at the public liberal arts college where I teach film studies and production. My colleague, a...
Road Trip Through A Cinematically-Constructed America: The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema, 1960-2000 by Christian B. Long Shannon Scott June 2018 Book Reviews Issue 87 For film scholars interested in the narrative settings of cinema examined through a “cultural materialist approach to film history” (p. 4),...
Iron Roses: Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorgical Cinema of Jean Rollin, ed. Samm Deighan Dean Brandum March 2018 Book Reviews Issue 86 Like many, I was aware of the films of the French director Jean Rollin long before I viewed any of his work. It would have been some time in the...
From the Banal to the Extreme… and Back Again: Troubled Everyday: The Aesthetics of Violence and the Everyday in European Art Cinema by Alison Taylor Felicity Chaplin March 2018 Book Reviews Issue 86 The sustained critical success of auteur directors like Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier, the emergence in the 1990s and 2000s of the “new...
The Cinema Hypothesis: Teaching Cinema in the Classroom and Beyond, by Alain Bergala Tony McKibbin March 2018 Book Reviews Issue 86 If Bazin's classic essay collection was titled What is Cinema?, along comes contemporary French critic Alain Bergala asking how the subject should be...
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...
