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...
“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,...
