Books

 » ‘NEW: 2011 & 2012’

April 2012

Screen Savers II: My Grab Bag of Classic Movies (Hansen Publishing Group)

John DiLeo follows up the first installment of his personal take on classic movies with extensive essays on 10 remarkable and underappreciated movies of various genres and such stars as Barbara Stanwyck, James Stewart, Ginger Rogers, and DiLeo favorite Joel McCrea. He also collects and categorizes posts from his classic-film blog screensaversmovies.com, and presents a section of classic-movie quizzes.

DiLeo has now published a slew of outstanding books on classic movies. Pauline Kael called his And You Thought You Knew Classic Movies (1999) “the smartest movie quiz book I’ve ever seen.” DiLeo followed up in 2002 with 100 Great Film Performances You Should Remember But Probably Don’t (Limelight Editions, 2002), which The Washington Post said could “serve as balm for anyone who has ever been disgruntled by the Academy’s choices on Oscar night” – and who isn’t in that vast club?

His 2007 book, Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery, appeared in 2007, also from Hansen, while in 2010 he published Tennessee Williams and Company: His Essential Screen Actors.

In addition to writing about classic film, DiLeo hosts classic-film series, appears often on radio shows, and conducts film-history seminars.

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Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies by Celine Parreñas Shimizu (Stanford University Press)

A filmmaker and associate professor of Asian American studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara considers Asian-American masculinity and sexuality in Hollywood and independent movies. Her earlier book, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene, from 2007, won the 2009 Cultural Studies Book Prize from the Association for Asian American Studies. In her new book, she notes that depictions of Asian American men as effeminate or asexual pervade popular movies, as if Hollywood has decided that Asian American men cannot qualify for heroic heterosexuality. This, she argues, aggravates Asian American male sexual problems both on and off screen. She considers such alternatives as Bruce Lee and Long Duk Dong and the ways they portray intimacy on screen – not dominating, but caring – while also emphasizing diverse ways Asian American men experience complex, ambiguous, and ambivalent genders and sexualities. The result is “an utterly original examination” and “a critical tour-de-force” of cinema ethics,” says the University of Pennsylvania’s David L. Eng.

Recently, Shimizu’s first feature film, Birthright: Mothering Across Difference (2009), won the Best Feature Documentary at the Big Mini DV Festival. Her previous films include Mahal Means Love and Expensive (1993), Her Uprooting Plants Her (1995), Super Flip (1997) and The Fact of Asian Women (2002/4). She is currently developing her first feature narrative film based on a true story about a Filipino American community in Martinez, California, in 1931.

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Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism by Lan P. Duong (Temple University Press).

An assistant professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside takes feminist perspectives on post-Vietnam war era filmmakers Tony Bui and Tran Anh Hung, filmmaker, writer, and composer Trinh T. Minh-ha, and various other filmmakers and writers working in Vietnam, France, and the United States. Duong shows how history has shaped the loyalties and shifting alliances of Vietnamese artists caught between opposing forces of nationalism, patriarchy, and communism.

Duong is working on a second book, Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas: Imagining Nationhood in a Globalized Era, which will examine Vietnamese cinema from its inception to the present.

March 2012

Playing to the Camera: Musicians and Musical Performance in Documentary Cinema by Thomas F. Cohen (Wallflower Press, distributed by Columbia University Press)

An assistant professor of communication at the University of Tampa analyzes film documents of many varieties of music, from rock to experimental video art featuring modernist compositions. He explores links between moving images and musical movement to ask such questions as why performance is offered considered mere skill while composition is afforded the status of art.

February 2012

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January 2012

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December 2011

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November 2011

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October 2011

Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, by Miriam Bratu Hansen, edited by Edward Dimendberg (University of California Press)

Miriam Bratu Hansen, the late professor of humanities at the University of Chicago and founding chair of its department of cinema and media studies, author of Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film and other works, studies the key role that technological media played in the critique of modernity developed by Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. In analyzing the way that the friends and colleagues considered the role of cinema and photography from the Weimar period up to the 1960s, she inspects an archive of known and, in the case of Kracauer, less known materials to arrive at their theory of cinema and experience. She also suggests its relevance as moving-image culture evolves in response to digital technology. (In the series Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism.)

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Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl in Hollywood, by Emily W. Leider (University of California Press)

Biographer, poet, and memoirist Emily W. Leider (Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino, Becoming Mae West, and Rapid Eye Movement and Other Poems, among other books) writes the first biography of the mysterious silents-then-talkies star, who has been oddly under-studied. The results, says Anthony Slide, are “so conscientiously researched, so closely written in detail and intelligent style that there will be no need for a second.” Leider writes about the wry and sophisticated actress’s rough-and-tumble early years in Montana, her multiple and sometimes foolish marriages, and her development from exotic silent player to sophisticated lead in the Thin Man series as Nora Charles, wife to dapper detective William Powell. Leider also describes Loy’s subsequent transition into a seeming proud, understanding middle-class wife in the 1940s during a career of some 60 years. In Los Angeles in the 1920s, Loy’s striking looks caught the eye of Valentino; through her early-sound-era films of the thirties, she became a box office draw; after World War II, her career developed richly, and she befriended the likes of Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Joan Crawford and collaborated with John Barrymore, David O. Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, William Wyler, and many others.

Emily Leider describes exploring Myrna Loy’s life

Myrna Loy left an archive at Boston University’s Gotlieb Archival Research Center; it includes letters (though not too many reveal intimate details of her private life), photographs, clippings, scrapbooks, and some programs and scripts. Many of the photographs in my book come from the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where I also found material on Loy or her films in the Samuel Goldwyn Collection, the files of the Production Code Administration, and (in both the Core Collection and Special Collections) on individual movies, directors, producers, organizations, and acting colleagues. The Warner Bros. Archive at USC has files on individual movies, scripts, and legal documents. I consulted the MGM and Darryl F. Zanuck Collections at the USC Cinema Library and the Dore Schary Collection at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. UCLA Performing Arts Library (Special Collections) has material on films from RKO Fox and 20th Century Fox. Among the resources for watching Myrna Loy films were the Motion Picture Division of the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art Film Study Center in New York City, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

There are many lost Myrna Loy silent films, most of them made at Warner Bros. Her first film, What Price Beauty?, predates her Warners contract, and was made with Natacha Rambova, the estranged wife of Rudolph Valentino; it was filmed in 1925 but not released until 1928, and exists only as a few stills. One early talkie that was believed lost for many years, The Animal Kingdom (RKO, 1932, with Leslie Howard and Ann Harding as well as Myrna Loy), was located by Ronald Haver in 1985, restored at UCLA, and screened by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at a New York tribute to Myrna Loy that same year.

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Transnational Asian Identities in Pan-Pacific Cinemas: The Reel Asian Exchange, edited by Philippa Gates and Lisa Funnell (Routledge)

Essays that examine the exchange of Asian identities taking place at the levels of both film production and film reception amongst pan-Pacific cinemas. The authors consider films that exhibit “marked transnationality” and also the multiple meanings attributed to transnational films. Topics include the innovation of Hollywood generic formulas in 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong and Japanese films; the examination of Thai and Japanese raced and gendered identity in Asian and American films; the reception of Hollywood films in pre-1949 China and millennial Japan; the production and performance of Asian adoptee identity and subjectivity; the political implications and interpretations of migrating Chinese female stars; and the production and reception of pan-Pacific co-productions.

In the series Routledge Advances in Film Studies.

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September 2011

Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film in Visual Culture by Øyvind Vagnes (University of Texas Press).

A postdoctoral fellow at the research center Nomadikon: New Ecologies of the Image in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen examines how the footage of Kennedy’s assassination that was made by Abraham Zapruder – one of the 20^th century’s most important accidental documentarians – has figured in such realms as installation and performance art, video games, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and an episode of Seinfeld. Vagnes traces the film’s influences on such cultural expressions as the performance group Ant Farm’s video The Eternal Frame, Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld, and an episode from Seinfeld. He investigates Dealey Plaza’s Sixth Floor Museum, Zoran Naskovski’s installation Death in Dallas, assassin video games, and other destinations of the footage in popular culture and the historical imagination.

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August 2011

Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts, edited by Lingzhen Wang (Columbia University Press)

An associate professor of modern Chinese literature, gender studies, and Chinese film and media at Brown University (Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth Century China; editor and co-translator of Years of Sadness: Translation Anthology of Wang Anyi’s Autobiographical Works) presents essays on the work of Esther Eng, Tang Shu Shuen, Dong Kena, Sylvia Chang, and other filmmakers from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora who have transformed Chinese cinematic modernity. Sixteen authors discuss the filmmakers’ negotiations of local and global politics, cinematic representation, and issues of gender and sexuality from the 1920s to the present. In her introduction, Lingzhen Wang recounts the history and limitations of established feminist film theory, particularly its relationship with female cinematic authorship and agency as those relate to Chinese women’s films.

In the series Film and Culture Studies. http://cup.columbia.edu/series/62

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The Continental Connection: German-Speaking Emigres and British Cinema, 1927-45 by Tobias Hochscherf (Manchester University Press, distributed by Palgrave Macmillan)

A professor of audiovisual media at the University of Applied Sciences Kiel in Germany argues that German- and Austrian-born filmmakers from the late 1920s to the end of World War II had a far greater influence on British cinema than is generally recognized. Hochscherf analyzes several films by the likes of Ewald André Dupont, Alfred Junge, Oscor Werndorff, Mutz Greenbaum, and Werner Brandes to show that their aesthetics, themes, narratives, technical innovation, organization, and use of apprenticeship schemes all deeply influenced the British film industry when they came to the UK to escape Nazism.

Tobias Hochscherf describes his archival work:

The main problem I had to deal with was the fact that most archival sources were scattered in various archives. In addition, some documents were in English others in German (so language skills were an issue).

The most interesting primary sources can be found at the National Archives at Kew. Given that the majority of Home Office files on individual emigrés are still closed, I had to request their opening under the Freedom of Information Act. I would strongly encourage other scholars to do this, so that we gain a more nuanced and substantial understanding of how the conditions of exile and the diaspora had an impact on British and indeed Western culture.

A major setback, thinking of moving image archives, was the unavailability of subtitled films made by emigrés prior to their exodus from German-speaking countries as a result of the Nazi regime. In order to study the continuities and discontinuities of their work such a resource would have been invaluable.

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Hollywood Madonna: Loretta Young by Bernard F. Dick (University Press of Mississippi)

A professor of communication and English at Fairleigh Dickinson University wrote this full-length biography of the American actress (1913-2000) who won an Academy Award and starred in films like The Farmer’s Daughter, The Bishop’s Wife, and Come to the Stable, as well as a long-running, popular television show. Young began acting at the age of 4, became a star at 15, and made her last television movie at 76. Along the way, despite her devout Catholicism, she had an affair with Clark Gable and a child by him that she secretly adopted out, writes Dick (Hal Wallis: Producer to the Stars; Engulfed: The Death of Paramount Pictures and the Birth of Corporate Hollywood; Forever Mame: The Life of Rosalind Russell; Claudette Colbert: She Walked in Beauty).

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Hollywood’s African American Films: The Transition to Sound by Ryan Jay Friedman (Rutgers University Press)

An assistant professor of English and film studies at The Ohio State University traces the origins of a “vogue” for “Negro films” – black musical features and shorts – in the early era of talkies. Friedman suggests that they set the stage for later Hollywood treatments of Black images and sounds, and that the movie business turned to black musical performance to both resolve technological and aesthetic problems introduced by the medium of “talking pictures” and, at the same time, to appeal to the white “Broadway” audience that patronized their most lucrative first-run theaters. Capitalizing on highbrow associations with white “slumming” in African American cabarets and on the cultural linkage between popular black musical styles and “natural” acoustics, studios produced a series of African American-cast and white-cast films featuring African American sequences. Friedman asserts that these transitional films reflect contradictions within prevailing racial ideologies, and that this is clearest in the films’ treatment of African American characters’ decisions to migrate. He also notes that the films tended to highlight rather than suppress historical tensions surrounding African American social mobility, Jim Crow codes, and white exploitation of black labor.

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Masculinity and Film Performance: Male Angst in Contemporary American Cinema by Donna Peberdy (Palgrave Macmillan).

In a contribution to the emerging field of screen performance studies, a senior lecturer in film and television studies at Southampton Solent University, UK explores the performance of male angst in American film and popular culture during the 1990s and 2000s. In relation to such films as Broken Flowers, Far From Heaven, Pleasantville, Magnolia, and Wonder Boys, she considers theories of film acting, masculinity, performance, and cultural studies, and social, cultural, historical, and political contexts that have shaped and affected the performance of masculinity on screen, such as the aging of the baby boom, the launch of Viagra onto the marketplace, the ‘Iron John’ and ‘Wild Man’ phenomena, and the racially marked fatherhood crisis. Peberdy’s research and publications focus on performance, masculinity and sexuality in American cinema; she is co-editing a collection of essays titled Tainted Love: Screening Sexual Perversities.

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Paul on Mazursky, by Sam Wasson (Wesleyan University Press).

Wasson, the author of the best-selling Fifth Avenue, 5AM: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman, and A Splurch in the Kisser: The Movies of Blake Edwards, who is now working on a biography of Bob Fosse, conducts a series of conversations with comic-movie director Paul Mazursky about the writer/director’s sustained comic run in the 1970s and 1980s of almost 20 films. In the first ever book-length examination of one of America’s most important and least appreciated filmmakers, Wasson argues that Mazursky’s movies – Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice; An Unmarried Woman; Enemies, A Love Story – have not been given their due, perhaps because their mix of the sincere, the ridiculous, the realistic, the romantic, and “pure emotion,” makes them difficult to classify. Wasson and Mazursky go over the latter’s work one film at a time, discussing his life in and out of Hollywood. In the Wesleyan Film series.

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Tomboys, Pretty Boys, and Outspoken Women: The Media Revolution of 1973 by Edward D. Miller (University of Michigan Press)

An associate professor of media culture at The College of Staten Island and of theatre and film studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York links current fascination with reality television – reality programs, faux documentaries, and user generated content: real or feigned nonfictionality – to developments in the 1970s. It was then, he argues, that American media discovered the entertainment value of documentaries, news programming, and other nonfiction forms: John Dean’s performance in front of the Senate during the Watergate Hearings; Billie Jean King popularizing tennis by taking on Bobby Riggs in a prime-time match; David Bowie experiencing “outer space” in his tours across America; An American Family and their gay son facing the public’s consternation; Alison Steele, a female DJ, inviting listeners to fly with her at night. The early 1970s was a turning point in American culture, Miller suggests: Nonfiction media created, for example, new possibilities for expressions of gender, sexuality, and other aspects of identity that remain in force now. Miller aims to demystify current media trends by providing an analysis of the recent past.

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July 2011

Feeling Canadian: Television, Nationalism, and Affect, by Marusya Bociurkiw (Wilfrid Laurier University Press)

A filmmaker and assistant professor of media theory at Ryerson University in Toronto analyzes nationalist feeling and Canadian television from 1995 to 2002 from the standpoint of affect theory, which deals with such concepts and effects as changeability, fluidity, and contagion. She asks how certain images come to be consumed as emblems of the country. She tracks the ways that ideas about the Canadian nation flow from screen to audience.

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Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen by Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong (Rutgers University Press).

A professor of media cultures at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York (coauthor of Global Hong Kong and coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture) explores the role of festivals in the film industry. She considers the constellations of art, business, and glamor represented by the gatherings of movies, stars, directors, and critics. She writes about the history of such events. She also situates festivals within changing global practices of film, and explores the events’ construction of cinema knowledge.

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Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood edited by Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil (University of California Press)

Goldmark , an associate professor of music at Case Western Reserve University and the author of Tunes for ‘Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon, and Keil, an associate professor of cinema studies at the University of Toronto and the author of Early American Cinema in Transition and American Cinema’s Transitional Era, present essays by leading scholars of animation who explore the link between comedy and animation in studio-era cartoons, from filmdom’s earliest days through the twentieth century. They ask why animation became associated with comedy so early and so indelibly when animation and humor came together at a pivotal moment in motion-picture history. To examine some of the central assumptions about comedy and cartoons and to explore the key factors that promoted their fusion, the book analyzes many of the key filmic texts from the studio years that exemplify animated comedy. Funny Pictures also looks ahead to show how this vital American entertainment tradition still thrives today in works ranging from The Simpsons to the output of Pixar.

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The Machinima Reader, edited by Henry Lowood and Michael Nitsche (MIT Press)

In the first critical overview of the subject, Lowood, curator for history of science and technology collections and film and media collections in the Stanford University Libraries, and Nitsche, an assistant professor of literature, communication, and culture at Georgia Institute of Technology, gather essays about machinima, the use of computer-game engines to create movies. (The term “Machinima” combines “machine” and “cinema” to describe the process of using videogame engines and properties to create real-time animation.) The editors note that, over the last decade, enthusiasts have driven the phenomenon of machinima, teaching themselves to deploy technologies from computer games to create animated films quickly and cheaply. Academic and artist-practitioner contributors explore real-time production, machinima as a performative and cinematic medium, and the legal, cultural, and pedagogical contexts for machinima.

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Masculinity in the Black Imagination: Politics of Communicating Race and Manhood edited by Ronald L. Jackson II and Mark C. Hopson (Peter Lang Publishing)

Essays on black masculinity in such contexts as prime-time television depictions of queer identity, the black Greek-letter fraternity, and the criminalization of black manhood in contemporary America.

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Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II, by Yvonne Tasker (Duke University Press)

A professor of film studies at the University of East Anglia (author of Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema and Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema, and co-editor of Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture) examines military women as contradictory figures, neither soldier nor woman enough, in popular film and television – in musicals, screwball comedies, and action thrillers. She traces changing roles and expectations for women: as temporary necessities of “total war” during WW2, as nurses whose caring femininity offered a solution to the “gender problem,” through to 1970s isolated victims and heroines in thrillers and legal and crime dramas.

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June 2011

The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film, by Thomas Waugh (University of Minnesota Press). A professor of film studies at Concordia University, Montreal, discusses “committed” documentary. The book collects for the first time his essays (1974-2008) which relate the media form to the history of the Left, and address how the documentary film’s history and aesthetics bears on issues of the democratic performance of citizens and artists. Waugh analyzes an international selection of films from the 1920s to the present – from those of the industrialized societies of North America and Europe to those of 1980s India. He addresses such canonical directors as Dziga Vertov, Emile de Antonio, Barbara Hammer, Rosa von Praunheim, and Anand Patwardhan. Includes discussions of LGBT documentary pioneers and the firebrand collectives that changed the history of documentary, such as Challenge for Change and ACT UP’s Women’s Collective. In the Visible Evidence series.

Thomas Waugh reflects on his use of archives

Since the 10 essays were written between 1974 and 2008, they dramatically reflect the evolution of archive resources for film scholars over those three-and-a-half decades. The first ones were written in the pre-video years when one had to be lucky enough to catch public screenings – maybe a given film twice if a miracle – and hope that your notes and your memory were accurate enough to serve. And graduate students could seldom afford to pay to see 16mm films on Steenbecks at film study centers. Later essays were written during the VHS era, and whole different dynamics of accessibility and analysis were in play, from bootleg issues around quality and broadcast censorship, to the nagging insecurity of sometimes never getting to see a work on the big screen for which it was intended. The essay most recently written (2008), on the National Film Board of Canada’s “Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle” program of community-based “catalysis” (1967-1980), was riding the crest of the paradigm-shifting availability of films through online downloading and streaming.

As for “paper archives,” my 10 essays benefited from the resources of such archives as the Museum of Modern Art, the Anthology Film Archives, the Cinémathèque québécoise, the Joris Ivens Archives then housed at the Nederlands Filmmuseum and more recently at the Joris Ivens European Foundation, the National Film Archives of India, our own Concordia University archive, the National Film Board of Canada – not to mention private collections and community LGBTQ archives in Montreal, Toronto, and San Francisco, where one often went for stuff that official archives didn’t collect or hid (accidentally or on purpose). Some of these archives seemed underfunded at the time, but no doubt in the era of privatization and cutbacks, the situation may now actually be worse in terms of accessibility and resources – with the internet only partially compensating for the new austerity.

The archives of the National Film Board of Canada is both a case in point and a desperately unique situation: My chapter and our accompanying anthology that came out last year (Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada, co-written with Ezra Winton and Mike Baker) may actually be the last ever work to benefit from access to these splendid publicly owned collections (everything from 1940s notes by itinerary projectionists to early drafts of treatments or research “investigates” for films both epochal and obscure, in both official languages). Stagnating under the heel of the secrecy-obsessed, budget-slashing, and culture-hating Conservative minority government in Ottawa, the NFB no longer allows access for film scholars to the rich collections that earlier led to the groundbreaking work by film historians such as Gary Evans, Pierre Véronneau, Zoe Druick, and the late Peter Morris (to mention only four of the most distinguished Canadian researchers). NFB administrators, pretending that their archive was never in fact a public resource, pretending not to know what historical research actually consists of (“Our films are all available: look at them online or at our downtown screening centers”), and claiming that the directives from on high leave this short-staffed, publicly funded national institution no choice – all because of “privacy concerns”! Researchers are now required to submit “access to information” requests, wait months for an answer, and too bad if they’re too broad or imprecise (fishing and browsing are not permitted), or else they must use the predigested DVD document selections that they provide to undergraduate term-paper writers.

Well, this note turned into a lament for the loss of a precious archive, but it certainly demonstrates I hope the vital role of the moving-image archive constituency in keeping alive our memory and knowledge of our moving image past, and the urgent need for unwavering vigilance in keeping repositories of documents and moving images accessible and accountable. The Canadian Film Studies community (and the American researchers who were turned away at the door last summer because you have to be Canadian to submit an information request) will not give up without a fight.

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Tech-Noir Film: A Theory of the Development of Popular Genres by Emily E. Auger (Intellect Books, UK; distributed in US by University of Chicago Press)

The independent Canadian scholar explores literary precursors and cinematic examples of a genre embodied in such works as Blade Runner and James Cameron’s hit Terminator. She writes that tech-noir has roots in both the Promethean myth and the earlier popular traditions of gothic, detective, and science fiction. She discusses many well-known film and literary works – including The Matrix, RoboCop, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

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May 2011

American Remakes of British Television: Transformations and Mistranslations, edited by Carlen Lavigne and Heather Marcovitch (Lexington Books)

Essays on American shows, 1971 to the present, like Queer as Folk, What Not to Wear, American Idol, The Office, Sanford and Son, and Life on Mars that have attempted, generally with abysmal results, British TV programmes. The trend may well have begun with Norman Lear’s All in the Family, a limp remake of Till Death Us Do Part. Why do they bother? And what does it mean that some of the American adaptations, including The Office, What Not to Wear, and American Idol, have gained so much cultural traction? What does Americanization entail; what market forces drive the phenomenon, what differences do they demonstrate in such cultural conceptions as sexual identity and politics?

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Conjuring the Real: The Role of Architecture in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Fiction edited by Rumiko Handa and James Potter (University of Nebraska Press)

Essays on how historical buildings have figured in artists’, writers’, and filmmakers depictions of the past, from the mid-eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. As historical consciousness expanded, buildings became projections of creative artists’ conceptions of the past, and of the course of history. During the film era, that trend continued; during the age of blockbuster films, filmmakers have used historically significant buildings as locations that concretely conjure past eras for contemporary viewers. Conjuring the Real traces the practices of using architecture for this kind of representation; contributors examine ways that creators used them to shape their audiences’ historical imagination.

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The DVD and the Study of Film: The Attainable Text by Mark Parker and Deborah Parker (Palgrave Macmillan)

A professor of English at James Madison University and a professor of Italian at the University of Virginia consider how the study and reception of film has changed with the advent of movies on DVD “contextualized” with “extras” such as commentaries by directors, writers, and actors. The book draws on interviews with DVD producers, directors, and scholars to explore how the format can combine the enthusiasm of a fan, cinematic nostalgia, and scholarly insight. The book includes a chapter on The Criterion Collection as standard-setter and a case study of the films of Atom Egoyan.

Deborah and Mark Parker discuss their research:

Much of the research for this book was conducted through interviews with DVD producers. We were very fortunate to have access to a living archive. The moment for such research was propitious; we not only spoke with many of the producers who worked with Criterion in its laserdisc days but also to producers who worked under the more fluid rules of the early days of the DVD.

Their recollections were important given the uneven nature of the archives. Libraries, quite understandably, have been slow to recognize the value of the early versions of DVDs (and laserdiscs), and, given the unexpected fragility of the DVD, the maintenance of digital collections has proven difficult. Once damaged, the replacement version of a DVD often does not include some of the most interesting supplementary material. Hence some of the best audio commentaries have not been reissued, and access to them is difficult.

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New Austrian Film edited by Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck (Berghahn Books)

A volume of essays on the work of Austrian and Austrian-trained filmmakers. Authors contend that despite the accomplishments of filmmakers like of Barbara Albert, Michael Haneke, Stefan Ruzowitzky, and Ulrich Seidl, Austrian film has been under-appreciated, to date, for its politically and aesthetically significant filmmaking over the past decade, achieved despite poor funding. One editor, Robert von Dassanowsky, a professor of German and film studies at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, previous wrote Austrian Cinema: A History (2005), the first English language survey of that nation’s film art. The other, Oliver C. Speck, an assistant professor of film studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, has written about narrative strategies and the representation of memory and history in European cinema in such books as Funny Frames: The Filmic Concepts of Michael Haneke (2010).

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New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema edited by Cacilda Rego and Carolina Rocha (Intellect Books, distributed by University of Chicago Press)

Essayists address such topics as how the two countries’ filmmakers responded in the early 1990s to neoliberal policies that ended decades of government funding for cinema. When film production, distribution, and exhibition were hit, filmmakers and their supporters fought successfully by the mid-1990s for new laws that reestablished subsidies and credit lines and allowed for a rebirth of national cinema in both countries. Contributors consider this success story in light of commercially successful films, the effects of globalization and cultural policies on public incentives for filmmaking, and other influences.

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Stephen King on the Small Screen by Mark Browning (Intellect Books, distributed by University of Chicago Press)

A study of television versions of King’s books, from such highly successful projects as The Stand and The Night Flier to the lesser-known TV films Storm of the Century, Rose Red, Kingdom Hospital, and the 2004 remake of Salem’s Lot. Browning, a free-lance author (David Cronenberg: Author or Filmmaker? and Stephen King on the Big Scree, 2009, Intellect) based in Germany, asks what it is that makes King’s fiction so suited to the small screen; he asks, for instance, what makes a written or visual text successful at evoking fear, and examines the relationship between big and small screen, and their greater effectiveness from King adaptation to King adaptation. In this follow up to Stephen King on the Big Screen, Mark Browning considers the best-selling author’s much-neglected work in television, examining what it is about King’s fiction that makes it particularly suitable for the small screen.

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Walt Before Mickey: Disney’s Early Years, 1919-1928, by Timothy S. Susanin (University Press of Mississippi)

Susanin relates the great animator and filmmaker’s life before 1928, when he released Steamboat Willie, the film that secured his reputation and was the first Disney Studio cartoon with synchronized sound, and with Mickey Mouse. Susanin, the general counsel of a Fortune 500 company when he’s not exploring Disney, focuses on Disney’s work in advertising and commercial art in Kansas City after serving in France in World War I, and before his more-famous period as the creator of Mickey and his friends. The book recounts the great animator’s years of struggling with, failing at, and eventually mastering the art and business of animation. From the age of 17, Disney worked in various venues and studios, refining his later, Disney style. He had served in the Red Cross in France after World War I, then returned to his native Kansas City to work in advertising and commercial art. He set up four studios – Kaycee Studios, Laugh-O-gram Films, Disney Brothers Studio, and Walt Disney Studio. He created such series as the Laugh-O-Grams, one-minute topical cartoons for a local theater owner. Soon after, with borrowed money, he created the Oswald the Rabbit series, and then the Alice Comedies, which combined live action and animation. Then he moved to Los Angeles to join his brother, Ray, and the rest would become history. Susanin uses company documents, private correspondence between Walt and Roy, contemporary newspaper accounts, and new interviews with Disney’s associates to provide a detailed sense of this part of Disney’s career. He answered some questions about his project.

Before Disney settled on Mickey Mouse as his first major character, in the years you write about, from 1919-1928, he made a series of films with a different main character, a little girl named Alice. Can you tell me a little about those films – what kind of films they were, how many of them Disney made, and why he decided not to continue with these “Alice Comedies”?

Actually, Mickey was not Walt’s first major character. There was a recurring cast comprised of a girl, a boy, a dog, and a cat, in the Laugh-O-gram Fairy Tales he made at Kaycee Studios and Laugh-O-gram Films in 1921 and 1922. His Alice Comedies series, 1924-1927, starred Alice (live-action) and a cat named Julius (animated). He created and animated a series called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from 1927-28 (other animators continued that series after Walt had a falling out with the distributor in 1928). As to your question about the Alice Comedies: The series featured a live-action girl named Alice and her adventures in a cartoon world. She was seen with many animated animals, but her co-star was a black cat named Julius. There were 50 Alice shorts (one reel subjects) made between 1923 and 1927 (the first was not released until 1924). Over the course of the series, four young girls played Alice. In the earliest episodes, live-action sequences featuring Alice and her friends (played by children from the neighborhood surrounding the Kingswell Avenue location of the Disney Brothers Studio) opened and closed the reels. After a number of episodes, these live action sequences were dropped. The Alice Comedies ended in 1927, when Universal asked Walt’s distributor, the M.J. Winkler firm out of New York, to provide it with a series based on a rabbit. The Winkler company asked Walt to create and animate the new series, and the start of the Oswald series caused the end of the Alice series.

How many Alice films did he make, and what became of them? Are they well preserved and archived? Where?

Forty of the 50 Alice shorts are known to exist. Some are owned by the Disney company; others are in private collections, here and abroad. I viewed some at the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art. The best place for a listing of the Alice shorts (and where they may be found) is the book, Walt in Wonderland, by Merritt and Kaufman.

The Walt Disney Treasures collections series issued seven of the Alice films on DVD. Where did those come from, and have more been issued, or are others slated for issue?

I do not know if the Disney Treasures collection will do another Alice-based release. To the best of my knowledge, Disney has not announced the release of more.

Disney made other pre-Mickey films, too, right? Can you tell me a little about those – the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit films, for example. And the “Newman Laugh-O-Grams”? And what became of them?

You are correct. See my answer to number one above for the details. The Newman Laugh-O-Grams were cartoons made for a local theater in Kansas City in early 1921. Walt, who then worked at a film advertising company called the Kansas City Film Ad Company, made these cartoons after work. He would animate them in the evenings in his father’s garage behind the Disney family home in Kansas City, Missouri. A few of these cartoons exist, and can be found on certain Disney DVDs. (The endnotes to my book cite to the DVDs where I found such cartoons).

Have any pre-Mickey Disney films gone missing? Is it clear how many were made, and what might have become of them?

Some of the Newman films, and a Kacyee Studios series called Lafflets, no longer exist. (See the Epilogue of my book for a summary of the state of each series today). All seven Laugh-O-gram Fairy Tales exist (some were just found this year – see David Gerstein’s Ramapith Prehistoric Pop Culture Blog and its October 14, 2010 story on recently found Laugh-O-grams). As mentioned above, 40 of 50 Alices survive. The Oswald series appeared into the 1930s, but Walt’s connection to it ended after its first season, which was comprised of twenty-six shorts made in 1927 and 1928. Thirteen of those survive.

Is active searching under way to unearth other early Disney material, and how often is anything discovered?

I do not know what efforts the Disney company or the Walt Disney Family Foundation (which runs the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco) are undertaking.

For that matter, what is the overall situation with respect to the preservation and reissue of post-Mickey films?

The Disney company has an extensive Film Library which I imagine is responsible for the post-Mickey works.

What led Disney to switch from his earlier characters to Mickey and co.?

The last chapter of my book explains in great detail – informed by Walt’s letters home to Roy – how Walt lost the Oswald series to an unscrupulous distributor named Charlie Mintz during negotiations for season two in New York City in early 1928. The Disney-Pixar movie entitled Up made reference to Mintz’s role as a real live Disney antagonist by featuring a villain named Charles Muntz.

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April 2011

Adapting Detective Fiction: Crime, Englishness, and the TV Detectives by Neil McCaw (Continuum)

A senior lecturer in English and creative writing at the University of Winchester (UK) discusses the source fiction and adaptations of such British programs as Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost, Cadfael, and Midsomer Murders. He pays particular attention to the role that TV detective fiction has recently played in the politics of representation – the mutually-informing interrelation of cultural texts and political rhetoric the connection between the popular-cultural depiction and understanding of crime and criminality; and what the process of adaptation reveals about the social changes and the evolving nature of “Englishness.”

Neil McCaw’s Detective Work:

In a way, because of the subject focus of my book (English televisual popular culture), by definition many of the archival challenges and difficulties that many researchers face in mapping the cultural history of moving images did not apply in my case; the TV programmes I was working on (Granada Sherlock Holmes, BBC Miss Marple, ITV Morse, Frost, Cadfael, Midsomer) are readily available on DVD – there was a minor issue with the Marple series, which I had to watch on VHS in the early stages of the project because there was no UK DVD edition, but that was no great hardship.

Where the issue of archives did become significant (other than in researching the wider political context of the 1970s-1990s in the UK, in which a variety of political resources (speeches, policy documents etc.) became particularly relevant) was with the early section of the book on Sherlock Holmes adaptations. Clearly, Holmes is among (probably the) most adapted fictional characters ever to have been created, and tracking down, identifying, viewing etc. the enormous volume of relevant cinematic, televisual, and wider cultural material was a major challenge. If I’m honest, I didn’t manage it. There are I am sure many examples (of the literally 10s of 100s of 1000s) that I didn’t get to. But in finding my way through the morass I was indebted to The Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, Lancelyn Green Bequest at Portsmouth, and the Sherlock Holmes/Conan Doyle Collections at the University of Minnesota and Toronto (both of which have good online presences); all helped me put down markers to better comprehend the territory I was trying to map. I would also like to make special mention to Harvard University, who screened a delightful (and now my personal favourite) Holmes movie, the wonderful The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916) starring Douglas Fairbanks. I had not even heard of this film before I attended this screening, and my view of Holmes has never been the same since. For those who know this film, how ever could it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E9G4JDkh_A

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Avant-Garde to New Wave: Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism, and the Sixties by Jonathan L. Owen (Berghahn Books)

After completing his doctorate on Czech cinema at the University of Manchester, Owen examines avant-garde influences on Czech New Wave cinema – films like Closely Watched Trains, Daisies, and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders – that followed the cultural liberalization of communist Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. Then, he writes, filmmakers engaged with the avant-garde, particularly Surrealism, in part inspired by a yearning for broader political freedoms.

Jonathan Owen on how to find Czech film

When I began my doctoral research on Czech and Slovak cinema, I realized that tracking down films would present a challenge, and I found it necessary to cast my net – whether over the Net or elsewhere – as wide as possible. Screenings at film archives comprised a significant part, though by no means the bulk, of my viewing. I saw prints at both the BFI in London and the National Film Archive in Prague (an excellent archive and one of the world’s oldest, though many of its native holdings are of course unsubtitled). The libraries of these institutions, along with the library of the Czech national film school FAMU, were also extremely useful as a source of film-related literature.

Yet I generally sought to obtain films on DVD or VHS, as this would enable me to watch them multiple times and focus on small details. This process was made easier as new online DVD outlets sprang up in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Initially I leaned heavily on US resources such as Chicago’s Facets Multimedia store (www.facets.org/), but gradually I came to rely more on Czech, Slovak, and even Polish outlets such as www.dvdr.cz, www.gorila.sk, and www.merlin.pl. The latter two stores are particularly recommended for their reliability, relatively inexpensive shipping rates, and user-friendly sites (although Gorila does not offer an English-language option when navigating the site). Non-virtual visits to Prague’s second-hand record shops and ‘antikvariaty’ proved worthwhile in turning up out-of-print DVDs and books.

I also relied on the time-honored method of trading, and borrowed DVDs and tapes from friends and colleagues or from academics and film writers whom I contacted online. Often the films obtained by these methods were not commercial releases but private recordings of television broadcasts. Such recordings were often a godsend, notwithstanding their sometimes inadequate presentation (TV recordings of films dubbed into other languages required the supplement of published Czech-language screenplays). Yet whatever the flaws, byways, and costs involved, I ultimately managed to find all the texts I required.

The present situation is actually considerably better for researchers and fans of Czech and Slovak cinema than when I began my project, with many films now available more easily, in better condition and at a cheaper price. The Czech State Fund for film and the Slovak Film Institute have released many classic films on DVD (often with English subtitles), and over the last few years the British company Second Run has been busy rectifying the meager presence of East European cinema on UK DVD with its excellent sourced and extra-stocked releases.

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Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy, by Vicki Mayer (Duke University Press)

An associate professor of communication at Tulane University, who co-edited Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries and edits the journal Television and New Media, examines the roles of varied television personnel, such as television-set assemblers, soft-core cameramen, reality-program casters, and public-access and cable commissioners in relation to the globalized economy of the television industry. She argues that such workers increasingly exert creative influence, contradicting the industry’s self-conception as one created by the talented few. She says, for example, that television set assemblers in Brazil devise creative solutions to the problems of material production; soft-core videographers develop their own modes of professionalism in creating content for television; and everyday people become casters by packaging participants for reality programs; and volunteers administer local cable television policies. Mayer argues that the undervalued labor of production workers like those must be factored into any understanding of the new television landscape.

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Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema by Tim Palmer (Wesleyan University Press, distributed by University Press of New England)

Palmer, an associate professor of film at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, contends that a pervasive cinephilia – among filmmakers, audiences, the whole film system – has increasingly underpinned French cinema since 2000; he sees I in popular films, but also in such confronting genres as the transgressive cinema du corps – body films – that have been prominent in recent years. He discusses such directors as Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, and Gaspar Noe, and notes the generous representation of women among the ranks of newcomers, thanks in good part to the French national system of fostering young talent.

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Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo by Michael Schiavi (University of Wisconsin Press)

A biography of the leading gay-rights activist and film historian, who is known for his 1981 work, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, an early and enduring foundational text of gay and lesbian film studies. Schiavi, an associate professor of English at the New York Institute of Technology’s Manhattan campus, uses archival materials, unpublished letters and journals, and more than 200 interviews with Russo’s friends and family members to detail Russo’s life, beginning with a childhood in East Harlem. During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Russo became a pioneering journalist and author about gay issues, a founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), and a cofounder of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Among many cultural and social activities, he organized movie nights as forerunners to his worldwide Celluloid Closet lecture tours, which have gay audiences a community forum to discuss gay imagery in mainstream film.

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Cinematic Hamlet: The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda by Patrick J. Cook (Ohio University Press/Swallow Press)

An associate professor of English at George Washington University applies insights from neuroscience and communications psychology in a scene-by-scene analysis of four film versions of Shakespeare’s play. He seeks to show how the films – by Laurence Olivier, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Michael Almereyda – rework Shakespeare’s play into powerful films by cannily deploying film devices.

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Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship by Jonathan Auerbach (Duke University Press)

A professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park (and author of Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations), shows how anxieties about citizenship and national belonging in midcentury America connects to the sense of alienation conveyed by American film noir. He refers mainly to a dozen canonical and lesser-known films noirs, including Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, and Pickup on South Street, and less familiar noirs such as Stranger on the Third Floor, The Chase, and Ride the Pink Horse, and considers them in relation to a series of U.S. national security measures enacted from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s that cast doubt on who was properly American. Contributing to and expressing the alienation and confusion of the era, Auerbach writes, were such historical developments and film elements as the presence of the Gestapo in America, and the United States’ blurred borderlines with Cuba and Mexico, all in a time of cold war, heightened security, and thus paranoia and suspicion. (Among Auerbach’s other books is Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations (U California, 2007).

Jonathan Auerbach on Hunting Down the Film Noir

My previous book, Body Shots, clearly presented more challenges for archival issues than the current one. I am fortunate to live near the Library of Congress , where I did most of the early cinema research for Body Shots. Since film noir is a relatively popular genre, virtually all of the movies I discuss in Dark Borders with the exception of Ride the Pink Horse and a few others are readily available on DVD, although some important ones such as Stranger on the Third Floor and Confessions of a Nazi Spy came out only after I started working on the book, and so initially I had to turn to private collectors and scour TCM cable screenings for these titles. Then of course, there was the curious circumstance that arguably the greatest and most well-known of these films, Wilder’s Double Indemnity, had to wait until 2006 for its digitally remastered release! I would say another curiosity is that due to the power of the term “noir,” movies (DVDs) now get marketed under that rubric that sometimes have little to do with that genre as film scholars tend to use the category.

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Detecting Women: Gender and the Hollywood Detective Film by Philippa Gates (State University of New York Press)

An associate professor of film studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario (Detecting Men: Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective Film; coeditor, The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film) traces the evolving figure of the female detective from her pre-cinematic origins in nineteenth-century detective fiction through her many incarnations in more than 300 Hollywood films. She argues that while a popular assumption is that images of women have become increasingly positive over this period, the most progressive and feminist models of the female detective exist in mainstream film’s more peripheral products, such as 1930s B pictures and 1970s blaxploitation films. She finds that such films found room for a fantasy resolution of social anxieties about crime and even gender. The book, says Linda Mizejewski, author of Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture, “makes a huge contribution by giving extensive treatment to the female detectives in B movies and to the many investigating women characters in films not usually considered detective films.”

Philippa Gates describes her archival work

I relied heavily on the UCLA Film and Television Archive for viewing films. In fact, at one point, they complained about the number of films that had transferred for me (as there is a cost for transferring them from celluloid to video for viewing at their Study Center). I have to admit that I found it frustrating to locate films for this book project (and for my current project on Chinatown in B-films). UCLA – as do other archives – often lists copies of 35mm prints they have but do not necessarily let people view because the prints are rare, damaged, etc. That means there might be films that I cannot find anywhere else, that I see listed in the catalogue, but still cannot view.

Having said that, I must point out that UCLA did let me pay to screen some 35mm archive prints on a Steenbeck flatbed where they keep their nitrate prints – films that were otherwise impossible to find and for that I am most grateful. I remember there was one film (Sob Sister) that was listed as a “unique” print and under “restricted use” (and therefore not necessarily viewable); the junior archivist who screened the film for me said “Take good notes as this may be the only time you are allowed to watch it.” She also said that I was likely the first person to watch the film since it was screened in 1931. That gave me such a thrill to think that I was bringing to light, through my research, films that had been forgotten. Sometimes the archivists would watch the films with me (with their own set of headphones) and one told me that he really enjoyed the film (I think it was The Office Scandal) and didn’t know that they made films “like that” (i.e., with plucky detective heroines) “back then” (i.e., 1928).

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A Divided World: Hollywood Cinema and Emigre Directors in the Era of Roosevelt and Hitler, 1933-1948 by Nick Smedley (Intellect Books, distributed by University of Chicago Press)

A freelance film historian who teaches at London University traces the way that three directors, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder, exemplify and stand apart from other Hollywood directors’ embrace of the New Deal, and of the sweeping and idealistic social, political, and cultural changes it brought to the United States as the country rebuilt after the Great Depression. He also describes the postwar paranoia that replaced that progressive spirit – and the kind of optimism exemplified by the likes of Frank Capra, and patriots like John Ford – and Hollywood was swept for purported communist infiltration.

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Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return by Miryam Sas (Harvard University Asia Center, distributed by Harvard University Press)

An associate professor of comparative literature and film studies at the University of California at Berkeley examines important moments in Japanese arts from the 1960s to the early 1980s, focusing on underground (post-shingeki) theater and on related works of experimental film and video, buto dance, and photography during an era of postwar activism and idealism in Japan. She emphasizes the sophisticated theoretical grounding of the developments, and locates experimental arts in a sustained dialog with key issues in critical theory.

Miryam Sas on the challenges of studying Japanese experimentalism

It is still very hard to research experimental/underground theater in Japan, but there are some key places to go. The first and most important place is to develop and build personal connections: the artists, or their estates and families, still very often hold the works and the rights to the works and undistributed videos of the works. Luckily, many of them from the 60s and beyond are still having long and productive artistic lives in Japan, and you can go see what they are doing today and ask for help finding the older works. A second place is the culture museum network: for example, anything from Terayama Shûji can be reached via the “Terayama Shûji Kinenkan/Terayama Shuji Museum” (Japanese only) and also a lot has been released on UPLINK. For butô dancer Hijikata Tatsumi, there is a one-stop shop that has it all: the Research Center for the Arts and Arts administration, Keio University, and its brilliant researcher Morishita Takashi. On Sôgetsu Art Center, all art activities, talk to the very helpful (and Anglophone) Uesaki Sen, also at Keio. For lots and lots of other experimental films, from older through contemporary, the key place is Image Forum, in Tokyo. There is lots more to be written about this subject: may the ranks of those working on this subject grow!

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How Television Invented New Media by Sheila C. Murphy (Rutgers University Press)

An assistant professor in the screen arts and cultures department at the University of Michigan describes how television provides key precedents and frameworks for understanding such devices of contemporary digital media as personal computers, video game systems, iPods, and other new media technologies. A near-universal frame of reference for viewers and media makers, television also created abstract concepts that have shaped newer media, she suggests.

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Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema by Alistair Fox (Indiana University Press)

A professor of English and Director of the Centre for Research on National Identity at the University of Otago presents a study of the New Zealand director, and asks how she has used her films ­– their symbolism, techniques, and aesthetic strategies – as means to address traumas of her life, particularly a complex family background. He uses much new material, including interviews with Campion and her sister and personal writings of her mother, to trace the connections between the filmmaker’s complex background and the thematic preoccupations of her films.

Alistair Fox describes his research

I found that most of the films were readily available on DVD, with invaluable commentaries by the director. Luckily, most of Campion’s earlier short films were also available as special features appended to her main films, on certain compilations. Her very first film, Tissues, however, appears not to be held in any archive.

For documentaries on Campion and her work, I needed to make use of the New Zealand Film Archive in Wellington. The Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences also holds the screenplays of several of her films, and these are significant, because there are significant differences between the scripts and the eventual films.

For biographical information, I gathered material from a variety of sources. One important source was the Bibliothèque du Film in Paris, which holds dossiers of reviews of Campion’s films that appeared in French newspapers and journals, and which contain information that she has not made public in any other form. New Zealand newspapers provided another source of interviews, given not only by Jane, but also her sister Anna, and her father Richard Campion. In addition, a further extremely important source resides in the papers of Edith Campion, Jane’s mother, which are deposited in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. Much of this material is embargoed, but the catalogue alone contains important information about the circumstances of all family members. Other archives I looked at were the Hocken Library at the University of Otago, and the Australian National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, both of which contain material on Campion.

Finally, I compiled information from books on other New Zealand figures, such as the theatre director Nola Millar, and the filmmaker John O’Shea, who were prominent in the circles in Wellington in which the Campions moved.

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Local History, Transnational Memory in the Romanian Holocaust edited by Valentina Glajar and Jeanine Teodorescu (Palgrave Macmillan)

Glajar, an associate professor of German at Texas State University at San Marcos (who previously co-edited “Gypsies” in European Literature and Culture and of Vampirettes, Wretches, and Amazons: Western Representations of East European Women) and Teodorescu, an assistant professor of French at Columbia College (Chicago), edited this volume of essays on the Romanian experience of the Holocaust as represented in literature, film, personal testimonies, and other media. The volume’s Romanian and Western authors say they seek to end an historical silence imposed by the Communist regime about Romania’s past of anti-Semitism, genocide, and violence, and to debunk the denials of the Holocaust in Romania. They contend that writers like Paul Celan, Aharon Applefeld, Elie Wiesel, and Norman Manea, artists, and film directors like Radu Mihaileanu and Radu Gabrea share not only a Romanian heritage but also a complicated relationship with Romania and intense preoccupation with the memory of the Holocaust.

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Shot in Oklahoma: A Century of Sooner State Cinema by John Wooley (University of Oklahoma Press)

A former entertainment writer with the Tulsa World and author, co-author, or editor of more than 20 books traces the history of cinema in Oklahoma since 1904, when a Thomas Edison crew came from New Jersey to film cowboys and Indians on the 101 Ranch near Ponca City. Wooley describes films from early all-black movies shot in African-American communities and others with Native Americans as leads, through to mainstream blockbusters like Twister and cult movies like the Tulsa-shot Blood Cult, the first made-for-home-video feature. He interviews important figures in the state’s film history such as novelist S.E. Hinton, whose novel The Outsiders became a 1983 Francis Ford Coppola movie with then-young Tom Cruise and Matt Dillon, and he relates many you-are-there stories from newspaper accounts stretching baxck to the 1910s. Wooley provides backstories for many films, such as the one about how President Theodore Roosevelt’s fascination with a man purportedly able to catch a wolf in his hands led to The Wolf Hunt, shot in the Wichita Mountains and screened in the White House in 1909. The book includes a filmography of more than 100 productions filmed in the OK state.

John Wooley talks about archival issues relating to his book:

While many of the made-in-Oklahoma films, even the obscure ones, were relatively easy to find and purchase, some of the earlier ones were not. Of course, since they started around 1904, a lot are lost, but the Oklahoma Historical Society came through with viewings of a few key titles that were of enormous benefit to the book.

Two of those, both of which the Society has restored, are The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaw and Daughter of Dawn. The first is a four-reeler made in 1915 by a U.S. Marshal named Bill Tilghman, mostly because he and his fellow lawmen were upset with a film spawned by one of their local outlaws, Al Jennings, called Beating Back.

The other is an all-Native American picture from 1920, with tinted scenes, that never got much of a release. The Society is currently having a full soundtrack recorded for it.

The OHS also has a copy of The Kidnappers Foil, which is a two-reel kid comedy an itinerant filmmaker named Melton Barker shot over and over again with different casts as he traveled through middle America. The Society print also features reminiscences from former children who played in the picture. It was fascinating and illuminating material.

One relatively recent movie that didn’t have an official DVD or VHS release at the time was Stark Fear, a 1962 psychological thriller made by Oklahoma filmmakers with a nice B-picture cast: Beverly Garland, Skip Homeier, and Kenneth Tobey. As it happened, the local PBS affiliate had given it a “world TV premiere” a few years back, and I’d had the foresight to tape it.

Finally, it took me a long time to run down a little picture shot in Tulsa called Just Between Us (1960), featuring a German shepherd named London who’d been in a couple of other features, notably 1958’s The Littlest Hobo. I found a newspaper photo spread on Just Between Us in the vertical files at Tulsa’s Central Library, which led me to a few contemporary Tulsa Tribune columns about it. But – since it apparently never got a release outside of Tulsa – I couldn’t find much of anything else. However, I contacted the son of the columnist who had originally written about it, and he remembered London and a publicity stunt held in conjunction with the Tulsa premiere, involving one of London’s sons parachuting from an airplane(!).

Armed with every scrap of information on the film I could find, I devoted one of my monthly Oklahoma Magazine columns to it – and the woman who’d starred in the picture as a little girl contacted me! She had a VHS copy, taken from the original 35mm print and given to her by the film’s backer. She was happy, if a bit puzzled, to see the movie talked about in print after a half-century, and I was delighted to be able to see it and write about it myself. You can bet I included plenty of reminiscing from its star.

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The Media and the Models of Masculinity by Mark Moss (Lexington Books)

A Toronto writer and consultant discusses the impact that advertising, films, television shows, interior design, and other mass media have had on men’s ideas of identity, style, and deportment, fashionability, acceptability… Takes account of fashion, domestic space, sports, and other realms. Makes use of theories from sociology and media and cultural studies. n

Neither God Nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics by Brian Price (University of Minnesota Press)

An associate professor of film and visual studies at the University of Toronto (and founding editor of World Picture, an online journal of critical theory), reassesses the French director as a radical political filmmaker whose classics – Diary of a Country Priest (1951), The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), The Devil, Probably (1977), L’Argent (1983) – have long been considered as preoccupied with questions of grace and predestination with little interest in the problems of the social world. Rather than religious or spiritual, Price contends, Bresson’s films were steeped in radical, revolutionary politics. His early style modeled social resistance while those he made after May 1968 reflected on the failure of revolution in France. Price claims to raise philosophical questions about the efficacy of revolutionary practices and about untested metaphysical tendencies in film historical research.

Brian Price on Locating Bresson

The beginning of this project coincided with the wonderful Bresson retrospective that circulated in 1999, which I attended at MoMA in New York. The prints shown were wonderful. With one major exception–Four Nights of a Dreamer–there are good prints available. Four Nights of a Dreamer, which is a film that I really admire, has been out of circulation for some time. I’ve heard from a very trustworthy source that the problem does not lie with the Bresson estate, as many so often suggest, but with the terms of its production and exhibition rights. Hopefully this problem will sort itself out in time. There is a bad video of it which circulates and it is better than nothing. There are also, by now, very good DVDs of Bresson’s films and while I do prefer to see them projected, I don’t think that it’s the only way to see them or to study them. The major resource for me was the Bibliothèque du film (BIFI) in Paris. I can’t imagine a better place to do research on French cinema. I was really interested in looking at Bresson’s reputation in the popular press. I was also keen to look at how Bresson’s reputation was formed in Cahiers du cinéma. It was very instructive to go back through all of the back issues of the journal which featured any writing about Bresson. And of course BIFI has all of this, as well as tons of DVDs and video and they’re now right next door to the Cinémathèque française. One of the best research days I ever had involved spending the morning reading through back issues of Cahiers, running next door to see Duras’ Le camion, which was a real revelation, and then coming back to the library and carrying on. I can’t say that I have any good war stories about locating materials. Most of the people in possession of the material I needed to see were only ever eager to help. For instance, there’s an excellent young Bresson scholar named Colin Burnett, who sent me information about a photo that Bresson had taken in the 1930s that appeared in a Surrealist exhibition, which proved to be very important to my argument. This kind of generosity is rare. Scholars can be quite possessive and territorial.

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The New India: Citizenship, Subjectivity, and Economic Liberalization by Kanishka Chowdhury (Palgrave Macmillan)

An associate professor of English at the University of St. Thomas (USA) draws on films, advertising, literature, and other sources in a study of the varied cultural constructions of the Indian citizen between 1991 and 2007, the period when economic liberalization became established government policy. In films, literary texts, corporate advertisements, political documents, and citizens’ responses to the privatization of public space, Chowdhury examines various images of citizenship and its rules and rituals to shed light on the complex interactions between culture and political economy in the New India.

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Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley by Steven Rawle (Cambria Press)

A lecturer in film studies at York St. John University presents the first full-length critical survey of the films of Hal Hartley, an American director who enjoyed prominence in the independent American cinema boom of the late 1980s and 1990s. Rawle focuses in particular on the aesthetic and thematic aspects of performance in the work as he analyzes such films as The Unbelievable Truth (1989), Trust (1990), Simple Men (1992), Amateur (1994), Flirt (1995), and Henry Fool (1998). Rawle notes that Hartley also has more recently experimented with digital video in The Book of Life (1999), The Girl from Monday (2005), and Fay Grim (2006), and has maintained a prolific output of experimental short films including Surviving Desire (1991), Ambition (1991), Theory of Achievement (1991), The New Math(s) (1999) and two collections of short works released under his Possible Films label (2006 & 2010). Over all, says Rawle, Hartley’s style – minimalist, abstract, and exhibiting an alienated mode of performance – exhibits concerns with stylization and self-conscious narration akin to films of the French nouvelle vague and the European arthouse tradition of Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, Chris Marker, and others. Among Hartley’s other distinctions, Rawle notes, is his persistent independence – he has never had an agent and has run his own production company for 20 years.

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Recording Reality: Desiring the Real by Elizabeth Cowie (University of Minnesota Press)

Explores the documentary film and its contemporary media forms to reveal its status as factual, story, art, and political. Cowie, a professor of film at the University of Kent, addresses the seeming paradox between the pleasures of spectacle in the documentary and its project of informing and educating, through which it creates a new understanding of spectatorship. In the Visible Evidence series.

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Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir by Robert Miklitsch (Rutgers University Press)

“Robert Miklitsch has convinced me,” says Krin Gabbard, author of Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture. “Sound and music in film noir are every bit as important as the visuals.” Miklitsch, a film and media studies at Ohio University, and the editor of Psycho-Marxism and the author of From Hegel to Madonna: Towards a General Economy of “Commodity Fetishism” and Roll Over Adorno: Critical Theory, Popular Culture, Audiovisual Media, argues that dramatic expressionist visuals are not film noir’s only distinctive traits. He considers a wide range of films noirs, celebrated and not, and proposes the notion of audiovisuality to investigate period sound technologies such as the radio and jukebox, phonograph and Dictaphone, popular American music such as “hot” black jazz, and “big numbers” featuring iconic performers such as Lauren Bacall, Veronica Lake, and Rita Hayworth, as well as a palette of distinctive sounds – gunshots, sirens, swing riffs, canaries… He contends that such elements have been given too little attention despite recent developments in studies of sound.

Robert Miklitsch on “The Chase” – his questfor films noirs

I’ve been teaching a class on film noir, “Kiss Me Deadly: Classic and Neo-Noir,” at Ohio University for over 15 years, so I was very excited when I finally embarked on writing a book about the genre. Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir confines itself to the 1940s, so the first issue for me was whether I would be able to view films from the period that were not available on DVD or, in some cases, VHS. (Seeing films in their original 35mm format was the exception, but a memorable event was watching Robert Siodmak’s wonderfully dolorous Christmas Holiday (1944) – at the height of the Christmas season no less – at the Wexner Center for the Arts located on the campus of The Ohio State University.)

In order to provide a “deep” or “thick” reading of 40s noir, I wanted to screen as many films from the period as possible, including and especially “B,” “obscure,” and/or “marginal” films such as Stuart Heisler’s Among the Living (1941) starring Albert Dekker as diametrically opposed brothers (one sane, one psychopathic); Arthur Ripley’s phantasmagorical, Cornell Woolrich-derived The Chase (1946); and Leslie Fenton’s Saigon (1948) starring that dynamic and iconic duo, Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. (At this point, I hasten to add that “obscure” is a relative term; for some aficionados of the genre, noir is effectively defined not by “prestige” but “program” pictures: hence, the more obscure, the better.) My first resource for difficult-to-find films was a former undergraduate, then graduate student, Matt Gladman, a real film buff who over the years has compiled an extended library of titles from the 40s and 50s, including many noirs that were not available on DVD at the time I was writing. (A fount of noir trivia – man, am I glad I made Matt’s acquaintance!)

I then turned to other, obvious resources: the media library at Ohio University (a pretty good resource as we’ve had a School of Film for some time) and OhioLink (the electronic system that links all the college and university libraries in Ohio) as well as my local and city libraries. Although the Columbus Metropolitan Library was rated the best city library in the country in 2010 by the American Library Association, its noir holdings were, to my disappointment, limited; however, to my pleasant surprise, the Bexley Public Library possesses an excellent collection of classic noir DVDs. (When I inquired about this, I learned that one of the male librarians, who has since left to become a state trooper, was a fan of film noir.)

After exhausting what I took to be the usual suspects, I started searching on eBay for the noir titles I wasn’t able to locate via the above “venues.” I initially purchased DVDs from various sites, but the real find – a virtual treasure trove – was Bob Connors, who has amassed an astounding collection of Hollywood titles from the 1930s to the 1950s. If the bad news is that many were recorded from TV (with the usual poor visual or, more problematically for me, audio qualities), the very good news is that I was able to find virtually any and every film noir I had been searching for. Now, when I’m looking for a particular film (I’m currently writing a follow-up to Siren City), I just send Bob a list and it’s rare when he doesn’t have it. (Nota bene: at $4.00 per DVD plus mail, you can’t beat the price, although I always check out all the eBay purveyors on the chance I can access a VHS as opposed to TV-recorded copy.)

In the end, I managed to screen over 100 American film noirs from the 40s. While I was not able to write about each and every one, much as I wanted to (and such is my obsession with classic film noir, I very much wanted to), I felt confident in the belief that I possessed a thorough, working knowledge of the genre in its initial, classical phase. But I’d be lying if I claimed that that was the principal benefit, since the main thing for me was the sheer pleasure of watching and re-watching vintage noir. Still is.

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Synthetics: Aspects of Art and Technology in Australia, 1956-1975 by Stephen Jones (MIT Press)

An Australian video artist and electronic engineer explores the “rolling new” in Australian art – the constant embrace of new technologies in making art –in art that used early digital and other technologies after years 1956, and that culminated in a landmark exhibition in 1975. He considers the role of computing technologies and video displays as they evolved into tools that artists could use, and examines reciprocal collaborations between artists and technologists. Jones notes that new technologies created opportunities but also imposed constraints – output and display technologies generated various possibilities, as did computer graphics, and then video art in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And since that time, based on electronic arts of that time that have received little attention outside Australia, new media art has boomed in the country, Jones says. Jill Scott, a media artist and professor for art and science research in the Institute of Cultural Studies in Art, Media, and Design at Zurich University of the Arts, calls the book “a seminal history for any artist who is currently working with technology.” Based on Jones’s thesis at the University of Technology, Sydney, in 2006.

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Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility by Marian Aguiar (University of Minnesota Press)

An associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University draws on literature, film, and other realms in what claims to be the first book to explore the role of the railway in the Indian imagination since colonial days – as a transformative technology, a rational utopia, a moving box in which racial and class differences might be amalgamated under a civic, secular, and public order. She views the ubiquitous railway as a symbol of the tensions of Indian modernity, from Gandhi’s nineteenth-century tour in a third-class compartment to the recent cinematic shenanigans of Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited. She studies the partition of India, labor relations, rituals of travel, works of literature and film, visual culture, and the Mumbai train bombings of 2006 to identify incongruities she terms “counternarratives of modernity” that present a microcosm of tensions within Indian modernity.

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March 2011

Arthur Penn: American Director, by Nat Segaloff (University Press of Kentucky)

Segaloff presents the only full-length book about Penn, and the first sustained treatment of the director since Robin Wood’s short monograph of more than 40 years ago. The book was written with Penn’s participation. Segaloff is a writer, producer, teacher, and journalist. His writings have appeared in Film Comment, the Journal of the Producers Guild of America, and American Movie Classics Magazine. He is the author of Hurricane Billy: The Stormy Life and Films of William Friedkin and coauthor of Love Stories: Hollywood’s Most Romantic Movies. He lives in Los Angeles, California. His book about the influential filmmaker, who directed Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Alice’s Restaurant (1969), Little Big Man (1970), and Night Moves (1975), includes thematic chapters about Penn’s life and career, as well as pertinent events in the history of American film, theater, and television, and details of Penn’s interactions with Marlon Brando, Anne Bancroft, Warren Beatty, William Gibson, Lillian Hellman, and other actors.

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The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s, by Malcolm Turvey (MIT Press)

The professor of film history at Sarah Lawrence College, editor of October, and author of Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition writes of the European avant-garde’s embrace of cinema in the 1920s. He examines such painters as Hans Richter and Fernand Leger and their collaborations with filmmakers from such movements as Dada and surrealism. He focuses on the nature and affiliations of five films from the avant-garde canon: Rhythm 21 (Hans Richter, 1921), Ballet mecanique (Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger, 1924), Entr’acte (Francis Picabia and René Clair, 1924), Un chien Andalou (Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel, 1929), and Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929). He explains their relations to the dislocations of modernization.

Malcolm Turvey, whose previous book Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2008) argued that the film theories of Jean Epstein, Dziga Vertov, Béla Balázs, and Siegfried Kracauer constituted a tradition – revelationism – distinct from modernism and realism, will spend academic 2011-12 as a fellow at The Stanford Humanities Center at Stanford University researching and writing another book, Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism, which looks like being the first book about the films of Jacques Tati (1907-1982) by an English-language scholar in over 25 years. It will analyze Tati’s aesthetic as a response to then-modern life and focus on Tati’s innovative synthesis of his modernist aesthetic and comedian comedy.

Turvey, who is an editor of MIT Press’s quarterly arts journal October, is also working with NYU’s Richard Allen on a book about “film and mind,” examining the tradition of theorizing about their relations. According to a Sarah Lawrence College statement, Turvey and Allen “excavate this tradition and point out its flaws, such as the loose nature of the analogies that are drawn between film and mental phenomena.” They also try “to clarify certain core psychological concepts in film theory, drawing on the ordinary-language philosophical tradition of Wittgenstein, Austin, and Ryle. They define terms such as ‘imagination,’ ‘see,’ and ‘think’ – concepts which most film theorists misunderstand and misuse.”

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Forgotten Horrors Vol. 5: The Atom Age, by Michael H. Price, John Wooley, and Jan Alan Henderson (CreateSpace)

Price, a movie historian and special-effects/storyboard artisan, began the Forgotten Horrors film-book series in 1979 with George E. Turner (1925-1999) to recognize the indie-studio thrillers of the Depression years – horror, sci-fiF, film noir, and unclassifiable oddities. Its fifth volume covers the WWII and postwar years, and the off-Hollywood rise of science fiction during 1949-1954. To tackle the most conflicted and paranoid period of American cultural history, Price is joined by genre historians John Wooley, biographer of horror-filmmaker Wes Craven (who in March 2009 – see below – published a biography of Craven), and Jan Alan Henderson, biographer of the special-effects pioneers Howard and Theodore Lydecker. This installment focuses, as always, on small-budget productions, and includes fresh responses to such breakthrough films as Mikel Conrad’s The Flying Saucer, the oddly matched set of George Pal’s Destination Moon and Kurt Neumann’s Rocketship X-M, Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Man from Planet X, Ivan Tors’ Office of Scientific Investigation trilogy, William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders from Mars, E.A. Dupont’s The Neanderthal Man, William Castle’s exploitation-film debut It’s a Small World, and Skipalong Rosenbloom. Wooley says on his website that “it’s 300-plus pages of the good, the bad, and the exceedingly strange, bound together by Michael’s insight, wit, and intriguingly skewed vision.”

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Race under Reconstruction in German Cinema: Robert Stemmle’s Toxi, by Angelica Fenner (University of Toronto Press)

An associate professor of cinema studies and German at the University of Toronto investigates postwar racial formations via a pivotal West German film, Robert Stemmle’s Toxi (1952). The film, which coincided with the enrolment in West German schools of the first five hundred Afro-German children fathered by black American occupation soldiers, didactically traced conflicts among members of a patrician family when they encounter an Afro-German child seeking adoption. It broached issues of integration at a time when the American civil rights movement was gaining momentum. Fenner shows how perceptions of blackness in the film, which was made at a time of economic and political anxieties, class antagonism, and the reinstatement of conventional gender roles, reflected those of Wilhelmine Germany (the period running from the proclamation of Wilhelm I as Kaiser in 1871 to the abdication of his grandson Wilhelm II in 1918) but also revealed the influence of American popular culture – of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Birth of a Nation, and even Shirley Temple films.

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Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past by Steve F. Anderson (Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England)

The director of the PhD program in media arts and practice at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, who co-edits Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, explores the way that history has come to be constructed through such visual media as television, experimental film, and video games. He emphasizes alternate and fantastic histories, including Star Trek time-travel episodes, fake documentaries, films created from home movies and found footage, video games about cultural traumas such as the siege at Waco and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and also expressions of the modernist avant-garde. All, he suggests, hold a powerful sway over how history has come to be recorded. He argues that history as it is presented and conceived in these films, on TV programs, in video games, and online suggests the limitations of formal history, and offers alternative ways of relating it. (In the series Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture.)

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Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks by Douglass K. Daniel (University of Wisconsin Press)

A study of the American eight-Oscar-winning screenwriter and director Richard Brooks (1912-92), a prickly iconoclast called “God’s angry man” for his unyielding demands in pursuit of personal and artistic freedom, and whose films included Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elmer Gantry, In Cold Blood, and Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Daniel, a writer and editor with the Associated Press and author of Harry Reasoner: A Life in the News and Lou Grant: The Making of TV’s Top Newspaper Drama, explores how the writer-director made it from the slums of Philadelphia to the Hollywood elite working with the top stars of the day including Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Jean Simmons (his wife of 20 years), Sidney Poitier, Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, and Diane Keaton by dramatizing social issues and depicting characters in conflict with their own values. Daniel draws on unpublished studio memos and documents and interviews from stars and colleagues to shed light on Brooks’s major films. (In the series Wisconsin Film Studies.)

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Wes Craven: The Man and His Nightmares, by John Wooley (John Wiley & Sons)

Wooley, who calls himself “a fan of Craven even before he optioned (but, unfortunately, never filmed) my novel Old Fears, which Ron Wolfe and I co-wrote back in the early ’80s,” says issues relating to Craven’s films have been kicking around in his head for decades – “ideas having to do with the connections between art and exploitation, for instance, as well as what youthful exposure to the concept of an endless, burning hell full of tortured souls might have on a writer or filmmaker.” His exhaustive research with colleague Rachelle Vaughan extended to a lengthy interview with the filmmaker that revealed little-known details about the director’s life and work. Wooley explains how Craven came to be one of the most successful and iconic horror movie directors in Hollywood – his Scream series is the most successful horror franchise of all time – by forging a nightmarish nexus of dreams and reality. During his 40-year career, Craven has mixed horror, sex, and humor to revitalize the slasher film genre.

John Wooley describes his research:

It was not difficult to find all the movies I needed for A Man and His Nightmares. Although I often moan about how the Internet has robbed us of much of the thrill of anticipation and the arduous but fulfilling work of research, it sure comes in handy when you’re trying to find films. I didn’t even have trouble locating a marginal title like Confessions of a Blue Movie Star, a weird little patchwork job that allegedly included Craven’s participation. (In fact, it simply featured a few seconds of gore footage from Last House on the Left, passed off as “real.”) I could only get it on VHS, but that was certainly no hardship.

I would’ve loved to have seen the student film, The Searchers, which Craven was associated with during his time as a professor at Clarkson College in the late ’60s, but I didn’t have a clue about how to find it. To hear Craven tell it, the administration wasn’t all that delighted about it, so it likely wasn’t preserved at the school, and its makers have been scattered for decades.

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February 2011

Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema by Robert J. Corber (Duke University Press)

The director of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program at Trinity College considers how cold-war-inflected homophobia – particularly in relation to “the femme” as invisible threat – in 1950s and 1960s Hollywood movies like All About Eve, The Children’s Hour, and Marnie influenced American ideas about lesbianism. He argues that fear that college-educated women would weaken the nation by rejecting marriage and motherhood. Before that time, he says, homophobia had focused on notions of masculinity in lesbians, but during the Cold War, lesbians came to be viewed as women attracted to other women. Corber – the author of Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity and In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (both Duke University Press) – develops these observations with reference to influence of homophobia on the careers of stars like Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Doris Day.

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Deleuze and World Cinemas: Transworld Cinema/Transworld Deleuze, by David Martin-Jones (Continuum)

Part of the controversy surrounding the philosopher’s writings on cinema stems from their Eurocentricism. Martin-Jones, a lecturer in film studies at the University of St Andrews, UK, the author of Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity (EUP, 2006), Scotland: Global Cinema (EUP, 2009), and Deleuze Reframed (I.B. Taurus, 2008), contends that Deleuze’s writing offers radical ways of understanding cinema, but gauges his theories’ relevance to films he did not discuss – films from Europe and the USA, Bollywood blockbusters, Hong Kong action movies, Argentine melodramas, South Korean science fiction movies. He argues for adaptation and reinterpretation of Deleuze’s writing to ensure its continued relevance for such issues as cinema’s contemporary engagement with the aftermath of the Cold War and the global dominance of neoliberal globalization.

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Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction: The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety by Ignacio Lopez-Calvo (University of Arizona Press)

A professor of Latin American literature at the University of California at Merced writes about depictions of marginalized Latino youth by LA-based Latino authors and filmmakers – about Latino lives within the city, and their social relations and anxieties, repressed rage, and deep racial guilt.

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The New Entrepreneurs: An Institutional History of Television Anthology Writers by Jon Kraszewski (Wesleyan University Press, distributed by University Press of New England)

An assistant professor of communication at Seton Hall University studies the cultural control of television in the 1950s. He discusses the ways that writers of television anthology programs including Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose, and Rod Serling achieved unusual artistic (and political) freedom over the constraints and censorship of 1950s corporate culture. By analyzing both well-known and little-considered tv anthology scripts, Kraszewski shows that the writers worked as “new entrepreneurs,” adapting their scripts for Hollywood, Broadway, and book publishing at a time when relations among television, theater, and art cinema in New York art culture were taking shape.

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The Real Story: A Viewer’s Guide to Documentary Films, by Rick Ouellette (Chicago Review Press)

A free-lance photographer, videographer, and producer of three television documentaries who also has reviewed books and films for Boston Phoenix, Video Eyeball, and Kapital Ink argues that the golden age of documentaries is upon us. They are widely viewed in cinemas, or via video and specialty cable channels. His aim in his book is to provide a general guide to documentaries. He examines 300 of the world’s most notable examples, beginning with the Lumière Brothers’ Arrival of a Train of 1895 to a Disney nature film that uses the latest digital technology.

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January 2011

Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture, edited by David Serlin (University of Minnesota Press)

An associate professor of communication and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, collects essays that consider the visual culture of public health from seventeenth-century London broadsides about the handling of plague victims’ bodies, to YouTube videos about preventing the transmission of STDs. Contributors examine such historical and contemporary visual practices as Chinese health fairs, documentary films produced by the World Health Organization, illness maps, fashions for nurses, and live surgery on the Internet.

David Serlin describes the archival work of the book’s contributors

Imagining Illness came about as a result of the frustration experienced by me and some of my colleagues at the National Library of Medicine – in particular, Elizabeth Fee, the chief of the NLM’s History of Medicine Division, and Paul Theerman, the NLM’s head of Images and Archives – when I held a research position there in the early 2000s. We regularly discussed how disappointed we were by the ways in which conventional historians of medicine and public-health scholars were ignoring the rich visual materials found, often languishing, in medicine- and science-based archival collections such as those of the NLM. Public health, as a subset of history of medicine, has traditionally been a text-driven discipline; and when visual materials are used at all, they are used more often than not to illustrate historical arguments rather than as interesting historical artifacts in and of themselves. Furthermore, many of the methodological and theoretical innovations associated with visual materials, such as those nourished by scholarship in cinema studies, media studies, and so forth, were virtually nonexistent in public health circles. In most cases, the power of the written word (and the institutional authority it wields) still continues to trump even the most powerful visual rhetoric and simply reduces an illustration, photograph, or engraving to the status of visual curiosity rather than recognizing it as a legitimate historical source.

Elizabeth, Paul, and I believed that it was possible to stage a methodological as well as pedagogical intervention that would highlight the vitality of archival materials for public-health scholars and activists as well as create models for analyzing and interpreting those materials. So with the financial support of the National Institutes of Health and private donors to the NLM, we chose and invited scholars from across the humanities and social sciences to conduct research using visual materials from the NLM’s History of Medicine collections as well as in its Image and Archives collections. We invited scholars whose work engaged with visual media, deliberately choosing both those with credentials in public-health scholarship and specialists in fields such as geography, anthropology, art history, and American studies that had never before worked on topics in public health or history of medicine. Scholars were asked to develop research projects that would bring to light the NLM’s archival holdings but were also encouraged to use the vast resources located in the Washington D.C. area, such as the Library of Congress or the National Archives. The result of their labor was featured at two large international symposia at the NLM that we organized: “The Visual Culture of Public Health” (November 2003) and “Global Health Histories” (October 2005).

Since the NLM is the largest medical library in the world with collections spanning thousands of years of medical history, it was not difficult for invited scholars to find interesting visual archival materials, including many that had never been analyzed before and even many that had not been seen since they were first created. Mark Monmonier, for example, an expert on geography and cartography at Syracuse University and the author of How to Lie with Maps, combed through the Images and Archives collections for maps documenting public-health crises as well as campaigns for charting illness. Many of these were created by military organizations and census bureaus and deposited as artifacts of government public-health intervention during the Cold War and had never been examined before. Meanwhile, Liping Bu, a historian of medicine at Alma College in Michigan, found a magnificent collection of Chinese public health posters from the 1920s used to promote personal hygiene and cleanliness at home. Like the archival materials Monmonier found, they had been donated years ago waiting for translation and interpretation.

Many of the invited scholars chose to use conventional published materials but examine their contents in unconventional ways. Katherine Ott, a curator of medical science at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, looked at the NLM’s collection of dermatological atlases — large-format books produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to help physicians identify diseases of the skin. While most historians have used the atlas texts to discuss disease etiology or those who developed treatments, Ott chose instead to focus on the images themselves — stunningly beautiful engravings, etchings, and hand-tinted color prints of some of the most grotesque skin conditions imaginable. Such atlases provide a wealth of information for both historians of medical science as well as those interested in alternatives to conventional (and typically idealized) representations of the human body. Lenore Manderson, an anthropologist at Monash University in Australia, found a remarkable cachet of images in the manuscript collection of Wilbur Augustus Sawyer, a public-health administrator involved in campaigns to eliminate hookworm who was also an amateur documentary photographer. For anyone interested in the visual record of building outhouses and digging latrines in early-twentieth-century Australia and the Pacific Rim, the hidden gems in the Sawyer collection is an embarrassment of riches.

One of the NLM’s more remarkable archival holdings is in its abundant collection of films related to the history of medicine — from visual documentation of laboratory science to films following health campaigns (such as, for but one example, extensive footage of children in the late 1950s being inoculated with Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine) to public-service announcements (PSAs) from the 1920s onward about the civic dangers of smoking, alcohol, malnutrition, overpopulation, and poor bodily hygiene, and even recent films about the threat of bioterrorism from the 1980s and 1990s. Gregg Mitman, a historian of science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found superb films documenting the work of the March of Dimes as well as film footage of impoverished African Americans suffering from tuberculosis in rural America.

Like some of the films famously found in collections such as those of Rick Prelinger, many capture health fears of the other in their most spectacular Cold War iterations. Kirsten Ostherr, for example, a cinema and media scholar at Rice University, found numerous films produced by the World Health Organization in the 1950s that unabashedly depict white doctors asserting their authority, and superiority, over black African patients while invested benignly in the “objective” pursuit of medical science. Such images may preserve evidence of mid-twentieth-century racism and colonialism, but they are also time capsules that prove that the recognizable formalistic elements that constitute the documentary, particularly the PSA, have been around for almost a century.

I am proud of the amazing archival materials brought to light by the authors of Imagining Illness, but I am also proud to have created a work that, I think, opens up many possibilities for those interested in the visual culture of public health as well as the methodological approaches that an emphasis on the visual archive helps to encourage.

Spain on Screen: Developments in Contemporary Spanish Cinema edited by Ann Davies (Palgrave Macmillan)

A senior lecturer in Spanish at Newcastle University, UK (Carmen on Film: A Cultural History, 2007; Daniel Calparsoro, 2009) edited this collection of essays by leading scholars of Spanish film on such topics as controversy over the provisions for film funding in the Cinema Act of 2007, the role of short films in Spanish cinema, and the contrasting approaches of two “biopics” of St. Teresa of Avila. Also discussed are such issues as genre, auteurism, stardom, the relationship between film and TV, the horror genre as voice of conservatism, and recuperation through documentaries of memories of the Civil War.

Unless noted, all content © Moving Image Archive News, 2012. All rights reserved.