Book Reviews – February 2014
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Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies Issue 26 February 2014 Book Reviews – February 2014 Table of Contents Watching the World: Screening Documentary and Audiences By Thomas Austin A Journey through Documentary Film By Luke Dormehl American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation By Jeffrey Geiger A Review by Douglas C. MacLeod Jr. ............................................................. 6 Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley By Steven Rawle Hal Hartley By Mark L. Berrettini A review by Jennifer O'Meara..................................................................... 14 Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman By Will Brooker The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader Edited by Christoph Lindner A Review by Matthew Freeman .................................................................. 21 Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women By Lucy Bolton Civilized Violence: Subjectivity, Gender and Popular Cinema. By David Hansen-Miller A Review by Katherine Whitehurst.............................................................. 28 1 Book Reviews New Takes in Film-Philosophy Edited by Havi Carel and Greg Tuck Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts By Felicity Colman Deleuze and World Cinemas By David Martin-Jones A Review by Sergey Toymentsev ............................................................... 35 The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture, 1933-2000 edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Christophe Dupin J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood’s Cold War by John Sbardellati The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television by Tricia Jenkins A Review by Elaine Lennon ........................................................................ 44 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer By Shaun Kimber Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain By Julian Petley A review by Karen Oughton ....................................................................... 50 Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers: Redefining Feminism on Screen By Kathleen Rowe Karlyn African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900-1960 By Charlene Regester Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film By Corinn Columpar A review by Mantra Roy ............................................................................ 55 2 Issue 26, February 2014 Book Reviews Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732-1933 By Erik Butler Stephen King on the Small Screen By Mark Browning John Carpenter By Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell A review by Alissa Burger .......................................................................... 63 Bollywood: Gods, Glamour and Gossip By Kush Varia Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema By Tejaswini Gamti A Review by Laya Maheshwari ................................................................... 73 The Queer Art of Failure By Judith Halberstam InterMedia in South Asia: The Fourth Screen Edited by Rajinder Dudrah, Sangita Gopal, Amit S. Rai and Anustup Basu The New Media Nation: Indigenous Peoples and Global Communication By Valerie Alia A Review by Rohit K Dasgupta, University of the Arts London ........................ 80 Reforming Hollywood: How American Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies By William D. Romanowki Celluloid Sermons: The Emergence of the Christian Film Industry, 1930-1986 By Terry Lindvall and Andrew Quicke A review by Hannah Graves, University of Warwick ...................................... 86 Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation by Donald Crafton The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. by Thomas Lamarre A review by Daniel Knipe, University of the West of England .......................... 93 Issue 26, October 2013 3 Book Reviews Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento By Maitland McDonagh The New Neapolitan Cinema By Alex Marlow-Mann Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema By Austin Fisher A review by Joseph North ........................................................................ 100 Mike Leigh By Sean O’Sullivan Discomfort and Joy: The Cinema of Bill Forsyth By Jonathan Murray A review by Marcus Smith ....................................................................... 107 Lindsay Anderson: Cinema Authorship By John Izod, Karl Magee, Kathryn Hannan and Isabelle Gourdin-Sanguaord The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom By Deborah Allison A review by Martin Stollery ..................................................................... 112 A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas Edited by Anikó Imre European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory and Politics By Ewa Mazierska European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe Edited by Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg A review by Andrea Virginás .................................................................... 119 Existentialism and Social Engagement in the Films of Michael Mann By Vincent M. Gaine Maximum Movies–Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson By Peter Stanfield A review by Michael Ahmed ..................................................................... 127 4 Issue 26, February 2014 Book Reviews Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream By Sherry B. Ortner Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s By Alisa Perren Hollywood’s Indies: Classics Divisions, Specialty Labels and the American Film Market By Yannis Tzioumakis A review by Steven Rawle ....................................................................... 133 Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetee, Sans Soleil and Hiroshima Mon Amour By Carol Mavor Temporality and Film Analysis By Matilda Mroz A review by John A. Riley ........................................................................ 141 Scripting Hitchcock: Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie By Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick A Companion to Literature, Film and Adaptation Edited by Deborah Cartmell A review by J. E. Smyth .......................................................................... 147 What Dreams Were Made Of: Movie Stars of the 1940s Edited by Sean Griffin Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s Edited by James Morrison Shining in Shadows: Movie Stars of the 2000s Edited by Murray Pomerance A review by Jude Warne .......................................................................... 153 Coming Soon to A Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals Edited by Jeffrey Ruoff Film Festival Yearbook 4: Film Festivals and Activism Edited by Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin A review by Dorota Ostrowska ................................................................. 158 Issue 26, October 2013 5 Book Reviews Watching the World: Screening Documentary and Audiences By Thomas Austin Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007. ISBN 9780719085581. 217 pp. £11.99 (pbk). A Journey through Documentary Film By Luke Dormehl Harpenden: Kamera Books, 2012. ISBN 9781842435908. 31 illustrations. 189 pp. £12.99 (pbk). American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation By Jeffrey Geiger Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. ISBN 9780748621484. 22 illustrations. 288 pp. £24.99 (pbk). A Review by Douglas C. MacLeod Jr, SUNY Cobleskill. Documentaries seem to have become more marketable over the years, both in Hollywood and in academia. More and more directors, scholars, and university departments are delving into a cinematic (and televisual) world that has vastly changed due to a dynamic political climate, technological advances, and shifting ideas as to what constitutes reality and its viable representation. Because of this, a mass of work both within and about the documentary genre has been produced, with varying degrees of success. This review will examine three academic works found vying for attention as textbooks that help to navigate this unwieldy collection of primary and scholarly material in the classroom. Thomas Austin’s Watching the World, Luke Dormehl’s A Journey through Documentary Film and Jeffrey Geiger’s American Documentary Film each provides an interesting study on the subject matter, but only the last of these is altogether comprehensive and, in short, is one of the better books on documentary (and film studies discourse) that I have read in quite some time. At the beginning of Watching the World Austin tells us that the book is meant as an exploration “not only of documentary texts, but also some of the commercial, discursive and social contexts in which they circulate and are watched, and the expectations and responses of some of their audiences” (1). Austin explores audience response by first starting with the “booming” importance of documentary filmmaking over the last twenty-or-so years, and then uses “case studies” (5) and empirical data 6 Issue 26, February 2014 Book Reviews (certain films, both cinematic and televised, and audience statistics) to prove his hypothesis. Text and context have been widely studied, but audience reaction to documentaries is generally not as well covered, as Austin dutifully points out: “Hopefully, this book will provide an example of some of the insights that can be achieved by turning attention to this unaccountably neglected object of study” (2). Unfortunately, much of Austin’s text is written in this prescriptive fashion. Another example comes in a chapter entitled