New Books in Film

When television began to grow in popularity, broadcasters had to come up with programming to fill the day. Growing from the Flash Gordon movie serials, science fiction shows geared towards young people filled the air in the 1950s, affecting both entertainment and the consumer culture. The series were also major influences on modern filmmakers, including George Lucas. This collection of essays examines the genre in many different and interesting ways. In their new book 1950s “Rocketman” TV Series and Their Fans: Cadets, Rangers, and Junior Space Men (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2012) Cynthia J. Miller and co-editor A. Bowdoin Van Riper brought together various writers to discuss the rise of the shows, along with many of the political, cultural, and historical aspects of the characters and plots. Cynthia discusses these essays and also talks about the process of drawing together essays for an academic collection.

One of the continuing issues of the entertainment industry is the treatment of women in movies and television. Even with a larger number of female writers, producers, and directors, roles often follow stereotypical and negative conventions. In her new book Smart Chicks on Screen: Representing Women’s Intellect in Film and Television (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), Laura Mattoon D’Amore brought together 13 writers to discuss issues of the depiction of the intelligence of women on film and in television. The articles cover from the 1950s to present day and include interesting views of the depiction of females in both traditional roles and in newer settings. The four writers interviewed with Laura are: Stephen R. Duncan, who discusses the actress Judy Holliday and how her image was altered by the Cold War red scare. Stefania Marghitu, who examines the character of Peggy Olson from Mad Men, comparing her actions in the 1960s from the perspective of twenty first-century writers. De Anna J. Reese, who details how Kerry Washington is able to present a viable version of a black woman with power who is able to keep her racial and gender identity. Amanda Stone, who discusses the importance of the female characters of the popular series, The Big Bang Theory. These writers represent a great cross-section of ideas related to gender and intelligence that runs through the book.

[Cross-Posted from New Books in Media and Communications]  Bridget Conor’s new book, Screenwriting: Creative Labor and Professional Practice (Routledge, 2014), looks closely at the creative practice and profession of screenwriting for film and television in the US and UK.  Situated within the critical media production studies paradigm, Screenwriting analyzes the history, current industrial practices, identities, and cultural milieu that surround this form of creative labor.  Conor examines the professional myths that are often associated with screenwriting by looking back at its history during Hollywood’s golden age, beginning with the groundbreaking work of sociologist Hortense Powdermaker.  Then, utilizing theoretical frameworks developed by luminaries of media production studies such as Angela McRobbie, John T. Caldwell, and David Hesmondhalgh, Conor outlines the contemporary labor scene for screenwriters.  Through in-depth interviews with professional screenwriters, Conor underscores some of the commercial and creative tensions in the industry that often challenge these individuals’ professional autonomy and claims to authorship in their work.  Lastly, Conor unveils some of the deep social inequalities that persist in this industry, many of which are unfortunately perpetuated though the numerous “how-to” manuals that serve to socialize budding screenwriters in the profession.  Screenwriting also illuminates some of the fascinating changes being wrought by the Internet on screenwriters and their sense of autonomy in a new digital world.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Film] When George Lucas first began to write “The Star Wars”, as it was originally known, he had no idea that it would become his main life’s work. Beginning as a modern Flash Gordon-style space adventure, the eventual series would become arguably the most successful film franchise in history. In his book How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise (Basic Books, 2014), Chris Taylor, Deputy Editor at Mashable.com, presents a history of the series, from its development when Lucas was a struggling filmmaker to its rebirth when Disney buys Lucasfilm. He presents the franchise as both a film and cultural phenomenon, with both multigenerational and multinational ties. Chris’s Twitter handle is @FutureBoy.

When George Lucas first began to write “The Star Wars”, as it was originally known, he had no idea that it would become his main life’s work. Beginning as a modern Flash Gordon-style space adventure, the eventual series would become arguably the most successful film franchise in history. In his book How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise (Basic Books, 2014), Chris Taylor, Deputy Editor at Mashable.com, presents a history of the series, from its development when Lucas was a struggling filmmaker to its rebirth when Disney buys Lucasfilm. He presents the franchise as both a film and cultural phenomenon, with both multigenerational and multinational ties. Chris’s Twitter handle is @FutureBoy.

While the Cold War ended in 1991 with a whimper, not a bang, it still affects popular culture in many ways. In his book. Hollywood and the End of the Cold War: Signs of Cinematic Change (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), Bryn Upton discusses how filmmakers used many of the same Cold War themes in new ways. Dr. Upton is an associate professor of history at McDaniel College. In addition to providing the background of the Cold War and how it was represented in films of the period, Bryn Upton describes the period since the fall of the Soviet Union and how movies deal with many of the same issues. He talks about how films deal with good versus evil, how espionage is portrayed with different enemies, as well as the changing identities of different groups. He also makes sure to review the concept of nuclear holocaust, one of the major Cold War film themes, and how newer films still use it as a plot point. Upton gives a great overview of modern film and what the movies took from the ideas developed during that turbulent period.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Religion] When we watch film various visual elements direct our understanding of the narrative and its meaning. The subjective position of each viewer informs their reading of images in a multitude of ways. From this perspective, religion can be imaged in film and may be found by viewers but its interpretation will depend upon the relationships between media and audience. In Imaging Religion in Film: The Politics of Nostalgia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), M. Gail Hamner, Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, offers a dynamic theoretically informed methodology to examine the ethico-political dimensions of religion and film. She offers a semiotics of religion that relies on her reading of Charles Peirce and Gilles Deleuze, who aid us in thinking about how viewers react to and transform cinematic images. Through three case studies, including Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1972); Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997); and the Coen brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), she explores how religion is imaged in social and discursive fields through notions of nostalgia and transcendence. In our conversation we discuss postmodern aesthetics, the pedagogy of self, philosophical gelling through mechanical reproduction, the political economy of film, Deleuzian relations of gaze, situation, and reflection, the space between humanity and animality, confessional ways out of alienation, and ideas about how to watch a film.

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] It seems that everyone in Hollywood is on the political Left. “Seems” is the operative word here, because there are actually Republicans in pictures, at least according to this website. (NB: I have no idea whether the folks who created this list know what they’re talking about, so beware.) Nonetheless, it’s pretty certain that most–the vast majority?– of Hollywood-types are on the Left. But it wasn’t always so, as Donald T. Critchlow shows in his fascinating book When Hollywood Was Right: How Movie Stars, Studio Moguls, and Big Business Remade American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2013). There was a time–the 1940s and 1950s–when Conservatives were an important and very vocal faction in Hollywood. This group emerged out of opposition to the New Deal and found their issue in anti-Communism. They were, truth be told, never terribly numerous. But they made up for their small numbers by their political savvy and, ultimately, their ability to produce skillful, viable political candidates. One of them, of course, was Ronald Reagan, who proved to be very skillful and very viable indeed. It’s a remarkable and largely forgotten story. Listen in. This interview is brought to you by Cambridge University Press.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Journalism] No professional sports league in the United States wields more social and cultural power than the NFL. It’s not even close. In Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media (University of Illinois Press, 2014), Travis Vogan performs a cultural and structural history of the organization that helped shape the NFL into what it is today. It’s a book about myth, image and a collective vision. “NFL Films only produces an estimated one-half of one percent of the league’s total revenue,” writes Vogan. “NFL Films, however, is not designed to produce financial profits. Rather, it enhances the league’s ticket sales, television contracts, and ability to move branded merchandise by creating and publicizing a favorable identity for the NFL that shapes the value of the myriad products that now bear its name.” Born from archival research, original interviews, and thorough, creative analysis, Keepers of the Flame belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in media studies, sports studies, or anything having to do with the NFL.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Jewish Studies] Fifty years of Holocaust screenplays and films –largely unknown, killed by censors, and buried in dusty archives – come to life in Olga Gershenson’s The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (Rutgers UP, 2013). As she ventures across three continents to uncover the stories behind these films, we follow her adventures, eager to learn what happened, why, when – and what comes next. This page-turning exploration begins with the first-ever films made about the Nazi threat to Jewish life in the 1930s – artistically successful movies released to crowded theaters in the USSR, Europe, and the US. The power of film being what it is, some 1930s viewers learned the lesson of Nazi hatred and fled to safety when Germany invaded the USSR in 1941. Immediately after the war, Soviet filmmakers again broke new ground when in 1945 they portrayed the Holocaust in “The Unvanquished.” The war just over, Soviet censors, Gershenson discovered, had no set policy and hardly knew how Stalin wanted them to respond. But the respected filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein supported the film, a movie featuring Jewish victims filmed on site in Kiev; it became one of the few Soviet movies that identified the Holocaust with Jews. Thereafter, the Holocaust would be a universal problem sans Jews that occurred anywhere but in the USSR. Among the stories that Gershenson relates, she raises the curtain on “Ordinary Fascism,” a blockbuster when it was released in the USSR in 1966.  The three-hour black-and-white documentary montage, narrated by its famous director Mikhail Romm, apparently drew 20 million Soviets to cinemas before it was withdrawn. Gershenson describes Ordinary Fascism as “a real breakthrough,” “stunning,” and an explosion.” Romm’s irreverent, casual commentary to Nazi newsreels, footage, photos, and art explored the psychology of Nazism – and, viewers recognized, made Soviets reflect on themselves. Why did Soviet censors refuse to permit a book on the subject to be released? Censors explained that a film would be seen once and forgotten. A book, on the other hand, would start people thinking! As Gershenson explains: “Half of all Holocaust victims…were killed on Soviet soil, mostly in swift machine-gun executions. And yet, watching popular Holocaust movies…the impression is that Holocaust victims were mainly Polish and German Jews killed in concentration camps.”  Her stories explain why Soviet filmmakers almost never shared the Soviet Holocaust experience on the screen. Gershenson’s book has a partner website. Here you can find video clips of featured films, with subtitles.

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] In The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema (Duke UP, 2013), Daisuke Miyao explores a history of light and its absence in Japanese cinema. A commentary on the history of modernity, the book considers how an aesthetics of shadow emerged from a Japanese modern that was fundamentally transnational. A fascinating history of film, the book guides readers through the emergence and transformations of new dramatic genres and new ways of being a movie star in modern Japan. A corrective to the tendency to valorize directors in cinematic histories, the book gives voice to the cinematographers and other craftsmen of light and shadow who shaped the cinema of Japan through the mid-twentieth century. It is a wonderful story of flashing swords, sensual glances, battling movie studios, and tensions between technologies and aesthetics of illumination that alternately concealed and revealed. The Aesthetics of Shadow also treats us to close readings of some wonderful Japanese films that were a revelation for this reader: have YouTube handy as Miyao introduces you to Crossways (Jujiro) and That Night’s Wife, guiding your eye to visual traces that reveal broader histories of blindness, surveillance, and the tactile. Enjoy!

[Cross-posted from New Books in Critical Theory] What is noise? In his new book Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Greg Hainge, Reader in French at University of Queensland, Australia, explores this question. The book is written within the tradition of critical theory and is at once playful and punning, as well as suffused with challenging and perceptive analysis. The core position of the book is that we need to move beyond the dichotomous understanding of noise that sees it as either something to be removed or rejected, an unnecessary distraction from a core signal, or something that should be celebrated, but in celebration co-opted into being something that isn’t noise. For Hainge we need a new understanding of noise, an understanding that seeks to celebrate noise through a range of engagements with cultural and theoretical phenomena. Noise is not just about sound, but figures in all forms of communication. The book takes on the accepted readings of work in music, such as John Cage’s 4’33″, literature, such as Sartre’s Nausea, as well as photography and film. These new approaches, mediated by the concern with noise, will be of interest to a range of readers from across the humanities, as well as for specialists in film and music theory and aesthetics. The project of founding on ontology of noise is also a contribution to the growing field of noise studies, which is the kind of interdisciplinary academic area that is emerging within the noisy world of the contemporary academy.

Filmmakers discovered in the early twentieth century that Americans would gladly pay to be scared to death. As the decades marched on, dismissive critics regularly wrote obituaries for the relentlessly popular horror genre, even as other kinds of films (Blaxploitation, anyone?) disappeared from theaters. David Konow, in Reel Terror: The Scary, Bloody, Gory, Hundred-Year History of Classic Horror Films (St. Martin’s Press, 2012), surveys the history of this much-maligned genre and explains why it refuses to die. As he demonstrates in one eminently readable chapter after another, it’s incredibly “fun” to be afraid. That simple fact helps explain why “the true fans of the genre couldn’t care less what the mainstream or the critics think about horror. It never kept them away from the theaters.” Like all good books, Reel Terror’s strengths stem from the talents of its author. Konow is possessed of a true encyclopedic knowledge of his subject matter and is a passionate advocate for horror. He’s also a dogged researcher, as evidenced by the dozens of original interviews he conducted with film directors, producers, and actors both obscure and famous. Ultimately, rabid fans of the genre who think they’ve heard all of the stories surrounding classics like Psycho, Night of the Living Dead and Jaws will find new insights in the pages of Reel Terror, and even those who have only a passing interest in such films will find themselves reconsidering their stance by the end of the book. David Konow is the author of Bang Your Head: The Rise and Fall of Heavy Metal and Schock-O-Rama: The Films of Al Adamson. He has written for dozens of publications and websites, including LA Weekly, Guitar World, Fangoria, and TGDaily.com. He lives in Southern California and can be reached via Facebook or email (konowd@pacbell.net) .

[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press, 2012) is a fascinating study of the MP3 as a historical, cultural, conceptual, and social phenomenon. In the course of an account of the MP3 that has surprising connections to telephony and the economics of perception, Jonathan Sterne usefully shifts our attention from media-in-general to a more specific focus on material formats, “the stuff beneath, beyond, and behind the boxes our media come in.” MP3 explores the process by which AT&T learned how to make money from the gaps in human hearing. By the 1980s, Sterne shows, engineers had developed methods for using what cannot be heard within the audible spectrum as the basis for a system of data compression for digital sound transmission. The same decade saw a subgroup of the International Organization for Standardization, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), devise a standard for digital video and audio with the help of a series of tests that gauged listeners’ levels of sonic annoyance. Sterne shows how the MP3 format emerged out of these overlapping material and social contexts of perception, technics, and experimentation. There are cat pianos and cat telephones (not what you think!) here, as well as accounts of cybernetics and information theory, histories of the domestication of noise, considerations of the challenge of archiving digital mashups, and vignettes about Suzanne Vega and Tom’s Diner. It’s a wonderful book about an important part of our daily media landscape, and it was great fun to talk about it!

[Cross-posted from New Books in French Studies] In his new book, Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2013), James S. Williams engages the work of five contemporary filmmakers who are complex creators and interrogators of cinematic space in all its forms: screen, landscape, narrative, soundscape, and the space of spectatorship itself. Grappling simultaneously with film theory, the varieties of cinematic technique, and the social and political fields in which films are made and viewed, the book explores the spaces and places of films by Bruno Dumont, Robert Guédiguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. The book’s seven chapters take the reader from the “provincial” films of Dumont, to Guédiguian’s versions of Marseilles, to Cantet’s space of the classroom, Kechiche’s filmic métissage, and Denis’ cinema of diaspora. A theoretically sophisticated study that includes close readings of key films, the book is throughout concerned with the ways that cinema is a crucial site of representations of, and challenges to, French culture and tradition. Contemporary France and some of its most significant auteurs/directors here offer readers opportunities to think through critical concepts, practices, and experiences of and in the cinema. At the same time, the cinema and its spaces are sites of deep feeling, expression, and politics framing, de-framing, and re-framing the investments and fault lines of the wild, urban, exclusionary, multicultural, and postcolonial Republic.