Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 - Humanities — Language & Literature — Women's & Gender Studies

In his fresh Animated Personalities, McGowan (animation history, Savannah College of Art and Design) celebrates the stardom of American cartoon characters. The book is impressive for its lucid historical structure and exceptionally enjoyable content. Engaging key scholars of animation and star studies, McGowan makes a cogent, compelling case for including such movie icons as Felix the Cat and Popeye in a pantheon of media stars because the extra-textual personal lives of these animated characters puts them on a par with actual Hollywood stars in terms of qualifying for the red carpet of celebrity. The author bestows an aura of credibility and a rhetoric of authenticity on cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse, showing how such anthropomorphic creations have lives beyond their seven-minute films. These characters give interviews, promote commercial products, inspire patriotism, confess to scandals, interact with live-action counterparts, sign contracts, and picket their studios over labor issues. What makes this work particularly readable is McGowan's ability to stitch delight into ideas, including weaving in such neglected concepts as Steve Seidman's "comedian comedy." McGowan breathes life into celluloid figures, giving readers a backstory for some of the most enduring iconic characters of screen history. This is a truly gratifying book.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

The concept for this volume is brilliant, and Shiel's execution is stunning. Architectures of Revolt comprises essays that address the relationship between cinema, the city, and architecture in the pivotal year 1968. Paris, Milan, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Tokyo are all examined through this lens. What makes this collection work so well is the editor's guiding hand. Shiel (film studies and urbanism, King's College London, UK) made sure that the essays all speak to each other rather than simply adhere to a rough theme (as in so many edited works). Thus, one learns about the international cinematic ramifications of this turbulent year in instances of Chris Marker and Andrei Tarkovsky working in Tokyo and Michelangelo Antonioni filming in Los Angeles. The contributors utilize well-known films of 1968 (e.g., Midnight Cowboy, Medium Cool, Zabriskie Point) but also rarely seen films of those who used collective revolutionary means in documenting and distributing their works. This reviewer's only quibble is that the essays deal more with spatial geography than with architecture, but this a minor complaint about a collection of essays that are so well written and documented.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

In this meticulously researched, clearly organized, well-written study, Barrow (Univ. of East Anglia, UK) examines Peruvian fiction film of the late 20th and early 21st centuries--in particular features produced in the period from 1988 to 2004, when the Peruvian state was undergoing a political crisis due to the Shining Path insurgency. Barrow skillfully and fruitfully combines sociopolitical contextual analysis with close readings of individual films to examine key themes such as trauma, memory, the political violence between Sendero Luminoso and the military, cultural responses to terrorism, and the relationship between state, cinema, and cultural and national identity. Films subjected to close textual analysis include, among others, Francisco Lombardi's landmark La boca del lobo (The Lion's Den), Marianne Eyde's La vida es una sola (You Only Live Once), and Josue Mendez's commercially and critically successful Dias de Santiago (Days of Santiago). Barrow applies appropriate theory, drawing, for example, on Susan Hayward's conceptual work on national cinemas. In addition, she makes frequent reference to the abundant Spanish-language literature relating to the history and criticism of Peruvian cinema. Her observations and conclusions are insightful and represent an important addition to understanding of the field. A thorough scholarly apparatus is included.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Thanouli (Aristotle Univ. of Thessaloniki, Greece) compares and contrasts trends in academic history and modes of historical filmmaking. The author is painstaking in attempting mediation between these two fields, with their seemingly unbridgeable differences ranging from incompatible definitions of realism to inconsistent embraces of narrativization. In order to put popular historical films into conversation with academic history, the author works through the discursively difficult-to-place scholarship of Hayden White, Siegfried Kracauer, and Michel Foucault, especially, as an avenue for showing that the two ways of "doing" history have much in common. Thanouli's provocative central claim--that films are "magnified miniatures" of history books--should enliven interdisciplinary debate. Her application of ideas from White, Foucault, David Bordwell, and Bill Nichols to contemporary films like Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017) goes a long way in explaining the differing expectations built into film scholars' taxonomizing of cinema forms, versus historians' recourse to seeing most historical movies as interesting failures. A deft and authoritative book with great case studies (especially for those interested in cinematic representations of war), this book should define the film/history debate for years to come.

In this stunningly original and deeply troubling book, Fay (Vanderbilt Univ.) argues that in the Anthropocene age, humans--having laid waste to Earth through overpopulation, pollution, and the sheer plundering of its natural resources--have pushed the planet past the point of no return and into an inevitable spin toward the apocalypse. Ranging across a vast array of films to prove her point, Fay examines the work of Buster Keaton and Andy Warhol, US government atomic-test films such as Operation Cue (1955), Jack Arnold's sci-fi classic The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Robert Aldrich's brutal film noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Jia Zhangke's Still Life (2006), and documentary films set in the unforgiving landscape of the Antarctic. She closes with Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016), which deals directly with the disintegration of the film image itself. Throughout the text, Fay makes astonishing and compelling connections between these films and the collapse of a once ecologically stable world. The result is a groundbreaking, one-of-a-kind book destined to be a classic. This is film criticism at its most urgent and impressive.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

Author of Hollywood's New Deal (CH, Sep'97, 35-0184) and one of the coeditors of Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian-American Cinema (CH, Aug'11, 48-6797), Muscio (Univ. of Padova, Italy) now presents a tremendously informative account of cinematic exchange between Italy and the US from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. She comes at these exchanges from multiple directions: Italian actors in silent and classical Hollywood films; American films made in Italy; Italian-language cinema made in the US; transnational neorealism. Sometimes the book assumes the format of an encyclopedia, as individual actors are provided with compressed biographical and filmographic entries. But Muscio also takes on many overarching themes having to do with nationalism, ethnicity, race, and gender. Many other scholarly books parallel parts of Muscio's history (e.g., Jonathan Cavallero's Hollywood's Italian American Filmmakers, 2011) or place the material in a more comparative ethnic framework (e.g., Samuele F. S. Pardini's In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen, 2017). But no other Italian/American film history is so convincing in its research, its critical and aesthetic evaluations, and its handling of cultural and ethnic identities.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Tracing the trajectory of Arab cinema in the Maghreb and the Middle East in the 1980s and 1990s, Armes (emer., Middlesex Univ. London, UK) illustrates how pre-independence national cinema was mostly deployed as a mode of resistance against Western colonization and how European cinema--namely French, Italian, and British--influenced this new wave of Arab filmmakers and postcolonial Arab cinema in general. Armes draws intimate portraits of leading Arab filmmakers, examining their financial woes and their rebelliousness toward the despotic governments that controlled every aspect of film production. The author highlights the plight of Arab filmmakers who incessantly searched for funding, from mostly Western sponsors, and negotiated their newfound freedom to create work that appealed primarily to Western audiences without compromising the core of their stories. Situating Arab cinema in pertinent historical, social, economic, and political settings, this insightful, well-researched book abounds with interesting material about pioneering women filmmakers in Arab countries and less-popular documentary films, as well as prominent feature-length motion pictures. A must-read for anyone interested in cinema of the Arab world.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Those who expect from this book a familiar approach--biography mixed with production notes and critical analyses--will be surprised. Backman Rogers (feminist philosophy and visual culture, Univ. of Gothenburg, Sweden) is interested in neither biography nor pro-filmic details. It is Coppola's overall philosophy that fascinates her, and that fascination is very much a part of her subject, starting when she was 17 and sufficiently beguiled by Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (1999) to decide to become a film scholar. Backman Rogers detected in that film and Coppola's subsequent films a deeply philosophical mind at work, one anxious to engage with postfeminism and existentialism from a specific, unabashed female subjective point of view. Coppola's films, writes Rogers, are intellectually profound but also present a rich surface of "pretty" images. This "pretty" quality has led many critics to condemn Coppola's films as trivial, but Backman Rogers--following Rosalind Galt and her work on "pretty" (Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image, CH, Nov'11, 49-1359)--finds them revelatory and "haunting." Rogers's book led this reviewer to rewatch some of Coppola's films and decide that at least Lost in Translation (2003) and Marie Antoinette (2006) are masterpieces. What can be better than a book of criticism that leads one to revise one's own aesthetic judgments?Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

On the screen one sees wilderness, seemingly endless, unchanging, undefined--feminine. Entering this scene is a lone rider, the embodiment of Manifest Destiny and the "white man's burden," the conqueror, the bringer of order--masculine. Countless films (books, artworks) have ingrained this trope within the viewer/reader; it resounds in male-directed films. What about films directed by women? How do they present space? Thornham (Univ. of Sussex) investigates this question brilliantly. Drawing on the films of women from around the world--Kelly Reichardt, Patricia Rozema, Jane Campion, Marleen Gorris, Coline Serreau, Claire Denis, Andrea Arnold, Samira Makhmalbaf, Julie Dash, et al.--she focuses on five types of space: wilderness, city, interior, border, and what she calls doubled spaces, i.e., spaces created when women filmmakers adapt works by women writers. Thornham looks at the strategies employed by the filmmakers to ignore, obscure, reverse, fracture, or supplant the dominant trope. Her theoretical underpinnings are wide-ranging and her analyses compelling. This reviewer found himself wishing the book were twice as long as it is. One caveat: do the camera movements in these films consist almost exclusively of "pans" and "swoops"?Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

In this fascinating book Hoerl (communication studies, Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln) argues that films and television programs of the last three decades have deliberately reconstructed the 1960s, with the intent, as she writes in the introduction, of "derid[ing]" and "trivializ[ing]" the decade's political activism. She goes on to claim that since the 1980s media have distorted this decade through their "depictions of the counterculture, New Left, women's liberation, and Black Power movements" and more specifically, portrayals of radical activists as "immature, caustic, angry, and dangerous." The strength of this study is Hoerl's ability to recapture this decade in all of its complexity and relate it to the current social and political climate. Hoerl concludes that documentaries and independently produced films have the potential to "shin[e] a favorable light on people who have demanded rights and justice for exploited and colonized people ... [and] highlight the emancipatory potential of memory, capable of resisting a presentist or reified consciousness to recover what has been ... excluded from current public debate." Well written and engagingly argued, this is a thorough interrogation and a key resource for those who teach, study, or have an interest in the 1960s.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Erigha (Univ. of Georgia) is a sociologist, and in this volume she takes a sociological approach to documenting the racial divide that continues to plague the Hollywood film industry. She draws on statistical data related to production budgets, film profits, and domestic/international distribution outlets to substantiate her claim of persistent racial ostracism in Hollywood. In the introduction, Erigha posits that "the making of racial inequality and hierarchy is a process that is explicitly and deliberately constructed by Hollywood insiders" and is "framed around beliefs about cultural and economic value" that have the markings of the "Jim Crow system." Erigha's findings affirm what many already believe; what is groundbreaking is her assessment that unless some of these practices are abandoned, this Jim Crow system will never be dismantled. Erigha concludes that until the "myths" related to "conventional logics of media production and control" are challenged, the situation will persist, the increasing cultural and ethnic diversity of the world notwithstanding.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

This concise introduction to transgender cinema seems to be at the right place at the right time. Transgender rights and struggles have become amplified in the media, so a guide to the history and depth of transgender cinema is overdue. Bell-Metereau's overview of the history of transgender film is succinct and valuable, but what is particularly important in this addition to the "Quick Takes" series is the author's introduction of less-familiar and foreign transgender films to readers who may not be familiar with the mode. Bell-Metereau (Texas State Univ.) delivers in-depth analyses of Georgie Girl (2001), The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (2005), Boy I Am (2006), and Girl Inside (2007), among other films, and her thought-provoking descriptions make one want to run to Hulu or Netflix to find the films. She made the wise decision to discuss how the introduction of new platforms of delivery in the past decade has expanded options for viewing such films. She also includes a discussion of vocabulary, which will be extremely valuable to those who may not be familiar with the issues of personal identification at hand.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Drawing on a wealth of historical, theoretical, and critical scholarship, McCarroll (writing and rhetoric, Bowdoin College) provides an excellent and thoughtful examination of how Appalachians have been depicted onscreen. In the introduction, the author writes that she uses the term unwhite as a way to "understand the function of the other through a historicized racial lens, specifically interrogating the investment in Appalachia as poor and white." Moreover, she argues that "white privilege pervades even in situations of white poverty." Most interesting is how she equates the Appalachian stereotype to those related to other ethnicities or racialized groups through her identification of types such as the Civil Savage, Vanishing Indian, Disappearing Hillbilly, Monstrous Mountaineer, Appalachian Woman as Mammy, and Mountain Migrant as Mexican Migrant, among others. Specifically, McCarroll claims that "the history of both nonwhite immigrants and slaves in America and the history of highlanders, hillbillies, and mountaineers have ... been tied to a cycle of stereotypic misrepresentation and poverty." This book provides a rarely explored depiction of a marginalized group that has long deserved interrogation. The author convincingly demonstrates how these stereotypes share similarities with stereotypes of other marginalized groups. An invaluable resource for those interested in the study of culture, ethnicity, and race.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Holmes (Purchase College, SUNY) delivers a superlative study of early 1970s crime film in Welcome to Fear City. The volume works on so many levels. First, Holmes has the ability to analyze and translate film scenes in a literary yet extremely readable way. Because of his observational technique and descriptive analysis, the book reads like a well-written novel. Second, Holmes's research borrows from a variety of fields, including urban studies, film history and theory, and political history, a broadness that gives the work a solid, firm foundation. Too many film historians emphasize only one facet of their methodology, but Holmes's wide knowledge gives a holistic breadth to this study. Third, the emphasis on physical space and place--such as the apartment, the disco, the skyscraper, the well-lit street--is unique and makes the work all the more valuable. Finally, having in-depth analysis of All the President's Men (1976), Klute (1971), The French Connection (1971), Detroit 9000 (1973), The Incident (1967), Death Wish (1974), and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) in one book is invaluable. Few authors have considered the intersection of urban sociology and popular film as brilliantly as Holmes does. This volume should fascinate not only film studies readers but also anyone interested in the 20th-century American city.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.