Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2020 -

Few books are as important to a field of study as Ryan Powell's Coming Together is to queer film history. Powell (Indiana Univ., Bloomington) does a magnificent job of using solid archival and historical research and applying it to primary sources queer theory. Powell begins with underground gay films from the late 1940s into the late 1960s, films that were often deemed illegal by their very production. He then moves to films marketed to a gay audience in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and demonstrates how the very existence of these films created a gay audience and a public space for queer male viewers to congregate. The author describes these films as "overtly political articulations of gay personhood as the male author/onlooker moves on screen" (p. 17). The author also addresses seminal films of the mid-1970s that indicated a more psychologically driven form of gay life. Powell concludes with an examination of hard-core pornographic films of the 1970s, films he describes as "liberation porn." Not only were these films virtually the only depiction of queer male love/sex on screen (a genre mainstream Hollywood avoided), they also depicted a series of relations that were able to remake the world at large due to their use of space, desire, and community.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Zimmerman (Ithaca College) is a national treasure. Over the years she has established Ithaca College as a center of avant-garde documentary film studies and herself as a leading teacher, theorist, historian, critic, curator, advocate, cultural ambassador, and practitioner of the "indie" film--both documentary and narrative. This book collects her writing on the subject, ranging from program notes for presentations of the works of artists such as Daniel Reeves and Michael Kienitz to meditations on the possibilities opened up by new media, like digital video, streaming, and Flash. Perhaps the key essay is "Digital Deployments," in which Zimmerman strives to make sense of the differences between and the interweaving of traditional analog filmmaking and digital independent filmmaking. Where there used to be a clear difference between the two, a complex global structure now renders "independence" problematic. Hope for true "indies" lies in the Web--in online festivals, in streaming, in Flash. Therein lies the possibility of a democratic art form that can challenge the political and economic status quo. Zimmerman is certainly an ardent and eloquent advocate for that change.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

In Fidel between the Lines, Humphreys (communication, Tulane Univ.) wields an unusual interdisciplinary approach. She combines the methodologies of anthropology and film studies in order to explore how "allegory, paranoia, and ambivalence shaped the production and reception of Cuban cinema" (p. 62) during the revolutionary period--particularly the post-Soviet era. This scholarly treatise is appropriately theorized, and major influences--such as Fredric Jameson and Richard Hofstadter--are clearly recognized. Humphreys's approach draws productively on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork (e. g., interviews), archival research in Cuba, and close textual analysis of selected films. Specific subjects examined include the controversies surrounding the satirical and explicitly allegorical fiction feature Alice in Wondertown (1991); the 2007 censorship debate among artists, intellectuals, and bureaucrats known as the "email war"; and the production history and reception of Cuba's blockbuster "zombie comedy" Juan of the Dead (2011). Humphreys's research is wide-ranging and up-to-date. The readable prose has clear lines of argumentation, and most key concepts are aptly elucidated. Cinema has long held a privileged place in the Cuban public sphere, and this creative study represents a major advance in understanding the island's cultural politics.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

In this substantial work, Kornhaber (English, Univ. of Texas, Austin) looks at how animated films, both feature length and short, have treated war--its causes and its consequences--revealing a shocking, poignant, and surprising history of inhumanity. Ranging across a century of films--from Winsor McCay's silent Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) to Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir (2008)--Kornhaber provides an insightful analysis of the invisible and unthinkable aspects of global warfare, from Czechoslovakia to China. Parodies of dictators, idiosyncratic parables of war, antiwar propaganda, and narratives on nuclear annihilation communicate the horrific lived experience of war by bearing unique witness through the animated film. The author shows the power of animation to reorder the world and expose human cruelty and idiocy. She is strategic in dividing her study into films of resistance, made obliquely under the tyrannies of Nazi Germany and Communist dictatorships; films of pacifism, such as Norman McLaren's classic Neighbours (1952); and films of memory and memorial, piercing and heartbreaking works such as Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies (1988). Kornhaber's book is one of the most important, haunting, and riveting works published in a decade.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

This study of the pioneering comic films of French mime and filmmaker Jacques Tati (1907-82), a favorite of post-WW II audiences, is long overdue and reveals the unique cinematic aesthetic of this undeniable genius. As is evident in such films as Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), Mon Oncle (1958), Playtime (1967), and Trafic (1971), Tati was inspired by silent movie comedy and by his own highly individual and somewhat jaundiced gaze at the complexities of the modern world. Turvey (Tufts Univ.) does an excellent job of elucidating this, and the illustrations he includes shed light on Tati's experimentation and innovation with visual humor. As in silent film comedy, the pitfalls facing an ordinary individual in a perversely complicated universe are on full display in Tati's work, thanks to his singular talents as a performer. He won an international following and seemed to be an exemplar of both the Golden Age of silent comedy and the screen's avant-garde. Turvey's accessible, entertaining book is much more than an introduction to Tati's achievement, though those unfamiliar with Tati are sure to be captivated by it. The book a delicious treat, and serious film students will appreciate it as a penetrating primer on the cinematic comic artist at work.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers.

In the introduction to this volume, Lee (Nanyang Technological Univ., Singapore) reports that he wanted to create "an accessible and readable book that would cover canonical film texts for students and general readers alike." He succeeds admirably. Korean cinema scholarship in English is barely out of its infancy, and this volume makes a huge contribution to the maturity of that literature. The insightful and informative introduction includes an overview of the contemporary Korean film industry, a historiography of Korean cinema scholarship in English, and a survey of the book's 35 individual essays. In the opening essay, Cho Junhyoung presents a "brief but comprehensive" history of Korean cinema, starting with the silent cinema and continuing to the present. Each essay focuses on a single significant film (1936-2016), analyzing it in context. All genres and forms are represented, from documentary through historical drama, horror, and romantic comedy. The contributors are a Who's Who of scholars of Korean film. Eminently readable and extremely informative, this is the best English-language book on Korean cinema this reviewer has encountered. Readers will want to watch every film discussed.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Filmmaker and scholar David MacDougall (Australian National Univ., Canberra) has gathered essays about cinema, anthropology, and documentary filmmaking that speak to the sensory relationship between viewers and filmmaker, and the difficulty viewers have finding ways to become independent of the movies they are experiencing. The author divides the 12 essays into three parts: "Filmmaking as Practice," "Film and the Senses," and "Film, Anthropology and the Documentary Tradition." These deal with, respectively, the filmmaker's eye and mind and their connection to the life experience of the general public; the "ways that images and sounds evoke emotions and physical sensations"; and the power of documentary in representing public and academic life. The essays concern dislocation, the art of looking, the importance of color, the need for observation, and so on, as connected to anthropology and the cinema. Though slightly disjointed, the work is easy to follow, and MacDougall's thesis--watching movies is an overtly created human experience--easy to see. MacDougall is masterful in writing succinctly about how audiences and their bodies connect to the films that they are watching. The Looking Machine is a must read for those interested in the history and humanity of movies.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

The movie musical has had a turbulent history of ups and downs in Hollywood, going from popular to unpopular to popular again in a recent resurgence. From the escapist films of the world war period to animated film to present-day originals (e.g., La La Land, 2016) and remakes of standards (e.g., Bradley Cooper's 2018 remake of A Star Is Born), musicals have permeated film culture and drawn audiences. In The Movie Musical! respected film scholar Jeanine Basinger (Wesleyan Univ.) defines and discusses the true musical film, which is not a film that includes music but a film that uses song and dance as part of the plot. Throughout this journey, Basinger discusses Hollywood's evolving approach to the musical film, starting with early sound pictures and continuing through films of the present day. The path is not straight and narrow but rather takes one through influences from Europe and Broadway. Basinger includes many stills, from a variety of films, that will delight the reader, along with engaging footnotes that provide fun facts about some of the films she discusses.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Shail (Newcastle University, UK) has written a comprehensive analysis tracing the early days of the film industry and the development of the star system. Drawing on exhaustive archival research, Shail simultaneously builds on the scholarship of Richard deCordova (CH, Mar'91, 28-3794) and proposes new understandings of the early star systems of cinema in Europe. By detailing the emergence of the star system in Europe--and how its formative years differ from Richard deCordova's account of the origins of the star system in North America--Shail corrects assumptions about the European star system while also expanding on deCordova's pioneering work. The Origins of the Film Star System includes an impressive bibliography and reproductions of rarely seen publicity photographs and posters. Shail also presents his findings through diagrams and charts, transforming the data into an accessible, graphic form. Shail's book stands as a monumental achievement, demonstrating the dynamism of historiography while arguing for the necessity of looking beyond American modes and machinations of the early star system.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.