Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

In 1905 China produced its first film, Dingjun Mountain. During the ensuing four decades the film industry blossomed, ushering in the first golden age of Chinese cinema. Rea (Univ. of British Columbia) surveys 14 feature films from this era, 6 silent and 8 sound, most long-recognized classics (e.g., Street Angel, Spring River Flows East) and most actors household names (e.g., Ruan Lingyu, Zhao Dan, Zhou Xuan). Each chapter focuses on one film, opening with production details and a brief synopsis followed by analyses of key scenes and discussion of the film's historical, cultural, cinematic, and social contexts and significance. Filled with new insights and interesting facts, the book also compares Chinese and foreign films. Completing the book are a filmography from 1895 to 2020 and a selective list of film personnel. All films featured are freely available with added English intertitles and subtitles on Rea's YouTube channel. Watching them and reading the chapters afterward was a thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding experience for this reviewer. An excellent work for film studies and for anyone wishing to learn more about China in the first half of the 20th century.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Originally published to great acclaim in France in 2017, Leteux's study of French cinema during the German Occupation is now available in English, thanks to this translation by the author. Leteux (independent scholar) focuses on the German-controlled studio Continental Films, which released 30 feature films between 1941 and 1945 under the tyrannical management of Alfred Greven. Working from archival materials, Leteux demolishes the myth that the French artists Continental drafted--including such luminaries as Maurice Tourneur, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Pierre Fresnay, and Danielle Darrieux--were willing collaborators who turned out Nazi propaganda while the rest of the country suffered under the Occupation. Leteux points out that most of these artists signed with the studio out of necessity or under duress; some were active members of the Resistance. Their movies, shot on meager budgets and tight schedules, were on the whole well crafted--and studiously apolitical--commercial affairs. A few, such as Clouzot's Le Corbeau (1943), can actually be read as subtle commentaries on the poisonous atmosphere of the period. In chapter after chapter, Leteux reveals astonishing facts about Continental's history, personnel, and productions. Her engrossing, impeccably researched book adds nuance to the picture of filmmaking in occupied France and is a necessary corrective to more simplistic treatments of the subject.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

White (visual culture and fine art, Middlesex Univ., UK) offers a comprehensive and eminently readable history of Hong Kong (and by extension, all Chinese) cinema as it was received by and influenced the Anglophone West. The study has a twofold purpose: to narrate that transnational history and to analyze its political, social, and cultural implications for both China and the West. White cannily avoids the many pitfalls such a study could engender and instead theorizes the larger implications of the impact of wuxia films (i.e., films with martial hero/ines on Western television, e.g., the Kung Fu series), comic books, cinema, magazines, and popular culture, not to mention the explosion of martial arts instruction in the West beginning in the 1970s. White devotes chapters to production and reception of Hong Kong cinema, US reception of that cinema, African American identification with and appropriation of Kung Fu culture, how martial arts films featuring white male protagonists radically transformed the genre, women in martial arts cinema, and the postmillennial wave of art house Kung Fu cinema. In the end, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, as White demonstrates a tapestry of a cinema of resistance and rebellion across national, ethnic, and gender lines.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

French Film History, 1895-1946 joins the literature on a period of film history that may seem sufficiently covered. Certainly there is no shortage of textbooks and scholarship on French cinema. However, this volume--the first in a projected two-volume set--is an important supplement to the traditionally studied and taught figures and films of the era. Neupert (Univ. of Georgia) is particularly thorough in his examination of films and movements of the 1910s and 1920s. This is an era that saw the expansion of large studios and serial forms; artists experimenting with Impressionist, surrealist, and Dadaist forms; and the beginning of the transition to sound cinema. Fascinating too is Neupert's discussion of film during the German occupation (1940-46), a subject not covered frequently or as thoroughly as it is here. Erudite yet extremely readable, the volume is appropriate for a broad audience, cinephiles as well as scholars. It is richly illustrated with black-and-white reproductions throughout and a selection of color plates. This reviewer looks forward to the publication of its companion volume.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

With piercing clarity, Friedman (history, West Chester Univ.) raises crucial questions regarding the portrayal of Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust in contemporary media comedy. He explores the nature and functions of the comic in the catastrophic context of real historical horrors, uncovering how comedies unleash a testimony to survival, fresh therapeutic perspectives for traumatic memory, and warnings against tyranny and cruelty. Friedman applies diachronic and synchronic analyses, investigating how productions change over time and what tropes and themes endure. In five chapters, he probes how familiar comedies (e.g., JoJo Rabbit) can comfort, subvert, or empower. He explores the comic portrayal of Hitler (e.g., Warner Bros. cartoons of Bugs Bunny) and dissects comic representations of the Third Reich. His last two chapters concern the constructions of collective memory through Holocaust films with impressive studies of satiric social commentaries, such as South Park and Curb Your Enthusiasm. He astutely demonstrates how comedies reveal information about life and death, expose villainous systems of oppression, and wave red flags by attending to their depth of purpose, contemporary relevance, and originality of form and content. This is a riveting, profound, and provocative book.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

Hollywood has perpetuated rape culture for a long time and is reckoning with that in the #MeToo era. In taking on this subject Funnell and Beliveau (both, Univ. of Oklahoma) bring together essays that have a broad historical scope (from early James Bond films and Saturday Night Fever to recent Netflix movies and mini-series) but focus on just one or a few films. Screening #MeToo offers readers the benefit of a breadth of history and genre without sacrificing in-depth analysis of specific films. The volume is organized in three parts based on theme and genre, but it also operates somewhat chronologically, reinforcing the historical arc. Standout chapters include those on sexual violence and rape culture at the heart of Sean Connery-era James Bond films, reevaluation of Revenge of the Nerds in relation to revenge porn, Wes Craven's interrogations of rape culture in the Scream franchise, and representations of consent in contemporary teen comedies such as To All the Boys I've Loved Before and Booksmart. All the essays are well written and will prompt readers to rethink popular films within shifting cultural landscapes and representation. This collection will be a good companion to Margaret Tally's The Limits of #MeToo in Hollywood: Gender and Power in the Entertainment Industry (CH, May'22, 59-2511).Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

The Bates Motel may be the most iconic movie set ever built. For director Alfred Hitchcock it was a character in its own right. Throughout his career Hitchcock paid particular attention to location and architecture. French (an independent scholar) has undertaken to write about this understudied aspect of Hitchcock's films, especially those of the 1950s-60s: Rope, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and The Birds as well as Psycho. She considers the role played by these films' production designers, many of them graduates of USC, and the architects who inspired both them and Hitchcock himself. The book is illustrated with color photos and drawings, and the author includes descriptive excerpts from the scripts and the books on which some of the films were based. She writes knowledgably about architectural styles and their history: for example, she includes an interesting history of the American motel, and she recounts the histories of many of the actual buildings Hitchcock used in his films--e.g., the hotel in Vertigo and the 1870s schoolhouse that was slated for demolition until The Birds turned it into a tourist attraction. Thoroughly researched and beautifully written, this book is a gem.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers

This marvelous, well-researched exploration of Japanese American film culture is divided into four chapters. In the first chapter Khor (American studies, Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston) focuses on "racial uplift," making sharp comparisons with African American film culture and a film she newly discovered in an archive, The Oath of the Sword (1914). In chapter 2, "Moving Screens," Khor describes important film theaters and "nontheatrical film exhibitions," in which films went on tour accompanied by a benshi (narrator, projectionist, impresario). In the last two chapters she provides, respectively, an overview of the transition from silent cinema to sound and the threat of so-called yellowvoice, and "Japanese film culture ... at its edges" (p. 116), showing how often Japanese-owned theaters showed Filipino films. Khor's arguments are detailed and multidimensional: she turns smoothly between commentaries on individual films, contexts for these films through social history, reception studies of both known and lost films in English- and Japanese-language media, evaluations of the contours of anti-Asian racism in Hollywood and beyond, descriptive maps of the international movement of people and films, and introductions to key figures (directors, producers, actors) and theaters. This methodical, exemplary book is a valuable contribution to early-20th-century film culture in the US.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Impeccably well written and exceedingly accessible, White Terror stands as a remarkable contribution to scholarship on contemporary horror cinema. Boasting an array of sumptuous full-color images from the films examined (a feature sadly neglected by most publishers of film studies), this slim volume is organized into eight chapters, an introduction ("Whiteness, Politics, and Horror"), and a conclusion ("Horror in the Trump Era"). Meeuf (School of Journalism and Mass Media, Univ. of Idaho, Moscow) writes that the book is meant to "help students, scholars, and horror fans grapple with the role of race and white racial anxieties in contemporary US horror films" (p. vii). Especially noteworthy sections are those engaging whiteness and fear of home invasion, horrific children, and nightmarish dreams of lack of social mobility. Chapter 6, "Motor City Gothic: White Youth and Economic Anxiety in It Follows and Don't Breathe," a consideration of Rust Belt economic depression and desperation as the backdrop for horror, is remarkable for its insight. White Terror occupies a rare place in the literature on horror cinema: it serves those who are fear film aficionados and scholars who seek new approaches and paradigms in film studies. A necessary and welcome addition to scholarship on horror cinema.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.