Film History

'The Lure of Antonioni'

by Hamish Ford

Book review, Antonioni: Centenary Essays (eds. Laura Rascaroli & John David Rhodes, Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, 2011), Australian Book Review, June 2012, pp. 34-35.

Five years since Michelangelo Antonioni’s death, the groundbreaking Italian director’s films occupy an increasingly... more Five years since Michelangelo Antonioni’s death, the groundbreaking Italian director’s films occupy an increasingly important but odd position. Exemplifying serious ‘art cinema’ at the peak of its European expression – or, as recent scholarship often prefers to locate it, post-war film modernism – his most famous work continues to compel yet also cause problems for critical reception. How to write about such demanding and endlessly rewarding films without falling back on what we are often told are the old clichés of ‘alienation’ and chilly modernist formalism? A welcome addition to the slowly percolating appreciations of the filmmaker in English, Antonioni: Centenary Essays quite visibly, if not perhaps intentionally, struggles with and exemplifies this challenge.

Sound and Meaning in Film: A Short History of Theory and an Outline for Analysis

by Jasper Aalbers

written for the 'Sounders Meeting' at Maastricht University, November 2008

My intention with this paper is twofold. First of all I wish to offer an introduction in the theory of film sound, as... more My intention with this paper is twofold. First of all I wish to offer an introduction in the theory of film sound, as it has been developed from its very earliest moment until its maturing in the 1980s and 1990s. Second, I will roughly outline what I think is a fruitful approach to researching film sounds, rather than Film Sound with capital F and capital S.

‘Problems in Paradise: Race, Gender and Historical ‘Truth’ in Paradise Road’

by Christina Twomey

Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, January 2006, pp. 30-52.

Regarding Mekas: Avant-Garde Film and Audience Subjectivity

by Jan-Christopher Horak

NERVEN (1919, Robert Reinert)

by Jan-Christopher Horak

Text in German and English

Hollywood - Encyclopedia of Communication

by Jan-Christopher Horak

Sodom and Gomorrah: Notes on a Reconstruction, or Less Is More

by Jan-Christopher Horak

Sauerkraut & Sausages with a Little Goulash: Germans in Hollywood 1927

by Jan-Christopher Horak

German Exile Cinema

by Jan-Christopher Horak

Review of Nayibe Bermúdez Barrios´s "Latin American Cinemas: Local Views and Transnational Connections." Calgary: U of Calgary P, 2011. Pp. 333. ISBN 978-1-55238-514-2.

by Santiago Juan-Navarro

Published in Hispania 95.2 (2012): 344–75

Wildlife Documentaries: From Classical Forms to Reality TV

by Jan-Christopher Horak

Luis Trenker's The Kaiser of California: how the West was won, Nazi style

by Jan-Christopher Horak

Zionist film propaganda in Nazi Germany

by Jan-Christopher Horak

The Strange Case of The Fall of Jerusalem : Orphans and Film Identification

by Jan-Christopher Horak

A Mannerist Period in John Ford's Cinema

by jorge carrega

From a historical context, this article intends to carry out a formal analysis of John
Ford’s work, with the... more From a historical context, this article intends to carry out a formal analysis of John
Ford’s work, with the purpose of identifying the origins of an anti-classic aesthetic, which
marks the director’s filmography from the end of the 1920’s to the end of the 1940’s, and
establish a mannerist period in the career of one of the greatest names in classical Hollywood
cinema.

The Earth Still Trembles: On Landscape Views in Contemporary Italian Cinema

by Giorgio Bertellini

italian culture, Vol. xxx No. 1, March, 2012, 38–50

The essay discusses contemporary Italian fi lmmakers’ sustained interest in
the representation of national... more The essay discusses contemporary Italian fi lmmakers’ sustained interest in
the representation of national landscapes and physical environments as
revelatory settings of defacement of the nation’s geo-cultural patrimony.
Whether historical costume dramas, documentaries, or high-class melodramas,
Martone’s Noi credevamo, Guzzanti’s Draquila, and even Guadagnino’s
Io sono l’amore, among others, have exposed comparable forms of spatial
and anthropological degrado. In so doing they resonate with articulations
of environmental literacy and ethics emerged in the writings of Roberto
Saviano and Salvatore Settis.

A Storied Shooting: Liberty Valance and the Paradox of Sovereignty

by Joshua Dienstag

CFP: International Film and Media Studies Journal: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae

by Ágnes Pethő

The International, peer-reviewed, open access journal of the Sapientia University (Cluj-Napoca, Romania) invites the submission of original, previously unpublished articles written in English. Articles in all areas of film and media studies are welcome. Deadline for the next issue: June 15, 2012. Previous issue available online here: http://www.acta.sapientia.ro/acta-film/, and here: http://issuu.com/actauniversitatissapientiae/docs/film4_2011

‘Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory’: The Cinematic Adaptation of American Poetry

by Michael Devine

Adaptation 5.1 (March 2012): 1-17

This essay reconstructs a forgotten crisis in American letters and film: President Theodore Roosevelt's unpopular... more This essay reconstructs a forgotten crisis in American letters and film: President Theodore Roosevelt's unpopular campaign to make ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ the nation's poem in 1908 and the poem's popular film adaptation in 1911. As the cinematic response to poetry's failure as a national art, the Vitagraph film became a collectivist hymnal for the nation's dream of assimilation. Featured prominently in American poet Vachel Lindsay's pioneering work of film theory, The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), the adaptation effectively reasserted the popular roots of the otherwise genteel ‘Battle Hymn’ poem and by doing so helped to modernize poetry's communal function and the nation's literary tradition.

Targeting American Women: Middle-Class Female Audiences, Marketing, and the Women-in-Danger Pictures of 1978-84

by Richard Nowell

(Forthcoming)

By invoking the figure of the working-class male spectator, cultural elites and film scholars have tended historically... more By invoking the figure of the working-class male spectator, cultural elites and film scholars have tended historically to reduce so-called “women-in-danger” films to sinister fantasies celebrating the most sadistic, brutal, and depraved of responses to second-wave feminism and to those American women seen to benefit from the social and economic upward mobility it facilitated. In contrast, this article reveals the extent to which films like Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), Dressed to Kill (1980), and Visiting Hours (1982) were actually framed to appear relevant and of interest to middle-class thirty-something-plus women, particularly those who held, or envisaged themselves holding, positions of professional influence. Cultivating this potentially lucrative audience, it is argued, involved spotlighting sympathetic female protagonists, high-end fashion, heterosexual romance, female participation in the culture industries, and gender relations discourse. Accordingly, the article reveals that what are often deplored as the most misogynist films in American history were in fact framed contemporaneously in the US public-sphere as in part glossy, topical dramas warning middle-class women of a misogynist seem running deep in American society – in short as cautionary tales of a purported backlash.