Pub Date : 2022-05-05DOI: 10.1080/17411548.2022.2073777
Michael Cramer
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Pub Date : 2022-05-05DOI: 10.1080/17411548.2022.2073775
Michael Grace
Study of Film Museums is shorter than the standard length for scholarly monographs. It could easily cover more. Whilst reading the text, I frequently found myself needing to go check online for additional information. This may on the one hand be a shortcoming as the details could have been in the book. But on the other hand, it could also be interpreted as a factor that confirms the book as sufficiently interesting to prompt further investigation. I give it the benefit of the doubt: it is a useful study that I wholeheartedly recommend. As a final aside, though, I do notice in this book a trend in the publishing of scholarly monographs that I have also noticed in recently published texts: no longer is there a bibliography at the end of the book. Rather, there are separate bibliographies at the end of each chapter. Besides the often-unnecessary repetitions, this practice is in breach of the style manuals’ standards for presenting scholarly monographs. Yet, it seems this is the new standard that profit-craving publishers impose: a sustained longer piece of writing is cut into manageable and ‘sellable’ chunks. As publishers ‘rule,’ this new standard will prevail. But it also spells out the end of the coherent treatise as an intellectual project.
{"title":"Seeing from scratch: fifteen lessons with Godard, with the postcard game","authors":"Michael Grace","doi":"10.1080/17411548.2022.2073775","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17411548.2022.2073775","url":null,"abstract":"Study of Film Museums is shorter than the standard length for scholarly monographs. It could easily cover more. Whilst reading the text, I frequently found myself needing to go check online for additional information. This may on the one hand be a shortcoming as the details could have been in the book. But on the other hand, it could also be interpreted as a factor that confirms the book as sufficiently interesting to prompt further investigation. I give it the benefit of the doubt: it is a useful study that I wholeheartedly recommend. As a final aside, though, I do notice in this book a trend in the publishing of scholarly monographs that I have also noticed in recently published texts: no longer is there a bibliography at the end of the book. Rather, there are separate bibliographies at the end of each chapter. Besides the often-unnecessary repetitions, this practice is in breach of the style manuals’ standards for presenting scholarly monographs. Yet, it seems this is the new standard that profit-craving publishers impose: a sustained longer piece of writing is cut into manageable and ‘sellable’ chunks. As publishers ‘rule,’ this new standard will prevail. But it also spells out the end of the coherent treatise as an intellectual project.","PeriodicalId":42089,"journal":{"name":"Studies in European Cinema","volume":"20 1","pages":"233 - 235"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43243061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-05DOI: 10.1080/17411548.2022.2073773
Will Kitchen
precisely it is able to demonstrate the nature of these institutions, instead of simply gesturing towards an inchoate thing called ‘art cinema.’ My chief reservations about the book, however, concern the nature and function of its critical agnosticism. Jorge seems concerned mostly to use Costa as a kind of unusual case study, rarely intervening forcefully in any critical debates. Although he declares his intention to ‘give attention . . . to how possible political expression in Costa’s authorial practice is negotiated via critical discourses’ (130), after surveying the very disparate critical evaluations of Horse Money, he simply concludes that ‘[t]he debates emerging around the critical reception of Horse Money are still divided and to some extent inconclusive’ (146). At times I found myself caught between two stools, unsure whether I was frustrated by the scarcity of sustained critical and evaluative work in the book, or whether I would have preferred Jorge to have explicitly thematised his neutrality. Although it goes against my usual instincts, I did find myself wondering whether a rigorous refusal to engage in aesthetic evaluation might have been even more intellectually productive. Different readers will feel differently, but anybody interested either in Costa’s work or in the contexts within which it exists will find in the breadth and depth of the material presented in The Films of Pedro Costa an invaluable resource.
{"title":"Luchino Visconti and the fabric of cinema","authors":"Will Kitchen","doi":"10.1080/17411548.2022.2073773","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17411548.2022.2073773","url":null,"abstract":"precisely it is able to demonstrate the nature of these institutions, instead of simply gesturing towards an inchoate thing called ‘art cinema.’ My chief reservations about the book, however, concern the nature and function of its critical agnosticism. Jorge seems concerned mostly to use Costa as a kind of unusual case study, rarely intervening forcefully in any critical debates. Although he declares his intention to ‘give attention . . . to how possible political expression in Costa’s authorial practice is negotiated via critical discourses’ (130), after surveying the very disparate critical evaluations of Horse Money, he simply concludes that ‘[t]he debates emerging around the critical reception of Horse Money are still divided and to some extent inconclusive’ (146). At times I found myself caught between two stools, unsure whether I was frustrated by the scarcity of sustained critical and evaluative work in the book, or whether I would have preferred Jorge to have explicitly thematised his neutrality. Although it goes against my usual instincts, I did find myself wondering whether a rigorous refusal to engage in aesthetic evaluation might have been even more intellectually productive. Different readers will feel differently, but anybody interested either in Costa’s work or in the contexts within which it exists will find in the breadth and depth of the material presented in The Films of Pedro Costa an invaluable resource.","PeriodicalId":42089,"journal":{"name":"Studies in European Cinema","volume":"20 1","pages":"228 - 230"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47188649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-05DOI: 10.1080/17411548.2022.2073769
N. Morris
symbolic for the entire crisis of white masculinity. Just like the white male protagonists of the films analysed in previous chapters, these ‘angry old men,’ having been abandoned by the malfunctioning or withdrawing modern state, feel that ‘the world has changed and is no longer accommodating, comfortable or home-like’ (250) for them. On the one hand, the films in this batch – Tyrannosaur (Paddy Considine, 2011), I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach, 2016) and En man som heter Ove/A Man Called Ove (Hannes Holm, 2015) – still display potentially damaging aspects of masculinity, while also suggesting more productive channels of resentment and frustration – but only via women who are willing to help. In a talk about the book, Kalmár pointed to its cover. At first glance, a homogeneous reddish-brown, a solid colour taken for granted and unmarked by any possible meaning attribution; but if observed more carefully, it turns out that the cover mimics the rich, multilayered texture of a rusty piece of iron, a leftover of a decaying, post-industrial society, giving a complex and powerful metaphor for understanding the situation of white men in crisis. ‘This rust remains with us,’ Kalmár contended, referring to the fact that new solutions are still needed for coping with the new questions regarding white masculinity, but also hinting at the un-postness of the title’s ‘post-crisis’ expression. The crisis has just begun and we are by no means through it. Even though it seems like a permanent state now, we are just beginning to make sense of what this new episteme might entail for us. That is why Kalmár is hesitant to draw solid conclusions at the end of his work. Instead, he mentions a few trends in European culture and film that might be able to characterise this new world order, but none of them would suggest that it is possible to find final answers. According to Kalmár, post-crisis Europe is characterised by a hostility towards historical metanarratives, and closely related to it, he identifies a new wave of more informed heroism in films, and also as a response to the first claim, ‘a new tendency of post-crisis European films to turn their attention back to the European self’ (264). One thing is certain, though: intellectuals and professional readers of (European) culture are going to play a central role and have a huge responsibility in making sense of what Kalmár convincingly argues is indeed a new paradigm. For the sake of white men – and everyone else, too.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17411548.2022.2074958
Owen M. Evans, G. Harper
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1986 about German electronic band Tangerine Dream’s soundtrack for Ridley Scott’s Legend, the late Edgar Froese, the band’s founding member, remarked that ‘a lot of soundtracks are quite boring because they just work with the picture. I think you should also be able to listen to it on record’ (Smith 1986). At that point, Tangerine Dream had already worked with the likes of William Friedkin and Michael Mann, on Sorcerer (1977) and Thief (1981) respectively, as their particular brand of sequencer-driven synthesiser music was deemed a particularly suitable accompaniment for films in a period when electronic music was coming to the fore culturally. Of course, Wendy Carlos had already produced a film soundtrack composed entirely on a Moog modular synthesiser for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), which blended original compositions alongside adaptations of classical pieces by Beethoven, Rossini and Elgar. Famously, Carlos had recorded arguably the first truly pioneering electronic album in 1968 with Switched-On Bach, which raised the profile of Moog synthesisers to such an extent that musicians such as Kraftwerk, the aforementioned Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre would go on to popularise them and other brands of synthesiser with seminal albums such as Autobahn, Rubycon and Oxygène respectively in the mid 1970s. These albums would in turn inspire the likes of David Bowie, Gary Numan, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, The Human League and Depeche Mode in the late 1970s with the result that the synthesiser has become a staple instrument for musicians ever since. Whether we agree with Froese or not about the necessity for a film score to have a life of its own beyond the realm of film, there is little doubt that myriad classic films would have had much less impact without the composers’ contribution to the mix. It is no surprise, therefore, that the names of so many directors are inseparable from the composers who scored their films. Think of Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann (North by Northwest; Psycho; Vertigo), Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone (A Fistful of Dollars; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Once Upon a Time in the West), George Lucas or Steven Spielberg and John Williams (Jaws; Star Wars; Raiders of the Lost Ark; Schindler’s List), and more recently Christoper Nolan and Hans Zimmer (The Dark Night; Inception; Interstellar). However, it is Zimmer’s recent work with Denis Villeneuve, which has brought him particular acclaim, winning the Oscar for Best Original Score for Dune (2021) at the 2022 ceremony, now forever overshadowed by Will Smith’s unfortunate confrontation with Chris Rock. In many ways, though, it is Villeneuve and Zimmer’s previous collaboration on Blade Runner 2049 (2017) that is especially interesting, inasmuch as both were responding respectively to the partnership between Ridley Scott and Vangelis on an iconic film with arguably one of the most influential origin
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17411548.2022.2073774
D. Iordanova
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17411548.2022.2073770
Agata Lulkowska
Donovan and Fairport Convention’ (136); a quotation that This Is England ‘seemingly portrays the East Midlands with a coast’ (143) provides revelation unlikely to surprise Lincolnshire folk. Trivially – nevertheless irritatingly – a hare is called a rabbit (191). The brief conclusion states Forrest ‘has consciously avoided discussion of the institutional and production contexts’ (195) – notwithstanding the Traditions in World Cinema rubric (ix). As British cinema mutates, his ongoing project positions him well to track developments and, crucially, their meanings and causes. New Realism, which could have been clearer in half the words, or have explored in depth and scope within the same limitations, indicates what Forrest could do but frustratingly has not achieved.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17411548.2022.2073174
P. Sutton
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17411548.2022.2073771
Mariana Liz
Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe came out two years after the symposium upon which it was based, and which took place at the University of Leeds in 2018. By the time of the book’s release, then, the financial crisis that had most likely motivated this initiative, even if its effects were still being felt, had been overcome in most European countries – only for a very different crisis to hit Europe, as well as the rest of the world. Indeed, 2020 will certainly be remembered as one of the most difficult years in recent decades, with the pandemic caused by the Covid-19 virus having permanent implications for the globe’s political, social and cultural life. While it may seem irrelevant to read this collection of essays through the lens of Covid-19, since no one could foresee what was to come during the period of the book’s production, many of the issues raised by Cinema of Crisis are not only tied to, but have also been exacerbated by the pandemic. And this connection to the pandemic contributes to the volume’s ongoing relevance. A timely contribution to important debates arising in Europe and contemporary film about intersectional forms of marginality and discrimination, Austin and Koutsourakis nonetheless face a key challenge when writing about Europe, namely to present a comprehensive rather than a merely comparative approach. Although the volume’s case studies are clearly focused on different European countries, the European dimension is, however, not foregrounded by the editors – and the reader is not told how many pieces from or about which countries are included in the book, with many of the chapters addressing films and national contexts covered elsewhere in the volume. If the European dimension is not clearly addressed, the crisis also appears as too vague a signifier for the volume’s main title to emerge as particularly meaningful. The introduction collates a series of statements about the state of the world without telling the reader what the potential implications are of the facts described, or how contemporary European cinema can help us to rethink these topics beyond an illustrative character. A telling paragraph of the vagueness that characterises the introduction’s writing, could, until its very last words, be about any film style, period or grouping. As follows:
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