Book review : Chapman, James, Glancy, Mark and Harper, Sue (eds.), The new film history: sources, methods, approaches

Book review of: The new film history : sources, methods, approaches / edited by James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper, Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 288 pages. ISBN-10: 0230001696, ISBN-13: 978023000169

Americans: amateur photography 1950-1980

Americans has its genesis in an ongoing academic research project examining domestic photography in Europe and America in the latter half of the Twentieth Century. The project has involved assembling an archive currently amounting to over 20,000 amateur slides (and a few prints) from the 1930s to the 1990s. Americans represents some of the best work of some of these unwitting ‘masters’ of photography; photographers who, by luck, happenstance, or joyous accident produced pictures worth seeing outside the family photo album

Pictures or it didn’t happen: photo-nostalgia, iPhoneography and the representation of everyday life

This article presents an analysis of the phenomenon of “retro” digital photography, informed by aspects of postmodern theory, notably Jameson’s assertion that postmodernity is characterized by “nostalgia for the present,” and the shift toward nonessentialist conceptions of identity. The article argues for a rigorous application of these concepts and suggests that the popularity of “retro” effects used in smartphone photography represents an effort to stabilize images that are in fact immaterial and unstable; to endow the insubstantial and transitory signs by which life histories are registered with an aura of materiality and permanence

Hollywood Spaces, on Deborah Thomas Reading Hollywood: Spaces and Meanings in American Film

Deborah Thomas _Reading Hollywood: Spaces and Meanings in American Film_ London: Wallflower Press, 2001 ISBN 1-903364-01-9 144 pp

Book review : The aesthetics of nostalgia TV: production design and the boomer era

Book review of: The aesthetics of nostalgia TV: production design and the boomer era / Alex Bevan. London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 264 pages. ISBN: 9781501331411 (hardback), 9781501368097 (paperback), 9781501331435 (e-book

Theorizing the Couple, on Martha P. Nochimson's Screen Couple Chemistry: The Power of 2

Martha P. Nochimson _Screen Couple Chemistry: The Power of 2_ Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002 ISBN 0-292-75578-3 (hb) 0-292-75579-1 (pb) 394 pp

Stanley Kubrick and the Internationalisation of Postwar Hollywood

This essay examines the early career, up to 1960, of the Jewish-American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, covering his first five features as well as his short films, his unrealised projects and also, very briefly, his initial work as a photojournalist. With detailed references to Fear and Desire (1953), Paths of Glory (1957) and The German Lieutenant (a script that came close to production in 1959), it discusses Kubrick’s strong interest in twentieth-century German and Austrian culture and history, his ‘procedural’ approach to stories about World Wars I and II, and the increasing internationalisation of the content and production circumstances of his work. These developments are discussed in relation to box office trends and public opinion in the United States as well as to changes in Hollywood’s mode of production and key markets in the post-war era