Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2017 -

Furniss (California Institute of the Arts) has written a magnificent and enthralling book. The narrative flows like a mesmerizing story, and the images shine like sparkling stars. Setting the stage with precinematic visual entertainment, the author chronicles the historical trajectory of the animated film from its silent beginnings to its panoramic explosion around the globe. Scholars will appreciate the book as an insightful compendium of the animated film's remarkable evolution, and as a text book it will both instruct and delight as dulce et utile. Furniss demonstrates an acute awareness of aesthetic and cultural contexts outside the films themselves in dealing with artistic movements, censorship, politics, and even gag structures that showcase an interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. This animation film history easily supplants all the great ones that have gone before it, and sets a gloriously brilliant new benchmark. A tour-de-force, it joins Giannalberto Bendazzi's equally fine, three-volume Animation: A World History (CH, Mar'17, 54-3134).Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

In this impressive three-volume set, Bendazzi expands his Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation (CH, Apr'95, 32-4401). He focuses on the art of animation in the entertainment industry, not animation used for advertising or education. He intends the present volume to be the most comprehensive text on the art of animation, a complete overview of the development of animation around the world. The set covers three centuries of animation history in more than 90 countries. Arranged both chronologically and geographically, it highlights the aesthetics and technical processes that impacted the development and popularity of animation as an art form. Biographies of animation artists and details about films are included (information that in many cases is not readily available elsewhere). Volume 1 covers the archaeological foundations of animation through the Golden Age of the medium (1928-51). Volume 2 examines animation from 1951 to 1991, including the influence of the television age and the political and economic atmosphere of the era. Volume 3 features the effect of globalization on the development of animation from 1991 onward. Although sparsely illustrated with black-and-white images, this comprehensive treatment is a required resource for animation studies.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Shary (independent scholar) and McVittie (Northeastern Illinois Univ.) offer an excellent, wide-ranging overview of Hollywood's cinematic representations of aging and mortality--a topic that mainstream films mostly avoid. Though some films offer serious takes on issues of aging in US society, for the most part women and men in their 60s and beyond are represented as caricatures, whether for humor, as in Grumpy Old Men (1993) and The Big Wedding (2013), or sentimental pathos, as seen in Evening (2007) and Meet Joe Black (1998). Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this volume is its comprehensiveness. It starts at the dawn of cinema, continues right up to the present day with such films as Gran Torino (2008), and provides a list of key "elder films" (as the authors dub them) and an extensive index that includes relevant topical entries (e.g., "Elder Kitsch," "May-December romance," and "Senility and Alzheimer's Disease," to name just three). Required reading for all cineasts, this title bids fair to be the definitive book on a subject much in need of attention.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Perhaps no other film director has been the subject of as many books, essays, and articles as Alfred Hitchcock. Hidden Hitchcock joins that literature by offering a radical reconceptualization and reconsideration of Hitchcock's cinematic technique. Miller (Univ. of California, Berkeley) engages with Hitchcock's "hidden style" by assuming the role of the "too-close viewer." This viewer is extremely sensitive and aware of often-overlooked, on-screen occurrences such as continuity errors, counternarratives, the Hitchcock cameo, and violations of Hollywood techniques. Utilizing technology to play, replay, slow down, and pause films--specifically, Strangers on a Train, Rope, and The Wrong Man--Miller reveals the filmmaker's often-unseen techniques. For example, the author notes the effect of continuity errors and blocking in Rope, and he excavates previously undocumented elements in The Wrong Man, including a never-before-noticed Hitchcock cameo. Drawing on the work of theorists such as Roland Barthes and Laura Mulvey, Miller's enjoyable, vivacious romp through viewing and reviewing the cinema of Hitchcock pioneers a compelling new approach to viewership and carves out new scholarly territory. This is a major contribution to the literature on Hitchcock and film studies more broadly.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

One of the major Polish cinema directors since WW II, Has (1925-2000) is still too little known in the West. In this compact, insightful, smoothly written study, the first English-language treatment of Has's work, Insdorf (Columbia Univ.) devotes chapters to each of his 14 features, and in the end matter she examines Has's early, more conventional shorts and his later successful career as a pedagogue at the famous Lodz Film School. Little interested in the staple political concerns of most Polish filmmakers, Has focused on agonistic heroes and desperate outsiders early in his career. By the mid-1960s he had turned to digressive, ambiguous, often fantastically surrealistic narratives like his celebrated The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), praised by Luis Bunuel and Jerry Garcia. Though she provides little biographical detail, Insdorf offers lively descriptions of the films and is always alert to the complex interplay of composition, character, dialogue, and music and to the intertextual relationships among Has's works. She astutely highlights visual motifs (clocks and windows), Has's preoccupation with the theme of time, and his quasi-oneiric, circularly structured stories often told by unreliable narrators. With an excellent bibliography of Polish and English sources, this is an invaluable contribution to the film literature.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

Layton and Pierce's book, like the film it examines, adopts the revue format, devoting chapters to the saga of Paul Whiteman's musical career from WW I to the 1930s; the history of Universal Pictures under the Laemmles prior to the making of King of Jazz in 1930; Broadway musical productions in the 1920s; and those involved in the making of the film, from its would-be directors Wesley Ruggles and Paul Fejos to its director-of-record John Murray Anderson, whose theatrical expertise in the revue format and reworking of most successful earlier numbers gave the film youthful energy and an engaging, rhythmic pacing. Chapters on the actual making of the film, its initial failure at the box office, its rerelease, and its restoration in 2016 round out a montage of attractions designed to fascinate readers interested in jazz, Hollywood production practices, Broadway musicals, and vaudeville acts. The film itself is an invaluable document of musical entertainment of the 1920s, and this book serves as a master class on the subject of film preservation. With more than 200 color and black-and-white images and an amazing mass of data on the film's production history, this book provides a model for primary research on the cinema.Summing Up: Essential. All levels.

The Conscience of Cinema has instantly become the authoritative work on influential Dutch documentary film director Joris Ivens (1898-1989). In a sense, Waugh (Concordia Univ., Montreal) has made the elevation of Ivens his life work. He conducted interviews with the director late in his life, developed an exhaustive historiographic knowledge of publications on him, and has been painstaking in conducting research on the director. Waugh's worship of Ivens seems questionable in places, but there is no doubt he makes the case for Ivens's contributions to the documentary form. Waugh's approach is interesting: rather than offering a personal biographical treatment, he focuses on Ivens's films in chronological order, weaving together information about the production process, evidence of the influence of each film, and deep textual analysis that includes aesthetic and political factors. Discussing not only completed works but also filmic attempts that were stalled due to political and economic factors, Waugh describes the ever-changing political limitations (and opportunities) that Ivens faced as he continued his craft. At some 780 pages, the book provides an all-encompassing narrative about, as Waugh writes in his introduction, an "artist who pushed documentary to the limits of conscience for more than six decades." This aptly illustrated book is a tour de force.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

In this brilliant book, Forster delineates "careerographries" of three stars of early cinema--one Dutch (Adrienne Solser), one French (Musidora), and one Canadian (Nell Shipman). Their career trajectories were remarkably similar: they began on the stage and in vaudeville, entering films in the 1910s; started their own production companies, writing, producing, directing (or at least co-directing), and acting in their own films in the 1920s; and were essentially out of films by the end of the silent era. All three were known for a particular kind of role. Solser, a hefty, middle-aged comedian, was known as "queen of the Jordaan" (a working class district in Amsterdam); her comic films left space for her to interact personally on stage. Musidora was identified with her villainous role--Irma Vep--in Louis Feuillade's serial Les Vampires, but in her own films she got to be the heroine. Shipman, the "gal from the Northwest," made adventure films that allowed her to do her own stunts and incorporate dogs and wild animals. Forster is painstaking in locating the women's careers in personal, theatrical, literary, and cinematic context, and she does especially well in reconstructing their lost films. An amazing book!Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.