In Jane M. Gaines newest book, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?, she rediscovers the previously overlooked women of the silent era that were instrumental in the earliest […]
Category: film
Contemporary Film Directors Series: Celebrating 15 Years of Scholarship on Filmmakers From Around the World
“Our aim has been to publish conceptually ambitious, risk-taking work that challenges familiar models for understanding film authorship.”–Justus Nieland, CFD series editor Since the publication of an illuminating cross-cultural dialogue […]
Happy Birthday Steven Soderbergh
Born on January 14, 1963, in Atlanta, Steven Soderbergh found filmmaking in his teens. His Hollywood apprenticeship included work as a cue card holder and a director of concert films. In […]
Happy National Spaghetti Day
“There’s a reason that this genre film never worked. It must be ethnic to the core—you must smell the spaghetti. That’s what brought the magic to the novel—it was written […]
Happy Birthday Frank Sinatra
One hundred-and-one years ago, Francis Albert Sinatra entered the world in Hoboken, New Jersey. He proceeded to live one of the more completely lived lives this side of Casanova. Though foiled […]
Climbing Twin Peaks, plus David Lynch cooks quinoa
An excerpt from Justin Nieland‘s once-again-timely book David Lynch. Laura Palmer—passive, suffering, already victimized—is one kind of a melodramatic myth, and Twin Peaks, both the series and the fictional town, is Lynch’s […]
Backlist Bop: Women in film
Widely regarded as one of the most innovative and passionate filmmakers working in France today, Claire Denis has continued to make beautiful and challenging films since the 1988 release of […]
Backlist Bop: Only Pam Grier can save us
This lively study unpacks the intersecting racial, sexual, and gender politics underlying the representations of racialized bodies, masculinities, and femininities in early 1970s black action films, with particular focus on […]
On the classic opening scene of D.O.A.
Excerpted from the new book The Red and the Black: American Film Noir in the 1950s, by Robert Miklitsch D.O.A. begins at night with a tilt-down shot from the top […]
Paul Thomas Anderson and the pits of ourselves
Excerpted from the book Paul Thomas Anderson, by George Toles. The film discussed is There Will Be Blood. Anderson briefly confuses us about which man has been struck down and about […]
There will be analysis. . . on George Toles and Paul Thomas Anderson
During winter break, the Los Angeles Review of Books covered our new book on Paul Thomas Anderson by film scholar George Toles, himself a figure of distinction in the moviemaking dream […]
Boo Man Group
In honor of Halloween, we have slunk into the UIP vault of horror to dig up books both Profound and Mysterious to get you in the mood for our most […]