film
The first notable aspect of Jordan Brower’s intensely researched book is that it mentions Theodore Adorno only twice, in passing, and Max Horkheimer not at all (poor Max). We get it by now: the culture industry qua oligarchy of the Hollywood studio system qua corporate personhood was propaganda, and scholars need to get on with more detailed work. As I write, the emergent rallying cry of “Stop the Oligarchy” analogizes more to the Gilded Age than to Classical Hollywood. Yet today’s anti-oligarchy sentiment is often directed at Silicon Valley tycoons, who have consumed much of Hollywood itself through streaming services, wrought a new kind of culture industry by commodifying our very attention beyond ideological propaganda, and are now trying to deaccession government itself. Brower’s account of the studio system provides an important analysis of how such oligarchical sausage once got made at the nexus of entertainment, art, and anti-trust law by charting how literary authors, the publishing industry, and classical studios adapted to each other, in every sense, for better or worse.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s midcentury psychological fantasy Black Narcissus (1947) is enjoying something of a resurgence, available to be rewatched and taught more widely than ever before. For much of the 70-plus years since its release, the movie was difficult to find except as written descriptions, movie stills or poster art (fig. 1).
Dear Sarah, I’m in the foothills of holiday territory as I write this, so forgive (or at least understand) this opening bout of sentimentality. However, there’s a formal point here, if not a critical one, so I take some comfort in the fact that this is periphrasis with a purpose.
As I watched Marie Menken’s short film, Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945)—screened as part of an exhibit at the Noguchi Museum earlier this year—I found myself thinking about Gertrude Stein. Specifically, I recalled the letter Stein wrote to Samuel Steward in 1940, thanking him for a gift he had sent her and Alice B. Toklas: a countertop stand mixer known as the Sunbeam Mix Master 500.
Though the term cinephilia simply means “love of cinema,” historically it has been used to mark a love of cinema with a difference.
The success of his film Calcutta 71 (1972), remarked director Mrinal Sen, was not due to “cinematic excellence,” but “more because of the time in which it was made and released.”[1] Sen was right. Calcutta 71 did not reap profits in the box office. In this it was much like the two other films that were part of Sen’s Calcutta trilogy, Interview (1971) and Padatik [The guerilla fighter] (1973).
Coming of age in the 1960s in newly independent Senegal, documentarist Samba Félix Ndiaye participated in a ciné-club at the French Cultural Center in Dakar with a group of friends that included fellow future filmmakers Ben Diogaye Beye, Mahama Traoré, and Djibril Diop Mambety.
Early in Samuel Shimon’s first-person autobiographical novel An Iraqi in Paris (‘Irāqī fī Bāris), the young author-narrator has left his hometown of Habbaniya, Iraq on the eve of Saddam Hussein’s military takeover of the country. A child pushcart vendor now in his early twenties, Shmuel harbors a rags-to-riches dream of traveling to the US and making it big as a Hollywood director. While he hails from a poor Assyrian Christian family, he is detained and tortured in Damascus, due in part to his Jewish name, on suspicion of being a Zionist spy.
Cinephilia is generally known as the feverish love of cinema.[1] In Hong Kong during the 1960s, such affection towards cinema was entangled with the complex sensation and sentiments revolving around Chinese nationalism (“Cultural China”), the British colonial rule and locality during the contesting ideologies in the Cultural Cold War and demonstrated in wide ranging practices.
Hong Kong has enjoyed a long film history, which dates back to as early as the invention of film. Recent scholarship has begun to pay attention to the early screen culture of Hong Kong cinema. These findings paved the way for exploring the cinephilic culture in Hong Kong that has taken shape since the mid-1920s, when local critics and movie lovers began to group themselves to form cine clubs and unions and published film magazines. Yinguang (銀光) was