Film Studies

How many words does it take to write a life (or actually half a life) of movie star Barbara Stanwyck? Admittedly, she had a long career – she started in a revue chorus in 1921 at the age of fourteen and played in her last episode of the television series The Colbys in 1987 at the age of eighty – but 1044 pages that take us only to 1940? As Liz Smith quipped in the Chicago Tribune, ‘She was a great actress, but not Winston Churchill.’

Ben McCann’s Ripping Open the Set begins with four epigraphs, observations of various kinds. They come from American figures – Frank Capra, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Nathanael West – and they express a range of notions, none of them particularly positive, about the place of design in cinema. McCann – senior lecturer in French at the University of Adelaide – then starts his introduction with another American voice: producer David O. Selznick sends a memo to his design colleagues during pre-production for Gone with the Wind (1939). This time, however, the observation has a different tone. Selznick canvasses, with some concern, the widespread belief that French films have ‘a quality of reality in photography, sets, and costumes’ that American movies lack. American films seem constructed – French sets looked lived-in.

Although he used screenwriters, Alfred Hitchcock was a model auteur and engineered his films meticulously. ‘Casting and performance, mise-en-scène, lighting, camera angle, construction of setting, and music must all be woven into the director’s “action” as he makes a scene,’ remarks Murray Pomerance in his study of Hitchcock’s American films as a reflection of the country he moved to in 1939 and became a citizen of in 1955.

As film critics go, Geoffrey O’Brien is a lover, not a fighter: unconcerned with starting quarrels or settling scores, he simply aims to share his pleasure in what he has seen. Perhaps his remarkably good temper stems from the fact that he is not a full-time critic, but an example of that nearly extinct species, the all-round man of letters. He is editor-in-chief of the Library Of America series, and oversaw the latest edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations; he has published six collections of poetry, along with books on pop music, hard-boiled fiction, and the history of Times Square.

Reflections upon Melbourne’s reputation as a world cultural capital often sideline film-making, but the relationship is long and fruitful. The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), filmed on the former Charterisville Estate in Heidelberg, is history’s first feature film. The first Australian entry in this series of global guides highlights the centrality of location to emotional spaces and film narrative. Melbourne-set films are defined by a ‘dispersed and piecemeal psycho-geography of the city’. The guide loosely groups forty-six films into six eras, providing snapshots of pivotal locations and scene-setting stills, from the dusty dystopian carnage of Mad Max (1979) to the subterranean blues of the brutal Romper Stomper (1992) opening sequence.

In recent years, the work of French philosopher Alain Badiou has been discussed with increasing regularity as part of an academic dialogue between cinema studies and philosophy that is often called ‘film-philosophy’. His various writings on cinema were for a long time scattered among many different sources, the majority untranslated. With its original 2010 French version and now this English translation, Cinema has finally changed all that. Containing thirty-one different pieces, all but five appearing in English for the first time, this important book offers a unique contemporary philosopher’s rich, varied, yet always coherent and evolving response to cinema spanning seven decades.