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The 10 Best Film-Studies Books of 2013

Several major university presses such as Duke, Texas, California, and Indiana continue to set the benchmark for scholarly film studies.

The 10 Best Film-Studies Books of 2013

Several major university presses such as Duke, Texas, California, and Indiana continue to set the benchmark for scholarly film studies. However, none of the following books are for academics only, since their authors have clearly written them with a larger audience in mind—an encouraging trend that understands intelligent writing need not be impossible to decipher. Moreover, each of the following books isn’t just a stellar examination of a given director, genre, or cinematic trend, but an advancement of thought within the field, whether auteur theory, queer studies, documentary, or film history, and reaches beyond the bounds of the university setting by articulating how these films, both old and new, are still relevant and, even, essential to becoming fully cognizant of the daily constraints that must be undertaken in a media-driven, convergence culture.


10. Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood

Mark Gallagher’s insightful discussion of Steven Soderbergh’s canon reveals as much about shifting exhibition landscapes as it does about the auteur himself. Not that the two are unrelated, which is precisely Gallagher’s point, as he deftly utilizes numerous Soderbergh films and their reception to explain how critical discourse, particularly that which can only view cinema through an auteurist lens, is simply behind the times. Included is a lengthy interview with Soderbergh about such matters, which serves as a perfect compliment to his state-of-cinema address at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival.


9. Queer Bergman: Sexuality, Gender, and European Art Cinema

Utilizing a Freudian framework, Daniel Humphrey sets as his task the lensing of Ingmar Bergman’s oeuvre through queer theory, and the result isn’t simply a series of close readings which reveal Bergman’s “queer work,” but a deeper investigation into how hagiographic cinephilia has prevented many canonical films and filmmakers from receiving a proper evaluation. Instead of continually lauding the usual suspects, Humphrey calls for more complex approaches to individual films in asking how its components reflect the larger aims of a given filmmaker. Moreover, Humphrey’s analysis primarily focuses on less-discussed Bergman films, such as 1944’s Torment and 1968’s Shame, which is an added delight.

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8. The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television

Maria San Filippo shirks the trouble that often plagues survey-driven monographs by finding precise and acute similarities between the most seemingly disparate films and TV shows, even discussing Louise Brooks and Tila Tequila in the same sentence! Her deft pen is not merely quick, however, as the case studies contained here are long on theory and narrative comprehension (especially a chapter on Wedding Crashers which ranks with my favorite critical case studies of the year). If the book lacks discussion of formal traits within its given objects of study, those shortcomings are easily dismissed with the high level of textual analysis on display.


7. Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing

Who knew the opening credits of Friday the 13th were so meaningful? Caitlin Benson-Allott’s exquisitely argued and researched work here explains how studies in cinematic spectatorship have consistently neglected the format in which films are shown. Moreover, she’s selected films which themselves deal with the phasing of one technological format into another. In doing so, Benson-Allott provides case studies that range from Romero’s Dead films to Gore Verbinski’s The Ring to explain her case. An early discussion of “planned obsolescence” and its relation to Jack Valenti and the MPAA is daring, but even more provocative is a chapter on peer-to-peer downloading, which includes discussions of BitTorrent sites as KaraGara and the Pirate Bay.


6. Exporting Perilous Pauline: Pearl White and the Serial Film Craze

The global influence of Pearl White on both silent cinema femme nouvelle blossoming at the end of the 1910s is the subject of Marina Dahlquist’s diverse and historically rapturous edited collection, which globetrots in its articulation of the wide-ranging impacts of American cinema as early as a century ago (the book’s primary film of study, The Perils of Pauline, was released in 1914). Perhaps most refreshing is that the essays compiled here vacillate between history and theory, providing each frequently enough to satisfy those in both camps. That’s the mark of a significant collection and Dahlquist threads the individual pieces here to offer a thrilling whole.

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5. The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema

Speaking of thrilling, Daisuke Miyao approaches the use of lighting in early Japanese cinema with the attitude of an academic-cum-pulp novelist, as actor Hayashi Chojiro’s ascent to stardom and a subsequent attack which led to his disfigurement, and its significance to a rift between studios Shochiku and Toho, is explained to scintillating effect. However, Miyao never lets the potentially lurid nature of his book get the best of him, since he meticulously frames his discussion of cinematic lighting around the off-screen events involving Chojiro, and negotiates his clear passion for the subject matter throughout. For anyone concerned with the state of film history as practice, The Aesthetics of Shadow is an exemplar.


4. Psycho-Sexual: Male Desire in Hitchcock, De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin

David Greven sets out by asking whether Hitchcock’s films are of a misogynist order or if they critique characters exhibiting misogynist traits. Greven primarily sides with the latter, explaining how Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, and William Friedkin seized on Hitchcock’s interest in homosocial groups and how male-oriented behaviors bred and affected male/female relationships. The result is a must-read for anyone interested in these directors, certainly, but also anyone interested in larger questions of how cultural influence and history can be understood as a living organism, mutable to the individuals who take up a particular call to social arms.


3. Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory, and the Performance of Violence

The best film of 2013, The Act of Killing, receives an edited collection discussing not only the film itself, but 20 essays of varying length addressing numerous documentaries and their approach to reenactment, trauma, and violence on film. That Joshua Oppenheimer is one of the editors only further solidifies this collection’s immediacy, which doubles as both a beginning and advanced text for any reader wishing to grapple with the ways in which documentary films refuse to let such catastrophic events be forgotten. Jean-Luc Godard once said that “forgetting extermination is part of extermination.” These essays, much like the documentaries discussed, are insistent upon ensuring such memory lapses never occur.

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2. American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn

Don’t let the rather bland title fool you. Scott MacDonald’s essential and expansive examination of Boston as an unheralded locus for documentary filmmaking not only provides in-depth discussions on the entire oeuvre of over half a dozen filmmakers, but positions them historically and in relation to once another, explaining the films of Robert Gardner with inextricable relation to Lorna and John Marshall. Even more surprising (and ultimately worthwhile) is MacDonald’s omission of Fredrick Wiseman and Errol Morris from expansive discussion, even though both filmmakers reside in Cambridge. True to his aims, MacDonald’s endeavor to detail the ethnographic filmmakers of the Boston area is the sort of inestimable addition to the film-studies canon, revealing the mesmerizing work of several filmmakers who have remained at the periphery of study and significance for far too long.


1. Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics

Yuriko Furuhata hasn’t merely proffered a history of the Japanese avant-garde here; she’s re-conceptualized the very nature of Japanese documentary and avant-garde practices over roughly a two-decade span to reveal early examples of converging media cultures. Discussing not just the films of Toshio Matsumoto and Nagisa Oshima, but each of their active political roles in both activism and writing theory, the scope of insights attained by Furuhata has the feeling of a critical work that cannot be contained by its subject matter, since its insistence that research must be conducted from a materialist, evidentiary basis is not just an academic plea, but an ethical one, meant to prevent further falsified claims from being accepted as fact. Cinema may not have always been postmodern, but Furuhata’s book is sure to remain a staple in film-studies courses for years to come.

Clayton Dillard

Clayton Dillard is a lecturer in cinema at San Francisco State University.

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