Learning on ScreenMedia Screen Roundup – December 2014-January 2015
Published: 3 March 2015The monthly roundup of film and television publications compiled by Simon Baker, Institute of Historical Research, & published here at the BUFVC by Linda Kaye.
Pre- and early cinema feature significantly in this month’s Roundup. David Jones, in Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern, explores erotic themes associated with the magic lantern shows and how these shows in turn influenced Gothic fiction. Tom Gunning also discusses magic lanterns and early cinema in Animating the Nineteenth Century: Bringing Pictures to Life (or Life to Pictures?), while Alice Maurice looks at how race has defined the cinematic apparatus since the earliest motion pictures, especially at times of technological transition in her book, The Cinema and Its Shadow. The cinematic representation of the city in British film from 1895 to 1914, featuring depictions of London, Glasgow, Dublin, and British colonial cities is explored in Cinquegrani’s Of Empire and the City: Remapping Early British Cinema. Magic lanterns and early cinema feature also in Ludwig Vogl-Bienek’s Screen Culture and the Social Question, covering political propaganda, the portrayal of slum life and poverty, the work of the Salvation Army and temperance organisations.
With only three months to go before the British general election it’s useful to highlight two articles on politics and television. Scholars on Air: Academics and the Broadcast Media in Britain examines the role of political scientists’ engagement with the mass media and what benefits they can expect from such an engagement. The article argues that their role is predominantly passive.
Sheryl Buckley looks at the television programme Decision British Communism which followed the British Communist Party during preparations for its 35th Congress in 1977, where it would debate an important change of rule. It also places the programme in the broader historical context of the party’s decline.
There are also two book on biopics. Alan Rosenthal looks at a range of biopics in From Chariots of Fire to The King’s Speech : Writing Biopics and Docudramas. While Minier in Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic covers such celebrities as Elizabeth I and II, Princess Diana, Shakespeare, Jane Austen and John Lennon.
And finally an article about an Israeli newsreel – the Carmel Newsreels – screened in cinemas from 1935 to 1970. The article examines the place of the newsreels in the Hebrew language media on the eve of the establishment of the state, its rivalry with newspapers and its celebration of the achievements of the Zionist project.
