The monthly roundup of film and television publications compiled by Simon Baker, Institute of Historical Research, & published here at the BUFVC by Linda Kaye.

A slimmer issue of Roundup than usual but with just as wide a variety of references. With the re-launch of the TV series The X-Files, there is Trevor McCrisken’s The Housewife, the Vigilante and the Cigarette-Smoking Man: The CIA and Television, 1975–2001 which looks at the characterization of the CIA in the series, Scarecrow and Mrs King, The Equalizer and of course the cigarette-smoking man in The X-Files.

Geography helps with reading of Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film, Contagion in Dixon and Jones’ The Tactile Topologies of Contagion. And continuing the theme of geography and travel, there is Dominique Brégent-Heald’s article, All Aboard! Travel Films, Railroads, and the North American West, 1897–1910. This article looks at how the film and tourism industries collaborated both directly and indirectly to shape representations of North America’s western landscape and its people looking especially at the Canadian Pacific Railway Company and the Northern Pacific Railway.

Finally, the legal profession is observed in Alison Connor’s article, The Lawyer Who Haunts Us: Yin Zhaoshi and the Bright Day, which looks at the 1948 Chinese film. One of the few Chinese films where a lawyer is given the central role and his eloquent arguments to a packed courtroom mark the high point of the film.

Media Screen Roundup (Apr 2015) IHR-BUFVC (PDF 138KB)