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

Here be dragons! Sorry I could not resist opening this month’s Roundup with a reference to Thomas Honegger’s article on screen dragons in Bauer’s Fact and Fiction : From the Middle Ages to Modern Times.

Sadly, the rest of the Roundup is dominated by war. Lawrence Napper’s The Great War in Popular British Cinema of the 1920s: Before Journey’s End is complemented by Ritzenhoff’s Humor, Entertainment, and Popular Culture during World War I which also has a chapter by Napper on Alf’s Button (1920), as well as Hollywood’s view of the war. A theme taken up in Broderick’s Real War vs. Reel War : Veterans, Hollywood, and WWII. The Soviet view of the Great War is examined by Sumpf in War Disabled on Screen: Remembering and Forgetting the Great War in the Russian and Soviet Cinema, 1914–1940.

Finally two references look at the use of surveillance in the cinema. Marta Usiekniewicz’s More Than Meets the (Camera) Eye: Detective Fiction in Times of CCTV appears in Crime Scenes: Modern Crime Fiction in an International Context. While Garrett Stewart, in Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance, looks at surveillance in a range of films including M, Rear Window, The Conversation and The Bourne Legacy.

Media Screen Roundup (Sep 2015) IHR-BUFVC (Pdf)