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

Before Simon gives his take on a substantial list, I’ll just squeeze in my own recommendation as journalism on the box comes under a forensic light, Steven Barnett’s The Rise and Fall of Television Journalism: Just Wires and Lights in a Box?

A bit of a bumper issue this month.

Highlights include two special issues: Interventions:  International Journal of Postcolonial Studies has an issue entitled Cinemas of Displacement and Destitution, while Diplomatic History has a special feature – ‘Turning the lens on film and foreign relations’ – on the documentary series, Have You Heard from Johannesburg? which covered the 45 year struggle against apartheid.

There is also a bit of a theme on the Cold War with four books on various aspects of the conflict, John Sbardellati’s J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies; Theodore Hughes’s  Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea; Tony Perucci’s Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance and Rosemary Stott’s Crossing the Wall: the Western Feature Film Import in East Germany.

Do you remember “I agree with Nick”? If a week is a long time in politics, then 2 years must be a lifetime for the Coalition. You can see how it all started in a discussion on the first British television election debate in Lights, Camera, Election: Celebrity, Performance and the 2010 UK General Election Leadership Debates by Philip Drake and Michael Higgins.

And perhaps the award for most intriguing title goes to the chapter entitled, ‘ ‘‘Far-flung” neo-Victorianism: Hong Kong and Jackie Chan’s neo-Victorian films’ in Elizabeth Ho’s book Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire.

Media Screen Roundup (October 2012) IHR-BUFVC