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

Amongst the references in this month’s Roundup I’ll highlight two areas, politics and silent cinema.

Steven Fielding’s, A State of Play : British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It, explores how the British have imagined their politics. Mixing historical with political analysis the author includes, Yes, Minister, the films of George Formby, Steptoe and Son, and of course, The Thick of It. All of which leads naturally to Cardo’s, Celebrity Politics and Political Representation: The Case of George Galloway MP on Celebrity Big Brother.  Rebecca Beasley’s Russia in Britain, 1880-1940 : From Melodrama to Modernism includes a chapter entitled, Soviet films and British intelligence in the 1930s : the case of Kino Films and MI5 by James Smith. And adding to the Soviet flavour are two articles: Chomentowski’s , Un cinéma pour tous ! Politique des nationalités et cinéma en URSS à la fin des années 1930, which looks at Soviet nationalities policy and films at the time of the Great Terror; and Dumančić’s, The Cold War’s Cultural Ecosystem: Angry Young Men in British and Soviet Cinema, 1953–1968.

As for silent cinema, there is Jennifer Bean’s, Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space, which covers, serials in Tehran, D. W. Griffith, a history of the intertitle, early Japanese and Chinese cinema, as well as gender in silent film with the examples of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Tony Fletcher conducts A Kinematographic Journey through London (1907-8), and Dimitrios Latsis looks at nature and landscape in early American films from 1895-1910.

Media Screen Roundup (July 2014) IHR-BUFVC (192KB PDF)