British Universities Film & Video Council

moving image and sound, knowledge and access

Media Screen Roundup: December 2015 – January 2016

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.

To celebrate the 500th anniversary of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia it’s perhaps fitting that this month’s double issue of Media Screen Roundup features adaptations of utopian literature. Blaims’ Mediated Utopias: From literature to cinema includes Things to Come (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), film adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Lord of the Flies, and television adaptations of Brave New World (the later examples, more dystopian than utopian).

The journal Celebrity Studies has a special issue entitled The ‘blond issue’ examining blond stardom in film and within national contexts: Phullar on the American Veronica Lake and her peekaboo hairstyle; Kourelou on the Greek actress Melina Mercouri; Gmiterková on the Czech 1930s and 40s star Jiřina Štěpničková; and Vincendeau on Brigitte Bardot. Masculinity gets a brief look in with Wright on, “The all-American golden boy”, Robert Redford.

And from blond to Bond (!) Alec Mills, cameraman and director of photography, tells the inside story of his twenty years of filming cinema’s most famous secret agent in Shooting 007. Timo Muller examines the post-colonial in The Bonds of Empire: (Post)Imperial Negotiations in the 007 Film Series as part of Buchenau’s Post-Empire Imaginaries?: Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires.

There are also two newsreel articles. Federico Caprotti looks at The Abyssinian War (1935–1936) in Newsreels and Documentaries in Fascist Italy. While Leoanrdo Ciacci examines the role of newsreels in the modernization of cities in Urbanism and Dictatorship: A European Perspective by Harold Bodenschatz et al.

Media Screen Roundup (Dec 2015 Jan 2016) IHR-BUFVC (PDF)

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