Recent Publications
Richard Abel’s Americanizing the Movies and "Movie-Mad" Audiences, 1910-1914 is an engaging, deeply researched study providing the richest and most nuanced picture we have to date of cinema--both movies and movie-going--in the early 1910s. At the same time, it makes clear the profound relationship between early cinema and the construction of a national identity in this important transitional period in the United States. Richard Abel looks closely at sensational melodramas, including westerns (cowboy, cowboy-girl, and Indian pictures), Civil War films (especially girl-spy films), detective films, and animal pictures--all popular genres of the day that have received little critical attention. He simultaneously analyzes film distribution and exhibition practices in order to reconstruct a context for understanding movie going at a time when American cities were coming to grips with new groups of immigrants and women working outside the home. Drawing from a wealth of research in archive prints, the trade press, fan magazines, newspaper advertising, reviews, and syndicated columns--the latter of which highlight the importance of the emerging star system--Abel sheds new light on the history of the film industry, on working-class and immigrant culture at the turn of the century, and on the process of imaging a national community.
  Bambi Haggins new book, Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post Soul America (Rutgers UP), will be on the shelves no later than February 2007. Also, her article HBO Comedy: At Home on the Cutting Edge with Amanda D. Lotz in The Essential HBO Reader, G. Edgerton and JP Jones, eds. is forthcoming (University of Kentucky Press, 2007).
It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan American Odyssey by Catherine Benamou Welles' film has been variously described as a work of genius, a pretentious wreck, a crucially important film, and a victim of its director's ego, among other things, “It's All True,” shot in Mexico and Brazil between 1941 and 1942, is the legendary movie that Orson Welles never got to finish. In this book, the most comprehensive and authoritative assessment of “It's All True” available, Catherine Benamou synthesizes a wealth of new and little-known source material gathered on two continents, including interviews with key participants, to present a compelling original view of the film and its historical significance. Her book challenges much received wisdom about Orson Welles and illuminates the unique place he occupies in American culture, broadly defined.
Ira Konigsberg, Professor Emeritus of Film and former director of the Film/Video program (now the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures), is editing a new journal called Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind. The journal will be interdisciplinary in nature, including but going beyond psychoanalysis and exploring the ways in which recent advancements in other fields--such as neuroscience, cognitive psychology, genetics, and evolution--help us understand film and the ways in which film itself opens up explorations of the mind. The journal will also be responsive to essays on any of the visual arts and any of the new technologies for the motion picture. The intents of the journal are several: to explore these subjects, get a dialogue going between people in the sciences and the humanities, and to make the study of film part of today's exciting intellectual developments. The publisher will be Berghahn Journals, a press with offices in Oxford and New York responsible for a number of distinguished journals from around the world (Projections will be international). At this point the plan is for two publications each year. The first issue will appear this summer and includes essays by Torben Grodal. Norman Holland, and Gilbert Rose. Professor Konigsberg would be happy to discuss the journal with members of the Department.