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104Rocky Mountain Review moral, philosophical, affective, and spiritual impulses of body and mind. (158) Throughout this work, as in each of the above quotations, important points are phrased in language so abstract and specialized that the middle class Lebowitz so consistently attacks will (unfortunately) never understand what she is talking about. JAMES R. SCRIMGEOUR Western Connecticut State University PETER LEHMAN, ed. Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1990. 423 p. Peter Lehman has brought together twenty film essays, nine under the category of "formal analysis," ten categorized as "cultural analysis," and his own conclusion and reading of a John Ford film, "Texas 1968/America 1956: The Searchers." Eighteen ofthe essays are new, while Edward Branigan's "The Space of Equinox Flower" and Lehman's Searchers essay are expansions of previously published articles. Three-fourths ofthe essays are illustrated, with Mary Beth Haralovich's "All that Heaven Allows: Color, Narrative Space, and Melodrama," benefiting from sixteen excellent color frames. It is well indexed by name, film, and subject. Bibliographic data at the end of each essay, particularly in the cultural analysis section, is most valuable, usually including works cited, a bibliography, and the theoretical texts on whose assumptions the analysis rests. Most ofthe authors are well known film theory practitioners: Peter Brunette, Edward Branigan, Noel Carroll, Patricia Mellencamp, Lucy Fischer, Diane Waldman, and Douglas Gomery, to name but a few. It is difficult and probably meaningless to find a unifying thread which simplifies categorizing this anthology. Since the point of the text is to bring New Critical Theory to bear on individual films, the approaches vary as widely as do the various theoretical and critical positions which have evolved in the past three decades to place film studies at the cutting edge of contemporary critical discourse. From the narration theory in William Luhr's excellent analysis of The Maltese Falcon, to Lucy Fischer's feminist reading ofDesperately Seeking Susan, to Patricia Mellencamp's exemplary cultural analysis of GoZd Diggers of 1933 (using Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Freud on sexual aberrations, Mulvey's Hitchcockian approach, as well as Lacanian rereadings of Freud), these critical essays bear testimony that the theoretical debate of the past 25 years has been a worthwhile enterprise. Not all ofthe essays foreground theoretical foundations as does Mellencamp, and some are general enough to please readers hostile to theory. Delores Burdick's reading of Persona (formal analysis) is valuable to the student film reader baffled by Bergman's poetic text. Her reading takes the reader through the film scene by scene to conclude that Persona is "a mirror, not a window; it will always reveal my own face to me even as I try to see through it" (35). Russell Merritt's "D. W. Griffith's The Birth ofa Nation: Going After Little Book Reviews105 Sister" (cultural analysis) focuses on two characters, Gus and Little Sister. Merritt challenges past melodramatic readings of the "rape" sequence and examines the ambiguous character of Gus with a close reading that casts a new perspective (Gus was killed by the Klan for a rape he did not commit) on a film toward which some film history teachers may have grown jaded through overexposure. Close Readings is directed toward the general rather than the specialized reader offilm theory and criticism in that the authors are concerned with the film text rather than theoretical debate. Robert Eberwein in "The Master Text of Blow-Up" displaces the conventional "Oedipal master text" reading of the film with a Lacanian/Freudian reading which retains Antonioni's film as the master text. Eberwein carefully defines and explains terms so that anyone familiar with the film but fuzzy on Lacan will benefit immensely from this insightful analysis of an enigmatic masterpiece. Similarly, Mike Budd in "The Cabinet ofDoctor Caligari: Production, Reception, History" grounds the reader in extended definitions of "classical Hollywood cinema" and expressionism as an artistic movement as well as a cultural commodity. Branigan's discussion of Equinox Flower is the most rigorous of the formalist essays and one of the few films (Rossellini's Voyage to Italy being the other) among the twenty discussed not readily accessible to the average...

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