In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

humanities 327 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 succeeded Applebaum as director of the OAC). The biography is based on extensive interviews with Applebaum (referred to as >Louis= throughout the book) during the last year of his life, and also with his family members, friends, and colleagues. Pitman has much insight into Applebaum=s work as an administrator, but is less savvy about his work as a creative artist and has little or no detailed knowledge of his technical skills as a musician. The author was obviously loath to omit any of his research, for what did not get used in the body of the text was saved for filling out ninety pages of bloated endnotes. The book has an index (in ridiculously small six-point font) but no discography or works list. While Pitman obviously respects and admires Applebaum, he also deals with his subject=s inadequacies and shortcomings fully and fairly. Applebaum was, in the view of his son David, >a terrible businessman,= and it is difficult to argue with that assessment. Group Four Productions, a private film company that Applebaum founded in 1961, was singularly inept in its choice of projects and went bankrupt by the end of the decade. He was later involved with a group called the Living Arts Management Board (LAMB for short), which was quickly led to the slaughter after launching the short-lived cultural pay-TV station C-Channel in 1983. Even the Applebaum-Hébert Report was a fiasco: its 101 recommendations were ignored for political reasons that Pitman outlines in detail. But Applebaum=s successes and achievements greatly outweigh these failures. Pitman=s biography, though more workmanlike than inspired, is a welcome tribute to a man who was a vital force in Canada=s cultural life in the second half of the twentiethth century. (ROBIN ELLIOTT) Frank Burke and Marguerite Waller, editors. Federico Fellini. Contemporary Perspectives University of Toronto Press. xxxii, 240. $65.00, $24.95 The publication of this exciting new volume of essays constitutes a significant contribution to film studies in general and to Fellini studies in particular. The editors, Frank Burke and Marguerite Waller, both eminent professors of film studies and noted North American authorities on Fellini, had marked new directions in this field with their own research. Burke=s 1989 essay >Realism/Representation/Signification= was pivotal in initiating the discussion of Fellini and postmodernity; Waller=s 1990 essay on La dolce vita similarly established new ground in Fellini criticism in its study of this film=s challenges to >the regime of the written word and its attendant historiographies, notions of identity, and , inevitably, sexualities.= While both these articles are reprinted in this collection, the other nine essays have been expressly solicited for this project, which aims to update the importance of Federico Fellini by >bringing his work into relation with recent critical methodologies: semiotic/poststructuralist, psychoanalytical, 328 letters in canada 2002 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 feminist,and deconstructionist.= The goal of revisiting the Fellini opus from contemporary perspectives is a concerted effort on the part of the editors to counteract prevailing assumptions of self-indulgence and lack of political value in Fellini=s films. The essays are chosen, the editors note, to highlight Fellini=s evolving self-reflexivity and the self-critical, analytical dimension of his work; the organization of the volume according to theoretical issues situates Fellini in the >broader context of postwar signifying strategies.= As the volume does not represent the proceedings of a specific conference on Fellini, the editors acknowledge the importance of the intergenerational critical debate fostered by three important events: the annual Purdue Conference on Romance Languages, Literatures and Film, the annual conference of the American Association of Italian Studies (AAIS), and the 1995 Indiana University conference >European Cinemas, European Societies 1895B1995.= The individual essays will appeal to a multiplicity of interests: Helen Stoddard analyses the performative mode of the circus in I clowns; William Van Watson provides a reading of Fellini=s corpus as a comprehensive challenge to the normative authority of Lacanian subject construction; Virginia Picchietti offers a vision of Fellini as gender theorist; Christopher Sharrett studies...

pdf

Share