Recent Books in Film History

Reflecting the broad range of new scholarship in the history of cinema, the books included in this section have been selected by the editorial staff of Film History. The summaries have been provided by the authors.

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Bruce Bennett, Cycling and Cinema (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2019).

This is the first study of the history of the bicycle in cinema, from the late nineteenth century through to the present postcinematic moment. Cycling and Cinema examines the simultaneous emergence of these technologies—both technologies of movement that promise to transport the user—as exemplars of industrial modernity’s preoccupation with mobility and speed. The book then provides an overview of the history of representations of the bicycle and cycling, exploring the changing meanings associated with this ubiquitous machine. This is underpinned by close analysis of a wide selection of films from around the world, ranging from silent slapstick comedies, neorealist dramas, documentaries, and public information films to Hollywood blockbusters and avant-garde film. The volume concludes with a discussion of the ways digital screen technology is increasingly incorporated into the practice of cycling, subtly altering both the experience and the social and cultural significance of riding a bike.

A framegrab from the first film screened at the “first” film screening in Paris in 1895

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Richard Butsch, Screen Culture: A Global History (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019).

This historical synthesis integrates an enormous breadth of social, political, and media history research to offer a comprehensive examination of screen media and culture through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century as it has developed globally. It follows developments in film, television, and digital media on five continents and focuses primarily on audience practices, while placing them in the context of media industries, texts, and national and global histories.

Following the progression from film to television to digital media through the century, Screen Culture traces media developments in the US, Britain, France, Egypt, Nigeria and West Africa, India, and China. Also considered are the national contexts of rural/urban, class, gender, and ethnic differences in media access and audience practices. Richard Butsch places these national stories within the framework of colonization, cultural hegemony, and globalization, and compares their development and differences in terms of poverty, rural isolation, and audience responses to one internationally popular screen genre, serial melodrama. The study thus transforms national stories into an integrated, century-long global media history that will enable media scholars to see familiar stories in a larger context and shed new light on the parts as well as the whole. A clear writing style makes this complexity accessible to students and educated laypersons as well as scholars.

Image taken from Screen Cultures: A Global History

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James Leo Cahill, Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

French filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s oeuvre has remained a minor concern for cinema history, despite a cinematic bestiary of two hundred research and documentary films. Yet the subjects explored in his films—the marvels and terrors of animal life and nonhuman worlds, the possibilities and limitations of cinematic perception, the ethics of documentation, as well as...