Project MUSE®: Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1971) through current issueLatest Articles: Film & History: An Interdisciplinary JournalTWOProject MUSE®Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal1548-99220360-3695Latest articles in Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Evolution of the Western: The American Frontier in Film and Television by Martin Kich (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976825
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It’s a daunting task to try to set out the entire history of the Western, from its roots in popular cheap dime novels and pulp fiction, through the B-movies and serials of the 1920s and 1930s, and into the mid-century “adult western” classics of directors John Ford and Howard Hawks, and finally into an alleged age of fundamental revisionism. A tremendous amount of work has gone into the project.The result in The Evolution of the Western: The American Frontier in Film and Television, however, is a large and physically awkward academic book that reads mostly like an encyclopedia. Indeed, 80 per cent of this large book is an encyclopedia, a list of important films and television series in alphabetical order, with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallThe Evolution of the Western: The American Frontier in Film and Television by Martin Kich (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Evolution of the Western: The American Frontier in Film and Television by Martin Kich (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®99812026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Refocus: The Historical Films of Ernst Lubitsch ed. by David John Boyd (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976826
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Ernst Lubitsch is often unfairly pigeonholed by scholars as a craftsman of light, sophisticated comedies. Most books on Lubitsch have either ignored or, at the very least, diminished the importance of his silent costume dramas and grotesques. Scholars tend to examine these works to either provide context for the silent era of Lubitsch’s career or to define how they relate to the ‘Lubitsch Touch’. Yes, the ‘Lubitsch Touch’ has become such a dominant framework for examining Ernst Lubitsch films that few other frameworks, aside from those engaging his transnational identity, have been fully considered.This collection of essays, titled Refocus: The Historical Films of Ernst Lubitsch, edited by David John Boyd, and part
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallRefocus: The Historical Films of Ernst Lubitsch ed. by David John Boyd (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USRefocus: The Historical Films of Ernst Lubitsch ed. by David John Boyd (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®120902026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11The Naughty Bits. What The Censors Wouldn’t Let You See in Hollywood’s Most Famous Movies by Nat Segaloff (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976827
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With Joe Breen installed at the Production Code Administration (PCA) in Spring 1934, the casual enforcement of the moral code of standards for moving pictures produced in the United States that had been operative since 1930 ended. From the first of July, a rigorous application of the existing Production Code would apply, following the productions of all eight major film studios (and a few smaller ones) from a film’s initial screenplay right through to the release prints shown in theatres, which would now have to bear a numbered seal that testified to both their adherence to the Code and their approval by the PCA. This major shift in the oversight of the American film industry, until the Code and its seal were
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallThe Naughty Bits. What The Censors Wouldn’t Let You See in Hollywood’s Most Famous Movies by Nat Segaloff (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Naughty Bits. What The Censors Wouldn’t Let You See in Hollywood’s Most Famous Movies by Nat Segaloff (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®84572026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11The Human Shutter. Photographs, Stereoscopic Depth, and Moving Images by Robert L. Bowen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976828
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Is Robert L. Bowen’s book The Human Shutter a volume of photographic history, with its detailed disquisitions on the work of Antoine Claudet and John Herschel and their work at the beginnings of image capture? Or is it a book on stereoscopic vision and reproduction, with its explicit analysis of human binocular rivalry and 19th-century stereo imagery? Or is it a book on avant-garde vision with its descriptions of the obsessive viewers of Alfons Schilling and the films of Ken Jacobs? A book about perception? Time? Digital media? Artificial intelligence? A positive answer could be given to all of these questions, and several others, as the pages of this fascinating and provocative book turn through its twelve
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallThe Human Shutter. Photographs, Stereoscopic Depth, and Moving Images by Robert L. Bowen (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Human Shutter. Photographs, Stereoscopic Depth, and Moving Images by Robert L. Bowen (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®78932026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11For No Reason at All: The Changing Narrative of the First World War by Jeffrey A. Hinkleman (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976829
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For all the interest the Second World War has garnered on movie screens, the so-called “Great War” has effectively been displaced for the last century. Yet, in just the past six years, three major releases from three prominent directors have reclaimed narratives of the First World War. Those films — Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), Sam Mendes’ 1917 (2019), and Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) have pushed the conflict back into the forefront of critical conversations about the supposed purpose and rhetoric of the war film.Jeffrey A. Hinkleman’s For No Reason at All: The Changing Narrative of the First World War traces the narrative evolution of First World War films and the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallFor No Reason at All: The Changing Narrative of the First World War by Jeffrey A. Hinkleman (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USFor No Reason at All: The Changing Narrative of the First World War by Jeffrey A. Hinkleman (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®104692026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Visions and Victims: Art Melodrama in the Films of Carl Th. Dreyer by Amanda Doxtater (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976830
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Is the history of innovation necessarily an endless cycle of rejecting the past in favor of the new, or is there an underlying continuity in the relationship of the past to the present and future? The pioneering Danish film auteur Carl Theodor Dreyer is one of the best-known directors from Denmark. Still, his cinematic legacy has long been viewed as fundamentally divergent from the broader current of early Danish cinema history, in particular the globally successful silent melodramas made by Nordisk Films Company between 1910 and 1926. Like many other artistically ambitious actors and directors in the silent era, such as his countrywoman Asta Nielsen, Dreyer was deeply invested in exploring the artistic potential
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallVisions and Victims: Art Melodrama in the Films of Carl Th. Dreyer by Amanda Doxtater (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USVisions and Victims: Art Melodrama in the Films of Carl Th. Dreyer by Amanda Doxtater (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®119632026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Fashioning James Bond: Costume, Gender and Identity in the World of 007 by Llewella Chapman (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976831
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In Fashioning James Bond, Llewella Chapman undertakes an ambitious journey through the sartorial landscape of the James Bond film franchise, revealing the intricate interplay between fashion, character, and cultural representation. The author deftly fills a significant vacuum in academic scholarship, recognizing the absence of literature dedicated to male costume design in British cinema, sharply contrasting with available works on Hollywood that prioritize female wardrobes. This research provides an analysis of the costumes worn by James Bond, examining the varied characters populating his universe, and also weaves together themes of agency, labor, and costume through empirically oriented research methods, ranging
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallFashioning James Bond: Costume, Gender and Identity in the World of 007 by Llewella Chapman (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USFashioning James Bond: Costume, Gender and Identity in the World of 007 by Llewella Chapman (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®104242026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Playing the Percentages: How Film Distribution Made the Hollywood Studio System by Derek Long (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976832
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Distribution has long escaped the sustained attention of film historians, and for good reason. Unlike film production, distribution does not leave behind an object to study, to marvel at how it was made and why. And, unlike film exhibition, distribution does not have a corresponding physical imprint, ones that, in some cases, survive to this day, allowing us to imagine just what it was like to see a movie in 1920 by immersing ourselves in the spaces where films were screened.Instead, the distribution, or, as some might put it, the circulation of films has proven so difficult to research and write about that only a few have even attempted to do so. Mae Huettig’s 1944 study of the economics of the studio system
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallPlaying the Percentages: How Film Distribution Made the Hollywood Studio System by Derek Long (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USPlaying the Percentages: How Film Distribution Made the Hollywood Studio System by Derek Long (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®118542026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Chinese Films Abroad: Distribution and Translation ed. by Yves Gambier, Haina Jin (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976833
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Chinese Films Abroad: Distribution and Translation focuses on Chinese movies, directors, and releases abroad from the 1920s to the 2020s. It involves the start of global communication of the Chinese national movie industry and the emergence of the concept of soft power. The time division of Chinese films may not fit the Chinese political period: on the one hand, the technological development of the cinema industry and the translation in the country; on the other hand, the diplomatic relationship between China and other countries and the overseas translation policies put some pressure on Chinese films. This book provides information concerning the distribution and translation of Chinese films in many countries and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallChinese Films Abroad: Distribution and Translation ed. by Yves Gambier, Haina Jin (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USChinese Films Abroad: Distribution and Translation ed. by Yves Gambier, Haina Jin (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®113982026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere ed. by Arne Lunde, and Anna Westerstahl Stenport (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976834
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In Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere, editors Arne Lunde, and Anna Westerstahl Stenport propose “a new paradigm for Nordic film studies” through situating “Nordic cinemas as international, cosmopolitan, diasporic, [and] hybrid” as tracked across technological and cultural advancements across the medium’s history in numerous countries outside of the Nordic region, with a particular focus on “overlooked forms and narratives that foreground movement, mobility, interaction, exploration, synthesis, resistance, loss, reclamation, and repatriation” (1). A key strategy in unpacking this framework is to pay close attention to the pluralities, most notably the titular cultures and cinemas, resisting any
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallNordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere ed. by Arne Lunde, and Anna Westerstahl Stenport (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USNordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere ed. by Arne Lunde, and Anna Westerstahl Stenport (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®123782026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre by David J. Skal and Elias Savada (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976835
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In January 1932, preview screenings of Tod Browning’s Freaks were disastrous. MGM, which had signed Browning to a three-picture deal following the success of Browning’s Dracula (1931) and James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) for Universal, had hoped to cash in on the burgeoning market for horror films. The studio did not get what it had hoped for. As David J. Skal and Elias Savada recount, “Perhaps the most devastating judgment of all came from The Hollywood Reporter after the preview. ‘MGM ‘FREAKS’ REPELLENT: APPEAL MAINLY TO MORBID’ read the banner headline, with a singular subhead: ‘Picture Leaves Dark Brown Taste.’ To put it bluntly, never before had any trade paper compared watching a movie to eating shit”
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallDark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre by David J. Skal and Elias Savada (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USDark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre by David J. Skal and Elias Savada (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®109592026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Finding Birt Acres: The Rediscovery of a Film Pioneer by Deac Rossell, Barry Anthony and Peter Domankiewicz (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976836
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Writing as one who has had an almost lifelong interest in British film – so much more ‘real’ than Hollywood, I used to think – I must admit, and am ashamed to do so, that I had never heard of Birt Acres until this book came my way. I knew of other film pioneers such as William Friese-Greene, of there was once a biopic called The Magic Box (1951), and the Lumiere brothers, who began public screening in Paris in 1895, and was roughly aware of Britain’s pioneering role in the cinema screen, but not a word about Birt Acres, who was much involved in this. Of course, as time went on American cinema would seem to suppress such crucial development in general, almost assuming supremacy in the medium.This new book, Finding
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallFinding Birt Acres: The Rediscovery of a Film Pioneer by Deac Rossell, Barry Anthony and Peter Domankiewicz (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USFinding Birt Acres: The Rediscovery of a Film Pioneer by Deac Rossell, Barry Anthony and Peter Domankiewicz (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®81782026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Fractured Fifties: The Cinematic Periodization and Evolution of a Decade by Christine Sprengler (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976837
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The Fifties, as an idea and a body of associations, have occupied a significant and enduring space in American culture and politics. Whether encoding the Fifties as kitsch, nostalgia, or critique, visual media have testified to this fascination and helped perpetuate it. Art historian Christine Sprengler engages this fascination with a theoretically sophisticated, insightful, albeit occasionally flawed study. Her twofold thesis is straightforward. She argues that visual media with a heavy emphasis on cinema have profoundly shaped popular conceptions of the Fifties. She then contends that these cinematic representations have not yielded a single Fifties, but a multiplicity of competing Fifties.While her thesis is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallFractured Fifties: The Cinematic Periodization and Evolution of a Decade by Christine Sprengler (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USFractured Fifties: The Cinematic Periodization and Evolution of a Decade by Christine Sprengler (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®92722026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Black and White Bioscope: Making Movies in Africa 1899 to 1925 by Neil Parsons (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976838
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For both audiences and scholars, African cinema is replete with surprises, shocks, and stumbling blocks. Settling in at a Flaherty Seminar in the mid-1980s to watch a film from Ghana titled The Road to Accra about a woman leaving impoverishment in her village to move to the nation’s capital in search of a better life for her child, the audience calmly awaited an African version of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, at whatever level the debut director could reach. The opening shot of the film defied expectations as a soaring helicopter shot flew over Accra to display its modernity before traveling across a forest to swoop in on a close-up of a woman trudging along an isolated dirt road with her daughter. The film went
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallBlack and White Bioscope: Making Movies in Africa 1899 to 1925 by Neil Parsons (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USBlack and White Bioscope: Making Movies in Africa 1899 to 1925 by Neil Parsons (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®60532026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11The Stereoscopic Picturesque. Nineteenth-Century Photography, Literary Landscapes, and the Third Dimension by Bruce Graver (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976839
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Emeritus Professor of English at Providence College in America, Bruce Graver is a specialist in British Romantic writers, with an international reputation for his scholarly work on William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge Taylor. In this book, he builds on well-established elements of nineteenth-century literary criticism and its author’s landscapes, among them the Victorian obsession with literary tourism and the use of guidebooks by William Gilpin, Thomas West, and others to direct tourists to specific locations, or “stations,” where appropriately composed views of the countryside could be seen. Concentrating on “landscape stereography and its relationship to the tradition of picturesque drawing, and how stereo
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallThe Stereoscopic Picturesque. Nineteenth-Century Photography, Literary Landscapes, and the Third Dimension by Bruce Graver (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Stereoscopic Picturesque. Nineteenth-Century Photography, Literary Landscapes, and the Third Dimension by Bruce Graver (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®58472026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11It’s All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy by Victoria Sturtevant (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976840
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In the posters for the 1990s romantic comedies Nine Months (1996) and Fools Rush In (1997), the main female characters are seen whispering the news of their pregnancies into the ears of the surprised fathers. These depictions echo many similar representations in films made during the era of the Production Code, when pregnancy was both a verbal and a visual taboo. From the mid-twentieth century, however, the shame and secrecy surrounding pregnancy diminished, and today, pregnant bellies are seen everywhere in the media. Still, as these examples indicate, the idea that pregnancy is something to whisper about has persisted long after the demise of the Production Code. In the intriguing and well-researched book It’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallIt’s All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy by Victoria Sturtevant (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USIt’s All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy by Victoria Sturtevant (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®119392026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Dashing to the End: The Ray Milland Story by Eric Monder (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976841
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Hollywood actor Ray Milland was born in Neath, Wales, in 1907, and upon his death in 1986 at the age of 79, he left behind a legacy of over 180 film and television credits. With a remarkably long career spanning seven decades, Milland worked across British cinema, mainstream Hollywood, and independent films, as well as theatre, radio, and television (on both sides of the camera) from 1929 to 1985. This legacy meant he was active during the silent, pre-Code, and Code eras, and completed his career in the age of the Blockbuster, or what has been termed ‘New Hollywood’. Milland worked across a wide range of genres, including comedy, drama, horror, science fiction, musicals, and Westerns. Yet, it has taken almost 110
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallDashing to the End: The Ray Milland Story by Eric Monder (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USDashing to the End: The Ray Milland Story by Eric Monder (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®115442026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema by Laure Astourian (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976842
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Following the Second World War, anti-colonial movements began to agitate in both France and the African countries over which it had long imposed its imperial rule. Influential French intellectuals, artists, and activists were at the front line of these movements in France in the mid-to-late 1950s. Much of the French public, who were largely kept in the dark about the lived realities of colonial subjects, due to government censorship, shut themselves off to the growing dissonance that complicated their ties to a national identity rooted in imperial power. Following the loss of the Algerian War in 1962, decolonization began, and what was once a cultural dissonance became a fracture. Suddenly, the expansiveness of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallThe Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema by Laure Astourian (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema by Laure Astourian (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®118592026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11The Passion of Pedro Almodóvar: A Self-Portrait in Seven Films by James Miller (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976843
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As James Miller states in his preface to The Passion of Pedro Almodóvar: A Self-Portrait in Seven Films, his objective is to explore “Almodóvar’s theory of freedom rooted in Surrealism, the philosophy of Sartre, and a desire theory of well-being” (ix). To that end, he has reduced and reordered the Spanish filmmaker’s nearly two dozen films into a corpus of seven movies to analyze in depth Almodóvar’s autobiographical and philosophical self-projections in his cinema. In shrinking the filmmaker’s oeuvre, however, Miller has also narrowed our view of some of Almodóvar’s most original cinematic achievements. Indeed, many of the book’s limitations may be traced to the problem of what has been left out of that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallThe Passion of Pedro Almodóvar: A Self-Portrait in Seven Films by James Miller (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Passion of Pedro Almodóvar: A Self-Portrait in Seven Films by James Miller (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®115572026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Hollywood’s Unofficial Film Corps: American Jewish Moviemakers and the War Effort by Michael Berkowitz (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976844
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Michael Berkowitz’s Hollywood’s Unofficial Film Corps: American Jewish Moviemakers and the War Effort offers a revelatory account of the Jewish filmmakers, writers, and technicians who significantly influenced America’s cinematic response to World War II. Far from the familiar narratives that focus exclusively on celebrated directors such as Frank Capra, William Wyler, John Huston, George Stevens, and John Ford, Berkowitz uncovers a much wider and often overlooked network of Jewish professionals whose contributions were essential to wartime propaganda, training films, and the earliest documentation of Nazi crimes.The book begins by situating these filmmakers in the prelude to America’s entry into the war. They
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallHollywood’s Unofficial Film Corps: American Jewish Moviemakers and the War Effort by Michael Berkowitz (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USHollywood’s Unofficial Film Corps: American Jewish Moviemakers and the War Effort by Michael Berkowitz (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®96802026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Bringing Song and Dance to the Screen: Directors of Golden Age Hollywood Musicals by Thomas S. Hischak (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976845
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Hischak’s topic is intriguing and welcome, paying recognition to the number of directors working in the Hollywood studio system during its heyday that helmed musicals, looking at not just the commonly recognized and lauded auteurs (such as Busby Berkeley, Vincente Minnelli, and Stanley Donen) but also such under-discussed filmmakers as Lloyd Bacon, Irving Cummings, and Roy del Ruth. As he states in the Preface, “Perhaps it was the factory mentality, which strived to meet the demand for new movies every year, that led to so many different directors working on musicals. But whatever the thinking might have been, the result is a wide field of directors who turned out Hollywood musicals.” (x) In all, Hischak covers 27
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallBringing Song and Dance to the Screen: Directors of Golden Age Hollywood Musicals by Thomas S. Hischak (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USBringing Song and Dance to the Screen: Directors of Golden Age Hollywood Musicals by Thomas S. Hischak (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®91332026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness by Michael Koresky (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976846
<p></p>
I approached Michael Koresky’s Sick and Dirty – Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness with trepidation. I wondered if Mr. Koresky could add anything new to two of my favorite books on the subject: Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet (1981) and Richard Barrios’s Screened Out – Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (2003). Indeed, Mr. Koresky covers similar ground, but, to my delight, he has succeeded in putting his own stamp on the subject. Not only have I enjoyed the author’s take on gay/queer cinema, but I am also impressed with his attention to detail. I am also relieved that he has avoided using too much academic theory and jargon. Back in 1996, I discovered that it was possible
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallSick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness by Michael Koresky (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USSick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness by Michael Koresky (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®75172026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Policing Show Business: J. Edgar Hoover, the Hollywood Blacklist, and Cold War Movies by Francis MacDonnell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976847
<p></p>
Francis MacDonnell is clearly intrigued by the history of political subversion from both the Left and the Right. In his previous book, Insidious Foes: The Axis Fifth Column and the American Home Front (2021), he presented a careful examination of Nazi operations during the Second World War. In that work, he concluded that their espionage in the United States never amounted to much and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation quickly countered any attempts. German spies, saboteurs, and subversives tried to undermine the American government, but their efforts almost always failed.In his latest book, Policing Show Business: J. Edgar Hoover, the Hollywood Blacklist, and Cold War Movies, he arrives at a similar
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallPolicing Show Business: J. Edgar Hoover, the Hollywood Blacklist, and Cold War Movies by Francis MacDonnell (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USPolicing Show Business: J. Edgar Hoover, the Hollywood Blacklist, and Cold War Movies by Francis MacDonnell (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®105612026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Hollywood Unions ed. by Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976848
<p></p>
Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola have an ambitious approach to Hollywood Unions. They have compiled a set of essays that examine the full range of Hollywood industrial organizations from the silent era to the present day. Observing a clear gap in the literature, they argue that “most industrial analyses of films and television shows have continued to focus on authorial questions of above-the-line talent such as directors, writers, and stars” (5). To correct this imbalance, Fortmueller and Marzola also examine the less visible organizations and below-the-line workers— essentially the working-class backbone of Hollywood unions—and they are well qualified to do so. Fortmueller has written Below the Stars: How the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallHollywood Unions ed. by Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USHollywood Unions ed. by Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®115542026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11John Ford at Work: Production Histories 1927–1939 by Lea Jacobs (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976849
<p></p>
Lea Jacobs opens her book by quoting an earnest interviewer asking questions to John Ford and getting nowhere fast. In many interviews, Ford would give insulting and facile answers to serious questions, basically treating the interviewer with borderline contempt. He liked to portray himself as an irascible genius who sculpted a mythic America on film. Occasionally, he would conduct a serious interview with someone, such as Peter Bogdanovich, but he loved to play the gruff film director who thought film studies were palpable nonsense. For decades, film scholarship has largely reinforced this anti-intellectual portrait, and it eventually underpinned a vision of Ford as American poet laureate.Jacobs is a highly
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallJohn Ford at Work: Production Histories 1927–1939 by Lea Jacobs (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USJohn Ford at Work: Production Histories 1927–1939 by Lea Jacobs (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®114352026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Rethinking the Cinematic Cold War: The Struggle for Hearts and Minds Goes Global ed. by Stefano Pisu, Francesco Pitassio and Maurizio Zinni (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976850
<p></p>
When film historians write about the cinematic Cold War, their focus has largely been on blacklisting in the American film industry or on Hollywood films that depict communism in one way or another. The emphasis has remained steadily on the internal politics of the United States. Occasionally, some have strayed to look at Soviet or European cinema. This limited approach has marginalized many players.More recently, historians have suggested that the Cold War had a profound impact that extended far beyond the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings and anti-McCarthyite messages in High Noon (1952). Rethinking the Cinematic Cold War is the third volume in the Visual and Media Cultures of the Cold War and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallRethinking the Cinematic Cold War: The Struggle for Hearts and Minds Goes Global ed. by Stefano Pisu, Francesco Pitassio and Maurizio Zinni (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USRethinking the Cinematic Cold War: The Struggle for Hearts and Minds Goes Global ed. by Stefano Pisu, Francesco Pitassio and Maurizio Zinni (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®113642026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Breaking Home Ties (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976851
<p></p>
The National Center for Jewish Film (NCJF) at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, has been making miracles happen for nearly six decades, ever since Sharon Rivo founded it in 1978. NCJF has largely been responsible for rescuing the surviving pre-war European and American-made Yiddish films, which were produced most actively from the 1920s through the 1930s but were essentially discontinued with the onset of World War II. In addition, NCJF’s rich and unique catalogue includes other historical and contemporary narrative and documentary films on Jewish-themed subjects. This collection is a testament to the industriousness of Sharon and her daughter, Lisa Rivo, who continue to discover films thought lost and restore
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallBreaking Home Ties (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USBreaking Home Ties (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®92292026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11(Im)possible Histories: Race-Changing and other “Crude Thoughts” in Lovecraft Country
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976852
<p></p>
Of the genres for representing the past audiovisually, cinematic realism has tended to dominate—for obvious reasons. In the same way that literary realism was understood to offer readers seamless, immersive entry into a different historical moment, cinematic realism has been treated as a way to open a window onto the past. The dominance of cinematic realism stems from its presumed ability to marshal something that looks and feels like evidence: consider, for example, the attention paid to period details in costume and setting, to speech patterns and dialogue, to “getting it right.” In the audiovisual realm, realism, as a methodological commitment, seems to stand in for historical rigor. And yet, even as realism
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmall(Im)possible Histories: Race-Changing and other “Crude Thoughts” in Lovecraft Country2025-12-11text/htmlen-US(Im)possible Histories: Race-Changing and other “Crude Thoughts” in Lovecraft Country2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®471752026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Accuracy in the Approximate: Experiencing the Past through the Cinematic In-Between
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976853
<p></p>
We are all part of a moving-image culture, and we live cinematic and electronic lives,” the American film scholar Vivian Sobchack wrote back in 1988.2 This observation sheds new light on our understanding of how real past events are historicized through moving images. At the intersection between historical events and media-generated historical worlds, the past can be experienced in various ways. Live reporting on digital television, real-time news websites, and video platforms such as YouTube that are updated with new content every single second, make the spectators of historical events into witnesses who feel like participants in historical dramas. Luke Tredinnick argues that progress in media and communication
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallAccuracy in the Approximate: Experiencing the Past through the Cinematic In-Between2025-12-11text/htmlen-USAccuracy in the Approximate: Experiencing the Past through the Cinematic In-Between2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®432712026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Generating History: AI and Cinematic Representations of the Past
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976854
<p></p>
Representations of the past on film have sparked a range of dynamic and ever-evolving arguments about cinema’s contributions to our understanding of history and its role in the present. Propelled by shifts in historiographical thinking and technological developments, debates about historiophoty, colourization, and the nature of archives have guided discourse down a series of productive and provocative avenues in our field over the past several decades. Now, with the increasing adoption of another technology in the production of moving images, namely Artificial Intelligence (AI), we ought to consider with some urgency the implications of artificially generated histories in cinema. How and what we remember, what the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallGenerating History: AI and Cinematic Representations of the Past2025-12-11text/htmlen-USGenerating History: AI and Cinematic Representations of the Past2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®508172026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Archive, Temporality, and Verbatim Re-enactment: In Operation Varsity Blues (2021) and Reality (2023)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976855
<p></p>
Re-enactment occupies a complex and often contested space in historical filmmaking. A technique based on the speculative recreation of actual events—typically in the absence of a full visual record—re-enactment can challenge traditional notions of authenticity and objectivity, unsettling the relationship between past events and their screen representation. This article focuses on two recent examples: Operation Varsity Blues (2021) and Reality (2023). Both films are based on documents produced through FBI investigations, and both films re-enact this material verbatim. Operation Varsity Blues (OVB) depicts the 2019 college admissions corruption scandal and the FBI investigation that uncovered it, leading to multiple
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallArchive, Temporality, and Verbatim Re-enactment: In Operation Varsity Blues (2021) and Reality (2023)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USArchive, Temporality, and Verbatim Re-enactment: In Operation Varsity Blues (2021) and Reality (2023)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®512112026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Farce All the Way Down: The Historiographical Use of Satire and Comedy in Moving Histories
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976856
<p></p>
In the first sentence of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx famously muses, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce” (1990, 1). While both historical thinkers refer to the echoes and reverberations of real-world actions, events, and personalities, this pattern of historical reprise also conjures the repetitions of historicization, the ways events shift and re-form through their narrative reinterpretations. This paper examines satire as a mode of emplotment and comedy as a genre for historical representation in moving images, arguing that this narrative model
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallFarce All the Way Down: The Historiographical Use of Satire and Comedy in Moving Histories2025-12-11text/htmlen-USFarce All the Way Down: The Historiographical Use of Satire and Comedy in Moving Histories2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®802852026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Ida Lupino, Forgotten Auteur: From Film Noir to the Director’s Chair by Alexandra Seros (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976876
<p></p>
Alexandra Seros, the author of Ida Lupino, Forgotten Auteur, begins her acknowledgements: “I have many people to thank for helping me discover and recover this rare woman who could do anything” (179). I would say the same thing about Seros herself. She is to be thanked for revealing the truth about Lupino.Seros is uniquely placed to write about Ida Lupino. As a screenwriter, director, film academic, and non-fiction writer, she has a deep understanding of the film industry, film production, and television industry. She knows how to tell a story both on film and with the written word. Her writing style is simple, uncluttered, and organized. The book reads like a thesis with a proposition, examination, and conclusion
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/242/image/coversmallIda Lupino, Forgotten Auteur: From Film Noir to the Director’s Chair by Alexandra Seros (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USIda Lupino, Forgotten Auteur: From Film Noir to the Director’s Chair by Alexandra Seros (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®99622026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11