Scope. August 04.

The book reviews are probably my favorite section of any new issue of Scope, the online journal from the Institute of Film Studies at the University of Nottingham. Oddly, all of them - a dozen this time - are strung together on a single page. I doubt they're ever read that way but, however you dip into them, they're like little crash courses in fields you may never get around to reading a full book on, despite your interest, and yet other book reviews never get around them, either.

This issue also features eleven film reviews and four conference reports, but of course, the centerpiece here is the quartet of articles:

• Rebecca Feasey: "[A]lthough Sharon Stone made a conscious effort to take on challenging roles that would re-define her body as a site of performance rather than a site of erotic spectacle, a wide range of review publications that span media forms of quality and distinction continued to subjugate the performer to the controlling male gaze and devalue the accoutrements of femininity accordingly."

• Kevin Howley offers "a thematic and analytical evaluation of temporal sequencing and cinematic time in Pulp Fiction."

• Caroline Joan Picart aims "to diffuse beyond the traditional cinematic depiction of the evolving Frankenstein narrative with an eye to clarifying the relationships binding comedy to horror that are made manifest in comedic versions, such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein; science fiction versions, such as Alien, and iterations in which horror and comedy hang in a tight, oscillating balance, such as Terminator and Terminator 2."

• Jamie Sexton presents a brief but important history of how the advent of sound rattled critical circles in Britain before getting to his point about halfway in: "The most radical use of sound in the documentary film movement can arguably be found in Song of Ceylon, which surely deserves to be considered one of the most complex and radical sound films produced in Britain during the inter-war period."

Posted by dwhudson at August 11, 2004 10:27 AM