Bookforum. Dec 08 / Jan 09.

"An antitechnological, antirational, and antimodern modernist, Andrei Tarkovsky was, with Bresson, Dreyer and Brakhage, one of 20th-century cinema's great solitary figures." So begins J Hoberman's consideration of the reception of Tarkovsky's work then and now (with a particular emphasis on Andrei Rublev), by way of a review of two volumes for the new issue of Bookforum: Nathan Dunne's anthology Tarkovsky and Robert Bird's "dense, devoted appreciation" Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema.

Cormac McCarthy's "poetic, minimalist style has been called biblical by some; needless to say, finding a cinematic correlative has not been easy." Bilge Ebiri talks with John Hillcoat about adapting The Road and then turns to the matter of the two Sherlock Holmes movies in the works. Guy Ritchie's features Robert Downey Jr as a detective just as prone to action as he is to deduction; and Judd Apatow's producing the other film, with Sacha Baron Cohen as Holmes and Will Ferrell as Dr Watson: "Readers and viewers could be forgiven for thinking that the competing Holmes reinventions indicate a newfound Hollywood irreverence toward Conan Doyle's character. But a quick glance at Holmes's legacy on film suggests otherwise. 'The idea of the movies trying to be truthful to the Holmes character is pretty laughable,' says Leslie Klinger, author of The Life and Times of Mr Sherlock Holmes, John H Watson, MD, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Other Notable Personages and editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.

"Promiscuity and male anxiety, medieval witchcraft and state-of-the-art special effects, displaced class struggle and visionary utopianism, doppelgängers, vampires, and golems - these are the hallmarks of German cinema between 1918 and 1933, a period bracketed by the abdication of the Kaiser and the rise of the Führer," writes Gerd Gemünden, on his way toward arguing that Noah Isenberg's anthology Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era "is the volume on this fascinating era of international film history."

"So this is the climate the pornography scholar finds herself in nowadays," writes Laura Kipnis: "Porn isn't just culturally ascendant, it's triumphal. In response, [Linda] Williams has written a book that tries to reimagine the terms of sexual explicitness, moving from porn to a larger - though contiguous - playing field. Screening Sex is a wide-ranging history of sex in the movies, a vast enough subject, but Williams also wants to link the progression of cinematic images to shifting conditions of sexuality and gender over the past century. And she's devised a multilayered theoretical model to describe how moviegoers learn about sex from movies, which in turn conditions sexuality and changes the kinds of sexual experiences people have, which in turn influences the commercial production of sexual images. This is, needless to say, an ambitious project."

Posted by dwhudson at November 13, 2008 1:44 PM