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Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: Illinois University Press, 196 pp.,
ISBN: 9780252077128, p/bk, £14.99

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Reviewed by Thomas Wide, University of Oxford and Zuzanna Olszewska,

University of Oxford

The intervention in Afghanistan by US-led coalition forces has now become

the longest in Afghanistan’s history, exceeding even the Soviet Union’s
occupation of the country from 1979 to 1989. While much journalistic and
academic ink has been spilt in attempts to untangle the complex social and
political dimensions of the country, its cultural production and institutions
remain relatively little studied or understood. When Afghanistan’s culture is
discussed, it is primarily through the lens of its ancient past; a past which,
with its seeming cosmopolitanism, religious pluralism, and artistic legacies,
makes a neat counter-balance to the inter-ethnic violence, religious funda-
mentalism, and oppressive conservatism portrayed today. This article reviews
a book and a conference that explored a different facet of Afghanistan’s
cultural heritage: that of its cinema. In assessing their contributions to under-
standing the developments of cinema in Afghanistan and representations of
Afghanistan in the cinema of other countries, we highlight two main themes –
the relation of Afghan cinema to the state, and the relation of Afghan cinema
to flows and influences beyond Afghanistan’s borders, what one might call
the ‘transnational’ dimension of Afghan cinema. For at the heart of the story
of cinema’s development in Afghanistan lies a paradox: that Afghanistan’s
national cinema has developed out of a series of encounters and interactions

/)
J]na]ok

that are profoundly transnational in origin. We draw on our interview with

Afghanistan’s best-known director, Siddiq Barmak, present at the conference,
to illustrate these processes.
Mark Graham’s Afghanistan in the Cinema explores cinematic representa-
tions of Afghanistan in a number of American-made films beginning in the Cold
War era, as well as British, Iranian and finally Afghan films about Afghanistan.
His premise that western cinematic representations of Afghanistan are indis-
solubly connected to political interests, alongside his detailed descriptions
of the images used in relation to the socio-political climates in which they
emerged, hold great promise. He argues that Afghanistan has essentially
functioned as a blank canvas on which film-makers painted their responses
to the cultural, psychological and geopolitical concerns of their times, through
a range of standard Orientalist tropes: the country was often presented as
a stark and majestic wilderness populated by primitive people, portrayed
by turns as noble, ignorant, venal, fanatical or victimized, depending on the
preoccupations of the day. As such, he argues, these films embody the ‘rheto-
ric of empire’ and permit us to analyse and better understand it (8).
Thus far, the argument is not controversial. On the precise mechanisms
by which geopolitical considerations enter cinematic discourse, however,
or on how audiences perceive them, Graham is less informative, leaving us
only with the idea that the process is somehow automatic and inevitable.
Regrettably, Graham’s research did not include interviews with film-makers
or audiences and his analyses rely on secondary sources or his own intui-
tion, resulting in a disappointingly solipsistic hermeneutics. It reads more like
polemic than scholarship, and is further let down by turgid prose.
For example, it seems reasonable to conclude, as he does, that the raw
masculinity of the Afghan buzkashi players in John Frankenheimer’s The
Horsemen (1971) casts them as noble savages, and opens Afghanistan up as a
romantic new frontier for the western genre. But his further claim that this film
was intended to redeem America’s failures in Vietnam, and that ‘the return
to the native became not simply a form of flight but a desperate search for
meaning, for myth, and for a firm ground in the anomie of the post-60s era’
(17) is intriguing but not well supported. Similarly, John Huston’s adaptation
of Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King (1975) has frequently been
interpreted as an ambivalent film, both critical of imperialism and unflattering
towards its victims. But, once again, Graham’s claim that this film is plainly
nostalgic for a racist imperial past and that it ‘provided catharsis for post-
Vietnam America’s most recidivistic anxieties and paranoid fantasies – fears of
change, of others, of difference, of the loss of control’ (29) is surely a stretch.
Was it intended in this way by the director? Was it received as such by crit-
ics or regular cinemagoers? None of this is made clear, nor is any evidence
provided. If such a reading is possible, it is merely one among many. Might it
not have been simply a film adaptation of a great adventure story, conceived
by Huston before the Vietnam War even began, and more reflective of all
the moral ambiguities of the British colonial experience of the past than of
American neo-imperialism?
After America actually became embroiled in Afghanistan, supporting
the anti-Soviet resistance in the 1980s, one may more justifiably make links
between film and propaganda. For example, Rambo III (MacDonald, 1988) can
more plausibly be seen as an attempt to reverse the humiliation of Vietnam
and ‘rehabilitate the image of the American warrior and consequently of
America’s imperial self-image as civilizer, beacon of liberty, and champion of

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 J]na]ok

the underdog’ (40) – not least because the hero John Rambo is a Vietnam vet.  )& ?jY`YeÌk
]l`fg_jYh`a[
In this period, Afghanistan became the stage for ‘fantasies of revenge and [j]\]flaYdk^gjojalaf_
total victory’ (17), in which ‘neither the people nor the land are important, YZgml9^_`YfaklYfYj]
it’s what Rambo does there that matters’ (41). Such critiques also apply to Ydkgmf[d]Yj$_an]fl`]
hj]k]f[]g^YfmeZ]j
Charlie Wilson’s War (Nichols, 2007), which Graham considers in the same g^]jjgjkafl`]l]pl&>gj
chapter, and suggests was created to inspire support for the latest American ]pYehd]$`]eg[ckl`]
intervention in Afghanistan. Plausible as this is, beyond a quote from Jack BYe]k:gf\^adeL`]
Danaf_<Yqda_`lk^gjl`]
Valenti – former president of the Motion Picture Association of America – that af[gjj][lmk]g^l`]
‘Hollywood and Washington sprang from the same DNA’ (38), Graham does ogj\c`YaklY$o`a[`
:gf\kYqkËe]Yfk
little to illustrate for us the processes, agendas, networks and collaborations ÉZ]Ymla^mdÊaf9^_`YfÌ
through which such visions might be engineered. .!&?jY`Ye[dYaekl`]
Perhaps the strongest chapter of the book is Graham’s critique of the ogj\afim]klagfak
Y[lmYddql`]<Yja^gj
Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Fellini Prize-winning film Kandahar ËkdgoÌ&Afj]Ydalq$c`YaklY
(2001). Graham is right to puncture the enthusiasm of western audiences for \g]kY[lmYddqe]Yf
the haunting images of this film. Contrary to their probable assumption that Z]Ymla^mdafHYk`lm&
?jY`Yek]]eklg`Yn]
Iran’s proximity to Afghanistan gives Iranians the cultural expertise to present [gf^mk]\aloal`l`]
an authoritative vision of Afghanistan, Graham asserts that ‘the Afghanistan <YjaY`]klY$e]Yfaf_
kdgo&
of Kandahar fits firmly within Orientalist discourse’ (66). It is a fiction in which
an exotic but uncomfortably close Other, the ‘dark double of Iran itself’ (64),
is used to reflect on Iranian nationalism and its own relationship with radical
Islam. While the film’s reliance on real characters (such as the lead Nelofer
Pazira, an Afghan Canadian journalist) and a neorealist aesthetic give it the
veneer of a documentary, he argues that the style is more correctly seen as
surrealist and grotesque: a nightmarish vision of a corrupted society. Despite
the director’s avowed good intentions in making a film to draw attention to the
plight of an Afghanistan that had been all but forgotten by the international
community before 2001, Graham argues that Makhmalbaf in effect neutral-
izes poverty and suffering by aestheticizing them. When he portrays
many of the Afghan characters as primitive victims or rapacious brutes,
he does not venture far from the general contempt in which ordinary
Iranians hold Afghans (particularly Afghan refugees in their country) (see
Olszewska 2010).
Unfortunately, Graham does not appear to have the in-depth knowledge
of Iranian film and society to adequately explain the reasons for Makhmalbaf’s
interest in Afghanistan. A recent article by Kamran Rastegar (2011) offers a
useful contrast: it shows how the film was made at a time when the spectre of
the Taliban was often used as a caution in domestic Iranian political debates,
for example about gender segregation in hospitals. Yet the film was not just
made for an Iranian audience, and again Rastegar describes in greater detail
than Graham the tactics used by the director to pitch the film to a western
art-house audience.
The final section of Afghanistan in the Cinema is a discussion of the revival
of homegrown Afghan film-making in the post-2001 period, a topic that
has not yet been the subject of in-depth analysis and might have been this
book’s most interesting and unique contribution to scholarship. Regrettably,
this is probably where Graham’s polemic tone offers least and grates the
most.1 Having discredited the representations of Afghanistan in the work of
American and Iranian film-makers alike as superficial and replete with harmful
Orientalist stereotypes, he proceeds to praise Barmak’s film Osama and Roya
Sadat’s Seh Noqta/Ellipsis (2003) as incarnations of the true ‘Afghan voice’, the
voice of the subaltern who dares to answer back and defy the imperialist gaze
of the outsiders.

/+
J]na]ok

This argument is mirrored in the introduction to the book, an extended

meditation on Steve McCurry’s famous photograph of Sharbat Gula, the
green-eyed Afghan girl. This image, printed on the cover of National Geographic
in 1985, took on the status of the iconic Afghan refugee. He reads her gaze as
one of resistance:

She does not (as one might expect) cry out for us in helpless despera-
tion. Rather, she stares at us with what might be defiance, even anger.
[…] She, and the Afghanistan she embodies, stares back at us like a
private abyss suddenly made public. Those beautiful sea-green eyes
are like the sea itself, gorgeous but implacable, protean yet primeval,
sublime yet resolutely self-sustaining. Despite war, death, and displace-
ment, she can, and does, exist on her own terms.
(2)

Unfortunately, in this rather overwritten interpretation of the photograph,

Graham is repeating many of the sins of which he accuses numerous film
directors. He is projecting visions of his own onto the image of this girl, who
cannot by any means answer back, nor in this objectified context can she
possibly exist on her own terms.
In his analysis of the Afghan-made films, Graham does not do enough
to show that the conditions under which these films were made were no less
political than those made by foreigners. They represent efforts by a small class
of educated, liberal and cosmopolitan (and, notably, Dari-speaking) Afghans
to grapple with the oppression of the Taliban era or the local customs that
they oppose, and to steer their own national cultural narratives towards a
particular understanding of modernity. However much we may prefer their
message, they do not represent the view of all Afghans, nor are they an
‘authentic’ portrayal of the many Afghan realities (though their claim to do
so might have been fruitfully analysed in the context of the cultural politics of
post-9/11 Afghan intellectuals).
These films are produced in the context of webs of specific relations
between directors, funders, producers, aesthetic currents and audiences, not
to mention conditions of technological possibility, that would indeed be fasci-
nating to trace, but of which Graham says little. The most important factor
to consider is that Afghanistan’s limited economic resources, infrastructure,
and geographical positioning at one step removed from global marketplaces
has meant that Afghan film-makers have always been reliant, to some extent,
on the resources and expertise of other countries. At the same time, this has
driven an engagement with foreign film-making traditions, which have then
been recast and transformed by Afghan film-makers.
Indeed, Siddiq Barmak’s career epitomizes the transnational dimen-
sion of Afghan cinema more clearly than most. Barmak went to Moscow to
study film direction from 1982 to 1987 – a difficult decision since, although he
loved Russian cinema, he was strongly opposed to the Soviet intervention in
Afghanistan. At that time, the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow
acted as a meeting-place for young people from all over the Soviet Union:

It was a great concourse really, where a great number of people – Russians,

foreigners, and people from the other Soviet republics, Uzbekistan,
Tajikistan, Ukraine – were gathered, all wanting to enroll at the institute …
In that first year, most of my friends were from Central Asia.

/,
 J]na]ok

Bonds of solidarity grew between students from nations that had been incor-
porated, often brutally, into the Soviet Union. On Saturdays, these students
would gather together to watch films, and it was here that he first saw canon-
ical Russian films, as well as the films of Central Asian film-makers like
Davshenka and Parajanov. This engagement with Central Asian cinema, facil-
itated, ironically, by Soviet occupation, was to be a great influence on Barmak,
forging a sense of shared regional identity and solidarity. This would lead to
future collaborations with Central Asian artists, including with the Tajik singer/
actor Daler Nazarov on Barmak’s 2008 follow-up to Osama: Opium War.
Even more importantly, however, such interest in regional cinema and
cross-border relationships would lead Barmak to work later in his career with
Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Makhmalbaf not only provided his own camera for
Barmak to use to shoot his first feature film, Osama, but also provided essen-
tial funds and support for the film. It was, in many ways, a natural partnership:
Makhmalbaf had already shown himself to be very interested in Afghanistan
and its diaspora, making Baisikelran/The Cyclist (1987), a film about an Afghan
refugee in Iran, and then Kandahar. For Barmak’s part, Afghanistan’s cinema
had always owed a great debt to Iranian film-making, which provided both
cinematic inspiration and educational resources; since both Afghanistan and
Iran share a common language, Farsi (or ‘Dari’ in its Afghan incarnation),
most of the film-making textbooks in Afghanistan had come from Iran. At the
same time, the two countries shared a millennia-old cultural heritage, making
them natural collaborators:

We have a cultural bond: when you go to an Afghan home, in the

furthest corner of Badakhshan [province in northeast Afghanistan], for
example, you’ll see a book of poetry by Hafiz [the fourteenth-century
Persian poet from Shiraz in modern-day Iran]… similarly, when you go
to Iran, without a doubt in any home you’ll find the Masnavi of Maulana
Jalal ud-Din Rumi Balkhi [the thirteenth-century Persian poet claimed
by many Afghans to come from Balkh in northern Afghanistan]. There
is a shared cultural geography; we have deep social, cultural and histori-
cal ties with Iran. The only boundaries we have are political.

Indeed, Makhmalbaf’s mentorship of Barmak and his profound aesthetic

influence on Osama, as well as the involvement of dozens of Iranian profes-
sionals in the making of the film, lead Rastegar to conclude that in the
post-9/11 period Iranians have frequently acted as ‘legitimizing intermedi-
aries between Afghan contexts and narratives and global art house cinema
markets’ (2011: 148). Rastegar also gives us a clearer idea than Graham of
the mechanisms by which such films may have an effect on politics, and how
Barmak constructs his audience as a global rather than Afghan one. As ‘art
house’ films specifically targeting an educated western audience through
distribution networks carefully nurtured by Iranian directors over the years,
the heavily anti-Taliban Kandahar and Osama were watched and interpreted
as ‘authentic’ by elite groups who were likely to be influential in setting the
tone of their countries’ foreign policies. These are the kinds of details that
would have connected the loosely placed dots of Graham’s analysis and made
it more persuasive.
The transnational dimension to Afghan film-making, as well as the rela-
tion of film-making to the state, remain a source of tension and opportu-
nity today. A recent conference on ‘Afghanistan, Good Governance and the

/-
J]na]ok

Media’ explored these questions in detail. The buzzword of the conference

was ‘transition’ – the process whereby the ISAF coalition forces hand over
full responsibility for security and governance to the Afghan government –
and what this transition meant for the Afghan media. The conference also
reflected on the progress, or lack thereof, made in media institutions, produc-
tion companies, and film-making over the last ten years. The composition of
the conference made it clear just what a collaborative enterprise the Afghan
media continues to be, although whereas once Afghan cinema had drawn
on Soviet money and Indian expertise, this conference had representatives
from UNESCO, USAID, NATO and western media NGOs all with a stake in
its development. The vast foreign expenditure, like that of the Soviets in the
1980s, has had a distorting and uneven effect on the Afghan media. While
USAID has provided tens of millions of dollars in financial aid, there is still
not the institutional or sector-wide support for media development, making it
extremely fragile financially. At the same time, there are now new players on
the media scene; in particular former military and religious leaders have set up
their own stations, which are not dependent on advertising or bound to any
sector-wide code of ethics, leading to a form of ‘warlord media’.
During the discussions, many of the most insightful comments came from
Afghans themselves. Omar Samad, the previous Ambassador of Afghanistan
to France, injected a useful historical perspective into his analysis of the devel-
opment of Afghan cultural expression, focusing on the relatively free media
of the 1970s, the period of peak film production in Afghanistan, and asking
us not to forget Afghanistan’s previous periods of relative freedom of speech
and rich cultural production. Several recent Afghan films also showed the
promising developments taking place in contemporary film-making. Like the
progressive film-makers of the 1970s and 1980s who focused on the role of
women in Afghan society, modern film-makers continue to explore this issue:
Diana Saqeb’s Bedo Roobina Bedo/Run Roobina Run (2009) was a documentary
film about an Afghan girl’s participation at the Beijing Olympics, which power-
fully presented the challenges of being a young Afghan woman in a rapidly
globalizing world. It is heartening how many of the new generation of Afghan
film-makers are not just men who explore issues of gender and sexuality, but
young women themselves: for example, film-makers such as Roya Sadat and
her sister Alka Sadat, whose films recently screened at the 2011 Human Rights
Film Festival in Kabul and who have focused on the plight of women in areas
of Afghanistan outside Kabul. As in the past, however, such film-making
remains a controversial issue: in October 2011, a screening in Mazar-i Sharif
of Fariba Haidari’s Paper Boats, about the tragic lives of five young girls in rural
Afghanistan, was cancelled due to protests from state religious authorities.
The issue of the role of the state in Afghan film-making thus remains a
central bone of contention. Afghanistan’s economic situation ensures that its
film industry will always struggle to recoup its investments through the domes-
tic box-office. Afghan cinema thus relies on support, either from the state, from
wealthy individuals, or outside funding bodies for its survival. It has felt the
push and pull of state involvement and disengagement throughout the twen-
tieth century, from the first state-backed cinema through the rise of privately
owned production companies and cinemas to their later nationalization under
the Soviets, to a mix of state-funded and independent organizations today.
The story of Afghan film-making has thus been no Whiggish march towards
freedom, independence, ‘authentic’ expression and success, but a narrative
of sporadic stops and starts, rapid influxes of money and support followed

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 J]na]ok

by sharp decline, reflecting the turbulent history of twentieth-century Afghan

politics. That tension, between state involvement, independence, and the
issue of ‘outside’ support remains. Afghanistan’s national cinema has always
been a transnational enterprise, forged out of a set of cross-border exchanges
of equipment, education, and expertise, and fed by an imaginary that is truly
global in scope. At once national and transnational, distinctly Afghan and yet
increasingly worldly, Afghan film-makers and their work embody many of the
paradoxes that lie at the heart of this intriguing country. The book and the
conference reviewed here only begin to capture the subtleties involved, and
much more work remains to be done on the subject.

J=>=J=F;=K
Olszewska, Zuzanna (2010), ‘“Hey Afghani!” Identity contentions among
Iranians and Afghan refugees’, in Dawn Chatty and Bill Finlayson (eds),
Dispossession and Displacement: Forced Migration in the Middle East and
Africa, Proceedings of a Conference at the British Academy, 28–29 February
2008, London: British Academy, pp. 197–214.
Rastegar, Kamran (2011), ‘Global frames on Afghanistan: The Iranian media-
tion of Afghanistan in international art house cinema after September 11,
2001’, in Zubeda Jalalzai and David Jefferess (eds), Globalizing Afghanistan:
Terrorism, War, and the Rhetoric of Nation Building, Durham: Duke
University Press, pp. 145–64.

;GFLJA:MLGJ<=L9ADK
Thomas Wide is completing his D.Phil. on Afghan cultural history at Oxford
University. He is currently based in Kabul, Afghanistan where he is the
Country Director of the NGO Turquoise Mountain, which has the three-fold
objective of regenerating historic urban areas, renewing traditional Afghan arts
and architecture, and spurring the sustainable development of the nation’s
craft industry.
Contact: Balliol College, University of Oxford, OX 1 3BJ, UK.
E-mail: thomas.wide@balliol.ox.ac.uk

Zuzanna Olszewska is a departmental lecturer in social anthropology at the

University of Oxford, specializing in the cultural production of the Afghan
diaspora. She is the author of a forthcoming book, The Pearl of Dari: Poetry and
Personhood among Young Afghans in Iran (Indiana University Press).
Contact: Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford,
51-53 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PE, UK.
E-mail: zuzanna.olszewska@anthro.ox.ac.uk

//
J]na]ok

<=D=MR=9F<L@=;AF=E9KG>H=J>GJE9F;=2HGO=JKG>
9>>=;LAGF$=D=F9<=DJáG *()*!
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 240 pp.,
ISBN-13: 9780748649419, p/bk, £22.99

<=D=MR=9F<OGJD<;AF=E9$<9NA<E9JLAF%BGF=K *())!
London: Continuum, 270 pp.,
ISBN-13: 9780826436429, p/bk, £19.99

<=D=MR=9F<>ADE$<9NA<E9JLAF%BGF=K9F<OADDA9E:JGOF
=<K! *()*!
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 236 pp.,
ISBN-13: 9780748641208, p/bk, £21.99

Reviewed by Anna Backman Rogers, Stockholm University

Since the publication of Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body (1993) and David
Rodowick’s Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (1997), Deleuzian approaches to film
have become ever more popular and germane. While the aforementioned
texts, alongside the work of scholar Ronald Bogue (2003), have helped to
illuminate the imbricate nature of Deleuze’s work on cinema with his highly
specific interpretation of canonical philosophical texts, recent Deleuzian schol-
arship has taken a different tack. No longer encumbered with having to justify
or explain the relevance of their framework, scholars are able to use Deleuze’s
concepts, arguably, as he would have originally intended: as tools for form-
ing creative or rhizomatic connections and opening up new, unforeseen ways
of thinking about cinematic encounters. Taken together, these three studies
are indicative of a growing need for both respectful critique and expansion of
the (auteurist and Eurocentric) ideas originally set forth by Deleuze. In doing
so, this scholarship suggests that Deleuze’s ideas are not merely still relevant
to the field of film studies, but are an increasingly vital resource for expand-
ing our ways of thinking about the cinematic experience, the cinematic body,
popular, global and digital cinemas.
In Deleuze and The Cinemas of Perfomance (2012), Elena del Río takes her
cue from the phenomenological approach to cinema of Vivian Sobchack
(1992) and Laura Marks (2000), but uses Deleuzian theory to enrich further
these theories of embodiment. As such, del Río usefully builds upon existing
scholarship that has sought to analyse the importance of cinematic sensation
and affect that cannot be contained or necessarily explained in terms of narra-
tive stricture. In taking up the work of scholars such as Marks and Martine
Beugnet ([2007] 2012), who have married Deleuzian and phenomenological
theories to insightful effect, del Río makes a vital addition to phenomeno-
logical and Deleuzian scholarship. By privileging analysis of the performing
body in cinema, del Río expands on crucial concepts within Deleuzian theory
(such as affect, force and assemblage) in order to elaborate on how the cine-
matic image can be encountered and understood from a non-representational
perspective. This theoretical conjunction has important implications for the
way in which the cinematic body (that of the protagonist and the film itself)
and cinematic dispositif may be thought of and theorized as a field of affect.

/0
 J]na]ok

Moreover, del Río’s delineation of how her theoretical framework may be used
to analyse the role of the female body in film offers a welcome and exciting
contribution to feminist film theory through nuanced understanding of the
limitations of theories tied to the representational model (such as the seminal
work of Laura Mulvey and Judith Butler); in turn, del Río argues persuasively
in her book for an alternative understanding of certain psychoanalytic terms
such as fetishism, sadomasochism and narcissism, which can act as a ‘shock
to thought’ (6).
The corpus of films that del Río’s study is structured on represent what
could be called a sliding scale of affect, or what she describes as ‘a movement
from qualified realism’ (as exemplified in the films of Douglas Sirk) to ‘unqual-
ified abstraction’ (as located in the work of David Lynch) (17). In outlining the
dissolution of the cinematic image into pure affect, del Río guides the reader
through the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Sally Potter and Claire Denis,
all of whom employ cinematic affect in order to deterritorialize not only the
human body, but also cinematic genre – a gesture that is implicitly politi-
cal and experimental. Through her elegant and thoughtful analysis, del Río
posits the politics of affectivity as a fruitful strategy for reading cinemas that
are either often interpreted within a very particular (and limited) theoretical
context (for example, the application of Brechtian theory to Fassbinder’s work)
or woefully misunderstood (as has been the case with the work of both Potter
and Denis).
In his exceptional Deleuze and World Cinemas (2011), David Martin-Jones
‘reconsiders Deleuze’s conclusions by broadening the range of cinemas exam-
ined, both geographically and historically’ (1); in doing so, Martin-Jones
not only widens the suitability of a Deleuzian approach to film to cinemas
outside of Europe and the United States, but, critically, also develops notions
of the movement-image and time-image, which have proven to be limited
and problematic in terms of Deleuze’s own delineation of these concepts and
their applicability to global contemporary cinemas. To address this difficulty
directly, Martin-Jones introduces, what could be termed loosely, Deleuzian-
inspired concepts such as the attraction-image, action crystals and the masala-
image and, in elaborating upon them, makes intricate and sensitive readings
of films as diverse as Impossible Voyage (Méliès, 1904), Police Story (Chan,
1985) and Collateral (Mann, 2004). These highly useful terms supplement
Deleuzian theory in order to help overcome its hermetic scope. Martin-Jones
writes: ‘(w)hen I state that the global nature of world cinemas enables a global
application of Deleuze’s ideas … I mean this in the very specific sense that
the global spread of cinemas around the world both facilitates and necessi-
tates a reinterpretation of the Cinema books’ (6, original emphasis). In other
words, this study does not merely develop Deleuzian theory as a framework
through which global cinema can be read, it also demonstrates how global
cinema enables a reconsideration of Deleuzian concepts in a form of dialogue.
Furthermore, in addressing or directly confronting issues such as the osten-
sibly dichotomy between movement and time images, or the location of this
break between the two visual regimes in post-war European situation and
its cinemas, Martin-Jones opens up manifold and genuinely new paths for
Deleuzian theory and demonstrates how it can be updated for contempo-
rary and historically specific cinemas. The book provides excellent readings of
French, Italian, Argentine, Chinese, American and Indian cinemas by careful
analysis of the complexity and specificity of their contexts, while ‘mapping
cinema’s transnational flows’ (6). This transnational focus has the added

/1
J]na]ok

benefit of decentring Hollywood cinema as the benchmark by which ‘other’

cinema is judged or categorized.
It is perhaps in its analysis of Bollywood cinema that Deleuze and World
Cinemas provides its most outstanding and original contribution for it is in
this kind of cinema that ‘the most comprehensive challenge to the bounda-
ries of Deleuze’s categories of the movement-image and time-image’ (201)
is apparent. As Martin-Jones argues: ‘(n)either movement- nor time-image,
the popular Indian film instead exposes the Eurocentric reterritorializing that
Deleuze’s image categories prematurely impose on cinema’ (202). Indeed,
the manifestation of both time-images and movement-images within this
cultural context demands that Deleuze’s concepts be deterritorialized and
re-thought, the result of which is the concept of the masala-image (masala
meaning ‘a blending of flavours or moods’ (208)). Martin-Jones notes that
popular Indian cinema is characterized by a series of spectacles, which often
function as interruptions, and that the film proceeds in fits and starts often
‘haltingly’ or ‘circuitously’ (210). Form and content are inextricably interwo-
ven so that the spectacle seems to sweep up the characters in its own move-
ment (or in Deleuzian terms movement of world), which in turn either blocks
or precipitates the narrative (often relying on the sensory-motor continuity
of the central protagonist). As such, these kinds of films represent a direct
challenge to Deleuze’s compartmentalisation of movement and time images.
Martin-Jones argues further that these images partake in a dharmic whole
(dharma being a metaphysical conception of the whole that is often taken to
represent a cosmic and moral order within which one has a specific place).
Although Deleuzian in its thrust, the notions of masala-image and dhar-
mic whole allow for notably original readings of these films, while respect-
ing their cultural heritage. In other words, Martin-Jones persuasively shows
how Deleuzian theory can expand our reading and understanding of global
cinema, while global cinema can help to open up creative re-configurations
of Deleuzian concepts.
Deleuze and Film (2012), a collection of essays edited by David Martin-
Jones and William Brown ‘creates Deleuze and Guatarrian assemblages
through encounters with films from various countries, and spanning a range
of genres’ (1). As is the case with Martin-Jones’s approach to global cinemas,
Deleuze’s concepts are used as a catalyst for inventive and creative thought so
that a ‘mutual becoming’ (7) is effected between the film viewer and the film.
This volume not only demonstrates ably the value of a Deleuzian approach
to film, but also provides multiple paths for further exploration. Taken as a
whole, the study presents an outstanding collection of essays, but it is not
within the scope of this review to elaborate fully on each them. In this reader’s
view, one of the most important contributions the collection makes is in
developing and strengthening the connection between Deleuzian theory and
digital effects in film.
Markos Hadjioannou’s rich and beautifully written essay ‘In search of lost
reality: Waltzing with Bashir’, explores Deleuze’s Nietzschean concept of the
powers of the false in relation to Waltz With Bashir (Folman, 2008) by ally-
ing the crisis of memory with the evident ‘falseness’ of the digital animated
image. Hadjioannou argues that as an animated documentary, the film alters
the parameters of the documentary by eschewing connection to the indexical
(analogue) image and complicating its representation of time. In the process,
two important aspects of this film, and by extension the digital image, come
to the fore: first, if indexicality is no longer crucial in terms of defining what

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the cinematic image is, and can do, ‘the non-indexicality of the digital should
thus not prohibit the technology from expressing reality or from allowing for a
spectatorial experience that may bring the individual in touch with the world’
(108, original emphasis); and second, the digital (animated) image can, through
its very form, prompt us to question the independent reality presented within,
to use Deleuze’s term, the organic regime. Hadjioannou draws a correlation
between Waltz With Bashir and the mode of ‘performative documentary’
that foregrounds the construction of ‘truth’ as a form of critique. As such, he
argues that it is the impossibility of objectivity when in confrontation with a
traumatic event that is made manifest in the film; most crucially, Hadjioannou
suggests that this traumatic impasse is evident or effected through the digit-
ally constructed nature of its images.
In his impressive essay ‘Digitalising Deleuze: The curious case of the
digital human assemblage or what can a digital body do?’ David H. Fleming
uses the Deleuzian notions of cinematic affect and geste to analyse the ‘affec-
tive performance’ of Brad Pitt in David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin
Button (2009) alongside the pivotal role that digital effects play in this ‘star’
performance. Fleming seamlessly blends Deleuzian theory with his sophis-
ticated reading of the film, thus proving the editors’ point that ‘film expands
our worldview; we expand the film’s worldview’ (7). At the heart of this article
is an exploration of the process by which ‘the human actor is caught in a proc-
ess of becoming-digital, at the same time as digital imaging technologies shift
towards a becoming-human’ (197). By drawing on Brown’s remarkable work
on Deleuze and the digital image (2009, 2013) and del Río’s aforementioned
work on affective bodies, Fleming argues most persuasively for both the crea-
tive and liberating potential of this technological becoming.
While the immediate readership for this corpus of texts will certainly be of
Deleuzian persuasion, the texts’ fresh engagement with a range of art along-
side popular and contemporary cinemas ensures that this scholarship will be
read by a broad cross-section of film and philosophy academics and enthusi-
asts. Indeed, such a persuasive application of Deleuzian theory would suggest
that future scholars will be quick to contribute further to this expanding body
of exciting research.

J=>=J=F;=K
Beugnet, Martine ([2007] 2012), Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art
of Transgression, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bogue, Ronald (2003), Deleuze on Cinema, London: Routledge.
Brown, William (2009), ‘Man without a movie camera – movies without men:
Towards a posthumanist cinema?’, in Warren Buckland (ed.), Film Theory
and Contemporary Hollywood Movies, London: Routledge, pp. 66–85.
—— (2013), Supercinema: Film Philosophy for the Digital Age, London:
Berghahn.
Marks, Laura (2000), The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and
the Senses, Durham: Duke University Press.
Rodowick, David (1997), Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, Durham: Duke
University.
Shaviro, Steven (1993), The Cinematic Body, Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press.
Sobchack, Vivian (1992), The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film
Experience, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

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;GFLJA:MLGJ<=L9ADK
Anna Backman Rogers is a postdoctoral scholar in the film studies department
at Stockholm University. She has published on the work of Sofia Coppola, Jim
Jarmusch, Gus Van Sant and Miranda July. She is currently writing a book
on American independent cinema, which is forthcoming with Edinburgh
University Press in 2015. Her book on the cinema of Sofia Coppola is forth-
coming with Berghahn in 2016 and she is co-editor with Laura Mulvey of
Feminisms, which is forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press in 2015.
E-mail: anna.rogers@ims.su.se; annabackmanrogers@gmail.com

GMLG>LAE=2<=KAJ=AF9L=EHGJ9D;AF=E9$LG<<E[?GO9F
*())!
Minneapolis, London: University of Minneapolis Press, ix+285pp.,
ISBN: 9780816669967, p/bk, $25.00

Reviewed by Erato Basea, Columbia University

In the wake of digital revolution, a growing number of films employ an atem-

poral narration and make formal experiments to suggest that existence in time
does not always occur within a chronological, forward-moving temporality.
For Todd McGowan, such films fall into the category of ‘atemporal cinema’. In
the eight chapters, each focusing on a specific film, McGowan contends that
psychoanalysis, in particular the theory of the death drive, provides an ideal
tool for interpreting atemporal cinema.
This rich and highly entertaining study sets the stage by linking atemporal
films with desire. According to the psychoanalytic interpretation of films,
they, like dreams, activate the subject’s unconscious, and invite spectators to
interpret their fantasies and unconscious desires. However, films cannot fulfil
a subject’s unconscious desire; they merely replicate the subject’s failure to
realize this goal by reassembling time. In so doing, they repeat the trauma or
loss that corresponds to the subject’s death drive. Films that comply with the
atemporal cinematic mode do not simply reassemble time in a manner that
other films do; they also construct a reverse chronology and turn to the death
drive to introduce spectators into the logic of the repetition of loss. As a result,
the subject questions the possibility of change. This happens not in a deter-
minist manner but in accordance with the Kantian philosophy of freedom:
subjects are freed when they are out of time and its causality. Since there is no
possibility of transcending loss, the means for sustaining the drive (instead of
reaching a higher plain) becomes the end goal.
The study begins with Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994) since, for McGowan,
the film inaugurated ‘the contemporary wave of atemporal cinema’ (35).
Moreover, the film occupies a liminal place in relation to the rest of the films
discussed in the book, as it does not totally break from temporality but remains
focused on time. The Neo-Spinozist Left theory is pertinently discussed for it
sheds light on how Pulp Fiction suggests the birth of a new, revolutionary and
therefore liberating authentic temporality. With its emphasis on newness and

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the creative and ameliorative power of reconceived time, the film proposes
that the subject can escape trauma and the past in order to focus on the
newness possible in the future.
It is difficult to think of a film that could better reveal the manner in which
atemporal films can seriously question the possibility of the existence of a
better world in the future than The Butterfly Effect (Bress and Gruber, 2004).
The film revolves around the attempts of Evan Treborn to overcome a trauma
that defines his subjectivity and his relation to the world. Any attempt by a
subject to violate time, return to the past and intervene in the course of the
events leading to the initial wound, and create new, better opportunities in
life are unsuccessful. In contrast to the narrative suggested by Pulp Fiction,
the subject is able to go back in time and explore various possibilities. But
time does not allow novelty, and drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s theory on the
impossibility of good in societies, the author shows how time in the film can
only repeat loss.
The embracing of loss produced by trauma, and how loss can lead to
future gain, are the subject of the chapter devoted to 21 Grams (Iñárritu, 2003).
A traumatic event is at the centre of the narrative: the death of Cristina’s
husband and children in a car accident to which the film’s protagonists –
Cristina, Jack and Paul – incessantly return. Still, the traumatic, non-sensical
nature of the loss means that the event cannot be narrativized and as a result
affects all events in the characters’ everyday lives, defining their subjectivity
and, accordingly, interrupting and restructuring their sense of temporality.
Hence the film, the author is at pains to show, is freed from the constraints of
linear chronology.
But how and why do atemporal films about the life of a romantic couple
violate the nature of time? In general, McGowan argues, romantic Hollywood
films have a linear chronology and end with hope and the promise of newness:
the romantic union of a couple resolves sexual and social differences, and
the finale brings to the fore a fantasy object instead of embracing repetition
and the trauma of loss. According to McGowan, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless
Mind (Gondry, 2004), The Constant Gardener (Meirelles, 2005) and Irréversible
(Noé, 2002) depart from the temporality of such Hollywood movies. From
them, only the first film does not abandon the fantasy of romance. In Eternal
Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, the viewer first encounters the breakup of Joel
and Clementine and then gradually follows the dissolution of their imperfect
relationship as Joel painfully tries to forget any memory he holds from it. If the
couple reunites at the end, this is because they have accepted that antagonism
remains the basis of their union. Irréversible starts from the failure of the union
of Pierre and Alex and goes back in time to show Alex’s ultraviolent rape and
the implications of this event in the couple’s life. McGowan contends that the
film’s reverse presentation of events underlines the very nature of traumas:
they are unavoidable, and condition the very existence of a subject despite the
passing of time. With The Constant Gardener, romance acquires political over-
tones as Tessa and Justin become implicated in the western practices of drug
testing in Kenya. Each has a different relation to temporality. Tessa represents
authentic temporality that makes her realize the impossibility for a better
future and yet the need to act immediately; on the other hand, her husband
Justin’s external temporality makes him comply with the official ideology
and remain apolitical. Only after the traumatic event of his wife’s death is he
able to embrace submission to the logic of the drive and transform passivity
into action.

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In 2046 (Wong Kar Wai, 2004), the number signifies not only a future
date, but also a hotel room where the protagonist’s former lover used to stay
and an accessible place to which Chow Mo Wan, who has experienced a
failed relationship with Su Li Zhen, can travel to recollect lost memories. For
McGowan, 2046 constitutes a rupture with contemporary theorists for whom
eternity exists in relation to time. The film instead presents eternity as a place,
that remains outside the realm of everyday spaces but it is also linked to the
subject’s desire to find love. Although eternity promises the perfect realization
of a subject’s desire, the subject, however, maintains a distance in relation to
this hypothetical fulfilment. As a result, the spectator sees him repeating failed
encounters with women, an element that turns repetition into an underlying
structure upon which the film’s narrative can be formulated.
Peppermint Candy (Lee Chang-Dong, 2000) links a subject’s perpetual
repetition of failure with the trauma in South Korean national history. More
specifically, the film consists of seven sequences that follow, in reverse chro-
nology from 1999 to 1979, moments in the traumatic life of Yong-Ho. These
moments are linked with the nation’s trauma coinciding with the Gwang-ju
Massacre, and the film uses reverse chronology to suggest that the subject,
like the nation, cannot escape from the structural trauma of loss. In contrast to
Memento (Nolan, 2000), the character is not reconciled with trauma and never
embraces failure.
Given the recent developments in contemporary cinema towards making
films that defy chronological time, the publication of Out of Time is especially
welcome. The book will interest a wide variety of specialists who will find an
in-depth filmic and psychoanalytic analysis of the theory of the drive, and
various theoretically complex discussions on time: from Martin Heidegger’s
discussions about the spatialization of time and the relationship between
time and ideology, to Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the time-image and contem-
porary theories about eternity and time. General readers who seek pleasure
in exposing themselves to atemporal filmic images should be grateful for a
study that complements detailed case-studies with wider cinematic references
most notably to I’m not There (Haynes, 2007), Donnie Darko (Kelly, 2001),
5x2 (Ozon, 2004), Proof (Madden, 2005), Lantana (Lawrence, 2001), Out of
Sight (Soderbergh, 1998), Rules of Attraction (Avary, 2002) and The Machinist
(Anderson, 2004). Out of Time provides a refreshing and challenging outlook
on the subject. For its theoretical breadth and diversity of its contents, it can
also render the reception of atemporal films as somewhat less bewildering.

;GFLJA:MLGJ<=L9ADK
Dr Erato Basea is a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University.
She holds a D.Phil. in Film from the University of Oxford. Her article on
Hollywood film-making in times of crisis has been recently published in
the journal Interactions. Her research interests include European and world
cinema, auteur theory, literature and film, film adaptations, and transnational
aspects of cinema.
Contact: Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University,
74 Morningside Dr, New York, NY 10027, USA.
E-mail: eb2862@columbia.edu; eratobasea@gmail.com

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>J9EAF?>ADE2;AF=E99F<L@=NAKM9D9JLK$KL=N=F9DD=F
9F<D9MJ9@M:F=J =<K! *()*!
Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 273 pp.,
ISBN: 9781841505077, p/bk, £19.95

Reviewed by Jonathan Wroot, University of Worcester

This edited collection follows papers and topics discussed at the Framing Film
conference at the University of Winchester in 2009. Both the conference and
this volume are timely interventions within the study of film and its related
media. As Allen and Hubner’s introduction explains, there are few other
works addressing the interrelated nature of these different media types, but it
is a growing concern. Dudley Andrew et al. (1997), Angela Dalle Vache (1996)
and Susan Felleman (2006) have similarly explored film’s roots in pictorial
media, such as art and photography. Another growing topic for discussion is
the film director’s status as an artist (though this has arguably been the case
since the term ‘auteur’ was adopted within film criticism). Frank Cossa (1995)
has investigated artistic conventions that permeate throughout Barry Lyndon
(Kubrick, 1975) due to its eighteenth-century setting and iconography. An
even further permeation of such conventions is found in the films of Kitano
Takeshi, whose own paintings appear frequently within his productions
(Gerow 2007). This topic is one that also permeates the chapters in Framing
Film, but it is balanced with other perspectives too (such as the influences and
effects that stem from comics, DVD special features and stage plays). As a
result, the book is a successful insight into a broad field that will hopefully be
explored further in subsequent publications.
In Chapter 1, entitled ‘Crafting worlds: The changing role of the production
designer’, Ian Christie charts the history of designers within film production.
Though the role of ‘production designer’ existed in the production of silent
films, the term has been linked to work ranging from the construction of sets
to the recent animation of scenes using computer-generated effects. By under-
standing the scope of what production design can potentially define, it can be
framed as a process to be studied in order to gather evidence and insights into
film history. In this way, a perspective on production design can be applied,
which aligns with current debates surrounding film authorship and genres.
Chapter 2 then begins a series of contributions which examine the diverse
forms of still imagery that can both influence and be found within film texts.
And, as the chapters demonstrate, the still image is as versatile as the different
types of audio-visual media that exist today.
Ian Hague highlights a contemporary and popular influence on current
big-budget film productions, the comic book, in Chapter 2. In ‘Adapting
watchmen’, Hague not only discusses the adaptation of the original comic’s
narrative for the film Watchmen (Snyder, 2009), but also its visual conventions.
The film is found to be a faithful representation of the comic’s story, but Hague
effectively demonstrates the differences that exist between comic books and
films within their depiction of imagery. Both media use specific conventions
to invoke particular meanings, and films are innately incapable of reproducing
them (as was argued by the original story’s writer, Alan Moore). As a result,
Hague settles on calling the film ‘acceptable’, but not successful (47). Dorota
Ostrowska, in Chapter 3, discusses the history of film poster production in

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the Soviet Union through the case study of posters for French films that were
displayed in Poland after World War II. Though it is tightly focused on a
particular time period, Ostrowska’s informative study helpfully conveys that
film posters have their own artistic conventions, which can represent a variety
of contemporaneous meanings. In addition, such art is unique (as are types of
production design) because of its origins within one country’s film industry.
Another series of multifaceted images is then charted in Chapter 4 by Laura
Hubner. She re-addresses the history and reception of The Shining (Kubrick,
1980) through the circulation of one iconic screenshot – that of Jack Nicholson
peering through a recently chopped hole in a door. The image now has a dual
representation. It is both emblematic of the film’s narrative and the scene in
which it originally appears, and now signifies a variety of contexts and formats
in which it was subsequently appropriated. The original image and scene is
one which was intended to invoke horror and menace, but the image has now
been parodied and commercialized through comedy sketches, posters, t-shirts
and even tattoos. Hubner’s pertinent example suggests that other films have
been similarly treated, and asks if an original image’s meaning remains or
constantly changes through different types of representation.
The broad spectrum of types of still images related to film is then exam-
ined further in the next three chapters. In particular, these chapters centre
on film’s relationship to photography and concepts of realism, often stem-
ming from the perspectives of critic and writer André Bazin. Steven Allen
investigates what meanings can be interpreted from the literal insertion of
photographs in between film scenes, some of which correlate with specific
photo images. In Ten Canoes (Heer and Djigirr, 2006), Allen deduces that this
allows the film to emphasize a sense of ‘pastness’ and the passage of time.
While it can be agreed that this effect has been achieved, Allen’s analysis also
shows that film can reproduce and disseminate images which have a wider
significance (e.g. as historical evidence). Still images also have great impor-
tance outside of a film text. Tina Kendall explores an often ignored aspect of
DVD media, that of the image gallery, in Chapter 6. Through the example
of Ratcatcher (Ramsay, 1999), Kendall admits that her conclusions are drawn
from an ‘authored’ text. However, her study does suggest that still images are
just as layered with meaning as other DVD extras, such as making-ofs and
interviews. Aaron Barlow (2005) argues that such extras should be used as
academic sources to aid the analysis of films and other media texts, and both
Paul Arthur (2004) and Nicola J. Evans (2010) believe there is as much artistic
value in DVD special features as can be found in films. Kendall suggests that
both these perspectives can be gleaned from image galleries on DVD discs.
In Chapter 7, Matilde Nardelli reaches similar conclusions for photo books
(fotormanzo) linked to Italian films, which often circulate a related or divergent
narrative from the original text. They both have value as historic evidence and
information, as well as within their own conventions and forms, alongside
their replication of some editing techniques, such as montage (139).
Following these analyses of still images, both directly and indirectly stem-
ming from film texts, the remaining chapters investigate the implications of
using knowledge of artistic processes and practices to study film texts. David
Heinemann, in Chapter 8, aims to chart comprehensively how art can create
multiple meanings within films. This is not just through its addition to the
mise-en-scène and iconography within a film, but also through the depiction of
the artist as a figure within the narrative of a film. Though all these elements
are not a regular occurrence in cinema – and the films Michael (Dreyer, 1924)

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and Gertrud (Dreyer, 1964) are perhaps unique examples – Heinemann’s anal-
ysis does much to suggest how any appearance of art in film can be inter-
preted. The figure of the artist is again used to interpret multiple aspects of
particular films in the next two chapters. Chapter 9 consists of an examina-
tion of Hunger (McQueen, 2008) by Toni Ross. The artistic eye of McQueen
cannot be denied because of the film’s mise-en-scène, and is comparable to
the conclusions of Frank Cossa and Aaron Gerow that were cited earlier. In
Chapter 10, Leighton Grist argues that Martin Scorsese undertakes his role as
director in a manner analogous to an artist. This comparison also allows Grist
to interpret the production of several of Scorsese’s films through the prism of
biography, as well as the Hollywood film industry in the context of The King
of Comedy (1983), After Hours (1985), The Age of Innocence (1993) and Kundun
(1997) – ultimately suggesting that Scorsese could be the last director of this
kind that Hollywood may see.
The next two chapters trace the artistic influence in various films, through
the emotional themes of loneliness and grief. In tackling such broad topics,
both David Morrison and Dennis Rothermel question whether the means of
conveying these emotions are inherited from other forms of expression, or
if art truly is an antecedent to representations of these feelings in cinema.
Morrison concludes by stating that loneliness appears to be universally recog-
nized and expressed within both art and film, especially when comparing
numerous filmic examples to the paintings of Edward Hopper. Rothermel’s
analysis of depictions of war and violence suggests that when the context
of war frames violent acts, an audience’s interpretation of these acts can be
greatly affected. He concludes that cinema can decontextualize these images
and invoke other emotions (such as grief and loss), in similar fashion to a still
image that has been labelled as art.
While these two chapters posit future investigations for textual analysts,
Judith Buchanan charts the earliest influences that film took from paintings
and visual arts in the final chapter of the collection. Art had in fact influenced
stage productions shortly before the introduction of the moving image, by
way of ‘moving picture exhibition halls’ (239). And one of the first genres to
develop in the years of silent cinema was that of the enchanted painting (248).
Here, an artist’s work could either come to life in order to bemuse and confuse
the film’s protagonists, or be so life-like that the same (usually comedic) effect
could be achieved. This was not always in order to rebel against attitudes
towards early film that saw it as inferior to art. Buchanan argues that it acts as
evidence of the widespread knowledge of artistic conventions that audiences
possibly had at the time, implying that they were also versed in several other
media forms that preceded cinema. Therefore, Buchanan suggests that cinema
always has been, and will continue to be, inextricably linked with other visual
arts, as they provide a fruitful range of potential influences.
Buchanan’s conclusions are completely apt for the close of the collection,
as the aim of the editors has been to present film’s various links to the visual
arts. Several over-arching themes do appear evidently throughout many of the
chapters – e.g. authorship, history and realism – but they have been explored
from multiple perspectives. As a result, the possibilities offered by studying
film’s relationship to other visual arts are most clearly presented by the work
in this volume, and will hopefully encourage future studies of the rapport with
other media forms that film enjoys. In particular, this volume is thoroughly
recommended for readers and academics with a strong interest in art, digital
media, history, literature, and popular culture, as well as the study of film.

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J=>=J=F;=K
Andrew, Dudley (ed.) (1997), The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age
of Photography, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Arthur, Paul (2004), ‘(In)dispensable cinema: Confessions of a “Making-Of”
addict’, Film Comment, 40: 4, pp. 38–42.
Barlow, Aaron (2005), The DVD Revolution: Movies, Culture, and Technology,
London: Praeger.
Cossa, Frank (1995), ‘Images of perfection: life imitates art in Kubrick’s Barry
Lyndon’, Eighteenth Century Life, 19: 2, pp. 79–82.
Evans, Nicola J. (2010), ‘Undoing the magic? DVD extras and the pleasure
behind the scenes’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 24: 4,
pp. 587–600.
Felleman, Susan (2006), Art in the Cinematic Imagination, Austin: University
Texas Press.
Gerow, Aaron (2007), Kitano Takeshi, London: BFI.
Vache, Angela Dalle (1996), Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film,
London, Athlone.

;GFLJA:MLGJ<=L9ADK
Jonathan Wroot is a final year Ph.D. student and Associate Tutor at the
University of East Anglia. His thesis explores the distribution and marketing
of Japanese films on DVD in the United Kingdom. He has presented several
papers on topics derived from this research – regarding animation, special
features and critical reception, and their relationships to DVD discs. One of
these papers has recently been published in the online journal Frames.
E-mail: j.wroot@worc.ac.uk
Web address: http://worc.academia.edu/JonathanWroot

00
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