Daily Archives: May 12, 2021

Recommended Reading: Adrian Martin’s MISE EN SCÈNE AND FILM STYLE: FROM CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD TO NEW MEDIA ART

This book can now be purchased as a paperback for just under $28.00 (or less) on Amazon. — J.R.

MisenScene&FilmStyle

It’s a genuine pity that this remarkable new book — a kind of summation and extension of Adrian Martin’s work in film analysis and the history of film criticism in Australia, France, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. over the past two decades — is commercially available only at the whopping price of $80.75 on Amazon — or $76, if you’re willing to settle for a Kindle edition. As a longtime friend, colleague, and collaborator of Martin’s, I was fortunate enough to receive a free inscribed copy, but most of the rest of you will have to either shell out a fortune or wait for a softcover edition. All I can do now, really, having received this book only yesterday, is signal just a few of its many riches. Girish Shambu, Adrian’s irreplaceable coeditor at LOLA, has already posted a helpful summary of the book’s “four [interests] that animate the work” on his web site, so the most I can hope to do here is cite just a few treasured and brilliant passages that already have either sent me back to the films and texts being discussed or extended my current (re)reading and (re)viewing lists:

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Edward Yang has died at 59 [Chicago Reader blog post, 2007]

Edward Yang has died at 59

Posted By on 07.02.07 at 02:49 PM

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First Ousmane Sembene, the father of African cinema, who passed away at age 84 on June 9, and now the Taiwanese master Edward Yang. We’re losing our giants.

Many of Sembene’s major literary works are out of print (including Tribal Scars, a wonderful collection of stories that includes “The Promised Land,” which his first feature, Black Girl, was based on; purchasing this essential paperback on Amazon now costs about $49). Only four of his ten features are available on English-subtitled DVDs, all of them recent releases. Even Black Girl, the one that still moves me the most, is available only in an imperfect copy. (The film’s color sequence, which I’ve never seen in color, is printed in black and white.)

The situation regarding Edward Yang’s films is even worse: only the last of his seven features, albeit one of the best, Yi Yi, is available on Amazon. The one I consider his greatest, A Brighter Summer Day (pictured) can be found extralegally or semilegally from at least a couple of different sources, as I explain in my current DVD column in the summer issue of Cinema Scope.

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