I’m really enjoying Christina Meyer’s Producing Mass Entertainment (2019), a study of the Yellow Kid comics (1895-1898). Two items caught my eye while reading. First, Meyer meticulously documents how legal circumstances–comic artist Richard Outcault’s failure to copyright Yellow Kid–led to two versions of the Yellow Kid comics for about a year, one in William Randolph…
Category: Reading Response
Defenders of Video Game Analysis–Assemble!
In preparation for a chapter in my James Bond book on the franchise’s analog and video games, I’ve been reading up on something called video game analysis. As readers of this blog know only too well, I am an advocate of close–indeed, very close–analysis of film and media. (I’ve tried my hand it at with…
What’s a “Fictional Universe”? Some Thoughts on Markstein’s Theory
It’s something that no contemporary film critic or commentator can do without: the concept of fictional universes. “Worlds” are no longer sufficient to contain the stories of a film or media property. The scope of a franchise must be cosmic. Now fictional universes are multiplying faster than the umpteen ones predicted by string theory. Marvel’s…
“Bresson is still very young…”: Introducing the First Piece Ever Written on Robert Bresson’s Style—and It Features 7 “Lost” Works
Recent discoveries are changing how we view the career of French auteur Robert Bresson (1901–1999). It no longer seems adequate to describe his artistic output as modest, for example. And nor can his reputation for precise, conceptual, even “spiritual” art be ascribed solely to his feature film career (1943–1983). Before we get to some recent…
The Art History of Michael Baxandall, Part 4: Against Interpretation
This marks the fourth in a series of posts on the writings of art historian Michael Baxandall (1933–2008). If previous entries have examined Baxandall’s thoughts, all related, on the critical history of style, the relation of language and culture to art-making, and the inferential work of the art historian, this piece addresses a very different…
New Revelations on Bresson’s Early History: Scanning the Digital Archive
As Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar argue in their monumental Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (2003), there are numerous benefits to writing history as a quotidien or like a page of the daily press. “A newspaper,” they explain, “can shift the weight of history from continuous story to parallel attractions; it requires a peculiar kind of…
What Can Formalism Teach Us about Seriality? Some Remarks on Frank Kelleter’s Media of Serial Narrative (2017)
This is a rather heady entry, an attempt to work through some questions of method. As I continue to research my book on James Bond and the franchise’s multimedia storytelling, I’ve had to confront some basic questions related to seriality itself. What is it exactly? And how should we study it? The answers I propose…
The Art History of Michael Baxandall, Part 1: Tracing the Origins of a Visual Language
This entry begins a new series on the art historian Michael Baxandall (1933-2008). (The other essays in the series are here, here, here, and here.) One of the most thought-provoking art historians of his generation, Baxandall wrote books that did more than tell the story of Western art and its surrounding taste cultures; they made…
Book Review: OBJECTIF 49: COCTEAU ET LA NOUVELLE AVANT-GARDE (Gimello-Mesplomb, 2014)
What did it mean to be a cinephile in postwar France? If some historical studies give the impression that we’ve settled this important question, others, like Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb’s discerning new book, remind us that many stones have yet to be turned over. Relying on testimony from some sixteen original interviews and on data collected from a…
Sight & Sound’s Greatest Documentaries: No Canada?
The British film magazine Sight & Sound is well known for its polls and surveys. Its most famous poll, The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time, made news in 2012, when the 846 filmmakers, critics, distributors and programmers polled ended Citizen Kane‘s (Welles, 1941) 50-year reign atop the list. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) took its place….
Moving Patterns 