Just like many other popular forms of entertainment the pin-up magazine, or men’s magazine, did not just appear at the newsstand overnight, but had a long way to go from secretly sold and distributed smut and photographic sheet collections (like the “French postcards”) to the now very common form of glossy magazine centered on naked […]
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Author: Dr. A. Ebert
Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream by Mark Osteen (2013)
By choosing the rather bleak Edmund Goulding noir classic Nightmare Alley (1947) as the namesake for his new book, author Mark Osteen surprises with his fresh approach to films noir. He concentrates on the major antagonists, so to speak, of the American dream, and the American pursuit of happiness, a constitutional right in a way. […]
Ragged But Right. Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and … by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff (2012)
For several decades, a very distinctive form of African American minstrel show was the most popular form of entertainment for black audiences in the South, its fame covering almost the entire country by and by. The beginning of this art form (that was in parts of the country available until the late 1940s) and its […]
Mystery Movie Series of 1930s Hollywood by Ron Backer (2012)
There was a time when mystery stories were not written for the screen exclusively but were meant to be published and read by an audience. These texts, however, were the foundations for almost all the major mystery series listed in Backer’s book; as were some of the best film noir movies prior to Hollywood’s remodeling […]
Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings by J. von Molke (2012)
When Siegfried Kracauer and his wife Lili in 1941 finally could escape the Nazi regime and left for New York fleeing Marseilles via Portugal the future of film criticism would have a fresh start … or have its initial start, depending on your point of view. Sharing the fate of many of today’s intellectuals and […]
The Golden Age of DC Comics 1935-1956 by Paul Levitz (2013)
Shazzamm! Phew!! This is one absolutely stunning edition of the early days of DC Comics. That is, if you are interested in the history, the concepts, the authors, the many inventors and most of all the legacy of the great comic artists at DC Comics. Then the heavy volume may just be what you have […]
Bad Vibrations. The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease by James Kennaway (2012)
What an interesting find! From the pen of James Kennaway, a historian of medicine at Durham University with an interest in popular culture, this detailed account of the shifting representation of the nature, hidden dangers and even strategic uses of music now arrives. In the five main chapters of Kennaway’s study, music and disorder, nervous […]
Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy by Robert B. Pippin (2012)
Whenever you hear a character in the next film noir you are watching say something that sounds a lot like sarcasm, heavy irony or simply like the words of a doomed man… you may have caught one of the moments Professor Pippin uses to build a whole theory. Build it around the attitude, not the […]
In Lonely Places. Film Noir Beyond the City by Imogen Sara Smith (2011)
There seem to be specific instances that make a particular type of movie clearly identifiable as belonging to a certain group. For example, we like to have deserts, gunfights and horses if we watch a western movie, and we may look out for earrings, battleships, sabers and the Jolly Roger when we watch a pirates […]