Film Journalists Research Articles

Film festival coverage: an interview with journalists, critics, and event programmers of Latin American film festivals

Film festivals are meeting spaces where various players from the audiovisual industry, students, film enthusiasts, journalists, and the organizers themselves converge. This research aims to describe the experiences in journalistic coverage of film festivals for media outlets: generalist, specialized, and digital native in Ibero-America. To achieve this, a qualitative approach was applied through semi-structured interviews with film journalists and festival managers. The results reveal that each journalist applies their framebuilding to cover the event, which is subject to the informational agenda of the media commissioning them. New agents have also emerged who communicate about festivals, such as influencers; furthermore, festivals have created their own platforms to cover informational gaps that specialized press does not report on the festival. Therefore, it is concluded that festivals are media epicenters where different types of content generators currently converge, diversifying the informational offer thanks to the technological facilities offered by digitization, the internet, and social media.

‘An intellectual environment of ambition’: exploring questions of independence with film(-making) education in conversation with Ben Gibson

This article presents an interview with Ben Gibson, former distributor, programmer, film journalist and producer, who went on to run the London Film School from 2000 to 2014. In this interview, Gibson deconstructs what is meant by the term ‘independent film-making’ in an educational context. Drawing on his wealth of experience in a variety of contexts, Gibson takes apart current notions that dominate in contemporary educational and industrial discourses, surprisingly arriving at a conclusion which could lead emerging film-makers and their supporters towards a notion of independence after all.

Part VII–Critiquing Africas/Diasporas: Intersecting Dialogues—In Conversation with Claire Diao, Leyla Bouzid, Mati Diop, and Cornélia Glele

Abstract: Journalist/film critic Falila Gbadamassi, in conversation with several film practitioners and activists, discovers the myriad interests, concerns, and burning issues that propel their desire to plunge into this vast cinematic landscape. Franco-Burkinabe film journalist, programmer, and activist Claire Diao explores the role that cinema plays as a link between her two cultures. Franco-Tunisian Leyla Bouzid, talks about her film A Tale of Love and Desire (2021, Tunisia) in the context of her own lived experiences, to have a double culture and at the same time have a kind of distance, to be able to question these identities and interrogate representations of it. Franco-Senegalese Mati Diop's relationship to cinema is intertwined with her Africanity. At the same time that her films pay homage to the generation of her uncle Djibril Diop Mambety and her father Wasis Diop, she continues her cinematic journey in her own way, using the tools of her generation. Beninese film organizer and consultant Cornélia Glele navigates behind the scenes with The Woman King (dir. Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2022, United States and Benin) team as she teaches the actresses the fundamentals of the Fon language of the "Agodjiés" of Benin.

In Northcliffe Jail: Iris Barry, film journalist

ABSTRACT A reinvestigation of Iris Barry’s work for the Daily Mail in the period 1925–30. Barry is celebrated as a critic and curator. As a founder of the Film Society in London in the 1920s and first curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1930s she is a heroine of minority film culture. This article argues that her role in mass film culture has been overlooked. While it has been acknowledged that Barry wrote for the Daily Mail, one of Britain’s most popular newspapers, this article demonstrates that the number of articles she wrote for the paper has been underestimated by a factor of ten. Beyond the case of Barry, this article argues that elite institutions like the Film Society have been given undue credit for the phenomenon of ‘taking film seriously.’

The lexico-phraseological profile of professional film reviews published by the British media: A corpus-linguistic study

Using corpus linguistic techniques, this exploratory study is intended to provide a descriptive in-sight into frequent lexical bundles, keywords and key terms as well as selected lexical markers of style used in a corpus of professional film reviews. The research material includes 210 domain-specific texts from the years 2020-2021, extracted from the websites of six British newspapers, magazines and institutions offering guides for moviegoers. The results show that the analyzed reviews make frequent use of general cinematic terms and more specific lexis denoting the different types and (sub)genres of cinematic productions repre-sented by the reviewed films. Other salient lexical features include a high concentration of referential but low concentration of stance bundles, though attitudinal items, particularly evaluation adjectives, signifi-cantly enrich the lexical inventory of the reviews. The presented data may have important pedagogic appli-cations in the area of teaching authentic English to future film reviewers and film journalists.

The Social Body of Béla Balázs

AbstractFocusing on the interwar writings of the film journalist and theorist Béla Balázs, this article argues for an understanding of Balázs’s film aesthetics as grounded in a popular politics of the body. Balázs understood film as a medium in which experiences of image, sound, and expressive movement and gesture shape human subjectivities within a newly mediatized social realm. The article explores Balázs’s consequent plea for a film politics of popular embodiment and asks what a survey of Balázs’s writings as both critic and theorist tell us about the political valences of his film theory now.

Violence Reframed: Constructing Subjugated Individuals as Agents, Not Images, through Screen Narratives

Violence Reframed: Constructing Subjugated Individuals as Agents, Not Images, through Screen Narratives

‘What I was told about lesbians really did shock me. It can’t be true, can it? You’re all vegetarians?’: Greywashing Gay Shame in Pride

Celebrated by film journalists as the feel-good film of 2014 (Kermode, 2014; Osboldstone, 2014), Pride depicted the unlikely alliance between a group of London based gay activists and the miners from a small, Welsh village during the miners’ strike of 1984. However, the film can also be read as a nostalgic representation of a specific agenda of British Gay Liberation politics in the early 1980s – a period in which one of the main trajectories of Gay Lib was to attempt to eradicate the stigma and shame from the identification of being gay. This article will argue that the film’s inclusion of the fictional character of Gwen is an effective technique of focalising the gay pride mantra through the point of view of a very endearing, older woman whose unassuming and innocent perspective on gender and sexuality politics emphasises the key point made by a faction of Gay Lib at the time: sexual object choice should be no more remarkable than a preference for a specific type of gastronomic fare. This narrative technique can identified as greywashing.

Una primera aproximación a la figura de Carmen Prada, periodista cinematográfi-ca y empresaria en el Madrid de los años veinte

The aim of this article is to make Carmen Prada known. A film journalist who wrote in the Madrid press bet­ween 1918 and 1921 under the alias of ‘Duchess Borelli’, Prada will be later the manager of two important ci­nema theatres in the capital. In this text I will focus on her journalistic work. In order to cover all her writings, I have carried out a first reading of her articles and selected the most relevant to make known her insightful and complex knowledge of the cinema of her time. Insightful, because Carmen Prada made use of any press format to promote cinema, from the omnipresent newsletter of those times to the interview or the opinion article, where she demonstrated an extensive knowledge of film. Complex, because in all her writings she co­vers all types of film-related topics: not only the relatively brief film review, or the usual star propaganda, but she also reflects on interesting aspects from the study of film reception, film aesthetics, the work of directors and writers, the behaviour of audiences in the cinema theatre, or the work of film critics. The latter turns Carmen Prada one of the main references of film criticism in Madrid and a fundamental agent to understand that complex segment of film historiography which is the study of film reception.

Oh Paris! The Journeys of Lasse Braun’s 8mm Pornography

Oh Paris! The Journeys of Lasse Braun’s 8mm Pornography Mariah Larsson (bio) An easy way to challenge the concept of national cinema is by drawing on examples: if a Danish film director makes a film, set in the United States, funded by various European institutions and production companies, in Trollhättan, Sweden, bringing in an Icelandic singer as the star of the film as well as a French cinematic icon and American actors—how do we describe that film? Film journalists and critics have used the disparaging term “Euro-pudding” to mark such ventures, but as various recognized auteurs have come to exploit the possibilities of European funding, this type of transnational film production has become much more common and is not routinely disregarded anymore. The same kind of transnationality can be found in a 1970s porn context: if an Italian pornographer, with a production company at the time based in Copenhagen, makes a film in France with French and Vietnamese performers—how do we describe that film, in particular if the film surfaces in an American archive with an Italian title? Such is the case for the film Hotel Amour (Lasse Braun), of the Oh Paris! series from 1971 that also includes Petite fleur and Magnifique! Comparing Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000), described in the first instance, with Hotel Amour may seem far-fetched, but I would say that in terms of maverick transnationalism the two directors are not so different. The opportunistic transnationalism—that is, “responding to available economic opportunities at a given moment in time and in no wise about the creation of lasting networks or about the fostering of social bonds”—is evident in both cases, and in their respective contexts both are recognized as auteurs with distinct personal visions.1 The purpose of this article is not to compare Lars von Trier and Lasse Braun. Rather, I wish to point to and discuss some aspects of late 1960s to early 1970s pornography, using Lasse Braun and Hotel Amour to argue that adult film history provides a perspective on transnational film studies that contests received notions about how transnational films are produced and circulate. In fact, adult film and pornography in general challenge three traditionally strong conceptualizations of film history. First, because many such films were made in some [End Page 158] sort of transnational collaboration but were also often excluded from national film histories, they make evident the concept of national cinema as a clearly demarcated canon of films. Second, the history of adult film and pornography contests the notion of a world-dominant American (Hollywood) cinema, as the international diversity of productions on the internet and in the former “adult” sections of video stores demonstrate. Third, adult film and pornography defy the notion that popular European genre cinema and stars have difficulty traveling—that is, that European film stars often have to make a mark in a Hollywood film to be recognized in other European countries than their own. Transnationality has become something of a buzzword within film studies—and, as Mette Hjort astutely observes, it seems to carry with it an intrinsic value in and of itself. Nevertheless, as Hjort goes on to point out, there are many different types of transnational cinema, and by distinguishing them, their ostensible value can be defined and measured.2 In addition, one could argue that “transnationality” per se is a neutral term, simply referring to cross-border interactions. Outside of film studies, it is used in conjunction with both positive and negative issues, like transnational cooperation or transnational crime. However, what is quite often disregarded in discussions of transnational cinema is the importance of nationality to making someone or something itinerant. Without any kind of acknowledged nationality, travel becomes difficult and may leave the traveler in a state of suspension, an eternal limbo, much like the stranded Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) in Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal (2004), whose passport became invalid when his home country ceased to exist. Nationality, or at least an assumed nationality, is in fact a prerequisite for transnational interactions to take place. Perhaps the most apparent example of the transnationality of pornography in the predigital era, and...

Defining the friendly Other: A case study of the public reception of Finnish films in Sweden

Abstract This article discusses the relations between Swedish and Finnish film cultures adopting a historical cross-cultural reception framework. The cinema season 1937−1938 in Stockholm, when five Finnish films – an exceptional number – premiered, was a significant turning point for the import of Finnish films. The films aroused interest, and all of them were reviewed in the newspapers. The case illustrates how notions of both national cinema and national hierarchies are formed within transnational processes, which take place in networks encompassing different countries and cultures. Swedish journalists regarded Finnish cinema as backward compared to Swedish cinema, but as evolving: despite their primitiveness, Finnish films expressed authenticity and artistic ambition, even to a greater extent than Swedish films of the time. Through evaluations, comparisons and the construction of hierarchies, Swedish film journalists not only defined Finnish cinema but also presented ideas about Swedish and Nordic cinema.

50 Years of the Arsenal Cinema

Research Article| November 01 2013 50 Years of the Arsenal Cinema Steven Yates Steven Yates STEVEN YATES is a British freelance film journalist and member of the International Federation of Film Critics. He has sat on the critics' jury at numerous film festivals globally. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2013) 41 (3): 8–9. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2013.41.3.8 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Steven Yates; 50 Years of the Arsenal Cinema. Afterimage 1 November 2013; 41 (3): 8–9. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2013.41.3.8 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2013 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Writers Writing Dying by C. K. Williams

Patrick Roth Starlite Terrace Krishna Winston, tr. Seagull Books Four residents of a shabby apartment complex in Los Angeles tell the stories of their complicated existence. Encounters with iconic actors and musicians provide a recognizable historical framework as the narrators reveal details of their often bizarre lives. Patrick Roth, originally from Germany, has worked as a film journalist in LA for over thirty years. march–april 2013 • 153 Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp The Russian Folktale Sibelan Forrester, ed. & tr. Wayne State University Press Based on a series of lectures delivered by Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp at Leningrad State University, The Russian Folktale ranges from the history of folklore studies to heroes’ motivations in what the author terms “Russian wonder tales.” Whether focusing on folklore or Russian culture in general, this translation proves to be enlightening and authoritative. Nota Bene writing.” Shi Zhi’s tragic self-identification takes the form of furious social criticism that exposes the incurable wounds inflicted by the crimes of a chaotic and tyrannical age. Shi Zhi’s postscript reviews both historical and psychological conditions of his poetic writing during five periods of his life: the early years of the Cultural Revolution (1965–68), his first sojourn at a mental hospital in 1973, the first dozen or so years after the Cultural Revolution (1976– 89), his second and longest stay at an insane asylum (1990–2002), and the period following his release from mental institutions (2002–present). Jonathan Stalling’s acknowledgments explain the strategies that he has adopted in translating Shi Zhi’s poems into lyrically charged free verse with minimal punctuation. Stalling’s rendition provides readers of English with a window through which to observe Shi Zhi’s unusual life story and spiritual landscapes. Winter Sun is a long-overdue collection of one of the leading figures in contemporary Chinese poetry. I will close with an excerpt from one of Shi Zhi’s notable poems, “Oh, Nietzsche”: “Through so many sleepless nights he endured the torture of disease / Yet nurtured the poetic longing of solitude and indifference / An infant thought undergoes the trauma of birth / To finally cry out in an earthshattering voice.” Hua Li Montana State University C. K. Williams. Writers Writing Dying. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2012. isbn 9780374293321 Despite his many accomplishments, including a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, C. K. Williams begins this book humbly, avowing in “Whacked” that “one never is, really, a poet. Or I’m not.” Happily, the remainder of Writers Writing Dying proves him wrong. Ample evidence can be found in Williams’s use of his famously long line. Such lines are derived from Whitman, but whereas they are usually written to evoke breathlessly the ecstatic or prophetic tone, as in most of Allen Ginsberg’s poems, Williams has fashioned the long line into a surprisingly versatile poetic instrument . Often he uses it to suggest a line of thought worked out by a consciousness in time, as in “Mask”: “Didn’t Yeats have his file of fake Willies ? His Anti-Self, his Cuchulain, his Michael Robartes? / Why couldn’t I then? Why was I stranded like the insole of a shoe in this face glued on so tightly?” At other times, he uses the length to suggest persistence, for instance the persistence of sexual desire in “Bianca Burning,” in which he says, “The sexual terror lions are roaring into my ears as I make my way between their cages / at the Bertram Mills Circus in England in nineteen fifty-seven when I’m twenty,” or the persistence of literary engagement in “Prose,” in which we read, “So maybe the novelists do save me, maybe Lawrence and Mann, Dickens and Melville and Greene, / even the landslides of Thomas Wolfe that go through me like castor oil release 154 World Literature Today reviews me from myself.” In both cases, the length of the line is more than a stylistic tic; it is thematically essential to most of Williams’s poems. Matching length of line to length of life, Williams writes with humor and poignancy about aging, as in the moving and bold “Salt,” in which he admits to finding it “Abashingly eerie that just because I’m here on the long...

Troisième humanité by Bernard Werber

be a long time in coming. In the long soliloquy that constitutes this novel, the narrator alternates between speaking to “tu” directly about their present situation and telling her personal story. We do not know if he is listening to her, but we certainly are, and with growing curiosity. While the device feels somewhat forced, the flow of information is not devoid of verisimilitude. We learn that our narrator is a wife, a mother, and a film journalist with a long series of movie star interviews to her credit. The offhand manner in which she talks of her family and her job makes it clear that, in fact, her life is of absolutely no interest to her (which, ironically, makes it more interesting to us). And then a certain someone spills a Diet Coke on her sweater, apologizes and the die is cast:“Le mal n’avait plus qu’à incuber”(60). Her obsession begins like a bolt of lightning. It develops over time, and she recounts its evolution within her, again interspersed with flashes of the present situation.And it is thus that we come to understand ; the“tu”is a not-so-handsome movie actor being held captive by our outwardly rational journalist.A few innocuous encounters between the two of them have sufficed to break the pattern of her universe where, as she puts it: “J’ai commencé à vivre à l’infinitif, un temps mort vivant. Vider la poubelle. Étendre le linge. Trouver le livre. Voir le film. Faire l’interview. Sourire. Parler. Faire rire” (75). One day, after an interview , he hugs her, innocently enough, but it pushes the obsession along.After another encounter, again professional, he suggests that she call him to go out for coffee and gives her his number. She calls; he does not call back:“En ne partageant pas ce café avec moi, tu ne m’as pas déçue. Tu m’as trahie. Et c’est pour cela que tu es ici” (146). The rest of the novel is made up of the kidnapping, the captivity, and eventual release of the poor unsuspecting actor, all of which underline the narrator’s insanity. Madness is difficult to portray but the obsessed woman in Brioche makes perfect sense. How could she be anything but what she is? This is the mark of successful character development , if not necessarily the guarantee of an excellent novel. Metropolitan State University of Denver (CO) Ann Williams Werber, Bernard. Troisième humanité. Paris: Albin Michel, 2012. ISBN 978-222624422 -2. Pp. 587. 22,90 a. Werber’s first trilogy, Les fourmis, put him on the literary map twenty years ago. In Troisième humanité, he reconnects with the Wells family, in this first part of an equally ambitious multi-part saga,taking place in relative time: ”Elle se passe précisément dix ans, jour pour jour, après l’instant où vous (le lecteur) ouvrirez ce roman et commencerez à le lire” (avertissement). This time, however, he blends the past, present, and potential future in a roller coaster ride of urgency.Gone“homo gigantis”discovered in the opening by Charles Wells, Edmond’s descendant, “homo sapiens” is about to follow suit as David Wells, his colleague Aurore and his scientific team race against time to create“homo metamorphosis,”a mini-human population, the third humanity, 286 FRENCH REVIEW 87.1 Reviews 287 more feminized, resistant, and unified, to combat extremism, and to stop harm to the earth. Each time the earth feels threatened—it is a living, breathing, verbal entity in this novel—whether being “drained” of its oil or incessantly overpopulated—the earth in turn strikes back with plague, tornadoes, or nuclear reactor meltdowns, just to name a few. Werber tries to create a delicate balance between the earth and its inhabitants, making use of “L’Encyclopédie du Savoir Relatif et Absolu”that he so successfully used in Les fourmis, and giving voice to a planet exhausted by man’s tendency towards violence, waste, and ruin. How original to“hear”the earth complain about drilling its surface, to wonder how it will combat the meteor bits hurling at it, to sense its loneliness vis-à-vis the lack of...

AN INSIDER’S VIEW OF A FILM INDUSTRY IN TRANSITION: DARCY PAQUET’S MEDITATIONS ON THE CONTEMPORARY KOREAN CINEMA

This article introduces a variety of free-ranging meditations on the recent state of the Korean cinema as I have witnessed in my privileged position as a key insider to the Korean film industry. As someone with experience as a film journalist and a columnist for the weekly film magazine Cine21, I identify a common thread that unites a selection of Korean Cinema Today articles in an attempt to complement the academic essays in this special issue. By assessing the particular character and identity of Korean cinema in the “post-boom” years of 2007 to the present, I demonstrate how the industry has recovered some ground since 2007, when the industry faced widespread losses at the box office, the bursting of a film financing bubble and a steep drop in export revenues led many in the film industry to declare a crisis. Since then, although, there is still a sense that Korean cinema has entered a less bountiful era than the one that preceded it, a constantly evolving film landscape continues to offer hallenges of many kinds.

In Memoriam: Manny Farber, 1917–2008

he film critic Manny Farber, who died in August 2008 at age 91, was a unique voice in American film reviewing, a pugnacious, fiery polemicist whose two most famous essays Underground Films (1957) and White Elephant vs. Termite Art (1962) helped overturn mid-century middlebrow movie culture and pave the way for a broader, more varied film milieu, embracing both popular genres and the avant-garde. Although he gave up film writing just as the trends he helped foster were taking hold, Farber became a cult figure for many later film journalists, such asJ. Hoberman andJonathan Rosenbaum, who admired and emulated his eclectic taste across many different film practices, his familiarity with arts and culture high and low, his flights of metaphor and quirky rhetoric, his dis dain for received opinion and established canons, his championing of filmmakers unrecognized by cultural gatekeepers.

The Poet of Argentine Cinema

Cathleen Rountree (with Nancy Membrez ), “The Poet of Argentine Cinema: An Interview with Eliseo Subiela,” Jung Journal, Summer 2007, 1:3, 86-111. Argentine auteur director Eliseo Subiela is a poet of World Cinema. His body of work — redolent with philosophical curiosities, psychological explorations, mythic meanderings, political conundrums and spiritual quests — is couched in the darkly humorous, the erotic, the magical, and the surreal. This in-depth, definitive interview with Subiela (the only one of its kind, either in English or in Spanish), conducted by film journalist Cathleen Rountree, covers all aspects of Subiela’s artistic career as well as his personal history and revealing psychological thought processes. The internationally renown director discusses living in the Peron military dictatorship of Argentina in the 1970s, traveling in Cuba and Europe, his explorations into psychological theories, working with actors, the inception of story ideas, the importance of education, the place of dreams in a creative person's existence, and the necessity of imagination in one's life in particular and in society in general.

Interview with Ron Holloway

INTERVIEW WITH RON HOLLOWAY ON OCCASION OF HIS BERLINALE CAMERA AWARD 2007 ZOOM: Your career as a film journalist is directly connected to international festivals. How long have you been associated with the Berlinale? My first visit to the Berlinale was in 1965.At the time I will spending a summer at the Cinémathèque Française, "pirating" rare film prints from New York distributors to Henri Langlois for his archive. Langlois gave me a courtesy pass to all Cinémathèque screening. One day, Lotte Eisner at the Cinémathèque suggested that I visit the Berlinale and see what the young German filmmakers were up to. So I took an Air France flight to Tegel, at that time a barn instead of a terminal, and spent a week at the Zoo Palast as an accredited journalist for Film Society Review in New York. When did you visit the Berlinale together...

Een prul een prul noemen. Filmkritiek in twee Nederlandse dagbladen 1910-1922

To call a bad picture by its name. Film criticism in two Dutch newspapers 1910-1922The period before L.J. Jordaan started writing his famous column in 1923, the Netherlands were considered to be void of'serious' film criticism. This was partly because of the strong influence of the Nederlandsche Filmliga (the Dutch Film league), which prescribed its own artistic criteria in deciding what movies took precedence over others. However, close-examination of two Dutch national newspapers (Het Algemeen Handelsblad and De Telegraaf) in the decade prior to Jordaan's column shows that between 1910-1922 a genuine tradition of film reviewing had started to develop in the Netherlands. Especially after 1918 a specialized form of film journalism came about. Both newspapers state that the critics published on a regular basis in Het Algemeen Handelsblad and De Telegraaf. Besides the reviewing as such, the articles consisted of stories about film industries in a general way, gossip about film stars, or informative prose relative to technological innovations in movie making. An explicit theory of film criticism was never written by any of these early film journalists. But close reading of the articles these critics have written, reveals the most important criteria seem to have been intrigue, acting, mise-en-scene, and technique. The plot made out the largest part of the review; it was meticulously summarized and tuned in mild irony. Acting was considered one of the most important qualities of the cinema. Mise-en-scene and technique were mentioned less often, but were sometimes considered to have an important function in the film. When a film was presented as a work of art by the studio or cinema, artistic merit was a criterion. But when it was 'only' meant to amuse, its quality was measured by other standards, such as suspense in the case of a thriller or humor in the case of a burlesque.

Propaganda und Film im "Dritten Reich" , and: Jüdische Figuren im Film und Karikatur: Die Rothschilds und Joseph Süss Oppenheimer (review)

168 SHOFAR Summer 2000 Vol. 18, No.4 A separate chapter is devoted to Chiune Sugihara, the consul in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania who, on the basis of bogus final destination visas to the Dutch island of Curayao, issued transit visas to Polish Jews caught between the German and Russian lines in 1940. While Sugihara's actions certainly are laudable, he was not the only Japanese consul following existing instructions by issuing transit visas to Jewish refugees. The account of the activities of the Dutch honorary consul Jan Zwartendijk who provided the bogus end visas was not fully discussed and is inaccurate. The number of visas issued by Zwartendijk was not 1,200 to 1,400 as stated, but 2,345. Without these, Sugihara could not have issued more than a few transit visas. The book also describes the actions ofColonel Senko Yasue and CaptainKoreshige Inuzuka, who in 1911 were involved with the translation ofthe "Protocols ofthe Elders ofZion," and how Captain Inuzuka, considered by some as an "arch anti-Semite," was put in charge of the Bureau for Jewish Affairs in Shanghai. In 1942, when relief funds no longer reached Shanghai, Inuzuka cooperated with the representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in feeding the starving Jewish refugees. Sakamoto goes into great detail discussing Tokyo's prevailing politics and the working relationships between embassies and consulates scattered around the world with their superiors in Japan, citing numerous references. Perhaps a reader thoroughly familiar with the workings of the Japanese government might be better able to follow the elaborate trail through the functions of its divergent organizations. Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees lists voluminous references attesting to the author's extensive research. Unfortunately, she sometimes seems to have relied on personal testimonies and recollections as well as other sources without having fully verified their accuracy, thus making this otherwise excellent work umeliable for research by future historians. Ernest G. Heppner Independent Scholar Propaganda und Film im "Dritten Reich," by WolfDonner. Berlin: tip Verlag, 1995. 159 pp. n.p.!. Out ofprint. Judische Figuren im Film und Karikatur: Die Rothschilds und Joseph Suss Oppenheimer, edited by Cilly Kugelmann and Fritz Backhaus. Sigmaringen and Frankfurt/Main: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1996. 167 pp. DM 24.80. The late Wolf Donner was one of Germany's more important film journalists in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the director ofthe Berlin Film Festival from 1976 to 1979. As a film critic, Donner championed left-wing causes and directors who privileged social issues in the first and third worlds. Like many leftist-minded Germans of his generation (Donner was born in 1939), he spent a good deal ofhis adult life corning to Book Reviews 169 grips with the legacy of National Socialism and the nation's culpability in the Holocaust . This posthumously published monograph grew out of a set of lectures that Donner gave to students at the University ofCologne and at various Goethe Institutes. Donner died before he could write a book for publication or even complete a final chapter dealing with West German Neo-Nazis. And unfortunately, Donner was a better critic than he was a film historian, so these lectures have the rough edges ofhalf-baked ideas and reveal almost nothing new about film or propaganda in Nazi Germany. In his opening chapter, Donner discusses the Nazis' extremely efficient use ofmass media, inparticularJoseph Goebbels' ability to coin and endlessly repeat catchy phrases which reduced complex political issues to emotional appeals, e.g., "the Fuhrer commands and we obey," "Victory or Bolshevism," and "One People, One Fuhrer, One Reich." The last parole is used as a title to Donner's next chapter, which analyzes certain themes of National-Socialist propaganda: the attack against the Weimar Republic, the Fuhrer principle, militarism, "blood and soil," and antisemitism. There follows a very brief chapter about Goebbels' co-option of the German film industry, before Donner moves on to describe such signature films of the Third Reich as Hitlerjunge Quex, Triumph ofthe Will, Jew Suss, and Kolberg. While Donner's intentions were certainly pure and his plan to bring the book's concerns into the present by discussing the repression ofthe Nazi past in the 1950s and...