Screening the Past: Taking Place

Review of the collection edited by John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel.

Rhodes_taking coverIn a couple of ways John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel have assembled what is an ideal collection of writings on location and the moving image. First, the collection brings together some of the most distinctive voices in contemporary film studies, many of whom are working on larger projects of their own, and doing so provides a series of glimpses into a whole world of scholarly work that takes location as a vital and important part of those projects. Secondly, the collection itself is a multifarious accounting for location in as diverse locations as Buster Keaton’s Los Angeles of the 1920s, Italian neo-realism’s Esposizione Universale Romana, the wonderous sleaze and pornography of The Deuce, New York’s Times Square of the 1960s, the studio landscapes of Cinecittà as refugee camp of the immediate postwar in Rome, the imaginary of South Africa and other colonialisms and the interspace of Okinawa and Hong Kong as well as some truly intriguing accounts of the work of location in the moving image.

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Published in: Screening the Past
By: Deane Williams