Walter C Metz

Show Me the Shoah!: Generic Experience and Spectatorship in Popular Representations of the Holocaust

This essay explores the relationship between the textual features of popular cultural artifacts pertaining to the Holocaust and the circumstances of their reception. Comparative cultural studies methods are deployed in analyzing a film, Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997); a children’s book, Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches (1961); and the Jewish Museum Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind.

Narrative Delay and the Nature of Love in the Short Film, Come

By showing teenagers falling in love, and then cutting to the loving couple, now elderly, the short film Come brilliantly uses the excision of the narrative tradition of delay in order to revolutionize the cinema’s presentation of love in theoretical synchronicity with Irving Singer’s philosophical study, The Nature of Love.

Breaking the Cycle: Die Another Day, Post-colonialism, and the James Bond Film Series

Abstract This paper develops a post-colonial reading of the latest James Bond series entry, Die Another Day (2002), a film directed by Lee Tamahori, the New Zealand artist most famous for his international art cinema hit, Once Were Warriors (1994). The paper argues that the film shifts away from the colonialist ideological position of the Cold War-era films in the Bond series. This argument is supported by two methodologies derived from critical theory. First, the film is read intertextually against Once Were Warriors, the Cold War Bond films, and the academic literature on these films. Second, since the film’s villain is a North Korean colonel who has become Caucasian through a radical surgical procedure, Richard Dyer’s approach to whiteness studies is used to assess the film’s surprising position on racial difference

From the Frankfurt school to film school: theorizing cinema pedagogy

I teach film studies in a film production department at a rural mountain university. When I first picked up Film Production Theory, I had all but abandoned teaching a junior-level theory course to my practically-minded film students. Geuens’ book, which indicts the pragmatic and vocational nature of America’s film schools, was a desperately needed lifeline that reconnected me with the reasons I had wanted to be a film educator in the first place. His work offers a blistering critique of the capitalist nature of Hollywood cinema, and an impassioned plea for a cinema pedagogy that resists the reification of the film student. The first three chapters of the book—“Cinema: the State of the Art,” “Art/Entertainment,” and “The Film School”—are where its treasures lie. In “Cinema: the State of the Art,” Geuens begins with a restructuring of the industrial history of Hollywood in an attempt to explain why Hollywood cinema no longer has a space for independent and serious filmmaking. These developments make it very difficult for film schools to fulfill their academic mission of training critically skilled students. Geuens details the rise of the blockbuster in the New Hollywood, the 1960s emphasis on visceral pleasure over intellectualism, and the postmodern turn, as the three culprits that have led to this sorry state of affairs. In Chapter 2, “Art/Entertainment,” Geuens highlights what happens to the alternative visions of the world offered by art when the values of entertainment win out at every turn. In a nice historical move, Geuens begins this study with a comparison to seventeenth-century Spain, in which the violent plays of Lope de THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 3.4 (October 2003): 455–458  2003 National Communication Association

The Neorealist Auteur Revisited: An Archaeology of Criticism on Vittorio De Sica

Howard Curle and Stephen Snyder’s edited anthology, Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives, offers a much needed revisitation of the work of one of the most famous and skilled of the Italian neorealist filmmakers, Vittorio De Sica (1902–1974). In north American film studies, only De Sica’s immediate postwar neorealist films—Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), and Umberto D. (1952)—have been canonized. To a lesser extent, De Sica’s Miracle in Milan (1950) is studied, usually as a lament to neorealism’s decline into fantastical whimsy. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970) is also attended to, but more as a film about European fascism and the Holocaust than as a De Sica film. Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives fills this lacuna in the literature, drawing together a wide array of critical and theoretical methods to study De Sica’s entire oeuvre, from his acting in Italian fascist films of the 1930s through to his early 1970s films, including A Brief Vacation (1973), the subject of the last of the anthology’s 24 essays (six of which are new publications, written especially for this volume). After an overview introductory chapter, the book presents interviews with De Sica between the 1950s and the 1970s. Then, an essay by De Sica’s screenwriting collaborator, Cesare Zavattini, “Some Ideas on the Cinema,” begins to define the intentions behind the neorealist impulse. The anthology includes André Bazin’s essay on De Sica, the earliest and most influential of critical attempts to grapple with neorealism. THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 3.3 (July 2003): 275–278  2003 National Communication Association