I always love browsing through the new books as they appear on our shelves, and just occasionally an accidental theme emerges from the variety of titles and subjects on display. For instance, this week on a trolley laden with books covering photography, contemporary painting, music and theatre a small group of film books grabbed my attention and magically transformed themselves into this blog post; I’ll leave it to you to figure out why.
Death in classical Hollywood cinema by Boaz Hagin
Boaz Hagin uses the gangster film, the western, the melodrama and the war film to investigate how death has been incorporated into classical Hollywood narratives, focusing particularly on films from the 1920s through to the 1950s.

Palgrave Macmillan, 2010
A grammar of murder: violent scenes and film form by Karla Oeler
From Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin to Hitchcock’s Psycho and through to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, the author seeks to explore the ways in which different directors use different film forms to represent violence onscreen.

University of Chicago Press, 2009
Transfigurations : violence, death and masculinity in American cinema by Asbjørn Grønstad.
The title probably says it all, not to mention that cover!

Amsterdam University Press, 2008
Film violence : history, ideology, genre by James Kendrick
Westerns, horror movies and action films are in the spotlight in this very accessible introduction to “savage cinema”.

Wallflower, 2009
And now I think I’m ready for something a bit less confronting…..
The sound of music companion by Laurence Maslon

Pavilion, 2006
Well, it did have Nazis!
Pingback: New books and accidental themes « Arts | State Library of Victoria