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.

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.