Toward Cinema and Its Double by Laleen Jayamanne

Toward Cinema and Its Double by Laleen Jayamanne

This volume brings together Laleen Jayamanne's discussions of Australian films, Sri Lankan films, European art films, silent film comedy, contemporary American films, and her own films. She addresses a number of issues that have been crucial areas of contention in film studies over the years.

A Sri Lankan filmmaker, feminist, critic, and theorist who has worked in Australia for the past two decades, Jayamanne collects 15 old and new essays not otherwise easily accessible in most US librariesThe style is personal, even idiosyncratic, with occasional outbursts of self-indulgence. Jayamanne is an astute reader of films and a writer who avoids theoretical obscurity. She is opposed to the overvaluation of theory over criticism, [which has] impoverished the field. She has much to say that is intriguing about a range of subjects: postcolonial film and its travails, the gothic, the sublime, and melodrama, for example. Some sections will find only a small readership because few Americans have access to the films in question; but even the analyses of obscure films are worth reading for the insights they offer on feminist and Australian film and cultural criticism. Several chapters—on Chantal Akerman's films, The Piano, Do The Right Thing, and, above all, what Jayamanne calls the erotics of learning in Blue Steel and The Silence of the Lambs—will be accessible and suggestive for film majors and graduate students. Though no exactly comparable work exists, the book is embedded in the matrix of Australian feminist film criticism exemplified best in the work of Meaghan Morris.May 2002

-- K. Tölölyan (Tololyan) * Wesleyan University *

Laleen Jayamanne is a lecturer in Cinema Studies at the Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney. She is also a filmmaker, whose work includes A Song of Ceylon and Rehearsing and a dance video, LAMA. Her articles on her own film work and the work of other independent filmmakers have appeared in Screen, Discourse, and The Australian Journal of Screen Theory.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780253214751
ISBN 10	0253214750
Title	Toward Cinema and Its Double
Author	Laleen Jayamanne
Series	Arts And Politics Of The Everyday
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Indiana University Press
Year published	2001-09-26
Number of pages	336
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.