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AFRICA ON FILM

BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE

An intelligent but severely flawed look at Anglophone films set in Africa from the silent era to the present. Cameron (Our Jo, or the Chronicle of a Coming Man, 1974, etc.) notes that the Africa of American, British, and South African films bears little or no resemblance to the real place. Instead, it is a locus for the projection of mostly 19th-century attitudes toward the continent, often racist and imperialist. In his introductory remarks, the author promises that this book will move beyond the rather mechanistic dismissal of such films as pure-and- simple vehicles of racist ideology. He wants to examine the roles of gender and class in the films and how political and historical realities inflected their racial politics. He traces the influence of authors H. Rider Haggard (Solomon's Mines) and Edgar Rice Burroughs (creator of Tarzan), showing how filmmakers revamped the more overtly offensive elements of the books. Much of the rest of this volume is occupied with the development of various character archetypes in the films under examination. Cameron is a sardonic, witty writer and has obviously spent incalculable hours looking at films that few have seen since their original release. However, the book offers a narrative-based aesthetic that is ultimately as mechanistic and schematic as the simple-minded ``anti-racism'' that he calls into question. The book has little visual analysis, little recognition of the role of the director in many of the films under discussion. Moreover, his distinction between British and American films begins to break down as international cofinancing becomes the rule for English films. Is Mountains of the Moon, directed by Bob Rafelson, really a British film? Is Cry Freedom!, directed by Sir Richard Attenborough, an American one? An entertaining read, and not without the virtues of humor and smarts, but an ultimately disappointing volume on an underexamined subject.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-8264-0658-0

Page Count: 250

Publisher: Continuum

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955

ISBN: 0670717797

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955

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IN MY PLACE

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

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