This article argues that the figure of the femme fatale, associated by feminist film critics with the epistemological drive of causal and patriarchal narrative, attains a progressive potential when portrayed through the complex narrative temporalities of David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Lost Highway , and Mulholland Drive .

Reviewed by: The Arab Public Sphere in Israel: Media Space and Cultural Resistance Matt Sienkiewicz (bio) The Arab Public Sphere in Israel: Media Space and Cultural Resistance by Amal Jamal. Indiana University Press 2009. $65.00 cloth; $24.95 paper. 208 pages Amal Jamal's The Arab Public Sphere in Israel engages a set of crucial questions that have been largely swept aside in contemporary debates over the relationships among media, resistance, and political upheaval throughout the Middle East. In the wake of the Arab Spring and its ostensibly populist orientation, scholars have quite understandably turned their attention to the ways in which repressed majorities employ alternative modes of communication to effect antihegemonic change in the region. Jamal's work, however, considers Israel's Arab minority, focusing on the subtler, but no less important, issue of communicative practice among groups lacking the critical mass of people or power required to mount large-scale protests. In this slim but tightly packed volume, Jamal makes the case that although Palestinian citizens of Israel engage with the nation's dominantly Jewish mediasphere out of economic and political necessity, they have simultaneously crafted a unique and even resistant "media orientation."1 Arguing against scholarship that has conceptualized the Palestinian Israeli populace as a "trapped minority" unable to access either the Israeli or Palestinian public spheres, Jamal reframes the situation as one in which Arab citizens are able to achieve a "double consciousness" through the concurrent use of both Hebrew media and alternative Arabic information sources.2 The result is a compelling account that deftly mixes historical, theoretical, and empirical approaches, creating a multidimensional study that should be of interest to both scholars of the region and those concerned with minority media practice across the globe. The book begins with a conceptualization of the issue of minority resistance through cultural practice. Drawing on Homi Bhabha and W. E. B. DuBois, Jamal argues that the circumstances that have lead Palestinian [End Page 179] Israelis to be described as "trapped" ought to be reinterpreted. Culturally and linguistically literate in both the Jewish-Hebrew and Arab-Arabic worlds they must straddle, Palestinian Israelis, like African Americans and other marginalized communities, can find avenues for resistance in their ability to connect "to two different cultural worlds simultaneously."3 By picking and choosing media sources from hegemonic, counter-hegemonic, and foreign sources, minority communities are able to actively craft a media environment that provides for their local, informational needs while nonetheless quenching their desire for emotional and cultural identifications suppressed by the national majority. This possibility has been further advanced through the growth of globalization, whereby state apparatuses no longer possess (or are afraid to employ) the technological capacity to stop the spread of messages that originate abroad or in alternative local sources. Extrapolating from his case study, Jamal provides a concise and intelligent overview of the ways in which scholars might conceptualize media usage in communities ranging from Turkish Kurds to Latino Americans and beyond. Jamal then turns to the specific history of the Arab minority in Israel, approaching the question in terms of both general political tendencies and specific media policies. This narrative is a gut-wrenching one in which Israeli policies are shown to be aimed at marginalizing the Arab citizenry for the purpose of entrenching the state's "Jewish" culture and populace. It is important, however, to note the slippage that inevitably takes place between the words "Jewish" and "Israeli" in this context. Although Jamal makes some effort to denote that Israel's notion of Jewishness is not universally accepted, he could do more to make clear that the country's "Jewish" culture is neither homogenous nor identical to that of Jewish communities across the world. Nonetheless, Jamal's account is persuasive, detailing the ways in which the Israeli government has consistently crafted policies that limit the growth and prosperity of Arab communities. In providing this history, Jamal establishes the need of the Palestinian Israeli minority to find innovative approaches to media consumption that express their unique informational and cultural needs. Looking specifically at the world of media, Jamal offers a narrative in which Israel's government and media elite have also exacted a consistent and...

Reviewed by: Contemporary Arab Broadcast Media Naomi Sakr (bio) Contemporary Arab Broadcast Media by El Mustapha Lahlali. Edinburgh University Press 2011. $95.00 hardcover; $32.00 paper. 178 pages A simple search on Amazon reveals Al-Jazeera in the titles of dozens of works, dealing with many aspects of the famous broadcasting network, from its history and political economy to its impact on international relations, its place in the so-called war on terror, and its editors' choice of language when covering events. Examination of Al-Jazeera is central to Contemporary Arab Broadcast Media, and any reader would initially presume the book to offer some new insights about it. After all, given the recent, rapid growth in scholarly work on Arab media, new books on the topic need to be distinctive. Here, one is led to expect El Mustapha Lahlali's study to examine Al-Jazeera's coverage of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah and to compare it with the coverage of two other news channels broadcasting in Arabic, namely Al-Arabiya and Al-Hurra. In principle, such an undertaking—highlighted on the book's cover— may have seemed comparable to that of Leon Barkho, who used critical discourse analysis in his 2010 book to compare the way Al-Jazeera, CNN, and the BBC covered Israeli-Palestinian clashes and the invasion of Iraq.1 Where it would differ would be in the events covered and by whom. In practice, Lahlali's account of his three chosen channels turns out to be an exercise fraught with mystery, as this reviewer feels duty-bound to show. The mystery starts with the title. Al-Hurra, as explained in chapter 3, is a US operation funded by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a US federal agency. Lahlali implies that the US launched Radio Sawa and Al-Hurra simultaneously in 2004, after President Bush "laid the blame on Arab channels for spreading 'hateful propaganda' against the United States,"2 but Radio Sawa actually started in March 2002. Setting chronology aside, however, how does Contemporary Arab Broadcast Media justify labeling Al-Hurra "Arab"? It is true that publishers often choose [End Page 176] an all-encompassing title for a specialist book to attract more interest. In this book, however, the author himself promises an all-encompassing account that will "acquaint the reader with the development and progress of Arab media" before moving to focus on "three Arab channels" (including Al-Hurra), which together are said to "represent the face of the Arab transnational media landscape."3 Thus, a US media outlet is defined as Arab because it broadcasts in Arabic. By the same logic, British, French, German, Russian, Chinese, and Turkish stations broadcasting in Arabic could also claim the same label. The second mystery, given the author's promise to survey the development and progress of Arab media, surrounds the timing of writing and publication. The year of publication is 2011, and the precise release date was June 6. A sentence on page 86, stating that the Libyan regime arrested an Al-Jazeera team in Tripoli "in March 2011," proves that the book was not printed before March 19, the date of the arrest. So why does it say nothing at all about Arab media during the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt? Except for a single reference in the conclusion to "the 2011 developments in Egypt, Tunisia and across the Arab world," the author writes as if these "developments" had not happened.4 Readers are likely to understand the "radical media change" of the current era to have something to do with social networking and video-sharing online. Yet the radical change Lahlali speaks of is the "launch of satellite and cable television channels."5 In fact, the majority of references cited in the overview in chapter 2 date from 2001 to 2005, and much of the material garnered from these secondary sources has long since been overtaken by events. It is, for example, astonishing to read, in a book published in mid-2011, that Egypt's state-owned newspapers "are [the] most influential."6 Even if the author had no chance to mention why these newspapers' performance during the 2010 elections and demonstrations...

Introduction Kay Dickinson, editor (bio) Merzak Allouache's latest feature, Normal (2011), poses the question, from its very beginning, whether its film-within-a-film should have an alternative ending. As uprisings spark off in nearby Tunisia and Egypt, an Algerian director reassembles the cast of his two-year-old drama-documentary in hopes of persuading them to appear in fresh footage that captures civil unrest in their own country. Not everyone involved agrees with the idea, let alone on how it should be handled. Can such events be shoehorned into work that began under seemingly different premises? What are the numerous implications of capturing such activities anyway, especially in their initial throes? How does one start and how does one stop representing unfinished processes like these? Parallel dilemmas about rewriting and reediting have troubled those of us contributing to this dossier, too. It has not been easy for any of us to wrap up, particularly when we are so evidently addressing an uneven and incomplete struggle, rather than a tidy event, a heterogeneous cluster of dissent that simultaneously seeks inspiration from neighboring countries and beyond (Normal itself asks, as in Tunisia, so in Algeria?). The protracted production practices of academic publishing, like those of feature film, will always fail to achieve what the quick-fire coverage offered by other formats, such as Twitter or online journalism, can. Therefore the urgency of an immediate response to rapidly changing events has not been our primary objective here. At the same time, these protests have been vitalized by unforeseen and unprecedented media engagement, garnering the media an even more multileveled involvement in politics than is typically the case, and thus positioning media scholars in a dynamic yet thorny position. As has been roundly recognized, citizen journalism has filled certain voids created by censorship, biased state-sponsored coverage, press-permit denials, and the intimidation of both professional and nonprofessional commentators. Furthermore, the media have helped mobilize a people and catapulted its activists into unusual positions of [End Page 132] authority. Few could have predicted blogger Slim Amamou's passage from a Tunisian interrogation cell to the Ministry for Youth and Sports within a few short days (a position he hastily relinquished). Nearly a year later, Egypt's leading Tweeter, Sandmonkey (Mahmoud Salem), along with other social media activists, stood in the parliamentary elections but failed to win popular support. With 67 percent of the vote shared between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafi al-Nour Party, the movers and shakers of the so-called Facebook revolution are not, in the end, the faces assuming orthodox political power, perhaps because that platform does not boast particularly high per capita penetration in Egypt (7.66 percent), with only 1 percent of all Internet content delivered in Arabic anyway.1 Meanwhile, more customary relationships between the state and the media hold strong. There has been widespread terrorization—intimidation, torture, assassination—exacted upon those who risk and lose their lives reporting and whose footage has been routinely captured and wielded as counterinsurgency evidence. The power of the old guard as exacted through the media cannot be underestimated either. This explains why Maspero, the Egyptian state media building, has become a major site of both massacres and demonstrations, with footage of local atrocities regularly projected onto its edifice by protesters. All the while, production schedules for the region's once-buoyant film industries have stagnated, largely because audiences are timorous about venturing out to theaters.2 The cancellation of last year's Cairo Film Festival on account of Egypt's dire economic straits is testament to the reduced local financing for audiovisual material from the region. Although Arabs are certainly producing a flurry of interpretations of their situation, the revenues largely accrue in the pockets of foreign companies like YouTube. Who, then, is profiting from these revolutions? While the regional governments have been quick to discredit amateur reportage— setting up bogus online forums (e.g., the Syrian Electronic Army), passing off staged footage as actuality,3 and declaring visual proof of their brutality to have been doctored in Photoshop—they, too, have staked claims on the incidents and aftermath of January 2011. Anniversary celebrations in Egypt were framed...

Review Essay:Glenn Beck and the Politics of Affect Tim Raphael (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution From his Fox News debut the day before Obama's inauguration through his departure on June 30, 2011, Glenn Beck was arguably the most influential political personality on television. Within a month of its premiere, Glenn Beck (Fox, 2009-2011) was a phenomenon, doubling the time slot's viewership and generating new media buzz and ad revenues for a network whose ratings and influence had been declining in tandem with the Bush administration. Overnight, the show catalyzed Fox News's reincarnation as the electronic heart of resistance to the Obama presidency and made Beck the avatar of the vitriolic and weeping Right. Two new biographies of Beck, by journalists Dana Milbank and Alexander Zaitchik, weigh in on the Beck phenomenon. Although much [End Page 209] of what has previously been written about Beck has focused on the long shadow he cast in his brief stint at Fox News, Milbank widens the lens to situate Beck within the paranoid-style tradition of American politics first identified by historian Richard Hofstadter. Milbank details Beck's use of his radio and television platforms to trumpet vast left-wing conspiracies and doomsday scenarios, his staging of frequent tours and rallies to whip up the faithful, and his best-selling books that generated logically incoherent but affectively potent scenarios for dramatizing the political and moral struggle between good and evil. Characterizing Beck as a carnival barker with a megaphone, Milbank documents Beck's "factional" narrative strategies that employed "plots rooted in fact" to generate "completely fictional" accounts of history and current events.1 Whether describing Beck hyperkinetically lurching back and forth between chalkboard and map to document impending ruin on the Glenn Beck show or strolling onto the Fox and Friends (Fox News, 1998-) set to infamously declare that Barack Obama was "a guy who has a deep seated hatred for white people," Milbank paints Beck as the paranoid id of the American Right, the unconstrained articulator of the rage that dare not speak its name.2 Zaitchik convincingly identifies the 1980s morning-zoo revolution as the key to understanding Beck's performance persona and influence.3 Assessing Beck's media career as a continuum, with roots in the performance practices of the 1980s Top 40 radio shock and schlock jocks who ushered in the morning-zoo format, Zaitchik outlines how the cocaine-fueled, high-energy, hyperemotive persona of the morning-zoo DJ formed the embryonic hub of national talk-radio networks built around personalities like Beck and Rush Limbaugh that rose to prominence out of the deregulation and syndication frenzy of the Reagan-Bush years. Zaitchik traces Beck's development from Top 40 DJ to "radio superpatriot" to Fox News's most marketable asset by paying attention to how Beck made his own political awakening the lightning rod for channeling the electrical energy of a brewing political storm into a tsunami wave of politics-as-personal-testimonial that crested with the formation of the Tea Party. Although both books make valuable contributions to understanding Beck's popularity and political significance, they are also reminders of how unfortunate it is that there is so little good scholarly research on conservative media. Beck is a product of the inextricable link between the rise of neoliberal politics and right-wing media in the United States. Over the past four decades, conservative communications and media professionals have changed the way the political game is played by exploiting new structures of media production and dissemination, deregulation, and the rise of Internet technologies and social networks to develop syndicated media franchises, Fox News, and a powerful web presence. Their political clout is such that before serious Republican candidates could be considered for the presidency in 2012, they first had to pass muster with Fox News president Roger Ailes, one of the most influential figures in Republican politics over that forty-year span. That Ailes is merely a bit player in both books points to the vast field of research that remains to be mined by Media Studies [End Page 210] scholars. When Richard Nixon...

Introduction to Sergei Tretyakov:The Industry Production Screenplay Masha Salazkina (bio) Sergei Tretyakov (1892-1937), a celebrated Soviet playwright, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and theorist, is perhaps best known in the West as one of the first translators and popularizers of Brecht and as an acknowledged source for Benjamin's essay "The Author as Producer." In the Soviet Union of the 1920s and early 1930s, he played an important cultural role as part of a larger network of cosmopolitan leftist avant-garde artists and critics. As early as 1923 Tretyakov was writing essays on experimentation in Soviet cinema, and in the course of the following two decades, he became one of the most prolific—and polemical—essayists advocating for documentary approaches to cinema. In the 1920s and 1930s Tretyakov published a total of about fifty articles on cinema, many of them in LEF, a radical cultural journal (1923-1925) whose objective was to "re-examine the ideology and practices of so-called leftist art, and to abandon individualism to increase art's value for developing communism." After the dissolution of LEF, Tretyakov continued writing for Novyi LEF (The new LEF) magazine (1927-1928), which he also coedited. There, along with such important figures as Victor Shklovsky, Esfir Shub, and Dziga Vertov, he helped to rearticulate the avant-garde turn toward a new realist model, based on the "fixation of facts" as the foundation for socialist art. Tretyakov's work in theater brought him into contact with Sergei Eisenstein, whose 1923 production of The Wise Man, based on a play by Ostrovsky, was adapted by Tretyakov. Over the following two years, Eisenstein directed two more plays based on Tretyakov's original texts, Are You Listening, Moscow? and Gasmasks, and he collaborated with Tretyakov on the intertitles for Potemkin (1925). In 1924, Tretyakov published an essay expanding on Eisenstein's notion of montage of attractions, which originated in their collaborative work for theater.1 The same year [End Page 130] Tretyakov accepted an invitation to teach Russian literature at Peking University in China, an experience that had long-lasting impact on his artistic work. Upon his return he published his travel notes under the title of "travelfilm" ( put'fil'ma), which was one of his first attempts to conceptualize journalistic writing under the aesthetic forms being developed in cinema, a preoccupation that would continue throughout his life. In addition to his creative and theoretical work, Tretyakov was actively involved in the institutional development of Soviet cinema—in education and production—and its agitational work abroad.2 In 1925, he became a member of the artistic committee of the first Moscow film factory, Goskino. In 1927, he spent half a year in Georgia to agitate for the development of the documentary section of the Georgian film industry, and he also consulted on several films which were adapted from his scripts, including Salt for Svanetia (Sol' dlia Svanetii; Mihkail Kalatozoshvili, 1930). In 1929, he was a member of the Bureau for the Organization of Cultural Cinema as part of the Association of Revolutionary Cinematography. It was in this larger institutional context that he wrote his most widely known text, the 1928 essay "Our Cinema,"3 which was included (in German, French, and English) in the brochure for the Soviet section of the International Film Exhibition in The Hague. Throughout his work, Tretyakov was a harsh opponent of the individualist auteurist vision of cinema, viewing it, instead, as the kind of collective industrial endeavor that made it a uniquely appropriate media for a socialist society. His cinematic theory combined an emphasis on the primacy of the raw materiality of the profilmic sets and film's own photographic qualities with the conscious engineering of such filmic material through montage, thus putting on an equal theoretical footing the material composition of the film and the organization of labor in all other domains of social and political reality. He explicitly rejected the primacy of either form or content in the arts, arguing that primacy should always be accorded to the social function of the artwork. That function was divided between two key subfunctions—the demonstration of the social facts and the activation of the spectator. Thus, Tretyakov proposed that...

Focusing particularly on his first studio feature, Get to Know Your Rabbit (1970), this essay argues that Brian De Palma, director of Scarface (1983) and Body Double (1984), is an exemplar of Godardian "political" filmmaking. Potential consonances between De Palma's career and the historical development of Film Studies as a discipline are also outlined.

Reviewed by: Television Personalities: Stardom and the Small Screen Roberta Pearson (bio) Television Personalities: Stardom and the Small Screen by James Bennett. Routledge 2010. $140.00 hardback; $35.95 paper. 226 pages Bennett's Television Personalities undertakes the first comprehensive examination of those recurring and familiar faces that front lifestyle and light entertainment programming around the world—the medium's Jamie Olivers and Simon Cowells. Television personalities are not merely presenters but rather "those who develop a 'televisual image'" based on subsidiary forms of circulation as with film stars.1 But television personalities must be judged by standards appropriate to the small screen, not the large. While film stars, as Richard Dyer famously proclaimed, exhibit a tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary, television personalities must consistently display ordinariness, authenticity, and intimacy, entering the viewer's home without seeming to enact a prefabricated image. "Television personalities only ever play themselves, emphasizing the continuousness and authenticity of their ordinary persona," which distinguishes them from actors or stars who enact characters in fictional programming.2 Television personalities produce presentational performances of the self; television actors or stars produce representational performances of a character. Rescuing these personalities from academic neglect, Bennett posits them as deeply imbricated in television's systems of ideological, economic, and cultural meanings and argues for recognition of the skill, labor, and performance that go into the construction of their images. The book as a whole draws on wide-ranging, interdisciplinary research on both historical and contemporary television personalities; includes a range of well-chosen case studies; and applies theory lightly while making connections to larger debates, such as the construction of self in the postmodern world. Although the book devotes only one of eight chapters specifically to performance (in the sense of what these celebrities actually do on screen), the on- and off-screen [End Page 165] performance of authenticity and ordinariness is the fundamental component of the television personality's image. Readers interested in television personalities' on-screen performances—their presentational enactments of ordinariness and intimacy—will find fascinating Bennett's discussion of Cilla Black, long-term host of the British game show Blind Date (ITV, 1985-2003). Bennett shows how Black uses her voice, eyes, and body, together with her knowledge of television production, to keep contestants, studio audience, and home audience all engaged, playing off her image of being the ordinary girl from Liverpool. Bennett also provides a brief, if incisive, analysis of Jamie Oliver's performance in his early Naked Chef incarnation, remarking on the way in which the show's editing creates a kinetic style in keeping with Oliver's persona. Like any other screen performance, Oliver's results from a collaborative effort among all the program's producers, from costume designers to camera operators to directors. While it is important to recognize and value television personalities' skill and labor, it is equally important to recognize and value that of their largely invisible collaborators; otherwise, one runs the risk of buying into the myth of the self-made individual that the television personality system encourages. To be fair, however, an extensive production analysis of any one of Bennett's case studies would require another book. A key question lurks behind Bennett's discussion of Black's performance as typical of the on-screen construction of the television personality image: Can the analysis of this particular personality and this particular performance further our understanding of all television personalities? Bennett explicitly states, "It is not my intention here to provide a comprehensive typology of either performers or performance modes that are evident across the television personality system."3 Given the vastness of that system, Bennett's reluctance is understandable, and an illumination of even a part of that vast system is a valuable contribution to scholarship. As Bennett also says, there seems little point in comparing the performance of David Attenborough as natural historian with the deployment of Graham Norton's camp naughtiness as a chat-show host, given the generic differences between their programs.4 But the book never really comes to terms with these fascinating generic differences and, indeed, omits altogether figures like Attenborough and the other media dons who host the numerous science...