Cinema has long played a major role in the formation of community among marginalized groups, and this book details that process for gay men in Sydney, Australia from the 1950s to the present. Scott McKinnon builds the book from a variety of sources, including film reviews, media reports, personal memoirs, oral histories, and a striking range of films, all deployed to answer the question of understanding cinema-going as a moment of connection to community and identity—how the experience of seeing these films and being part of an audience helped to build a community among the gay men of Sydney in the period.
 

In This Issue

Special Issue Editors: Kenneth Paul Tan & Dorothy Lau

Letter from the Editor - YING ZHU

Cold War and New Cold War Narratives: Special Issue Editor’s Introduction - KENNETH PAUL TAN

Research Articles

Notes on Cold War Historiography - LOUIS MENAND

Tales from the Hot Cold War - MARTHA BAYLES

Bomb Archive: The Marshall Islands as Cold War Film Set - ILONA JURKONYTĖ

Das unsichtbare Visier—A 1970s Cold War Intelligence TV Series as a Fantasy of International and Intranational Empowerment; or, How East Germany Saved the World and West Germans Too - TARIK CYRIL AMAR

To Whom Have We Been Talking? Naeem Mohaiemen’s Fabulation of a People-to-Come - NOIT BANAI

The Man without a Country: British Imperial Nostalgia in Ferry to Hong Kong (1959) - KENNY K. K. NG

Imagining Cooperation: Cold War Aesthetics for a Hot Planet - MARINA KANETI

Book Reviews

Through Space and Time - Review of The Odyssey of Communism: Visual Narratives, Memory and Culture edited by Michaela Praisler and Oana-Celia Gheorghiu, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021 - ISABEL GALWEY

Review of Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market by Ying Zhu, New Press, 2022 - YONGLI LI

The Cautionary Tale of Painting War Remembrance in China as a New Nationalism - Review of China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism by Rana Mitter, Belknap Press, 2020 - FUWEI ZUO

Tracking American Political Currents - Review of White Identity Politics by Ashley Jardina, Cambridge University Press, 2019, and Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class by Reece Peck, Cambridge University Press, 2019 - DAVID GURNEY

Governing Visions of the Real traces the emergence, development, and techniques of Griersonian documentary—named for pioneering Scottish filmmaker John Grierson—in New Zealand throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Paying close attention to the productions of the National Film Unit in the 1940s and ’50s, Lars Weckbecker follows the shifting practices and governmentality of documentary’s “visions of the real” as New Zealand and its population—particularly workers and its indigenous population—came to be envisioned through NFU film for an ensemble of political, pedagogic, and propagandistic purposes.

Essays from a master critic on how artistic giants from modernism onward confronted mortality—forging unexpected links between Twain, Woolf, Mahler, Wittgenstein, Beckett, Toni Morrison, and more
 
While much about modernism remains up for debate, there can be no dispute about the connection between modernist art and death. The long modern moment was and is an age of war, genocide, and annihilation. Two world wars killed perhaps as many as 100 million people, through combat, famine, holocaust, and ghastly attacks on civilians. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is the fifth global pandemic since 1918, with more than a half-million American deaths and counting.
 
It can hardly come as a surprise, then, that many of the touchstones of modernism reflect on death and devastation. In Philip D. Beidler’s exploration of the modernist canon, he illuminates how these singular voices looked extinction in the eye and tried to reckon with our finitude—and their own. The Great Beyond:Art in the Age of Annihilation catalogs through lively prose an eclectic selection of artists, writers, and thinkers. In 16 essays, Beidler takes nuanced and surprising approaches to well-studied figures—the haunting sculpture by Saint-Gaudens commissioned by Henry Adams for his late wife; Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Mann’s Death in Venice; and the author’s own long fascination with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
 
The threads and recurring motifs that emerge through Beidler’s analysis bridge the different media, genres, and timeframes of the works under consideration. Protomodernists Crane and Twain connect with near-contemporary voices like Sebald and Morrison. Robert MacFarlane’s 21st-century nonfiction about what lies underneath the earth echoes the Furerbunker and the poetry of Gertrud Kolmar. Learned but lively, somber but not grim, The Great Beyond is not a comfortable read, but it is in a way comforting. In tracing how his subjects confronted nothingness, be it personal or global, Beidler draws a brilliant map of how we see the end of the road.