Picturing Peter Bogdanovich

Drawn from interviews conducted from 2003 to 2019, Picturing Peter Bogdanovich is a unique double portrait of a filmmaker and a fan. As the director of such New Hollywood classics as The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, and Paper Moon, Peter Bogdanovich is considered one of the first superstar directors of the 1970s, whose celebrity equaled that of many movie stars of the era. Growing up as an admirer of Bogdanovich’s films, film critic and journalist Peter Tonguette first had the chance to interview Bogdanovich for an online magazine piece in 2003—kicking off what became a decade-and-a-half series of conversations about his life and his films. The first part of the book features Tonguette’s exhaustive, film-by-film survey of Bogdanovich’s career and personal account of getting to know Bogdanovich; the second features a Q&A drawn from sixteen years’ worth of interviews, encompassing all of his film and TV projects, his background, his triumphs, his tragedies. The result is a film book like few others in its depth and detail.

Not so Foreign: the Case of Saint Jack

This chapter develops on the topic of foreignness in Singapore films and discusses the ways that Singapore has been depicted in films made outside the country, especially by Hollywood. It addresses the tendency to polarise local- and foreign-made films as inside/outside perspectives and argues that they all perform a Singapore that is equally foreign regardless of where they were made. The chapter also problematises the tendency to limit the study of national cinema to locally-made films by making the case for how a Hollywood production like Saint Jack (Peter Bogdanovich, 1979) can be considered a Singapore film.

The Searchers

Since the 1970s, The Searchers, directed by John Ford, has become one of the most discussed films of 1950s US cinema. A story of captivity and revenge set in post–Civil War Texas, The Searchers is now regarded as one of the best films ever made, although it received mixed reviews upon its original release. The film’s artistic reputation did not rise until the early 1970s, buoyed by auteur critics like Andrew Sarris and Peter Bogdanovich and by film school–trained directors like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, who paid homage to The Searchers in their own movies. An important trend in scholarship coalesced around the film’s depiction of fear of miscegenation, with literary antecedents illuminated by June Namias, Barbara Mortimer, and Richard Slotkin. A significant number of considerations of The Searchers focus on Ethan Edwards, the psychologically complex Indian hater played by John Wayne. Many film scholars address the film’s relationship to genre, with Edward Buscombe and Peter Cowie calling attention to the film’s debt to pre-cinematic visual representations of the frontier. Gaylyn Studlar and Hubert I. Cohen emphasize the film’s break from western conventions. Major biographies of John Ford by Scott Eyman, Joseph McBride, and Tag Gallagher provide insight into the film’s production history, as does Glenn Frankel. Analysis of The Searchers has been sustained by many academic scholars who are not film specialists, by literary critics such as Jane Tompkins; political scientists such as Robert Pippin; Native American studies scholars such as Tom Grayson Colonnese and Cristine Soliz; philosophers such as Richard A. Gilmore; feminist critics such as Susan Courtney; historians, including James F. Brooks; and classicists, such as Martin M. Winkler and James Clauss. In spite of the variety of methodological approaches applied, the literature on The Searchers often seems to follow the nonlinear trajectory of the film’s own narrative with a retreading of familiar terrain.