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Cinematic Terror: A Global History of Terrorism on Film Tony Shaw. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form David J. Alworth. Princeton University Press, 2016.
It might seem perverse to combine a film studies text with a work of literary criticism, especially when the research methodologies seem so different. Tony Shaw's Cinematic Terror traces the origins and development of terrorism in film by means of thirteen case studies of texts from a variety of countries. David J. Alworth draws on Bruno Latour and Erving Goffman to analyze the ways in which a variety of American writers treat specific sites including the road, the supermarket, and the asylum. Yet there is a palpable link between the two books insofar as they reflect on humanity's relationship to an increasingly fragile universe. The authors approach the subject in different ways while not arriving at any satisfactory solutions.
Shaw begins his discussion with Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936), a low-budget thriller based on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent that depicts the effect of murderous violence on ordinary people. In its representation of an amoral world where innocent bystanders are perpetually at risk, the film still packs a punch (especially in the wake of 9/11). In contrast, Otto Preminger's religious epic Exodus (1960) portrays terrorists as participating in a "just" war, forging new nation-states against those who would threaten civilization's future (81). Today the film seems archaic, evoking an idealized world where good and evil could be easily delineated. Likewise, the Die Hard franchise (1988-2013) conceives terrorism as entertainment, with the central character...