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Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition by Jonathan Rosenbaum. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010

recognize it more as an interesting hybrid of biopic and historical costume drama in which the female protagonist, Empress Carlotta (Bette Davis), represents an advanced political intelligence. Robé maintains that Left film criticism “steadfastly resisted a reevaluation of its problematic gender assumptions” (228) as it turned its attention in the 1940s to war films, boxing films, and film noir. This reactionary entrenchment followed the collapse of the Popular Front in the late 1930s and the split of the far Left between Trotskyites and Stalinists. In his conclusion, Robé adumbrates some of the lines of reconfigured Left film theory and criticism during and after World War Two in a context of the growing national conservatism of the time. He calls for future scholarship to take up the complex history of U.S. Left film theory and criticism from where his book leaves off at the end of the 1930s. His study seeks neither to “glamorize” nor “demonize” the radical theory and criticism of that decade but to “represent a moment of contact between past and present theoretical and political concerns,” a project he accepts as necessarily “filtered through my own psyche and the ideological constraints of the present moment” (235). To have opened up the misunderstood politics and aesthetics of the period under study in such a meticulous and perceptive manner—and to have done so in the light of many present critical concerns—suggests that Robé, in his first book, is already a film historian to be reckoned with.