New review up on Hong Kong Review of Books
Shard Cinema charts the brief history of glass as the ultimate liminal material and how the spectacle of the screen has increasingly become the lens through which we view the world. The author, Evan Calder Williams argues that while the vista of the cinema screen brought new worlds of sight and sound to the viewer, it also has increasingly been co-opted to present audiences with more spectacle and less substance. This more-ness is driven largely by scale but also the power of shock and awe to overwhelm the audience into non-thinking submission, with colours and shapes taking the place of plotting and intelligent camera work, at the cost of physical cinematography work which is a large part of what helped to establish moving film as both artform and the medium.
https://hkrbooks.com/2018/11/21/shard-cinema/
