Cinemonkey

R. Crumb's Genesis at the Art Museum

 

 

Comic book fans, graphic novel intellectuals, line drawing aficionados, surviving hippies, and other area eccentrics have a marvelous opportunity to see the art of R. Crumb, the so-called father of the underground comic, on glorious display at the Portland Art Museum, a touring show that arrives here under the aegis of Bruce Guenther, PAM's chief curator of modern and contemporary art.

In 2005, Crumb signed a contract with W. W. Norton to illustrate the first five chapters of the Bible. Crumb, a lapsed Catholic, explains in the book's introductory matter that though he is not a believer, he is nevertheless fascinated by spirituality and faith, and proclaims in The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book that "I believe in everything ... UFOs, Bigfoot, channeling, ESP ... I believe it all!." As I mention in my review of the The Book of Genesis, there are several other reasons why Crumb may have wanted to tackle the project. One was perhaps the idea of harnessing himself to the restrictions that an adaptation of the Bible would entail. Another motivation might have been to educate readers. The book is also a great technical exercise, and his work may also be a result of his interest in Jewish life. Most of all, though, The Book of Genesis is the end point of a fascination with adaptation that has preoccupied Crumb off and on since the 1980s.

 

 

The Museum puts on display all 207 pages of the comic itself, framed under glass and arranged across a series of rooms subdivided with sometimes diagonal hallways that tend to run left to right. Each area is color-coded with strong "comic book" colors, and the patron is first greeted by a black and white stand up cut out of Crumb in his stoop postured and gap-mouthed cartoon persona. From the very first pages, which are not that much bigger than the printed version, the viewer can see the detail and care that Crumb brought to the project. Nary a panel lacks a trace of Liquid Paper, which Crumb used to fix text or rejigger aspects of the frame. Some of the most amazing panels occur in the fiery death of Gomorrah, and one of the most striking panels occurs at the bottom of page 44, Chapter 15, when Abram has a night of sleepless dread. The ghostly faces hovering over Abram's head baffle the viewer wondering how Crumb achieved that effect, which looks much better in person than in the finished book.

A typical comic book page not only has to have well-composed panels within it, but the panels on the page must all work together cohesively and carry the eye. By putting the pages in reverse order, so to speak, the Museum has defeated the two-page spread effect that Crumb labored at, and emphasizes the lines and coordination of single page of panels. For the full effect, the reader is directed to consult the book, where Crumb's seemingly effortless command of layout is in full flower.

In addition to the original pages, much of Crumb's research material is on display beneath transparent boxes. These objects include frame enlargements from de Mille's The 10 Commandments, collected clippings of people, animals, "slaves," and landscapes for reference, and early educational comic book versions of Bible that Crumb drew upon. A display shows a group of images that were the source for Crumb's version of God, including Charleton Heston as Moses from The 10 Commandments. One of the treats of the exhibition is a black and white alternative cover, found in the final room.

Only 60 years ago the vulgarity and violence of comic books was under attack from psychologists and government agents. Today, the work of one of the form's greatest practitioners is on display in a museum as if it were art, which clearly it is. That comics are now published in hard covers is itself a tremendous advance from the poorly printed pulp pages of the past. The marriage of Crumb and the most sacred book in history is a strange meeting of high and low culture in a unique and powerful blend.

 

 

 

Now I wish two things, that someone will buy the film rights, and that will Crumb come to town and talk about the book and his art.

The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb's Book of Genesis is on display from June 12, 2010 to September 19, 2010, at the Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Avenue, Portland, Oregon 97205, 503.226.2811.

 

 

 

Originally printed in the Vancouver Voice, June 2010. 

A Head for Crime [Headhunters]

 

 

 

Fashions in detective Fiction seem to go in waves. There was the long Agatha Christie polite mystery, followed by the overlapping hardboiled school. In recent years there has been the “novelty” detective (dwarf, blind, Russian cop), followed by the grim realism of James Ellroy and Don Winslow, among others, which is the current standard.

In the past 10 years, though, the Scandinavian thriller has come to the fore. The First Scandinavian mysteries popular in English were the 10 “Martin Beck” police procedurals by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, many turned into American adaptations and also a series of homegrown TV shows. The Danish TV series Forbrydelsen is one of the best shows on any television ever, and has been turned into the slow paced American knock off, The Killing. In 1992, Danish author Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (Smilla’s Sense of Snow) was an international best seller (and a dull movie), and while in recent years, the obvious leader is the Dragon Tattoo series, which also drew attention to the work of Henning Mankell, Arnaldur Indriðason, Ann Holt, and numerous others in what is being called Scandinavian noir or when they come to the movies what I like to call film glacée.

 

Scandinavian noir films, such as Insomnia, are notable for usually being procedurals, often with political or social cause backdrops, a wide range of social strata examined (like the hardboiled school), and with troubled or disturbed main characters out of Dostoevsky. As with the Martin Beck books, they offer internal critiques of the “Socialist dream states” of the north, especially the bureaucracy and myopia, and the women have none of the Christian inhibitions of the U. S. or England when it comes to nudity, sexuality, multiple partners, and even crime. The latest recipient of readership loyalty is the Norwegian Jo Nesbø. Yellow Bird, the same company that adapted the Dragon Tattoo novels, has made a film of one of his stand alone novels, Headhunters, though most of his books feature the series character Harry Hole.

 

 

Taking a page from Patricia Highsmith, Headhunters tells of a successful businessman, the unusually named Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie, who has the cadaverous look of Steve Buscemi), who has a sideline in art theft, if only to keep his beautiful wife Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund, who, like Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut, is introduced in all her coltish beauty in a bathroom) in the finery he thinks she demands. Brown is rather on the short and gargoyleïsh side, at least in his view, and he needs all the edge he can to keep his wife interested – when in fact, all she wants is a child. In daily life, Brown is a recruitment executive, a headhunter for major corporations. At his wife’s art gallery, Brown meets one Clas Greve (TV’s Nikolaj Coster- Waldau, from Game of Thrones), who strikes Brown as a likely candidate for a computer company in search of a CEO. Greve seems even more attractive when Brown learns that the man inherited a rare Reubens from a relative. Little does Brown know, at first, that Greve is also a “headhunter” – hence the plural title.

 

More should not be said of this tale that relies on turnabouts and revelations as Brown slips from one predicament to another.[1] The director is Morten Tyldum who is working from a script by frequent collaborator Lars Gudmestad, and the film seems to be loyal to the text. As with other Yellow Bird films, the technical credits are high, but unlike the second two Dragon movies, the pace is lively, with the characters continually rooted in realistic elements, despite the usually heightened events of a thriller. The film in fact requires careful attention to its meticulous structuring. Few causal remarks, such as someone saying that they have a fear of dogs, are needlessly placed, and the theme of “heads” and “hunting” are a common theme, fully woven into the film’s texture.

 

Still, Headhunters isn’t probably the best introduction to Scandinavian noir. It’s more of an Elmore Leonard type tale than an examination of northern social problems and congenitally unhappy people – though in one sequence Roger comes home to find Diana watching The Girl Who Played with Fire on TV. Apparently, like the Dragon movies before it, Nesbø’s novel is to be turned into an American movie at some point, so the subtitle-reading-averse will still be able to get the story.

 

1 Though I will add that Headhunters becomes the fourth of only four films I can think of in which a character is submerged in human feces. The others are Seven Beauties, The Shawshank Redemption, and Schindler’s List. Interestingly the other three are all prison films, and two of them are set in concentration camps.

Posted at All Classical on April 28, 2012 by D. K. Holm

Unforced Errors: Recent Hitchcock Books, No. 2

 

There are already over 200 or many more books on Alfred Hitchcock in English alone, maybe more, and multitudes more in other languages, including Guillermo del Toro’s hard-to-find Hitchcock (EDITORIAL ESPASA CALPE, S.A (2008). These books began appearing in the mid-1950s when Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer wrote the first full-length critical study. Ten years later came the first study in English, Robin Wood’s still masterly Hitchcock’s Films. By the time Hitchcock died in 1980, there was already a hefty shelf’s worth, and they continued to appear, but for some reason lately there has been an acceleration of books on the director. Four recent volumes chart the scope of books about him. One is a biography, the second a Hollywood memoir, then a long book essay considering the life and work, and finally a detailed critical study taking on specific elements of the films.

Peter Ackroyd’s Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life (Nan A. Talese, 288 pages, $26.95, ISBN-13: 978- 0385537414) is a beginner’s guide to the director’s life and films. Ackroyd is a specialist in all things London and has written big books on the city and the river that runs through it and has published many biographies, of Dickens and others. There is no original research here, and no particularly gripping insights into how the films work, and this leads to a lot of revived opinions and unhelpful myths being perpetuated, among them the claim that Hitchcock assaulted Tippi Hedren on the sets of The Birds and Marnie.

In a similar book, the case is rehashed again, but at least from the horse’s mouths. Tippi Hedren’s Tippi: A Memoir (William Morrow, 288 pages, $15.99, ISBN-13: 978- 0062469038) is a dictated Hollywood autobiography that covers some of the same ground as the actress’s earlier book on lion conservation, along with remarks she made to Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto and to Camille Paglia in her BFI book on The Birds, all about Hitchcock’s supposed sexual harassment of her during the making of two films. Her claims have achieved the status of fact, so much so that Richard Brody could write about it in the otherwise-famously-fact-checked New Yorker as true, and HBO even aired a TV movie on the topic. Spoto’s goal was to peek inside to the inner turmoil that drove Hitchcock, and Hedren’s then-claims folded perfectly with that aim. But the situation is much more complicated, and much less easy to determine, despite Miss Hedren’s comments. Patrick McGilligan has the most rational approach to the case in his more recent biography of Hitchcock and Tony Lee Moral has the most detail in Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie.

My take on the situation is that the actress was a prudish uptight person not equipped to deal with Hitchcock’s raciness, jokes, and sometimes coarseness of manner. Alma was the person who pointed out Hedren to Hitchcock in a TV commercial, and the negotiations to take on her as a contract player were not hampered by her inexperience, or her weird squeaky voice. Clearly the two had a falling out, but the foundation seems more to be about a contract dispute and her resentment of Hitchcock’s trying to shape her image, in the manner of the old studio days, rather then the possibility of a proposition, or his forcing himself on her in the back of a limo. She did complain to Marni’s screenwriter, and to one of her co-stars, but the tension was not necessarily sexual based, and could have been really just boss-employee issues. Hedren writes that Alma apologized to her about Hitchcock’s behavior, and Hedren supposedly demanded that she do something about it, but again, was Alma voicing awareness of a sexual obsession, or referring to the tensions that enveloped the second half of the Marnie shoot? Yes, Hitchcock called Hedren The Girl, but that was a convention of British cinema and its stereotypes, a shorthand. Yes, Hitchcock worked with some of the most beautiful women in the world, but he also knew sides of them never exposed to the public, and had to wade into show business’s less savory facets having to do with the financial economy of beauty and profit. There are numerous recordings of Hitchcock’s discussions with Hedren, available at the Academy library, and there he called her by her name. According to McGilligan, when Hitchcock wouldn’t let her attend an awards ceremony in Manhattan, she threw a fit and called him a fat bastard. The case has been given even more attention in light of the multitude of prominent men exposed as predators via the Me Too movement.

Frankly, I’m not sure I grasped the point of D. A. Miller’s Hidden Hitchcock (University Of Chicago Press, 208 pages, $22.50, ISBN- 13: 978-0226374673), though it is interesting and even fun to read. Mr. Miller is a UC Berkeley grad school professor, and previously wrote a BFI Classics monograph on Fellini’s 8 1⁄2, and this new volume is a close look at Hitchcock’s meaningful “errors,” and while concentrating on only three films from roughly around the same time, Rope, Strangers on a Train, and The Wrong Man, makes a plug for what he calls the Too-Close Viewer. It’s a complicated and nuanced conceit, and flies in the face of authorial intention. For example Mr. Miller is more interested in the visual jokes that Hitchcock includes, and in continuity errors, and embedded representations of the director. Among the things he focuses on are the joke of Bruno Anthony in Train shown reading a book whose author photo is of Hitchcock himself because it is an anthology he edited. Its companion is a Dell Mapback anthology also edited by Hitchcock, barely seen in Bruno’s compartment. The author is also fascinated by the tilted candle shown in Rope, and the initials D and K revealed in a hat. In Wrong Man he is intrigued by doublings, the ghostly movement of props, and another cameo by Hitchcock sitting in the back row of courtroom. His free associations on these elements lead to some interesting and curious sideways glances at Hitchcock, and though the book could be accused of “reading too much” into what might be a mistake, the book still proves to be an example of just how richly Hitchcock’s films inspire reflection.

Enjoyable as Hidden Hitchcock proved to be, nevertheless I enjoyed the next book the most, probably because I didn’t have to twist my mind around a difficult concept. That next book is Michael Wood’s Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much in the Icons series (New Harvest, 144 pages, $20, ISBN-13: 978-0544456228), which already includes books on David Lynch, Poe, Lucian Freud, Hannah Arendt, Benazir Bhutto, Jesus (by Jay Parini), J.D. Salinger, Van Gogh, and St. Paul. Nice company to be in. Mr. Wood has written studies of Nabokov (with whom Hitchcock once wanted to work), and has a regular movie review column at the London Review of Books, and he has a learned but not academic style that is flexible and roving. On the surface a “conventional” film-by-film survey, which happens to be my favorite genre, Mr. Wood, like Mr. Miller, is strongest in his digressions. In fact, the whole book is like a digression, and merits not only reading, but re-reading. It joins a small cadre of recent books of speculation and free association that includes Peter Conrad’s The Hitchcock Murders, and the volumes by Murray Pomerance, all go-to volumes for insights.

 

 

 

 

Originally posted November 20, 2017 by D. K. Holm at All Classical

Driving Out the Money C h a n g e r s (Danger Diabolique, film and monograph)

 

 

An interesting, foreshadowing moment occurs about an hour and 15 minutes into Danger: Diabolik, the Italian film from 1968 based on the popular comic book. The villain-hero Diabolik (John Phillip Law) has once again foiled his Javert-like nemesis, Inspector Ginko (Michel Piccoli) and as a consequence, the new “Minister of Finance” (the country where he is administrating isn’t exactly specified) has offered a million dollar reward for the capture of the thief. Almost immediately, there follows a montage of explosions as the plinths identifying various tax offices go up in smoke and fragments. This immediately puts the viewer in mind of Fight Club, which ends with a sweeping survey of the city as Club-members take down insurance buildings, banks, and other symbols of economic oppression that keep the male identity weak and docile. Danger: Diabolik anticipated this spirit of anti-corporate anarchy by about 30 years.

 

 

Granted, the virile Diabolik is acting in self-defense. The reward was about to hamper his criminal schemes. And his response works. The new Minister is fired, the country is presumably bankrupt, and the old, equally incompetent Minister (Terry-Thomas) is back in office.

 

 

As a comic strip character, the leather-cat-suited Diabolik was a throwback to Fantômas, the Parisian crime lord who terrorized the city in novels and then in silent serials directed by Louis Feuillade. As Leon Hunt clarifies in his new slim monograph about the film, Danger: Diabolik was at the forefront of various remakes and inspirations based on the spirit of Fantômas, including remakes of the original, several lines of adult Italian comic books borrowing both from Fantômas and Diabolik, other comic book inspired pop culture films such as Barbarella, and much more.

 

Professor Hunt’s new Danger: Diabolik (Cultographies) (Walllower Books-Columbia University Press, 128 pages, $15, ISBN-13: 978-0231182812) is the latest in a series of single title monographs that cover what the French call film maudit, or disreputable movies, and what here we call trash, grindhouse garbage, and in general films that another book in the series could offer as a general title, Bad Taste (Jim Barratt’s volume on the Peter Jackson horror comedy). Other films covered in the Cultographies series include They Live (D. Harlan Wilson), Quadrophenia (Stephen Glynn), Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Dean J. DeFino), Frankenstein (Seattle’s Robert Horton), Blade Runner (Matt Hills), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Ian Cooper),The Evil Dead (Kate Egan), Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Glyn Davis), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock), Donnie Darko (Geoff King), This Is Spinal Tap (Ethan de Seife) and more recently, books on The Shining (Kevin J. Donnelly), Stranger Than Paradise (Jamie Sexton), I Spit on Your Grave (David Maguire defending what many consider the indefensible), Serenity (Frederick Blichert), The Holy Mountain (Alessandra Santos), Ms. 45 (Alexandra Heller- Nicholas), and Argento’s Deep Red (Alexia Kannas). As you can see, there is variety to that legion of titles that the mainstream culture deems, or used to consign to, garbage. Instead, this list is enough to inspire most film students into hysterics of ecstasy. Collect them all!

 

 

Leon Hunt was a contributor to the last physical issue of the influential Movie, a UK publication that focused on close readings of mostly Hollywood films, and whose last issue was No. 36 (recently the publication has been revived as a digital magazine out of the University of Warwick). Mr. Hunt’s contribution to that last issue was a late career survey of Vincent Price’s horror films, and he had fascinating, insightful things to say about tensions between the screen icon and his material and its directors, certain values found consistently among the roles, and the issue of campiness as embedded in self-mocking meta-horror.

 

Mr. Hunt might have gone on to write for Movie further, if the magazine hadn’t fallen into hiatus. On the other hand, he brought an historicism to his essay which matched that of C. G. Crisp, who wrote a book on Truffaut for the Movie series of now-sought-after out-of-print books. The more famous Movie contributors, such as the late Robin Wood and V. F. Perkins, embodied the spirit of close “textual” detail, mostly attending to mise-en-scene and editing (without foregoing story or actorial contributions, of course). Hunt and Crisp may not have fallen into that "pure" category, although their writings are rife with scrutiny of shots, gestures, and point of view. Hunt went on to become Senior Lecturer in Film and TV Studies at Brunel University and write or edit British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (1998), Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger (2003), BFI TV Classics: The League of Gentlemen (2008), Cult British TV Comedy: From Reeves and Mortimer to Psychoville (2013), East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film (2008) and Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and Television. Crisp became Colin Crisp, who until his recent retirement was Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, and has published a series of excellent books on French cinema from the ‘30s through to the ‘60s, published mostly by Indiana University Press.

 

Danger: Diabolik, the book, is one of the best I’ve read so far in the series. Its 128 pages are packed with information, facts, figures, speculation, analysis, and cultural connections. Want to know why the name “Diabolik” has a “K” in it, and how the name is properly pronounced in Italian? Interested in subtle differences between international cuts of the film? Were you aware that there was a proposed earlier version of Diabolik, with Jean Sorel and at one point Catherine Deneuve? The text is a indeed like a “biography” of the film, tracing antecedents and then its influence. Professor Hunt summarizes the history of the comic book itself, created by two sisters already in publishing, Angela and Luciana Giussani, how the film works, the influence of James Bond on the movie, which ultimately was directed by Mario Bava in what was probably his biggest budget ever, and the aftermath, more specifically the cult that has grown around first the film, then Bava, perhaps even more important the cult around the film’s composer Ennio Morricone (in one of his most varied scores), and finally the comic book itself. Culture quotations include the inclusion of Danger: Diabolik in a Beastie Boys music video, the film’s place in the pantheon of parodies by Mystery Science Theater 3000, and in CQ, Roman Coppola’s homage to European pop cinema from the 1960s.

 

 

 

Among the fascinating facets of the film are the moral contours of its hero-thief, the rich relationship between the mysterious Diabolik and his partner Eva Kant (Marisa Mell), and the aesthetic tennis game between producer Dino De Laurentiis, who was thinking big, and Bava, who was used to making magic out of slim budgets. The film’s visual scale is amazing given its limitations, though viewers today may laugh at the rear projection chase scenes. Hunt notes that the movie comes in three large parts, equivalent to three issues of the comic book rather than a a fully plotted out Poliziotteschi, which was a certain kind of Italian crime film that emerged shortly after DD and the “demise” of the giallos. The three parts, in fact, explore the anarchism behind Diabolik’s greed. In the movie, he is less interested in wealth than in tweaking the stuffed shirts chasing him, and in bringing down the civic hierarchies. Diabolik likes to put on a disguise and attend press conferences about himself, which he then turns into mockeries of the officials. He bravely feigns death at one point, only to reassert his superiority over the lumbering professionals hovering over him. His blowing up of the tax institutions and subsequent theft of the replacement gold ingot is motivated by a desire to make it all stop. He wants to bring down society – but really for his own seeming profit.

 

 

The first part of DD concentrates on a cash transfer heist, which establishes Diabolik’s wit and methods. The second part concerns the theft of a priceless necklace, which focuses on Diabolik’s relationship with Eva, whom he adores and pampers, and who in turn worships him. They are equals, and she has equal operative cunning. The third part expands the systems of transportation that the film exploits, in this case trains and ships, as Diabolik fetches the huge gold bounty he has contrived to send to the bottom of a lake. In the film’s dreamy anarchy, Ginko is impotent to stop him, until the very last sequence, but a breaking of the fourth wall indicates that Diabolik isn’t down and out yet, and that the producers may have assumed that the Diabolik series might attain James Bond level iterations. Well, there wasn’t a second Barbarella, either.

 

 

As in the anarchic parody of Fight Club, Danger: Diabolik explores, consciously or not, shades of masculinity, ranging from the potent lovemaking of D, to the just not quite good enough braininess of Ginko, the humorless lethality of the villains that harass Diabolik and Eva in part two, and the cluelessness of officialdom in toto. This celebration of all that is opposed to fatuousness, fibbing, and cultural vacuity in the end shows an at least indirect influence of Mad magazine, that hilarious, mass-culture-undermining seed-bed of the radical left and social protest of the ’60s.

Originally Posted February 27, 2018 by D. K. Holm at All Classical

Hitchcock and the "Third Way" of Understanding Films

 

 

When the BBC released the results of its poll of an unknown number of international critics about their favorite American movies, Alfred Hitchcock made the list five times – for Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Notorious ... and Marnie (at number 47). This placement sparked the usual groaning. Why Marnie and not Rear Window? Of all the directors represented on the list, Hitchcock was the most likely to have numerous masterpieces between his first American film in 1940, and the last “good ones” in the early 1960s. But Marnie has become a particularly vexatious point of debate among some film quackers over the years, especially since Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films, the first book in English on the director’s career, in which the late scholar dedicated a chapter to defending Marnie from dense critics. Since then, the debate hasn’t died down. Talk about notorious!

The BBC 100 has only re-ignited the controversy. Who were these writers who picked the film and how could it rise so high in the list? For some reason this information is difficult to track down, but then, I’m notoriously bad at Google searches. A synecdoche of the ire the film inspires is one blogger who alternates between year-round Oscar predictions, industry grievances, and proper cinematic sideburns disguised as diary entries. In a few error-filled columns, the blogger ran down Marnie and mocked those who came to its defense. On the other hand, critical luminaries such as Glenn Kenny and Dave Kehr have long been supporters of Marnie.

The debate, or at least the resistance to Marnie as a film worthy of inclusion in an all-time best list exposes an interesting chasm within the critical community, to use the term loosely. Despite the blogger’s call for some kind of weird vigilante attack on Marnie lovers, which unfortunately the Internet is all too easily roused to do these days – for which see the lynch mob mentality over the second season of True Detective, – Marnie is unlikely to go away or its champions be suppressed. There is already one whole book on the making of the film, Marnie figures significantly in the so far hundreds of books on the director, and the latest issue of CineACTION!, the Canadian film journal that Robin Wood helped found 30 years ago, coincidentally features a cover story on Marnie.[1]

The conflict isn’t between “tradition of quality” types like the blogger who finds films such as Shane the pinnacle of Hollywood craft versus the egghead intellectuals with no sense of how an audience interacts with a film, though the conflict is probably in part that. It’s that there is a third way. Yes, some academics do “read too much” into a film particularly if they are drawing upon Freudianism and other bankrupted ideologies. But go back and read the Marnie chapter by Wood, if you have it. It’s a carefully reasoned look at the choices Hitchcock made, with an analysis that if not explaining away such “mistakes” as bad process shots, painted backdrops, and psychological inconsistencies, at least sees them in accord with the overall meaning or seeming ambition of the film’s psychological portrayal. The “third way,” however, is an interest in the director as a person behind a film. The tradition of quality blogger can like North by Northwest as a “well made film” that pleases the audience and was validated as good because people paid to see it [2] – essentially the vantage point of a producer or studio executive, a meddling busybody with snap judgments and easy dismissals, the Rex Reed school of thought. The academic is good at tracking meaning and similarities and progressions of a film though a director’s career as it interacts with the business, the public, and the earlier films, all valuable. The third way, however, asks for great sympathy for a director’s works, both as a whole and individually. So for example, a fan of Samuel Fuller or of Hitchcock and Marnie looks at the film not for its tradition of quality craft but for its expression of the director’s personality. The “sloppiness,” the extremes of quietude and loudness, the psychological flaws are interesting in themselves because they bespeak either passion (as in Fuller) or some kind of inner crisis we can never truly know, as possibly in the case of Hitchcock.[3]

It’s assumed that Hitchcock “identifies” with Mark Rutland, the Sean Connery character who takes an interest in the case of the mysterious, chilly secretary whom he identifies as the robber of one of his colleagues. Like other Hitchcock characters he “rescues” Marnie – although the ending of the film is ambiguous, even somewhat open ended, and anyway, there aren’t that many male rescuers in Hitchcock films outside of Grant in Notorious, women being usually in that position. What if in some strange way Hitchcock identified with Marnie? That Marnie and Marnie herself represent Hitchcock’s struggle with the terror of sex, and who, like Marnie, chose a life of “crime, making films that are usually about thieves, murderers, and spies? From a position such as this, one can “forgive” a director many a “mistake” or break from the prevailing definition of the well-made film, a definition that shifts from decade to decade or from new technology to new technology. The results are that Hitchcock’s movies, like Kubrick’s, often look better out of their time, than in them.

 

[1] It’s a reprint from the massive book A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock.

 

[2] Hitchcock himself in interviews all too often took box office as validation over critical enthusiasm.

 

[3] By the way, until there is one other witness than Tippi Hedren to the alleged sexual harassment of which she charges him, I will remain dubious, as does Patrick McGilligan in his definitive bio of Hitchcock.

Originally posted at All Classical on 11 August 2015

Two More for the Third Wave

 

Another couple of names to add to the list of Third Wave cinema writers list from a couple of days ago are Peter Stanfield and Tag Gallagher.

 

 

Peter Stanfield is a professor at the University of Kent and author of several books, including The Cool and the Crazy: Fifties Pop Cinema with chapters on Korean War movies, juvenile delinquent pix, offbeat music films, hot rod tales, and others. He has also published 'Unamerican’ Hollywood, about the films of the Blacklist era, a book on Hollywood westerns of the ‘30s, Maximum Movies-Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson, and the recent Hoodlum Movies, about the motorcycle gang cycle of exploitation thrillers. I knew the name but the first thing I’ve read is an essay in Steve Neale’s anthology Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, from 2002. “‘Film Noir Like You’ve Never Seen’: Jim Thompson Adaptations and Cycles of Neo-Noir” focuses on the peculiar occurrence of a bunch of Thompson films that appeared almost all at once in the 1990s. That same cycle inspired my book on Film Soleil, but as usual my title does not appear in the bibliography. Nevertheless, Mr. Stanfield has done thorough research and traces the background that led to the Thompson resurgence, before addressing the “meaning” of them and the similar companion neo-noirs, or films soleils, subsequently released. This is an authoritative essay and demands attention. Now I have to read all of Peter Stanfield’s books.

 

 

 

Tag Gallagher has written two superb biographical-critical studies, on John Ford, and on Roberto Rossellini, as well as a series of highly informative video essays on visual style for a string of Criterion Collection DVDs. I was reminded of him just today while flipping through a random issue of Film Comment, from November-December 1998, 20 years ago. The cover feature is Mr. Gallagher’s essay on Douglas Sirk, "White Melodrama: Douglas Sirk," (I think ... the graphic design of the first page is confusing). It’s a piece in which he tries to save Sirk from his “champions,” in a sort of Orwellian manner. They get him wrong. And Mr. Gallagher is here to set them straight. The crux is that Sirk’s champions define Sirk as an ironist who is subverting the melodrama. But Mr. Gallagher both remembers seeing the movies of the ‘50s at the time and being both aware of the elements of the stories that undercut the world of the Eisenhower years, and also being moved by the uplifting endings, which he asserts that Sirk “meant.” Two films on which he concentrates are Summer Storm and A Scandal in Paris, both starring his close friend George Sanders. Mr. Gallagher also isolates a running theme in the films, the role of savior who intervenes in another’s life, surprisingly taken from Sirk’s own experiences, and usually played by Rock Hudson. He finds thematic and autobiographical material in a pair of little regarded Sirk films, All I Desire and A Time to Love and a Time to Die. This is a definitive essay on Sirk, a must-read, and should be widely anthologized.

Links of Interest: My review of a Beatty bio at Portland Mercury

 

Here is a link to what I hope is a series of reviews of movie biographies at the Portland Mercury blog. The debut review is a new bio of Warren Beatty. 

Robin Wood Bibliography: Contributions to Anthologies and others

 

 

 

A Robin Wood Bibliography

 

 

A descriptive, illustrated bibliography of the work of noted film critic Robin Wood

 

 

Books With Original Contributions by Robin Wood

 

 
 
 

The Films of Jean-Luc Godard [Edited, presumably, by Ian Cameron]

For details, see the citation for the second edition below.

The first version of this popular anthology of essays on Godard's films. Like almost all of the books in the series its dimensions are six inches wide and 6.5 inches high.

 

 

Second Wave [Edited, presumably, by Ian Cameron]

"Dusan Makavejev," pages 7 - 33; Praeger, New York, 1970, 144 pages.

An anthology of nine essays on filmmakers from around the world, with an intro by Cameron. Other contributions include Cameron on Oshima, three essays by Michel Ciment, and Andi Engel on Jean-Marie Straub (query to the universe: was Engel's book The Serials of Louis Feuillade ever published?). Like almost all of the books in the series its dimensions are six inches wide and 6.5 inches high.

The Films of Jean-Luc Godard [Edited, presumably, by Ian Cameron]

"Band A Part," pages 61 - 71; "Alphaville," pages 83 - 93; "Weekend," pages 162 - 171; Praeger, New York, 1970, 192 pages.

An anthology of 23 essays on Godard's films, in chronological order, by 16 contributors, including Raymond Durgnat, V. F. Perkins, Cameron, and Charles Barr. This is the second edition of the book, with the addition of seven new essays and four new contributors, including Wood on Weekend, and Durgnat on One Plus One. Like almost all of the books in the series its dimensions are six inches wide and 6.5 inches high.

 

 

Favorite Movies: Critic's Choice, edited by Philip Nobile

"The Seaweed-gatherer," pages 160 - 171, Macmillan Publishing, New York, 1973, 301 pages.

An anthology of essays by prominent reviewers discussing the one film they esteem the most. Other contributors include Peter Bogdanovich, Stuart Byron, Richard Corliss, Dwight Macdonald, Joseph McBride, William Pechter, Andrew Sarris, John Simon, and Parker Tyler. The contents page makes up a sort of who's who of "in" critics for the early 1970s. Wood's essay is ostensibly about Sansho Dayu, but his remarks range all across cinema and at, and the essay ends famously with the simple remark, "It is the greatest movie I have ever seen."

 

 

Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, The Major Filmmakers, edited by Richard Roud

The Viking Press, two volumes, New York, 1980, 2000 pages.

An anthology of essays by prominent critics discussing about 250 filmmakers and issues in cinema. Other contributors include Molly Haskell, Andrew Sarris, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and numerous others. The contents page makes up a sort of who's who of "in" critics for the 1980s. One peculiarity of the book is that editor Roud demands the last word. At the end of each essay, Roud adds his thoughts about the topic, in bold face. This is apparently a consequence of the long delay in publication, necessitating Roud's updates, the original authors being unavailable. Wood's contributions to the set are listed below.

"Robert Altman" pages 25 - 27.

"Bernardo Bertolucci" pages 125 - 131.

"Budd Boetticher" pages 133 - 135.

"John Ford" pages 371 - 386.

"John Huston" pages 513 - 516.

"Stanley Kubrick" pages 560 - 564.

"Fritz Lang: 1936 - 1960" pages 599 - 608.

"Charles Laughton" pages 610 - 611.

"Leo McCarey" pages 652 - 654.

"Dusan Makavejev" pages 655 - 657.

"Anthony Mann" pages 664 - 661.

"Alan J. Pakula and Robert Mulligan" pages 763 - 764.

"Sam Peckinpah" pages 771 - 774.

"Arthur Penn" pages 775 - 778.

"Robert Rossellini" pages 887 - 900.

"Ken Russell" pages 909 - 910.

"Don Siegel" pages 921 - 923.

"Jacques Tourneur" pages 1006 - 1008.

 

Don Siegel – American Cinema, edited by Alan Lovell, BFI, 1968, page 58. A response to a questionaire from the editor.

 

 

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, edited by Christopher Lyon; second, third, and fourth editions edited by Tom and Sara Pendergast

Perigee Books, Putnam, two volumes, New York, 1985, 622 pages and 550 . Subsequent editions were published by St. James Press (a part of the Gale Group), through at least the year 2000, in four volumes, Volume 1, Films; Volume 2, Directors; volume 3, Actors and Actresses; and Volume 4, Writers and Production Artists.

An ambitious undertaking, this anthology of essays by prominent scholars evolved into a massive contribution to film studies. Though horribly expensive at the time, the contents of the books have now been put on line at the Film Reference website, where Wood's numerous contributions can be unearthed. They will be linked from this page as they are discovered. Some Wood essays that appear in the Perigee edition, such as an article on John Carpenter, and replace in the St. James editions.

 

 

 

 

Films

 

"L'ATALANTE"

 

" BANSHUN"

 

"BOUDU SAUVE DES Eaux"

 

"LE CHARME DISCRET DE LA Bourgeoisie"

 

"IL Conformista"

 

"DAYS OF Heaven"

 

"E.T.-THE Extraterrestrial"

 

"LA GRANDE Illusion"

 

"Heaven's Gate [deleted after first edition] "

 

" HIGANBANA "

 

" IKIRU "

 

"THE LADY Eve"

 

"MEET ME IN ST. Louis"

 

"NANIWA Ereji"

 

"NOSFERATU"

 

"NUIT ET Brouillard"

 

" RASHOMON "

 

"REGLE DU Jeu"

 

"RIO Bravo"

 

"LE SANG DES BETES"

 

"SANSHO Dayu"

 

"THE SCARLET Empress"

 

"She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [deleted after first edition] "

 

"Tabu [deleted after first edition] "

 

"TAXI Driver"

 

"To Have and Have Not [deleted after first edition] "

 

"Tout va bien [deleted after first edition] "

 

"UGETSU Monogatari"

 

"VIAGGIO IN Italia"

 

"LE Weekend"

 

Directors

 

"Greg Araki"

 

"Tim Burton"

 

"John Carpenter [deleted after first edition] "

 

"Michael Cimino"

 

"Jacques Demy"

 

"Brian De Palma"

 

"Georges Franju [deleted after first edition] "

 

"Jean-Luc Godard"

 

"Lasse Hallstrom"

 

"Alfred Hitchcock"

 

"HOU Hsiao-Hsien"

 

"Juzo Itami"

 

"Richard Linklater"

 

"Anthony Mann"

 

"Leo McCAREY"

 

"Max OPHULS"

 

"George A. Romero"

 

"Martin Scorsese"

 

"Oliver Stone"

 

"Bertrand Tavernier"

 

Actors and Actresses

"Gloria Grahame"

 

"Sharon Stone"

 

Writers and Production Artists

 

The Modern American Novel and the Movies, edited by Gerald Peary and Roger Shatzkin.

Ungar, New York, 1978

"Charles Laughton in Grub St.," pages 204 - 214. [A reprint from On Film 1:1, 1970, pages 68 - 71, and focusing on Night of the Hunter and its adaptation history. Wood also wrote on this film in his Laughton entry in Critical Dictionary; see above]

 

 

The Book of Westerns, edited by Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye, Continuum, New York, 1994, 320 pages, ISBN 0 8264 0818 4

 

"Drums Along the Mohawk," pages 174 - 180.

"Duel in the Sun," pages 189 - 195.

An anthology of essays on the genre by former and current contributors to both Movie and CineACTION!, including Deborah Thomas, Michael Walker, Charles Barr, V. F. Perkins, Andrew Britton, Richard Lippe, Brad Stevens, Florence Jacobowitz, and Edward Gallafent. Wood's essay on Drums is reprinted from CineACTION!.

 

 The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, edited by Andrew Sarris, Visible Ink, Detroit-New York-Toronto-London, 1998, 692 pages, ISBN 1 57859 028 0

"Tim Burton," pages 86 - 70.

"Jacques Demy," pages 133 - 135. [Updated by Rob Edelman.]

"Georges Franju," pages 181 - 183.

"Jean-Luc Godard," pages 192 - 197. [Updated by Rob Edelman.]

"Alfred Hitchcock," pages 218 - 223.

"Antony Mann," pages 319 - 320.

"Leo McCarey," pages 328 - 330.

"Max Ophuls," pages 364 - 366.

"Scorsese," pages 453 - 457.

"Oliver Stone," pages 494 - 498. [Updated by R. Barton Palmer.]

"Bertrand Tavernier," pages 512 - 514. [Updated by Rob Edelman.]

An anthology of 200 essays and filmographies by some 75 contributors on the then-considered top directors. Other contributors include David Bordwell, Dave Kehr, Raymond Durgnat, Audie Bock, and Ginette Vincendeau. It's interesting to see who was considered important in 1998, or slightly earlier given the book's gestation time: Then-fashionable directors or club favorites such as Bill Forsyth, Nanni Moretti, James Ivory, and Hal Hartley are given much more space than their current status seems to warrant. This volume offers the only extended treatment that Wood gave to Burton, Franju, or Stone.

 

 

Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist, by Andrew Britton

"Foreword," page 6, Columbia University Press, New York, 2003, 264 pages.

This third iteration of Britton's important book contains a foreword by Wood. The volume was originally published in 1984. It was reprinted in 1994, as a Movie book under the stewardship of Ian Cameron. This edition reprints the 1994 version, with all the Movie apparatus and design, plus Wood's foreword, and Britton's programe notes for a Hepburn retrospective in 1984 (pages 253 - 260)

 

 

The Film Comedy Reader, edited by Gregg Rickman

Limelight, New York, 2001

"'I Just Went Gay All of a Sudden': Gays and '90s Comedies," pages 409 - 421. [This item may also have been printed in a different language in Filmhäftet; seen magazine bibliography.]

 

 

The Hitchcock Annual Anthology: Selected Essays from Volumes 10 - 15, edited by Sidney Gottlieb and Richard Allen

Wallflower Press, London and New York, 2009 (published in the USA by Columbia University Press)

"Hitchcock and Fascism," pages 97 - 122. [A treatment of Hitchcock's Lifeboat; this may be Wood's last published essay before his death.]

 

 

 

 

The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg, edited by Piers Handling

General Publishing Co, Toronto, 1983 (published in USA by New York Zoetrope)

"Cronenberg: A Dissenting View," pages 115 - 135.

The Film Noir Encyclopedia

Edited by Alain Silver, James Ursini, Elizabeth Ward, and Robert Porfirio

Overlook, New York City, 2010, 426 pages.

This is the fourth edition of the popular guide to the genre. Robin Wood is one of the numerous contributors, and his specific articles will be enumerated in due time.

 

DVD Audio Commentary Tracks and Liner Notes

 

 

The Furies, Anthony Mann, The Criterion Collection, spine number 435, ISBN: 978-1-60465-044-0, street date, June 24, 2008, region 1, $39.95.

Wood provided an essay to the booklet for this Criterion release.

 

 

Le Plaisir, Max Ophuls, The Criterion Collection, spine number 444, ISBN: 978-1-60465-060-0, street date, September 16, 2008, region 1, $39.95.

Wood provided an essay to the booklet for this Criterion release.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Book Review: Wonder Woman

In the annals of popular culture there are many times when a reading public has been drawn to subject matter that for a long time escapes the attention of the pundits and intellectuals. Penny dreadfuls were mostly ignored by the cultural commentators, as were pulp magazines until decades later, where the contents were often reevaluated as "art." In Britain, George Orwell brought to light in a famous essay the crude sex comic books that entertained the working class. In the 1970s and 1980s women readers in America consumed romance novels outside the scrutiny of media watchdogs. 

Comics on the other hand were always high profile. Descendent from newspaper comic strips, which were already a national mania, comic books quickly became kids stuff, the source of concern from parents and societal watchdogs even as movie studios, especially Disney, and other businesses, hijacked them as a marketing adjunct. Yet within the comic book industry there were pockets of bizarre novelty and obsession. 

One of these pockets as home of Wonder Woman, one of the many DC comic book superheroes introduced in the wake of Superman and Batman. It's difficult to evaluate true popularity, but Wonder Woman never seemed to be as popular as her elder siblings, nor of the other DC line of characters, such as the Flash, the Green Arrow and Aqua-Man. As late the 1960s, Wonder Woman's comic books maintained an archaic style that harked back to the 1940s, and worse, to young pimply-faced comic maniacs, Woman Woman was probably only for girls. 

If she was, what on earth were those girls thinking? In Whit Stillman's film The Last Days of Disco, one of the characters goes into an impassioned Tarantinoesque diatribe against the implications of Lady and the Tramp, arguing that Tramp is in reality a "self-confessed chicken thief and all-around sleaze ball" and that the film constitutes a "primer on love and marriage directed at very young people" philosophizing that "smooth talking delinquents are a good catch for nice girls," while the "only sympathetic character," the Scottie, is "mocked as old-fashioned and irrelevant and shunted off to the side." Casting an equally gimlet eye on Wonder Woman, you wonder what lessons the heroine was teaching her readers. 

Like a lot of women, Wonder Woman sent mixed messages. Resembling Superman, Diana Prince, A.K.A. Wonder Woman, was a super-powerful person first, but only disguised as a mere mortal in everyday life.  A resident of an island of Amazons, she came to the regular world after Steve Trevor, a fighter pilot, crash-landed there at the start of World War II. Following him back to the United States, Diana - Wonder Woman fights Nazis, mad scientists, and common criminals, and often finds herself tied up in highly detailed ropes and chains drawings that rival Betty Page for variety. 

 Dr. William Moulton Marston created Wonder Woman, and she made her debut in All Star Comics No. 8, published in December 1941 (becoming a DC figure when that company was formed in 1944). Marston was an evangelist for the educational benefits of comic books and wanted Wonder Woman to be a role model for female readers. To that end, Wonder Woman was mechanically competent (she flies an invisible plane), a good fighter (she has a golden lariat and wrist bracelets that look like bondage attire to help her out by repelling bullets), and is at times a scientist and military strategist. 

 Wonder Woman's mixed message seems to be that not only is it fun to triumph over male egregiousness, but it is also fun to be tied up for awhile before you get there. In its first period, the comic was famous for contriving some way to have Wonder Woman hog-tied, chained to a wall in a dungeon, or strapped to a St. Andrews Cross. Many kids seem to have a natural affinity for bondage, but is the attraction really inborn or does it come from media such as Wonder Woman comics?  If so, does Marston and his cartoonists bear the responsibility? Moreover, what's wrong with a little playacting bondage in the first place? 

 For the most part the new book Wonder Woman: Amazon, Hero, Icon (by Robert Greenberger, Universe Books, 208 pages, $35 dollars, ISBN 978 0 7893 2034 6) avoids dwelling on the bondage theme, preferring to celebrate the character in straightforward prose that recounts the background to, history of, and permutations in the comic book. The bondage theme comes up only on pages 112 and 115, where the reader learns that Marston insisted on the bondage postures as an "educational" alternative to scenes of violence. On the other hand, he also insisted that various slave girls in chains also decorate the bondage theater, so who knows what he was really thinking? Was the well-meaning educator also a libertine with Sadean leanings? The book then chastises feminist Gloria Steinem for avoiding the issue in an anthology of WW stories, even though Icon doesn't do much better. 

 Icon is divided into 12 brief chapters. The reader is presented with background history on the creation of the character, background on her Amazon roots and influence by Greek mythology, is given a survey of her weaponry, a list of her friends and her opponents, is followed into the swinging '60s where changes in the WW persona were finally implemented, and then shown how the character has evolved since then. The prose is informative if brief, but the book's main function is to show how numerous artists have interpreted the character over the decades, giving gravity to both the pulpy origins of Wonder Woman and the glossy "graphic novel" treatment of recent years. 

The knowing comic book buff wants a little more sleaze, however. For a detailed treatment, the reader can turn to Michael Fleisher's Wonder Woman volume in the Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes series, published in a less prudish 1976. Not only does Mr. Fleisher detail every episode of bondage and humiliation from issue to issue, such as on pages 87 - 88, where we learn how a Baroness Paula von Gunther used operant conditioning and a photograph of her holding a bullwhip to transform her victim into a "mindless, obedient slave, powerless to resist the baroness's commands," but there is also a four to five page section at the end of the book that goes into detail about the images of bondage, humiliation, and slavery in the series and their implications in terms of the comic's "philosophy" ("Nowhere in the comic book literature is the practice of slavery so prevalent as in the Wonder Woman chronicles"). Despite his almost comically sober prose, Mr. Fleisher has written one of the hottest accounts of a comic book ever put to paper. 

In an age when bondage images are readily available, readers don't have to turn to a comic book for fleeting images of women hogtied. But at the time, Wonder Woman's giving and receiving bondage may have been part of a coded language between disciplinarians on both sides of the drawing pen. But because the portraits of Wonder Woman tied up are embedded in longer (dull) action stories, the physical charge is evanescent at best, and it doesn't help that the early illustrators for Marston's vision aren't particularly good.  

It is also confusing that her name is Diana Prince, the word for a male role in royal hierarchy, especially given that Wonder Woman is a princess back on her home island. Aside from the name, however, there is little gender bending in the comics outside of WW's toughness and greater command of a male associated tools and machines. Yet given her competence it is confusing that she finds herself tied up all the time. A psychologist might hint that there are no accidents, and that Wonder Woman's propensity for finding herself in bindings betrays a secret hankering, in line with her "girlish" emotionalism toward Steve Trevor. What is clear, though, is that Wonder Woman's bondage is only a transitional stage, and that once through it, she triumphs against maledom, not unlike, one imagines, a woman who starts out as a masochist or bottom in the BDSM world and evolves to become a top or Dominatrix. In that regard, Wonder Woman may actually have something accurate to say about human psychology, however coded it might be. Some readers will yet wish, however, that Wonder Woman had been better drawn.

Book Review: Star Wars by Will Brooker

In 1966, George Lucas saw Jean-Luc Godard in person when the New Wave director made an appearance at USC, where Lucas was a grad student. Godard's approach to film influenced Lucas as the New Wave in general had inspired so many others. Lucas liked the spontaneity of the films and chumminess of the characters in them, the dirtiness and authenticity of the world. Godard's Alphaville was to have a significant impact on Lucas's short film THX 1138: 4EB and its later regeneration as a feature film. But shortly thereafter Lucas drifted away from the sorts of movies that Godard made, Lucas himself evolving from short films dissecting and anatomizing such objects as racing cars and cinema verite accounts of events in his life such as working on Coppola's The Rain People, to Hollywood style films of nostalgia and traditional narrative.

 

 Will Brooker alludes to this Godardian moment in his terrific monograph on Star Wars (BFI Film Classics, Palgrave Macmillan, 96 pages, $14.95, ISBN-13: 978-1844572779) enough to set the mind pondering the future of cinema if Lucas hadn't disengaged from his interest in Godard. But as Mr. Brooker makes clear, Lucas was already set in his ways, and the apparent contradiction between his early short and "experimental" films and the "slick" Hollywood product is a myth. Mr. Brooker is excellent at illustrating the continuity between the early student and the later mature films, while illustrating the real contradiction of the films. As Mr. Brooker puts it, in the "supposedly clear-cut conflict between good and evil, Lucas is rooting for both sides."

 

There have been hundreds of books, magazine articles, blog entries, and fan speculations about Star Wars and its series successors/predecessors. But as Mr. Brooker points out, there are few attempts to treat the film as a work of art, to analyze content, trace themes, and scrutinize philosophy. Mr. Brooker salutes Robin Wood, who, in his book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, has a critical account of the film and its impact on cinema. Yet Mr. Brooker still manages to find a nugget of helpful critical insight into the film from the late critic's essay on Star Wars, that totalitarianism can arise from within the forces of good, an insight that unlocks, at least for the generous Mr. Brooker, access to the aesthetic and thematic concerns of the film. Aside from Wood's essay (and a highly critical account of the film's fascism that appeared in Jump Cut, but which I don't think Mr. Brooker cites), Mr. Brooker's book is the first attempt to address the film as a film, rather than a symptom of Hollywood's decline.

 

Anyone who lived through the "great '70s" can well remember the excitement over the emergence of American filmmakers as diverse as Coppola, Scorsese, Jon Jost, and Bob Rafelson, among many others, filmmakers who brought an independent or film school sensibility to motion pictures, and some of whom stormed the citadel and began making their own films within the system, changing it, it seemed, forever. Yet by 1977, the year of Star Wars's release, there was a significant change in the mood of common cinephelia. Film buffs were no longer advocates of independent cinema, but apologists for the studios. They thought like studio chiefs, they followed the box office in Variety like studio chiefs, and they gravitated toward filmmakers like Lucas and Spielberg who harked back to old fashioned, non-modernist, non-alienated modes of storytelling.

 

One of Mr. Brooker's ambitions is to see through the obfuscation of that shift and find the real art and coherence underlying Star Wars, one of the most popular films ever made. His short book is divided into four chapters. After the introduction – an overture to his themes and approach, with a good point about how Lucas constructed his fantasy world to have a life, so to speak, outside the limits of the frame – the chapters are "Before Star Wars," "Dirt," "Order," and "Border Crossing."

 

The first chapter, "Before Star Wars", traces Lucas's entry into filmmaking, his attempts to position himself in the press as a guy always yearning to get back to small filmmaking just as soon as he is done with his Star Wars saga (a complaint similar to those made by his mentor and competitor Coppola), and how Star Wars is both similar to and yet also something new in his oeuvre. He distinguishes between Death Star World (cold, clean, orderly, ruthless) and Rebel World (spontaneous, improvisational, scrappy, jokey).

 

"Dirt" tracks Lucas's various strategies and also his foibles as he mounted Star Wars. Mr. Brooker is good here on Lucas's desire to "dirty up" the movie. Even though it was a fantasy, he wanted realistic elements. He is also good on emphasizing sound production as a key, if not revolutionary, element of the film's design and success. Lucas apparently doesn't work well with others, and Mr. Brooker also delineates among the approaches of the various actors to their roles, and offers up some on-set gossip. The author points out that in the making of the film, he created a Rebel World but only by acting like an emissary from Death Star World.

 

In Chapter Three, "Order," Mr. Brooker uses Lucas's special interest in and talent for editing as an entry point in talking both about his technique and his thematic ambivalence. In other words, the Empire is evil, but Lucas admires aspects of it, such as its orderliness and shiny implacability. Here, Mr. Brooker also touches on some of the influences on the film, such as Kurosawa, especially The Hidden Fortress, with helpful frame comparisons between similar moments in The Searchers and 633 Squadron. In his joint biography of Kurosawa and Mifuni (Lucas's first choice for Obiwan), Stuart Galbraith mentions an obscure Japanese action film, The Magic Serpent, that is apparently very close in plot and tone to Star Wars, but this title seems to have eluded Mr. Brooker's expansive attention (Galbraith indicates that the similarities are probably a genre coincidence).

 

Finally, in Chapter Four, "Border Crossing," Mr. Brooker gets to the aesthetic and interpretive – and evaluative – heart of the film. Essentially, he concentrates on Death Star World versus Rebel World, while also noting the underlying and generally unrecognized complex nuances of the political history of the Star Wars universe, i.e., that the evil Empire actually has its roots in the old Republic, setting up a Hegelian thesis to the Empire's antithesis, resulting in the Rebellion's synthesis.

 

Will Brooker's short book on Star Wars makes for fascinating reading that expands and deepens one's appreciation for the film, and it is a welcome addition to a library of books on the film that are mostly tilted toward the Empire of business and box office rather than the Rebellion of '70s cinema's spirit of adventure and aesthetic exploration.