The Books of My Life: Abel Gance

Steven Philip Kramer’s and James Michael Welsh’s Abel Gance (Twayne Theatrical Arts Series, Boston: Twyane, 1978) was, on its publication, one of the first English language monographs on the work of the now famous French cinéaste Abel Gance. In the book Kramer and Welsh explore and analyse eight films directed by Gance between World War I and the 1970s, films which, as Gance puts it, he made without having to prostitute himself for commercial purposes, including his now famous 1927 silent film Napoléon.

Kramer and Welsh explore, drawing on Gance's art films and his voluminous writings, the leitmotifs, the contrasts of light and dark, the mottled surfaces, the visual rhythms, the compositional skills, the visual forms, and the themes of Gance’s art films. Gance, as Kramer and Welsh also note, was not only a gifted visually oriented poet of the cinema, he was also a technical innovator. Gance invented or was one of the first French directors, to use polyvision, perspective sound, photographe, close-ups, the horizontal wipe, and sound.

The most interesting chapter of Kramer’s and Welsh’s Abel Gance for me was the chapter of the book that put Gance into his cultural and intellectual contexts. Gance, Kramer and Welsh note, was influenced by Jacob Boehme, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ricciotto Canudo, Jean Epstein, Elie Faure, Henri Bergson, Abbott Suger, Édouard Schuré, and theosophy. Gance's artistically oriented films, Kramer and Welsh argue, are, like Gance himself, thanks, in part, to his influences, idealistic, mystical, and romantic, and grounded in Gance's belief in the spiritual unity of humankind, the unity of the world's religions, and the notion that great prophets had and could lead humans and the world toward ever greater spiritual evolution.

I have a couple of reservations about Abel Gance. Kramer and Welsh note that Gance, like Orson Welles, had many of his more artistic films cut by the money men to make them more commercially viable and was, again like Welles, unable to finish films that were close to his heart because they weren’t regarded as commercially viable by the money men. They note that Gance saw the French Revolution as both negative and positive. They note that Gance saw Bonaparte as one of those Nietzschean prophets struggling and suffering in order to help the world evolve. Beyond this, however, Kramer and Welsh do not really explore Gance’s economic and political contexts in the thorough way that they explored his cultural and intellectual contexts. Additionally, Kramer and Welsh tend to speak of Gance’s intellectual and artistic genius in the third person rather than in, what for me, would be the more accurate intersubjective first person. Beauty and value are, after all, in the social and cultural eyes of the beholder.

The Books of My Life: The World War II Combat Film

Jeanine Basinger's The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) works on two different levels. On one level the book is a historical and sociological analysis of the World War II combat film genre. On another level the book is a historical and sociological analysis of film genres, particularly film genres in the Hollywood studio system from the early twentieth century to 1980.

Basinger's book explores the Hollywood WWII combat film genre, its origins, its precedents, and its historical evolution and dynamism. Basinger argues that the WWII combat film emerged in its full form with its recurring characteristics (night/day, safety/danger, comedy/tragedy, good weather/bad weather, combat/non-combat), plots (the last stand, the mission), recurring characters (hero, group), and recurring cinematic techniques in the films Air Force (1943) and Bataan (1943). She argues that the Hollywood WWII combat film was impacted by elements of earlier World War I films. She argues that the World War II combat film went through four stages: the establishment stage, the acceptance stage, the realist stage, the epic stage, and the inversion stage in which the World War II combat film was turned upside down. She explores how the World War II combat film intersected with the woman's film, the musical film, and the comedy film. Finally, she explores the cultural and ideological functions the World War II combat film played in the continuing socialisation of film audiences (the need for patriotism and sacrifices in order to fight the enemy in World War II and Cold War function, the national pride post WWII function, the satirical and parodic function in the Vietnam war era, and, in a later essay on Saving Private Ryan, a nostalgia for simpler times function).

There is much to praise in Basinger's book. Unlike so many studies by film studies scholars these days The World War II Combat Film is grounded in an analysis of a wide range of films rather than a few films that are regarded retrospectively as classics, however "classic" is defined. Basinger analysed, she claims, over 1000 films, a claim borne out by the annotated list of World War Ii combat films and the genres descendants (the Korean War and Vietnam War films) in the back of the book. It explores genre historically. As Basinger notes, the WWII combat film allows one to explore film genres historically because the World War II combat has a beginning point and is exemplary of how genre films come into existence and function. It is sociological. Basinger explores the functions genre serves in relationship to film audiences.

While there is much to praise in Basinger's book there were also some things I was a bit concerned about. Basinger's book doesn't really explore the impact of other media on the development of Hollywood film genres. There were a number of literary, theatre, and vaudeville precedents that impacted Hollywood melodramas and comedy films, for instance, Is this the case with the combat film? Sociological explanations about how audiences might respond to film social functions are grounded in supposition rather than in empirical audience analysis, something that may be impossible given the limited empirically grounded audience analyses of the past. Despite these qualms I remain very impressed with Basinger's book and recommend it for anyone interested in cultural studies, film history, and the sociology of films. It is one of the best books I have read on Hollywood and on Hollywood film genres.

The Books of My Life: George Cukor

Gene Phillips in his book George Cukor (Twyane Filmmakers Series, Boston: Twayne, 1982), argues that director George Cukor, the director of 50 feature films between 1930 and 1981, is an auteur, a conductor of filmmaking collaborators.  For Phillips Cukor is an auteur-conductor because the vast majority of his films are characterised by a common theme--that it is dangerous to get lost in fantasy worlds--a common visual style--camera work that is creative and innovative and cinematographic, something critics of Cukor said Cukor's films were not--and a common mise-en-scène strategy in which what is within the Cukor frame helps tell the narrative tale Cukor is telling.

In order to study Cukor's feature films, Phillips groups Cukor's feature films into five categories: two categories of adaptations--one theatrical and one literary--two categories that revolve around the films he did with leading female actors of his era--films he did with leading ladies such as Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford,  Judy Holliday, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Anna Magnani, and Sophia Loren, and films he did with Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, and Hepburn and Tracy--and, finally those films he directed in one Hollywood genre, the musical. While I understand the logic of Phillips grouping Cukor's films into five categories for analytical purposes, these groupings seem to me to distort the historical contexts of Cukor's films, require unnecessary repetition, and lead to overlap between the categories raising, in the process, questions about the logic of the organisation itself. Cukor's adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's classic novel Little Women, for instance, a film one would logically assume Phillips would place in the literary adaptations group, is instead placed in the theatrical category for reasons that are arguable, at least to me.

Phillips's book on Cukor seemed to me, as I was reading it, rather chatty. It seemed to me to be a kind of film scholar version of the TV show meets promotion for Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, or akin to one of the film magazines of the classic era of the studio system that served as promotional venues for Hollywood spiced up, as it is, with reflections on the brilliance of Cukor films, the brilliant performances Cukor got out of his actors, and comments by actors on what an education and a joy it was to work with Cukor. This promotional aspect of Phillips's monograph seemed to me to undermine most, if not all, of the scholarly intent behind Phillips's approach to the films of George Cukor. In the end, I thought that Phillips's book would have made a much better article tightly focused on Cukor's themes, his use of the camera, and his mise-en-scène, rather than an almost 200 page book.

The Books of My Life: Alfred Hitchcock (Haeffner)

Nicholas Haeffner's Alfred Hitchcock (On Directors series, Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2005) is one of the best academic introductions I have read to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Eschewing the psychoanalytic approach to Hitchcock that has dominated mainstream films studies since the mid-1970s, Haeffner opts instead--rightly in my opinion--for a historical and sociological approach that puts Hitchcock in his historical, economic, and cultural contexts.

For Haeffner Hitchcock and his films have to be seen as the product of an emerging middlebrow culture that brought together theatrical melodrama, picaresque thriller, German expressionism, Soviet montage, and French surrealism. They are also, as Haeffner notes, a product of a capitalist economy. Hitchcock did, after all, as Haeffner notes, want his films to make money.

Haeffner nicely integrates theoretical critique--Haeffner explores debates over Hitchcock and authorship, Hitchcock's mise-en-scène, Hitchcock's realism, Hitchcock's portrayal of women, Hitchcock and audience analysis, and Hitchcock's legacy--Hitchcock's themes--the evil lurking beneath the ordinary and the wrong man themes, for instance--and Hitchcock's mise-en-scène--camera movement, visual forms, sets, and Hitchcock's implication of his audience in the voyeurism of his films. In the midst of all this Haeffner offers his own analysis of how to approach and interpret Hitchcock in this excellent compact and straight to the point book. Highly recommended.

The Books of My Life: Alfred Hitchcock (Phillips)

Gene Phillips's Alfred Hitchcock (Twayne Filmmakers Series, Boston: Twayne, 1984) is a solid and succinct interpretive introduction to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. One of the biggest talking points of Phillips's book when it was first published, was that it was one of the first scholarly studies of Hitchcock to not only explore Hitchcock's 53 to 56 feature films, but also his 2 documentaries, save for the documentary on the Holocaust on which he served as "treatment advisor", Memory of the Camps (1955), and his 18 directorial efforts on his television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents/Alfred Hitchcock Hour (CBS and NBC, 1955-1965). It remains one of the few books to deal with the feature films, documentaries, and TV episodes even today.

Phillips's book follows standard auteurist film studies operating practise. It explores each of Hitchcock's films and each of his television directorial efforts in largely chronological order. It delineates the themes of Hitchcock's films--ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, the chase, the innocent pursued, people are not always what they seem, evil lurking in the ordinary, the fear of disorder, the dual nature of both hero and the villain, and guilt by association--the tone of Hitchcock's films--black comedy and suspense--and the visual aspects of Hitchcock's films--the noirish quality of Hitchcock's black and white feature films. Additionally, Phillips provides helpful information about production that some other books, emphasising interpretation, do not.

While I recommend Phillips's book--it is a very good introduction to Hitchcock's work in film and television--I do have a few concerns about it. I found Phillips's book too succinct when it came to Hitchcock's films of the 1950s. I think the films from Rear Window to Marnie deserved more than the two to four pages of analysis Phillips gave them. Phillips's book, while mostly chronological, wasn't fully chronological and I am not sure why. Phillips, for instance, dealt with Rope from 1948 and Under Capricorn from 1949 before Notorious from 1946 and Spellbound from 1945.

The Books of My Life: The Art of Alfred Hitchcock

For Donald Spoto (The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures, New York: Anchor Doubleday, second edition, 1992) criticism has two functions. Criticism, Spoto argues, should tell us something about the critics emotional and intellectual attachment and it should draw readers of criticism back to the films being criticised (p. ix).

So how does Spoto's book, a revision of a book originally published in 1976, draw readers like me back to the films of Alfred Hitchcock and what does it reveal to us about Donald Spoto? Spoto's book explores, generally in four to ten pages or so save in the case of Vertigo, which runs to 35 pages, the plots, the themes--the theatre, theatrical illusion, voyeurism, doubles, appearance versus reality, the dual character of protagonists, the dark and chaotic underbelly of nature--visual motifs--birds as chaotic--and the tone or genre--black comedy and suspense--of the films of Alfred Hitchcock. I found the chapters interpreting each film in Spoto's book, save for that on Vertigo, both far too brief and far too wordy at the same time. It seemed to me that about half of this 400 plus page book could have been profitably pared down to around 200 pages without any loss of substance. In fact, by books end I thought that the book might have been even better had it simply been a twenty to thirty page paper rather than a 471 page book. I found Spoto's use of celebratory phrases like "wholeness of feeling", "overt tenderness", "sheer poetry", and "his...fervid sensibility" far too vague and impressionistic rather than analytical and systematic. As to why we readers should take his impressionistic criticism seriously, Spoto seems to suggest that it is because when he showed his work to Hitchcock, the master gave him his imprimatur (p. viii). This justification of authority might be even better than St. Paul's justification of his apostleship on the basis that he had seen the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus in the spirit, since Spoto spoke to Hitchcock in the flesh.

Rather than taking me back to Hitchcock's films, I found that Spoto's prose and his wordiness circled me back to Donald Spoto. So too did Spoto's limited attention to the production details of Hitchcock's films and his extremely limited references in the text to sources he used in his analysis of Hitchcock. Spoto, for example, argues that Hitchcock was influenced by Victorian literature and Victorian art but he provides no sources for this intellectual pedigree. Since Spoto, who has a doctoral degree in Biblical Studies or Theology, is not, as far as I can tell, a specialist in Victorian Studies, I presume he got this information on Victorian culture and its influences from Victorian specialists. He does not, however, cite these scholarly sources nor do they make a cameo appearance in the brief bibliography at the back of the book. This general lack of references to sources throughout Spoto's book is, at least for me, unforgivable in someone with a scholarly background.

Because of all this I simply cannot recommend Spoto's book on Hitchcock. I found the book rather lacking, particularly in comparison to, for example, Robin Wood's earlier seminal book, Hitchcock's Films (1965), one of the first books in text oriented film studies I ever read and still one of the best interpretive film studies I ever read. So, if you are looking for an introductory book on the art of Alfred Hitchcock, I suggest you look elsewhere.

The Books of My Life: The Opening of the American Mind

Lawrence Levine's The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999) is a rejoinder to the jeremiads of Arthur Schlesinger Jnr, George Kennan, Roger Kimball, and others, which bemoan the decline of America and American civilisation. It explores the culture war between polemicists and academics over the American past and over American identity.

This culture war, Levine argues, is not new and like culture wars over American history and American identity in the past, it is grounded in different approaches to the past in late 20th and 21st century American academic and intellectual culture. On one side, argues Levine, is the polemicist camp. The polemicists, Levine argues, are characterised by a selectively remembered past grounded in romantic and nostalgic ideologies.  On the other side, argues Levine, are those academics in the humanities and social sciences who utilise the latest in theoretical and methodological tools to understand more accurately the American past and, by extension, the American present.

Both of these approaches, Levine argues, are not simply about the past. They are also about the present. For the polemicists America was, is, and forever should be, Western. For the polemicists Americans were, are, and forever should be, culturally Western. For the new academics, on the other hand, America was, at its birth, diverse culturally and ethnically, and is even more culturally and ethnically diverse today. As a result of this difference, both camps do history in general and American history in particular, differently. The polemical camp, Levine rightly notes, are more ahistorical (and hysterical for that matter) than historical in approach. They defend, for example, what they see as a long academic tradition, the Western civilisation core curriculum in its American variant, without apparently grasping--or perhaps they are simply using this rhetoric for Machiavellian and manichean ideological and political advantage--that the tradition they are defending was actually an early twentieth century innovation in American higher education. The new academics, on the other hand, are historical and utilise the latest in historical methodologies to try to get at, as best as they can,  the political, economic, cultural, and demographic realities of American history. While both camps are polemical, the polemical camp believes America and Americans should be Western while the new academics believe Americans should recognise the positives of cultural and ethnic diversity, the new academic approach is grounded in sound historical exegesis and hermeneutics while that of the polemicists is not. This difference, to me, is important since, norms and values, if we want to pursue them, must be grounded in historical reality rather than in selective romantic and universalist ideologies.

While I found Levine's book an excellent introduction to the contemporary culture war over American history, culture, and identity, one has to wonder who the target audience of the book is. Though The Opening of the American Mind seems ostensibly, at least, to be aimed at the polemicists in the book reading audience, the fact that they are largely uninterested in historical accuracy and more interested in winning the latest political and cultural battle in the post-1960s culture war, would, seem to make this book, grounded as it is in primary research and call and response academic practise, irrelevant to them. Those who are more likely to pick up this book and read it, it seems to me, are those already convinced of the superiority of an inductive and descriptive rather than a deductive and normative approach to American history and American identity. And that, dear reader, seems to encapsulate in microcosm the reality of a divided contemporary America that is rent through with anti-intellectualism, anti-academicism, ahistoricism, and the ideological construction of an emotionally grounded mythic "reality".

The Books of My Life: A Woman's View

Jeanine Basinger, in her book A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960 (Hanover: NH, Wesleyan University Press, 2013) rightly, in my opinion, sees the movies Hollywood made between 1930 and the early 1960s, particularly the movies aimed at women, as, at least in part, Durkheimian. Hollywood films, in other words, show those in the audience what they should and should not do. They hold up a mirror for women that reflects back to them images of how they should act and how they shouldn’t act. They also, as Basinger notes, allow women to have their cake and eat it too, for while watching women on the big screen doing what the films ultimately tell them they should not do, women in the audience were able to experience the vicarious thrill of liberation, if only briefly, from the social and cultural norms associated with the cult of domesticity.

There is a lot to admire in Basinger’s book. Basinger takes a sociological approach to Hollywood films and to women’s films rather than the psychoanalytic approach that is far too common in contemporary academic film studies these days and all the better, in my opinion, for it. Basinger foregrounds the fact that Hollywood films aimed at women were gender tales and moral cautionary tales, similar, in their own way, to the much critically reviled Socialist realist novels and films of the 20^th century. Hollywood films aimed at women, Basinger argues, showed American women in the audience that their lives should revolve around the cult of domesticity and showed them the dangers that awaited them should they not follow women’s natural path of men, marriage, and motherhood. Basinger’s analysis is grounded in a systematic and analytical analysis of hundreds if not thousands of women’s films with their recurring characters, settings, plots, dialogues, and techniques, rather than, as is far too common in contemporary academic film studies, the analysis of what are seen as classics largely in retrospect. Basinger’s study is sensitive to historical change. She argues, for example, that the cult of domesticity oriented women’s films Hollywood produced were undermined by the countercultural “revolution” and its sexual revolution.

I had a few qualms about Basinger’s analysis. Basinger admits that it is difficult to define the genre women’s films making one wonder whether Hollywood’s women’s films are best seen as a genre or as a theme or a tone. Basinger’s analysis is only limitedly quantitative raising questions about the representative nature of the case studies of women’s films she explores. Basinger’s study assumes certain things about audience reactions to Hollywood’s women’s films. Without quantitative or qualitative studies of how women in the women’s film audience actually reacted to such films, however, Basinger’s hypotheses about how the audience for women’s films reacted to the films remains, as she realises, tentative.
 
Despite these concerns I highly recommend Basinger’s book to anyone interested in gender studies, cultural studies, socialisation processes, and film studies. Unlike many of the scholarly analyses of films grounded in psychoanalytic methodologies and approaches, Basinger’s historical and cultural study of Hollywood movies is likely to prove useful to those interested in the intersections of gender, culture, films for some time.