The Books of My Life: Film as Film

V.F Perkins's Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Boston: Da Capo, 1993 [1972] is one of the most interesting books on the nature of film that I have ever read. Perkins, who was long associated with the influential and sadly understudied film journal Movie, takes, as the subtitle of the book indicates, both a descriptive and a normative or aesthetic approach to cinema in this enlightening book.

In Film as Film Perkins challenges both the image oriented and realist oriented approaches to cinema that dominated film theory between the 1920s and early 1970s. Perkins instead argues that, descriptively speaking, films are both grounded in the realism of the camera eye and the magic of film images. In chapters three though eight Perkins notes that film is a technological phenomenon, an economic phenomenon, and a meaning generating phenomenon that works or functions on both the narrative, photographic, and image levels. Perkins also explores how, in the films produced during the Hollywood studio era, it was the director who bought together the various contributions of narrative, image, sound, music, set design, and lighting and the important roles spectators play in the filmmaking process and the film interpretation process.

Perkins, as I noted, is not only interested in understanding films but in judging them. Perkins argues that good films must be credible, coherent, and balanced and that they must fuse narrative, concept, and emotion. For Perkins, the critic analysing Hollywood studio films--as Perkins notes this approach cannot be applied to many of Jean-Luc Godard's films which don't strive for credibility--can judge individual films and the films of certain directors on the basis of how credible they are, how coherent they are, how balanced the various elements that go in to the making of films are, and how more or less they integrate narrative, concept, and emotion.

I very much liked Perkins's approach of grounding an analysis of film value in an understanding of the nature of Hollywood films. That said, I am a bit more skeptical than Perkins of the ability to judge the quality of films given that value is in the social and cultural eyes of the beholder. Perkins, however, allayed some of my concerns my noting that a film criticism grounded in empirical phenomena still remains an open ended enterprise.

Anyone and everyone interested in the contextual nature of film and how films create meaning should read Perkins's groundbreaking and well written Film as Film. Additionally, those critical of auteurist approaches to Hollywood cinema should take note of Perkins's contextualised and nuanced approach to the issue of authorship in Hollywood cinema. I doubt that they will, however, given that contemporary critics of auteurism seem to prefer their auteurists to be romantic straw men or caricatures and stereotypes rather than real flesh and bone auteurists.