Musings on Critical Responses to Joe Wright's and Tom Stoppard's Anna Karenina

I spent several hours today watching Joe Wright's 2012 film adaptation of Lev Tolstoy's great novel Anna Karenina (1875-1877, 1878). Critics at the time of the film's release, as they tend to do in general, disagreed about the quality of the film when it came out. Some liked it. Some were lukewarm towards it. Some did not like it at all. Many, I suspect, even ignored it. Needless to say, such disparate views point up the empirical fact that beauty and value are in the socialised eyes of the beholder.

I found the response of one particularly "critic", the "critic" who wrote the capsule "review" for Leonard Maltin's 2014 Movie Guide, particularly interesting since it was so bizarre. This critic was at a loss as to why Wright set some of the scenes in a decaying theatre. He apparently did not notice, as those who have read and studied Anna Karenina and Tolstoy likely did, that Wright metaphorically and allegorically counterpoints the scenes in the film set in a decaying and decrepit theatres in Moscow and Petersburg, scenes dominated by the mannered, ritualistic, self-righteous, hypocritical and Westernising Russian elite, to the naturalistic rural scenes focusing on Levin and eventually Kitty, the space and the characters that were for Tolstoy metaphors for the "authentic" Russia, the "real" Russia. It would be, of course, this holier than thou Russian elite who, because of their ostracisation of Anna, would drive Anna to commit suicide by falling on tracks as a train passed, something that should also tell us something about Tolstoy's sense of morality and ethics.  

The Books of My Life: On Kubrick

 

As I have mentioned several times previously, I have been a cinephile or film head since the 1960s. Relatively early in my film watching "career" I discovered the joys of the art cinema of foreign film auteurs like Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Francois Trufaut, Alain Resnais, and Eric Rohmer. Around the same time I also learned that art films were not solely a foreign product, that there were also art films by American directors like Stanley Kubrick, an American director born in the New York City in 1928 and who settled in England in 1961, and John Cassevetes and Woody Allen, also New Yorkers, and that there was even an art cinema beyond Americas shores in other English speaking settler societies like Australia and New Zealand, an art cinema reflected in the work of directors like Peter Weir and Roger Donaldson.

In those days of yore when one could only see older Hollywood films on television, particularly independent American TV stations, in America's second run cinema houses and particularly in American college towns, whether in film classes or in local cinemas, I sought out the films of Kubrick, Allen, and the Australian and New Zealand new wave, but particularly Kubrick, in the same way that I had earlier sought out the films of Alfred Hitchock, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Anthony Mann. Soon I had seen most of the films of Stanley Kubrick. I saw The Killing (1956), Kubrick's film about rational criminal planning being trumped by contingent and irrational chance, a film Kubrick regards as his first serious film. I saw Paths of Glory (1957), Kubrick's film about the irrational "rationality" of war. I saw Spartacus (1960), a film Kubrick came to disavow because Kirk Douglas, more than he, had control over the film, a film about a former gladiator named Spartacus who leads a rebellion against patrician Rome. I saw Doctor Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and A Clockwork Orange (1971), a film that was X rated at the time of its first release in the US but which I nevertheless managed to get into despite the fact I was underage at the time. I saw Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). 

I have never, by the way, even though I have all of Kubrick's films on DVD or Blu Ray, been able to bring myself to watch Lolita (1962), Kubrick's and his then partner James Harris's adaptation of the famous and famously infamous 1955 novel about an older man obsessed with a twelve year old girl written by Russian emigre writer Vladmir Nabokov, a book which I simultaneously much admire while also finding it a product of self-indulgent navel gazing, because I just don't see how a film, that suffered the slings and arrows of the film censorship of its time could do justice to the book, itself the subject of battles over censorhip. And if said censorship tears the guts out of the book why adapt it in the first place other than as a way to get certain demographics into cinema seats thanks to cross marketing and branding? Why not instead do a film on a similar subject from an original screenplay that is already tamed and tailored for the world of film censorship?

As is the case with Nabokov's Lolita, I have long had a rather ambiguous relationship with the films of Stanley Kubrick. On the one hand, I admire Kubrick's sense of composition, his cinematic compositions themselves, and his artistic reach. On the other hand, I find Kubrick's films too mundane and too banal for my socialised eye of the beholder taste, though I realise that mundanity and banality are, to some extent, the point of Kubrick's films, something made clear by Kubrick's penchant for retake after retake after retake, retakes which seem to me to emphasise a kind of determinism, which, in turn, seems to make all marks of real spontaneous and emotional humanity persona non grata in KubrickLand. This realisation, however, doesn't make Kubrick's films any more pleasurable for me. It simply makes Kubrick's films less human for me. It makes them different from a television show I enjoy because I think it really does capture real humanity with all its messiness and greyness, Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Additionally, I find Kubrick's films far too full of a misanthropy that is too misogynistic for me. I don't think Kubrick could have written a well rounded female character to save his life, though that again may have been, in part, the point as well. This too makes Kubrick's world very different from the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a world, perhaps, that has a lot more of the post-modernist in it.

Despite sharing a misanthropy with Kubrick, I have long had a love and hate relationoship with Kubrick's art films. I quite like Doctor Strangelove, for instance, a film about the madness of those who plot and pilot America's wars and the sociopathy and psychopathy of the American sapping our body fluids American right, a right that has increased in power and impact since the film came out. Strangelove continues to seem to me, despite the fact that it is almost sixy years old now, the sociopathy, psychopathy, or madness of human beings and the insanity of the worlds they have created. I like A Clockwork Orange, a film about a near future filled with gangs speaking a hybrid of English and Russian, and who nightly engage in a bit of the old ultra violence. My trouble with this film, apart from its deterministic patterning--what Alex did happens to him--something one sees again and again in Kubrick's films, involves Kubrick's jettisoning of the final chapter of Anthony Burgess's utopian and dystopian book, a chapter that counterpoints the tyrannical state attempt to cure Alex (Malcolm McDowell),  something Kubrick seems to be aiming his poison arrows at, to Burgess's more humane religious cure for the old ultra-violence (1962). Kubrick's elimination of the final chapter of A Clockwork Orange seems to me to reveal something important about Kubrick and his art. It reveals an art that is simultaneously detached and ethically and morally challenged and hence disturbing, but again this may be the point. I like Full Metal Jacket, a film about the horrors of the transformation of teenagers into killers via the intense socialisation (some might say brainwashing) of boot camp, and the horrors associated with the wars these now terrifying warriors fight, in this case the American war in Vietnam. Full Metal Jacket, like Strangelove, reveals the madness at the heart of human behaviour, well male human behaviour, in war. 

I am lukewarm about Barry Lyndon, Kubrick's adaptation of William Thackery'a novel about the rise and fall of a roguish and above his station Anglo-Irish low status aristocrat trying to make his way in a world of insufferable eighteenth century English high status aristocrats. I am also lukewarm about The Shining, Kubrick's adaptation of a Steven King novel that takes us into a grotesque and uncanny world of male mental breakdown and patriarchal insanity which may be linked to a ghostly past. 

I don't like 2001 finding it a product of its countercultural cannabis, mescaline, and LSD times, a film in which pop art psychedela meets pop science fiction expansion of consciousness evolutionism (the same pop science fiction expansion of evolutionism that is reflected in Erich van Daniken's "non-fictional" 1968 book Chariot of the Gods and in the several "non-fictional" books of Carlos Castaneda). While recognising the historical and cultural significance and photographic beauty of the film, 2001 has always seemed to me, a mundane and banal film that one has to be in the right state of mind for, in that expansion of consciousness sort of way, in order to enjoy. Nor do I like Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's adaptation of the Arthur Schnitzler's novella that takes us into the marriagescape and dreamscape of a successful doctor residing with his wife in late 20th century Manhattan instead of Schnitzler's early twentieth century Vienna. I suspect that the film was transposed to late 20th century Manhattan for marketing reasons and because Kubrick was in ill health. Parts of England play the role of Manhattan in the film. I suspect that controversial Hollywood celebrity Tom Cruise, who I don't think really "works" in the film, and Nicole Kidman, his then wife, were hired for marketing and publicity reasons as well. Such, after all, is the reality of serious filmmaking in late 20th century Hollywood.

When I became a cinephile in the 1960s I not only watched films religiously, I also began to read about them beginning sometime in the early 1970s. If I recall correctly,  the first book on a film auteur I ever read, one that has stuck with me ever since, was Robin Wood's book on Alfred Hitchcock, a book whose mission it was to take Alfred Hitchcock seriously and analyse his films thematically in terms of content and style. Soon I began reading books on Kubrick, I read the first edition of Northern Ireland critic Alexander Walker's 1972 book on Kubrick. In the 1980s I read American academic Thomas Nelson's book on Kubrick (1982) and found Nelson's contention that the labyrinth or maze was at the heart of Kubrick's films an astute and compelling argument. I read bits and pieces of French critic Michel Ciment's combination coffee table book, interview book, and critical analysis of Kubrick's films (1980) in the 1980s and enjoyed it very much. When I found out that James Naremore, who I took a couple of classes with when I was a student at Indiana University in Bloomington in the late 1970s and early 1980s and whose work I have long found amongst the best and least theoretically problematic in academic film analysis and criticism, had written a book on Kubrick I had to read it too.

Naremore's On Kubrick (London: BFI, 2007) does what auteurist oriented film criticism, approaches that still remain dominant in academic film criticism and analysis despite the straw man argument that auteurism is a textless individualist romanticism of academic media scholars, always do. It rightly places film directors in artistic and social and cultural contexts. Naremore puts Kubrick in broader context placing him in the cultural context of the New York photographic and documentary schools and of the fin-de-siecle Austria-Hungarian Empire critical modernist culture of Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzer, Stefan Zweig, Franz Kafka, and Geza Csath with its obsession with the grotesque, the uncanny, the fantastic, the rational and the irrational, fairy tales, dreams, satirical and parodic dark or black comedy, and the psychic traumas associated with parent-child relations and sexuality. He places Kubrick's work in the context of the transformation of the Hollywood studio system in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling mandating that the studios eliminate their monopoly over film exhibition, the increasing number of widescreen and particularly widescreen epics made in Hollywood in the wake of that ruling and as a way to distinguish itself from television, which was becoming ever more prominent, the increasing distribution and exhibition opportunities available for home grown cinema and foreign art cinema that arose in the wake of that ruling, the increasing globalisation of Hollywood cinema, and Hollywood's increasing role in the post-World War II English film industry thanks, particularly, to the Eady Levy which offered Hollywood a subsidy for making films in the United Kingdom if it used British studios and British personnel to make them. He explores the themes--contentwise and stylistically--of Kubrick's art, the former which revolve around Austria-Hungarian modernism and the latter of which revolve around photographic like compositions,  the use of new and old cinematic techniques and technologies such as the use of widescreen, and a penchant for wide angle shots, zooms, and the handheld steadicam, all of which, Naremore argues, are used to emphasise both the the real and the grotesque. Naremore explores Kubrick's approach to actors and the acting craft, which Naremore argues, reflects Kubrick's obsession with realism, the uncanny, the fantastic, and dark comedy. Finally, Naremore explores the cinematic influences on Kubrick's art including that of the modernist Austrian filmmaker Max Ophuls, the Soviet filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin, Orson Welles, and documentary realism.

I found Naremore's On Kubrick a worthy addition to the seemingly ever growing literature on the films of Stanley Kubrick. I was particularly intrigued by Naremore's arguments that Barry Lyndon was ultimately a critique of the English class and status system, that The Shining was ultimately a critique of paternalism and patriarchalism, and that Full Metal Jacket was simultaneously a celebration of and critique of the masculine culture of warfare. I found Naremore's implicit reminder that students of the cinema need to remember the distinction between Freudian theory, which its devotees and groupies, including hordes in Literary, Film, and Television faculties these days, claim is universal, and cultural Freudianism, the intentional play with Freudianism by writers, filmmakers, and television auteurs, a point ever worth remembering given the dominance of the Freudian cultural-institutitonal-bureacratic complex in academia, a complex that sees Freudianism as the fundamental and universal interpretive key to unlocking the deeper secrets of seemingly inscrutable texts, but only if that task of unlocking a text is in in the hands of those with the unique ability to decipher the esoteric secrets underlying a text and devouring it from below. Finally, it should be noted that Naremore places the Kent State tragedy two years before it actually occurred and he confuses Richard Strauss with Richard Wagner in the section on 2001. Recommended. 

 

The Books of My Life: Licence to Thrill

Though I was eight years old in 1962, the year the first James Bond film Doctor No, made by producers Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli and starring Scottish actor Sean Connery, came out, I never really became a James Bond fan or aficionado and have never been a fan or aficionado of the spy thriller genre, of which the James Bond novels, novellas, and short stories of Ian Fleming and the James Bond films are examples. I recall seeing most of the Bond films when they appeared on television in the 1960s and 1970s and I recall seeing all of them in their chronological order of release on television in Moscow in the 1990s while I was doing research in Russia. I recall, if memory serves, that the only Bond film I ever saw in the cinema was the Roger Moore Bond film--Moore replaced Connery in 1973's Live and Let Die--Spy Who Loved Me (1977) which I enjoyed but in a different way than I enjoyed and appreciated a Truffaut, a Godard, a Bergman, or a Makavejev film, films by whom I also saw in the cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. 

As a viewer I recall that I found the Connery and Roger Moore Bond films a pleasant if hardly earthshaking and earth shattering viewing experience. I recall, being fascinated by the seemingly little things in the Bond films, such as the crushing and compacting of the car in the third Bond film Goldfinger (1964) and thinking it was pretty cool. It was the first time I had ever seen one of those car smashers and compactors. Ah, the things we adolescents find intriguing. I recall thinking, from the vantage point of the Roger Moore Bond films of the 1970s, that I preferred the Connery Bonds to the Moore Bonds. I recall that by the 1990s my favourite of all the Bond films I had seen was the aforementioned Goldfinger. I recall enjoying the Pierce Brosnan Bond, the fourth Bond after Connery, Moore, and Timothy Dalton, The World is Not Enough (1999) and enjoying its parodying of media moguls like Rupert Murdoch and yellow journalists and media moguls who could start wars based on flimsy evidence like William Randolph Hearst and his twentieth century heirs. I recall watching the first Daniel Craig Bond--Craig replaced Brosnan as Bond in 2006--whom I had enjoyed in the television programme Our Friends in the North (BBC, 1996), Casino Royale (2006) and finding that film overlong and overblown in that typical adolescent Hollywood megablockbuster kind of blow it up way even if it did attempt to add more character development into the Bond film mix. As I write, I recal the fact that I would never place that or any of the Bond films in my pantheon of favourite films including Citizen Kane (1941), North by Northwest (1959), Jules et Jim (1962), Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970), Celine vont en bateau (1974), WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), and the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997-2001, UPN, 2001-2003).

Though I am not really interested intellectually or critically in the Bond films, I am interested in British cinema and British television. I am also a fan of and interested in the British TV show and cultural institution, Doctor Who. It was through my interest in Doctor Who that I became acquainted with the research and writing of James Chapman, whose admirable book on Doctor Who, Inside the Tardis (2013), I read and much appreciated. Given my appreciation of Chapman's book on Doctor Who it was almost inevitable that I would be drawn at some point to Chapman's book on James Bond, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (London: Tauris, second edition, 2007).

As he did in his book on Doctor Who Chapman does an excellent job in Licence to Thrill of exploring the broader political, cultural, and ideological contexts of the James Bond films released from 1962 to 2006 and the production contexts of each of the James Bond films from Doctor No to Casino Royale. Chapman places each of the Bond films in the changing historical realities that impacted each Bond film from twentieth century great power politics and their World Wars and cold wars, to the war on drugs, and to the war on terrorism. He explores the cultural history of the Bond films and notes the impact of the twentieth century spy thriller books and thriller films, particularly Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, apparently one of Fleming's favourite films, on the books and the movies, He explores the impact of racism (outright racism zig zagging to more "subtle" forms of racism) and sexism (zig zagging from eye candy and bed candy for Bond to the independent female who fights before she falls in bed with Bond) impacted the Bond films if limitedly. He explores the rather humourous notion that Engand is still a player in the Great Power politics game and the nostalgia of some for the imperial days when England did matter in the imperial game. He explores the production of each of the films with their American financing and largely British personnel, thanks, in part, to the Eady Levy.  He explores the ups and downs and downs and ups of the British post World War Two film industry, the impact of changing demographics on the Bond films, and the fluctuating and changing costs of and factors affecting film production. Finally, He explores how Bond, like Doctor Who, periodically reinvented itself thanks to its Bond regenerations and its interaction with the dynamics of culture, ideology, politics, and economics.

Like many books on film, I felt that the Chapman book would probably have benefited it it had been article length rather than book length since there is, if understandably, a degree of repetition in the book. I would like to have seem more archival research by Chapman, something he did in his book on Doctor Who, and less reliance by him on second hand interviews with those involved in the making of the Bond films including writers, directors, and editors, though this may have been impossible given problems associated with access to primary source documents ensconced in corporate vaults and to film celebrities and stars. Recommended for those interested in the spy genre, spy and thriller films, and British cinema in post-World War Two Britain and the United States. Kudos to Chapman for not fetishising the Hollywood linear and aesthetic tendency to represent more recent films as more profitable and hence aesthetically superior (commodity aestheticism).
 

The Books of My Life: Eyes Wide Shut

As I have mentioned previously in these blogs the films of Stanley Kubrick often leave me cold. That--leaving me cold--sometimes seems to me the very essence and meaning of Kubrick's chilly, mechanical, and ultimately misanthropic and perhaps misogynistic films. They show, it seems to me, in a mechanical way, the absurdity of the human condition.

I have long admired Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove (1964), A Clockwork Orange (1972), a film in which Kubrick's decision not to end the film with the last chapter of the book and which, as a result, tells us much about Kubrick's themes, and Full Metal Jacket (1987), but his other films have generally left me both impressed and unimpressed at the same time. Additionally, his films often seem to me to be very much of their time to their detriment. 2001 (1968), for instance, seems, to be aimed at the psychedelic wow that is far out generation.

Eyes Wide Shut, the subject of film critic Michel Chion's monograph Eyes Wide Shut (London: BFI, Modern Classics series, 2002) is not one of my favourite Kubrick films. It is, however, one of the favourite Kubrick films of critic Chion as he makes clear in the opening segments of the book. Chion explores the differences between the film and the Arthur Schnitzler novella on which it was based (Traumnovelle, 1925/26), narrative form, camera shooting strategies, colour scheme, sound picture, something Chion specialises in in his film criticism and analysis, music, and editing of Eyes Wide Shut. Chion argues that words, words parroted and words first said, are at the heart of the meaning of the film. It is only, Chion argues, when the characters awake from their repetitious parroting slumbers that their eyes are opened if only in a non-Hollywood happy happy ending way.

Recommended for students of Kubrick.

The Books of My Life: Lolita

When I was a teenager and a twentysomething lover of cinema, Stanley Kubrick was one of the great auteurs of the cinephilic world. I have long had a kind of comme ci comme ça relationship with the films of Stanley Kubrick. On the one hand, I recognise the incredible beauty and studied composition of the Kubrick cinematic image and frame. Kubrick was once a photographer after all. On the other hand, I have long thought that Kubrick's characters were too stereotypical and cliched and that he (and most of his collaborators) could not write well rounded female characters to save their lives. In Kubrick films women are femme fatales, pin up girls, screamers, or the objects of male hatred. Finally, I have never quite been able to look past the studied and unleavened misanthropy of Kubrick's films and their often far too sophomoric humour.

Richard Corliss's monograph for the BFI Film Classics series on the 1962 Stanley Kubrick film Lolita (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics series, 1994), offers an interesting exploration of that film through a series of related fragments. Corliss explores the adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita from novel to film, gives readers a brief biography of both Nabokov and Kubrick, explores the visual qualities of the Kubrick film, explores how the adaptation of Lolita by Kubrick fits with the themes of Kubrick's other film work, explores the casting of the film, explores acting in the film, and engages the issue of censorship, which limited what Kubrick could do in his film adaptation of Lolita.

Corliss's monograph is an interesting study of a film seems to have been caught in the no man's land of that era just before the censorship regime of Hollywood broke down under the impact, at least in part, of foreign cinema in the US. I recommend it to anyone interested in Kubrick and Nabokov.

The Books of My Life: Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema

Tom Ryall's Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986) explores the history of British--British film historian Charles Barr prefers to call it English--cinema in the 1930s and 1930s. Ryall also uses the films of British or English filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock to explore the economic, political, cultural, and geographic contexts of English cinema in the 1920s and 1930s.

Ryall explores the development of a bifurcated film culture in England in the 1920s and 1930s, a divide that, as Ryall notes, only a few crossed, between the English entertainment cinema, a cinema heavily influenced by Hollywood, and the English art cinema, a cinema heavily influenced by German, French, and Soviet films and film theory with its network of film clubs, film journals, and art film houses. Ryall explores how the Quota Act of 1927 gave impetus to the development of an English cinema heavily influenced by Hollywood studio techniques and practises and drawing on English popular culture (the English music hall, the English theatre, English literature, English crime and spy novels). Ryall explores how the growth of the English cinema was limited-Britons continued to prefer Hollywood cinema--and its inability to regularly break into the American market, something necessitated by the small size of the English market compared to that of the United States.

Ryall places the films of Alfred Hitchcock into all these contexts. Ryall notes that Hitchcock was one of those few who straddled the divide between the entertainment cinema and the popular cinema, something evidenced, Ryall argues, in his films, films that are often simultaneously influenced by Hollywood and aimed at a mass audience, while also characterised by aural and visual experimentation that Hitchcock drew from Germany, France, and the Soviet Union. Ryall explores how Hitchcock's career benefited from the Quota Act and how the decline of the English film industry in 1937 led Hitchcock to move to Hollywood to make films. Ryall explores how Hitchcock's films reflect the popularity of certain British genres, particularly the thriller and spy genre, a genre with which Hitchcock became synonymous from the 1940s on, and explores how the theme of ordinary people impacted by extraordinary circumstances, a theme that became central to his thrillers, also became central to Hitchcock's auteurist image.

Ryall's superb book is essential to anyone interested in the relationship between society and film, culture and film, English society and culture in the early 20th century, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. It offers an approach to culture and film that is more sociological than psychoanalytic and is far the better for it and should be emulated by other film scholars far more than it has been.

The Books of My Life: Alfred Hitchcock (Cohen)

The films of Alfred Hitchcock have been at the very heart of film criticism and at the very centre of of the development of academic film studies in the West in the wake of World War II. While I don't have the numbers here, it is clear, just by a quick perusal of writings on Hitchcock, that no one, apart, perhaps, from Orson Welles, has generated the amount of film criticism and film studies Alfred Hitchcock and his films have.

The films of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly the American films he made after coming to the US in 1939 to work for producer David O. Selznick, have been subjected to a variety of approaches to film: "humanist", auteurist, semiological, marxist, psychoanalytical, feminist, queer, and some hybrid of all the above. Roberta Morantz Cohen's Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995) takes a historical, sociological, and cultural approach to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Cohen argues that Hitchcock's films correspond to Hitchcock's movement from modern Victorianism to postmodern postmodernism.  Hitchcock films to 1939, Cohen argues, reflect a Victorian reaction to the complex novels with complex characters, particularly female characters, of an earlier era, something she traces to,  Hitchcock's marriage to his wife Alma, the family they created, and Victorian family ideology. His films from 1939 to the early 1960s reflect an attempt by Hitchcock and others to recapture the complex novels of an earlier era and adapt them to film. Cohen calls this the daughter effect and traces it to Hitchcock's case relationship with his daughter Patricia. His films from the late 1970s to his last film in 1975, reflect postmodern cultural currents that sought to eliminate characterisation and critique dominant cultural and social norms.

While Cohen's attempt to historicise psychoanalysis and feminist theory is to be admired several issues beyond the questionable universality of psychoanalytic concepts and the sometimes confusion of psychoanalysis as a way of understanding the world and as a cultural phenomenon that impacted the arts and beyond, must be raised. Isn't it better to utilise the more viable approach of sociology and sociological socialisation than that of problematic psychoanalysis? Isn't it important to explore economic and institutional contexts of action along with cultural ones? Should homiletics, the quality of a film, be judged on the basis of ideology of the analyst? While Hitchcock certainly tried to manipulate his audience in certain directions via suspense, for example, did all those who watched Hitchcock films react to them in the same way or the same general ways? Isn't it important for scholars of film to undertake quantitative and qualitative studies of film response and explore, in the process, the broader contexts of film hermeneutics? Are academic readings of films and film directors impacted by their historical economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic contexts?

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.

Capsule Film Reviews: Driving Lessons

Driving Lessons, 2005, UK Film Council, ContentFilm, Sony Classics, directed and written by Jeremy Brock, Sony Classics DVD, 1:85:1

Ben (Rupert Grint of Harry Potter film fame) is a not so normal caricature of a sensitive London teenage boy. He fancies Sarah who, when he reads her one of his poems to her, tells him he is just plain "weird". Ben's Dad (Nicholas Farrell) too is a caricature. He is an Anglican vicar who, when he is not on the outs with mum and not so subtly criticising mum's lack of ecumenicism in his sermons, hides in his study losing himself in his bird books. Ben's Mum is also a caricature. She is a self-righteous, stern, overbearing, I wear the pants in this house, self-proclaimed "ambassador of God" who puts on school plays about Christ, takes in the poor Mr. Finsham (Jim Norton), likewise a caricature, who ran over his wife with his car, and uses guilt to make her son do a lot of things including trying to get him to become an "ambassador of Christ" in her image.

After one of mum's guilt trips Ben answers an add in the Hello Jesus classifieds and becomes the assistant to the eccentric, to say the least, "Dame" Evie Walton (Julie Walters giving her usual outstanding performance), a caricature of the elder actress who has fallen onto such hard times that she once had to take a part in a soap opera on Sky. Ben helps Evie around the house and with her outdoor chores, Eventually Ben and Edie become fast friends revelling in the joys of the Bard, Chekhov, poetry, and camping under the stars.

When Evie asks Ben to drive her to Scotland so she can read poetry to the Edinburgh Book Festival literary crowd Ben takes his first hesitant driving lesson in being an adult since by doing so he is rebelling against his mum's since she has told him he can't. In Edinburgh Ben's driving lessons toward manhood that Evie began continue. Bryoney (Michelle Duncan), the young woman who meets Evie when she arrives for the Edinburgh Literary Festival, introduces Ben to clubbing, drinking, and sex. Unfortunately, Ben's rite of passage manhood causes Ben to break a promise to Evie that he would be with her when she gives her poetry reading in front of Edinburgh's festival goers. He arrives too late to save Evie from stage fright but he does help her off the stage and takes her, after a night on a lovely loch, back home.

Once back in London mum puts Ben and Evie in their places thanks thanks to the tried and true methods of laying on the guilt and plain lying. Just when all looks lost for Ben, however, Ben rebels. He runs offstage during the play mum is putting on about Jesus and goes off to Evie's. Unable to rouse Evie from her drunken nap Ben returns to adolescent servitude as a eucalyptus tree in mum's play. But all is not lost. Evie hears Ben, gets up, grabs a London cab, and goes to the school hall entering it as though she is the ultimate revivalist the largely evangelical crowd has been waiting for. Mum's infidelity is revealed. Mr. Fincham, dressed in mum's clothes, runs yet another woman over, mum, Dad growns a pair and divorces mum, and Ben decides to become his own man moving into a tent in his Dad's backyard, getting a job at a book store, and deciding to go to school in Edinburgh to study literature. Happy ending. Eccentrics and their eccentricities saved so they can live another day.

I found the coming of age, road trip buddy movie, boy learns life lessons from an eccentric older woman, eccentricity triumphs over authoritarian conformity Driving Lessons interesting if formulaic and cliched film which reminded me quite a bit of another boy learns life lessons from an older more experienced "Dame" film with some black comedy, road movie, and buddy movie in it, 1971's Harold and Maude. I liked Driving Lessons plea for eccentricity but not enough to overcome its caricatured characters, its silly ending, and its indie alt rock/pop soundtrack which seemed more an attempt to appeal to the Grint demographic than to provide a mood for the film or to say something about what was going on in the minds of the characters in the film, two things that Cat Stevens's music in Harold and Maude did in spades. I give Driving Lessons two and a half stars.