Movies

by Gilbert Adair (Editor)

Cinema is the quintessential art form of the twentieth century. From the Lumiere brothers' first public film screening at the end of the nineteenth century to the technical wizardry of today, cinema has recorded, created, even revised our history. Its images, icons, follies, and foibles endure as part of our collective consciousness. However, does the end of the century also herald the "end of cinema"? Has mainstream, formulaic, big-budget moviemaking triumphed over other alternatives? Covering a panoramic range of genres and styles, from B-movies and Nazi propaganda films to independent features and animated productions, and with texts by Orson Welles, Francois Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock, Colette, John Updike, Umberto Eco, and other modern visionaries, this eclectic volume is a refreshing look at the ever-fascinating world of the movies and a much-needed corrective to the Hollywood bias.

Genres: Film

447 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2000

About the author

Gilbert Adair was a Scottish novelist, poet, film critic and journalist. Born in Edinburgh, he lived in Paris from 1968 through 1980. He is most famous for such novels as Love and Death on Long Island (1997) and The Dreamers (2003), both of which were made into films, although he is also noted as the translator of Georges Perec's postmodern novel A Void, in which the letter e is not used. Adair won the 1995 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for this work.

In 1998 and 1999 Adair was the chief film critic for The Independent on Sunday, where in 1999 he also wrote a year-long column called "The Guillotine." In addition to the films made from his own works, Adair worked on the screenplays for a number of Raúl Ruiz films. Although he rarely spoke of his sexual orientation in public, not wishing to be labelled, he acknowledge in an interview that there were many gay themes in his work. He died from a brain hemorrhage in 2011.

(source: Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Annabelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book of cinema-related articles--random essays, excerpts, poems, and snippets on the subject of movies, by an eclectic lineup of literary and cultural luminaries, notable notables who need not go by first names: Nabokov, Kurosawa, Tolstoy, Truffaut, Updike, Hitchcock, Fellini, Kundera, Kipling, Mailer, Sontag, and the Marx brothers, to name a few. The articles are as diverse as the contributors, and range from Vladimir Nabokov's waxing unsentimental on a home projector at his St Petersburg childhood home, to Francois Truffaut's livid, yet intimate letter to Jean-Luc Godard, to Richard Wilbur's doggereled ode to the Stewart Grangers in The Prisoner of Zenda (the fourth of five, as of 1999). Curated and edited by the novelist, poet, journalist, and film critic Gilbert Adair.

My favorites, in no particular order, are the following:

1) Norman Mailer's wishful might-have-beens, had he met Marilyn Monroe, and his uncanny impressions on her genealogy, her "full pedigree of insanity," as evidenced by the asylum (for the insane) seekers and suicide on her mother's side of the family. Marilyn was "a young woman whose sense of her own sanity can never be secure." Thus, "when the wings of insanity beat thus near, one pays attention to a feather."

2) Umberto Eco's hilarious instructions on How to Play Indians in Westerns, where we learn such nuggets of wisdom:

1. Never attack immediately: make yourself visible at a distance a few days ahead of time, producing easily observed smoke signals, thus giving the stagecoach or the fort ample time to send word to the Seventh Cavalry.
2. Leave clear traces of your progress: hoofprints, smoldering campfires, and amulets allowing identification of tribe.
3. Restrain your mustangs, notoriously faster than coach horses, so you won't outstrip the vehicle.
4. Never attach at night when the settlers might not be expecting you. Respect the tradition that Indians attack only in daytime.
5. Insist on making your presence known by giving the coyote cry, thus revealing your position.
6. If a white man gives the coyote cry, raise your head immediately to offer him an easy target.
7. Attach by circling wagons, but never narrow your circle, so that you and your companions can be picked off one by one.
8. In preparing to attack an isolated farm, send only one man to spy on it at night. Approaching a lighted window, he must observe at length a white woman inside, until she has become aware of the Indian face pressed against the pane. Await the woman's cry and the exit of the men before attempting to escape.
9. In shooting from a distance, assume a clearly visible position on the top of a peak, so that you can fall forward to be shattered on the rocks below.
10. On capturing an enemy, do not kill him immediately. Tie him to a stake or confine him to a tent, awaiting the new moon, by which time others will come to free him.

The essay is an excerpt from Eco's How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, a collection I am now intent on reading.*

3) Susan Sontag's The Imagination of Disaster, which chronicles the typical science fiction film's model scenario in five phases, delivered in color and on a wide screen, as opposed to the typical black-and-white science fiction film's scenario, which is set at a lower budget, and has four phases, allowing for alternative versions to the first and second scripts, naturally. Peppered with titles of retro, mostly B-movie, my-kind-of-science fiction movies, Sontag tells us something I've felt all along. "Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art."

4) Delmore Schwartz's arresting, dream-like, eventually nightmarish short story that begins on a Sunday afternoon, June 12th, 1909. I agree with editor Gilbert Adair when he he says "no anthology of film of film-related texts from which it has been omitted deserves to be taken seriously."

5) Gilbert Adair's short introduction to the article Suspects by David Thomson, who wrote the irresistibly titled Moments That Made the Movies. While Thomson's imaginary back-story of Norma Desmond and Joe Gillis provokes curiosity, it is Adair's insistence on our attention to the parallels of Psycho and Sunset Boulevard that make us go hmm...:

"For if there's any film bathed in the same gangrenous atmospheres as Sunset Boulevard, it's surely Hitchcock's Psycho. A handful of startling parallels can even be drawn between the two. In both, after all, a character pursued by the forces of order (by a pair of repossession agents in Wilder's film, by the police in Hitchcock's), seeks refuge in an isolated dwelling (a creepy old mansion in Wilder's film a motel in Hitchcock's) and ends by being slain, respectively in a swimming pool and a shower, by a certifiably demented occupant whose life is irretrievably stuck in the groove of the past. These occupants' forenames are, in addition, Norma and Norman (both of which cry out for the prefix 'ab'); and given that Norman Bates' psyche has been entirely usurped by his mother's, his name too could be thought of as Norma."

My two-star rating translates to: if only the rest of the almost eighty articles were as delightful and engaging!

* I didn't waste any time. I read and finished the book on December 28, 2023.

[Kyle Clewett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing collection of fragments, essays and errata.