Flickers: An Illustrated Celebration of 100 Years of Cinema

by Gilbert Adair

The author presents a single image from each of 100 years of cinema, together with a short essay on both the still itself and what that image represents in terms of film history. His aim has been to encompass the many facets of film without reducing the book to an academic inventory of highlights.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Art, Essays

202 pages, Paperback

First published August 22, 1995

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

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

One hundred two-page essays, accompanied by a still of the selected movie, intended to offer an alternate history of the cinema over the last century (ending in 1994—the book was published in 1995). Here are Gilbert’s choices:

1895 Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory
1896 The Kiss
1897 Fatima’s Dance
1898 The Battle of Manila Bay
1899 A Visit to the Spiritualist
1900 Grandma’s Reading Glass
1901 The Execution of McKinley’s Assassin
1902 A Trip to the Moon
1903 The Life of American Fireman
1904 The Great Train Robbery
1905 Rescued by Rover
1906 The Birth, Life, and Death of Christ
1907 The Channel Tunnel
1908 The Assassination of the Duc de Guise
1909 Gertie the Dinosaur
1910 A Tin-Type Romance
1911 Max Sets the Fashion
1912 Quo Vadis?
1913 The King of the Air
1914 The Perils of Pauline
1915 The Tramp
1916 Intolerance
1917 The Cure
1918 Tih Minh
1919 Broken Blossoms
1920 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
1921 The Sheik
1922 The Woman from Nowhere
1923 Our Hospitality
1924 Greed
1925 Battleship Potemkin
1926 Bardleys the Magnificent
1927 Sunrise
1928 The Man With a Movie Camera
1929 Money
1930 Other Men’s Women
1931 Freaks
1932 Trouble in Paradise
1933 Footlight Parade
1934 The Scarlet Empress
1935 Becky Sharp
1936 A Day in the Country
1937 Make Way for Tomorrow
1938 Bringing up Baby
1939 Daybreak
1940 Fantasia
1941 Citizen Kane
1942 Sullivan’s Travels
1943 I Walked with a Zombie
1944 Night and Fog
1945 Detour
1946 It’s a Wonderful Life
1947 Black Narcissus
1948 Rope
1949 Stromboli
1950 The Young and the Damned
1951 Rio Grande
1952 The Band Wagon
1953 The Robe
1954 Sansho the Bailiff
1955 Lola Montés
1956 Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
1957 Early Spring
1958 The Music Room
1959 Breathless
1960 The Testament of Orpheus
1961 Last Year at Marienbad
1962 Lawrence of Arabia
1963 The Nutty Professor
1964 Gertrud
1965 Blow Up
1966 Au hasard Balthazar
1967 Playtime
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey
1969 The Colour of Pomegrantes
1970 The Clowns
1971 Death in Venice
1972 Last Tango in Paris
1973 Cries and Whispers
1974 Céline and Julie Go Boating
1975 Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
1976 Kings of the Road
1977 The Green Room
1978 The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting
1979 Apocalypse Now
1980 Raging Bull
1981 Napoléon
1982 White Dog
1983 Querelle
1984 Zelig
1985 The Sacrifice
1986 The Green Room
1987 The Death of Empedocles
1988 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
1989 Do the Right Thing
1990 No, or the Vainglory of Command
1991 Raise the Red Lantern
1992 Unforgiven
1993 Jurassic Park
1994 Ed Wood

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite book on film. For the centennial of cinema, on each pair of facing pages, one still per year from 1895 to 1994 and some commentary. I should write more about this but there are so many great bits like why film noir was not really about despair, why Napoleon is not a masterpiece, and why White Dog was so great. There are some crazy bits too such as his belief, after Langlois, that silent movies should be shown in total silence. Since 1995, some things have changed, the most startling being that 1926's Bardelys the Magnificent, the film he takes as an example of a lost film, has since been found.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is ingenuity, an intellectual uniqueness embedded in Gilbert Adair’s ‘Flickers’ that is both provocative and frustrating. The construct of this 1995 publication is a series of essays written by the British film critic Adair to celebrate 100 years of movies, wherein the author uses one specific still image from a film to act as the stimulus for his writing. It is, as stated at the beginning of this review, a statement of commendable paradoxical inventiveness. Accompanying this formative approach is Adair’s own extremely idiosyncratic choices and opinions. ‘Flickers’ is not a bog standard summary of who made what, where and when, and was it any good. No, this is a complex and highly personal text.

The problem is Adair’s focus on theory, on form, on thought can become irritating to the point of downright smug and/or opaque over-intellectualism. It’s understandable that a man of his stature as film writer would express himself in language and ideas beyond the ken of your amateur film reviewer who posts their thoughts on Rotten Tomatoes. However, there are occasions in this book where it’s hard not to yell at the pages “What a load of bullshit!”.

Take as an example this quote from Adair’s essay on the Mexican film;
“Beyond everything else that has been said about Bunuel, beyond his surrealistco-marxistico-freudian abomination of social inequalities…”
I’m sorry, but this is execrable prose. Adair finds it necessary to swamp far too many of his essays in this book with an almost masturbatory celebration of obtuse language. The reader ‘gets’ that the author knows a lot and thinks a lot about film. So why the need to produce such turgid prose?

What makes the previously cited example, and other sections of this book so much of a literary wank by Adair is that one can also find some amazingly clear and incisive thoughts on film, expressed with real imagination and control of language. IN his essay on Woody Allen’s ‘Zelig’ Adair concludes with this comment:
“The only way, after all, to find out what a chameleon (Woody Allen) looks like it to set it down on top of another chameleon (Leonard Zelig).”
This kind of statement is so spot on and it demonstrates not just Adair's understanding of the film and its creator, but also his command of language, of imagery, of rhetoric.

Perhaps one of the problems with 'Flickers' is that the essays are often written from the perspective of a critic bound up in the elitist construct of the auteur. There is a lot of merit in considering how the film director develops the artist vision in their work, and Adair sheets home so much of the responsibility for the creativity of each movie he discusses to that one man (and yes, it almost always a man) who invariably is a name the reader recognises. Griffth, Murnau, Laemmle, Sternberg, Kurosawa, Bunuel, Hitchcock, Lean, Godard, Renoir, Bergman, Minelli, Scorsese, Ray, Almodovar, Fassbinder etc; Adair's work is almost entirely about how these men created their cinematic vision, what their attributes are as artists, and how one can respond to them.

The problem is, through approaching the subject via the centrality of the auteur film maker, almost everything else has been excluded or minimised. The worst implication for this approach is that popular and populist film making is almost sneered at. The art of the single cinematic artist trumps the contributions of all the other people crucial to the movies' production. Entertainment and commercial success, two key elements of the nature of cinema, are almost entirely ignored or relegated to a minor annoyance. Adair writes about film as if they are to be deconstructed like a scientific conundrum, and in the process he kills a lot of the pleasure one would hope to find.

There are some meritorious aspects of 'Flickers' that deserve mention. Adair knows his stuff; he is not just a ranting ill-informed 'expert'. He also endeavours to explore film as a global artistic and cultural phenomenon and this offers a wider perspective on what cinema can be (though sadly there are no mentions of Australian movies). The first 30 or so essays are an interesting reflection on the silent era and Adair makes it obvious that the movies made before the advent of the talkies deserve more respect both as films but also as a separate art form.

Yet at its core 'Flickers: An Illustrated Celebration of 100 Years of Cinema" is a bit of a misnomer. The reference to celebration in the title indicates that Adair has tried to present what stirs his soul and heart when it comes to movies, what makes him come alive and laugh, cry or experience whatever emotions the movies might provoke. Instead he slams the reader over the head with obtuse and insistent intellectual dissertations that can, and all too frequently do, injure the reader's potential for celebrating film with him.

[Kzfartz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Focusing on motion picture images, the frame and the images presented within, Gilbert Adair’s informative reviews are honest and illuminating to someone like me who is still enriching their film history knowledge. The verbiage can be grand and overwhelming at times (who uses the word milquetoast?!) leaving me both in awe of Adair’s understanding of language and confused by what he means. I liked reading it in sections, digesting films by the decade and making notes in my watchlist. I disagreed at times, but appreciated Adair’s reflection. The cinematic comic in the lower quadrant of the page is a highlight.

[Matinghaderi · Rating 5 out of 5]

100 شات فیلم که هر کدام نشان دهنده یک سال از 1895-1994 است. نثر آدایر به طرز لذتبخشی پربار و تا حدی تند است، یکی از کتاب های تاثیر گذار سینمایی که سبک و نوع مقاله اش، برای مثال در مورد روایت طناب وار کشتی روسی اثر سوکوروف برای خودم واقعا قابل توجه بود.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous and idiosyncratic way of examining film history- Adair takes one still from one film for each of the first hundred years of cinema. High and chatty at the same time.