Chapter 17

Ten Film Writers You Need to Read

In This Chapter

Recommending key writers and texts on film

Looking at films through others’ eyes

Expanding the critical tools you use to read films

Throughout this book, I make constant use of other people’s ideas. So this chapter is an opportunity to give a little back and pay respects to some inspirational film scholars. Obviously, the work of the ten writers I include barely scratches the surface of the huge variety of methods, approaches and styles that make up film studies. But hey, you have to start somewhere, and each of those featured here are great introductions to a range of approaches when writing about film. So get ready to meet ten fascinating film writers and thinkers, explore their contributions and chew on great quotes from their most notable works.

The books that I mention below are generally widely available through public libraries or booksellers. The majority remain in print, and those that are older can be picked up through used or second-hand shops or websites. Film journals can be trickier to access, but your local library should be able to help you track them down.

VF Perkins: Analysing Film Style

To discover how to write precise, elegant and weighty film analysis, you can do a whole lot worse than study the writings of Victor Perkins. Perkins began his career as a film critic for the film journal MOVIE. He later co-founded one of the first academic film departments in the UK at Warwick University in 1978, where he taught until he retired in 2004. He’s still an occasional lecturer and active researcher.

Key concepts and where to find more:

• Auteurism: As a critic for MOVIE, which followed the French Cahiers du Cinéma in celebrating the work of popular film and film-makers, Perkins was an auteurist (see Chapter 14) with a particular interest in mise-en-scène (which I discuss in Chapter 4). His favourite directors include Max Ophüls, Nicholas Ray and Jean Renoir. Check out his article ‘The Cinema of Nicholas Ray’, MOVIE 9 (May 1963).
• Film as Film: This influential book argues for film to be judged on its own merits instead of worrying about whether or not it’s an art form. See: Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Penguin, 1972).

In the movies we have to accept the point of view given to us. Our activity in the cinema, discounting the extra-curricular enjoyments of courtship, arson and malicious damage, is very limited. We can watch. We can listen. All the rest is in the mind.

—VF Perkins (Film as Film)

Richard Dyer: Watching Stars and Developing Queer Theory

If you love films, you can’t help but be fascinated by the glamour of film stars (find much more on stars in Chapter 3), which means you have to read Richard Dyer at some point. Luckily his writing is witty and intellectually rigorous. Dyer has held professorships in film studies at universities including Warwick, King’s College London and St Andrews. He has been actively involved in gay and lesbian politics in the UK, and he organised one of the world’s first film festivals about homosexuality at London’s National Film Theatre in 1977.

Key concepts and where to find more:

• Starry-eyed: Dyer argues that stars are constructed not only from an actor’s performances, but also from publicity material and gossip columns. You can then examine the resulting star image in relation to the politics of identity. Check out Stars (British Film Institute, 1979).
• Here and Queer: Dyer’s work in queer theory examines the repression of gay identity in popular culture and celebrates strategies of resistance, such as the camp sensibility: for example, The Culture of Queers (Routledge, 2002).

Looking at, listening to [Judy] Garland may get us inside how gay men have lived their experience and situation, have made sense of them. We feel that sense in the intangible and the ineffable – the warmth of the voice, the wryness of the humour, the edgy vigour of the stance – but they mean a lot because they are made expressive of what it has been to be gay in the past half century.

—Richard Dyer (Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd edition, Routledge, 2004)

Tom Gunning: Reassessing Early Cinema

If the idea of watching early cinema fills you with the fear of being bored out of your mind, take a look at the work of Tom Gunning. He brings the more outrageous and sensational aspects of early film practice to wider attention. Gunning is currently a professor in cinema studies at the University of Chicago. He has published widely on early cinema, film cultures and the history of film exhibition.

Key concepts and where to find more:

• Cinema of attractions: Gunning highlights the status of cinema as a fairground novelty instead of as an early version of today’s narrative film. The cinema of attractions is about visual spectacle and sensory experience rather than storytelling. Some critics (such as Leon Gurevitch) have extended this model into contemporary blockbuster cinema. Check out ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, Wide Angle 8 (Fall 1986).
• The newness of the old: Gunning emphasises that early cinema was radical, shocking and outlandish, as well as a vital part of modernism in European culture. See The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (British Film Institute, 2000).

From comedians smirking at the camera, to the constant bowing and gesturing of the conjurors in magic films, this is a cinema that displays its visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator.

—Tom Gunning (‘The Cinema of Attractions’)

Molly Haskell: Engaging with Feminism and Film

Molly Haskel is a journalist, film critic and film scholar, making her among the most accessible of writers on feminism and film. Like her late husband, Andrew Sarris, Haskell wrote for The Village Voice in the 1960s. She has taught at Barnard College and Columbia University. She continues to have a voice on the cultural politics of women and you can follow her on Twitter.

Key concepts and where to find more:

• Her-story of cinema: Haskell identifies a trend towards more derogatory representation of female characters in film, which the title of her noteworthy book spells out. But she also identifies examples of women who resist or break out of negative stereotyping, such as Katharine Hepburn. Check out From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (University of Chicago Press, 1974).
• (Not) Gone With The Wind: Haskell takes a detailed look at Hollywood’s greatest movie of all time to revise common perceptions of its sexism and racism. She also challenges the auteurist focus on directors by examining the contributions of author Margaret Mitchell and star Vivien Leigh. See: Frankly, My Dear: ‘Gone With The Wind’ Revisited (Yale University Press, 2009).

It’s a fitting irony that the example par excellence of this studio-confected world was Gone With The Wind, a celebration of caste and class from the New World’s most democratic medium, the portrait of a never-never land whose harmony and grace depended on the smoothing out of much that was ugly and uncomfortable.

—Molly Haskell (Frankly, My Dear: ‘Gone with the Wind’ Revisited)

Yvonne Tasker: Analysing Action Cinema

Yvonne Tasker writes clever things about (occasionally) stupid movies. Her work on the muscle-bound action stars of the 1980s has been widely influential, and she’s also written about images of women in the workplace and the military. She’s a professor of film studies at the University of East Anglia.

Key concepts and where to find more:

• Musculinity: Tasker’s work analyses the images of absurdly beefy bodies of both genders that are common in action films. Their importance is related to discourses (what you say and think) of race, class and sexuality. Check out Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (Routledge, 1993).
• Feminism/post-feminism: Tasker’s work tackles the debate around these two controversial terms. She investigates the differences and similarities between them and outlines their relative usefulness for discussions of popular culture, notably films and television. See Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, editors, Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2007).

The visual spectacle of the male body that is central to muscular movies puts into play the two contradictory terms of restraint and excess. Whilst the hero and the various villains of the genre tend to share an excessive physical strength, the hero is also defined by his restraint in putting his strength to the test. And it is the body of the male hero which provides the space in which a tension between restraint and excess is articulated.

—Yvonne Tasker (Spectacular Bodies)

Michel Chion: Speaking Up for Film Sound

Film began as a visual medium, and film criticism has tended to relegate sound and music to a secondary position ever since. This neglect is clearly a great injustice, because sound is crucial for film storytelling and good film music is one of the major pleasures of watching films. As a musician and composer, Michel Chion is well qualified to theorise about film sound. He works and teaches at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Key concepts and where to find more:

• Voice training: Chion’s work explores the strange power of the voice in cinema, drawing on a range of examples from Psycho (1960) to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). He distinguishes between visualised voices (where the source is on-screen) and acousmatic ones that are disembodied from their source. Check out The Voice in Cinema (Columbia University Press, 1999).
• Sound argument: Chion urges film audiences to think of sound as not simply a slave to the image and to narrative, but as an aesthetic force in its own right. Sound and image can and do work together, but this interaction requires a complex ‘contract’ negotiated between film and audience. See Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (Columbia University Press, 1994).

This work [understanding sound] is at once theoretical and practical. First, it describes and formulates the audiovisual relationship as a contract – that is, as the opposite of a natural relationship arising from some sort of pre-existing harmony among the perceptions. Then it outlines a method for observation and analysis that has developed from my teaching experience and may be applied to films, television programs, videos and so forth.

—Michel Chion (Audio-Vision)

Richard Maltby: Investigating Cinema History

Film history has traditionally been about the films themselves. The method has tended to involve looking for key classic film texts as ‘milestones’ and tracing aesthetic developments between them. Richard Maltby encourages viewers to return films to their social and economic contexts. His own history of Hollywood cinema is an important text for film students. He has taught film studies in the UK and Australia.

Key concepts and where to find more:

• Consider the Code: Maltby’s history of Hollywood emphasises the importance of the Hays Code’s self-regulation (see Chapter 9), which shaped classical storytelling into ambiguous narratives where film-makers signalled adult content without showing it. Check out Hollywood Cinema, 2nd edition (Blackwell, 2003).
• Cinema history: Maltby argues that film history misses what’s most vibrant and interesting about cinema-going. Instead, you should focus on cinema history, examining real buildings and their audiences. See: ‘New Cinema Histories’ in Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers, editors, Explorations in New Cinema History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

The [Hays] Code’s regulation of movie content can, therefore, best be understood as a generic pressure, comparable to the pressure of convention in a romantic comedy or a Western. ‘Sophisticated’ viewers, familiar with the conventions of representation operating under the Code, learned to imagine the acts of misconduct that the Code had made unmentionable.

—Richard Maltby (Hollywood Cinema)

Nicholas Rombes: Discovering Digital Cinema

The digitisation of cinema is one of the most important and urgent issues of contemporary film studies (as I discuss in Chapter 16). But given that digitalisation is a current and ongoing phenomenon, you can’t easily pick out which theorists are going to be the most influential. So I go with the scholar who’s had the biggest impression on my understanding of the topic.

Nicholas Rombes is something of a renaissance man, being a novelist, music critic and film theorist. He’s also professor of English at University of Detroit Mercy. As you’d expect from a digital guru, he has an excellent blog at www.thehappinessengine.net.

Key concepts and where to find more:

• New punk: Rombes finds parallels between the raw, stripped back aesthetic of punk music from the 1970s and the film-makers of today. Important film-makers in this regard include those of the Dogme 95 movement such as Lars von Trier (see Chapter 11) and the army of YouTubers doing it for themselves.
• Digital dreaming: Rombes is fascinated by the deliberate imperfection of early film shot on digital video, such as David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), or films displaying a nostalgia for old technology, notably Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse project (2007). He also makes provocative claims that film theorists no longer need to deconstruct cinema because contemporary cinema deconstructs itself.

[I]n the ruptures and gaps that have opened up as cinema transitions from the traditional analogue apparatus to the digital, there has been an unexpected resurgence of humanism – with its mistakes, imperfections and flaws – that acts as a sort of countermeasure to the numerical clarity and disembodiment of the digital code.

—Nicholas Rombes (Cinema in the Digital Age, Wallflower Press, 2009)

Hamid Naficy: Exploring Accented Cinema

As I note in Chapter 11, the study of world cinema in film studies has moved away from questions of national identity and towards issues of transnationalism. This shift provides space to discuss the many films made across national borders, or the films made by migrant or displaced populations. Hamid Naficy suggests that the latter’s films can be considered ‘accented’ in a similar way to your voice when speaking a language with which you didn’t grow up. Naficy is Iranian and has worked at home and in the West.

Key concepts and where to find more:

• Accented cinema: The ‘accented’ films of displaced film-makers working in other countries share common thematic concerns and stylistic elements, such as stories about journeys and fragmented narrative structures. His examples include Arabic or beur cinema in France and Asian cinema in Britain. Check out An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton University Press, 2001).
• Film-making in Iran: Naficy’s enormous four-volume history details the particular ways that Iranian society shapes its films. The book covers all periods from the silent era up to 2010, including the upheavals of both Iranian revolutions. See A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 1: The Artisanal Era (Duke University Press, 2011).

In the best of the accented films, identity is not a fixed essence but a process of becoming, even a performance of identity. Indeed, each accented film may be thought of as a performance of its author’s identity. Because they are highly fluid, exilic and diasporic identities raise important questions about political agency and about the ethics of identity politics.

—Hamid Naficy (An Accented Cinema)

Charles Barr: Battling for British Cinema

British cinema used to have a sorry reputation among film scholars, even British ones. This impression is partly François Truffaut’s fault, because he claimed that the words ‘British’ and ‘cinema’ were incompatible. One of the first scholars to challenge this reputation was Charles Barr. He also helped to set up the pioneering school of film studies at the University of East Anglia where he taught for many years. He is now a visiting professor and remains an active researcher.

Key concepts and where to find more:

• Ealing Studios: Barr was one of the first film scholars to study an institution rather than individual films and film-makers. He suggests that Ealing Studios’ post-war films can be seen as a ‘cinema of consensus’, securing national identity during a period of trauma and recovery. Check out Ealing Studios (University of California Press, 1977).
• English Hitchcock: Although Hitchcock is perhaps the most discussed film-maker in film studies, his early films made in England receive little attention. Barr corrects this imbalance through a detailed study of the 23 English films, grouped according to their scriptwriting collaboration. See: English Hitchcock (Cameron & Hollis, 1999).

I see Hitchcock’s absorption in the London stage as a mark of his rootedness within the culture, and the cinema, of that time and place. To the end of his life, he would remain very English in his public image – dress, speech, deportment, humour – and this Englishness was more than just a facade. My concern is not to deny the cosmopolitanism of his cinema in a spirit of cultural nationalism, but simply to redress a balance.

—Charles Barr (English Hitchcock)