TWO retirement-age survivors of the decimation of professional America film criticism chime in on the past and future of film, with weighty tomes on how technology and society have interacted with the onscreen image.
Film After Film
J Hoberman
Verso, £16.99
The Big Screen
David Thomson
Allen Lane, £25
A tang of panic seems to cling about volumes like David Thomson’s (subtitled The Story Of The Movies And What They Did To Us): cinema, now that its history exceeds living memory, risks slipping out of the range of the manageable, and must be trapped in amber before it gets away. And all this from one of the Big Clever White Men who passed judgment before the inconvenient advent of instantaneous global communication, video cameras on every phone and amateur opinions on blogs.
Thomson’s warm, gossipy approach tends on the whole to prioritise curiosity over jadedness, however, and the early years of cinema throw up thrilling characters for him to conjure with; he decides to credit the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who took proto-filmic successions of images of movement, with the initial conception of the moving image.
One might regard this as a touch arbitrary – it could be argued that the Lascaux cave paintings or the Elgin marbles or the Bayeux tapestry attempt similar impressions of continuous movement – but Muybridge was a thrilling personality whose eccentricities appeal to the storyteller in Thomson. It’s the supposed loss or suppression of such personalities that troubles him, as cinema marches towards the era of the blockbuster. In King Kong – the 1933 original – Thomson identifies a “naïve poetic impulse” which, by the time of Jaws in 1980, has been replaced by “cold-blooded detachment”. Agree or disagree specifically, the sense that things just used to be better is a depressing refrain in Thomson’s book. By the final chapters, he is mourning his own youth as “a time in which the mere act of looking and wanting to see possessed an innocence and an energy.” How sad, how patronising to thus impugn the very sight of whole generations, generations that have embraced and expanded the visual storytelling he loves so much to fit and reflect their own time.
J Hoberman, witty and insightful critic for the Village Voice, has an ostensibly more focused project: what do we mean by film once actual celluloid film barely exists? For Hoberman, film post-CGI is all animation. Your thoughts on whether that matters (or whether 24 frames per second isn’t technically “animation” too, when it comes down to it) may fade into irrelevance as Film After Film shifts from a polemic on technology into a collection of Hoberman’s pre-existing film writing. This means a cobbled-together feel, especially given that some of the films covered (Looking For Comedy In The Muslim World? V For Vendetta?) have faded from significance. They do share a connection to the politics around 11 September, 2001, a date at which, for Hoberman, all culture and society changed forever – another large assumption that might alienate the non-American reader.
Maybe the trick with these two books is to take their grand unifying arguments with big pinches of salt, whilst enjoying heartily their heft and fervour. «