My usual approach to internet memes is to duck and let them blow over. But “Reading the Movies” swept me into nostalgic list-making, to give honor to the books which were the most influential in my development as a film watcher, writer and programmer. Well, they’re not all books, but they do involve words about pictures…
1. Famous Monsters of Filmland
This one isn’t a book, but a magazine — or an adolescent’s subscription’s worth of magazines. And no doubt the fact that the original of this meme began with “Famous Monster” books provoked me to commence this list at all. But anybody who was there understands the rush of nostalgia and longing I get from just seeing the cover of an old FM even today. Forry Ackerman was my first guide backstage at the movies, introducing me in his snarky way to make-up, special effects, and, in a large way, criticism, a whole constellation of concepts and nomenclature for talking about films — how they were made, what they meant, how they made us feel and think. Even if the films were old Universal horror films or Godzilla pictures. My first bout of cinephilia was an addiction to “Creature Feature.” My first film writing, homeade notebook monster magazines in junior high study hall. All thanks to FM.
2. The Making of Star Trek and The Making of Kubrick’s 2001
Our small Midwestern town’s public library (peace be on it) was my launchpad to the galaxy, and growing up during Project Apollo, I devoured anything related to space travel. I remember painstakingly photocopying stills from the 2001 book at a laundrymat that happened to have a copy machine, and knew the making of the film inside and out long before I ever actually saw it. I had much easier access to Star Trek, and practically memorized this official creation story, complete with great behind-the-scenes factoids like how all Dr. McCoy’s medical gizmos were actually designer salt shakers! I was everlastingly designing starships for that science fiction movie I was going to make, based on blueprints and models I learned about here.
3. The Name Above the Title, by Frank Capra
VHS cassette distribution exploded in the early 1980s, and with them my interest in the entire Hollywood Studio Era. What a wonder to discover that there was at least a half-century of great films that I’d never seen and never even heard of! My first “Classic Hollywood” love was Frank Capra and I toted around his autobiography like a new convert with the Bible. Capra’s version of his story has been challenged, as has his gee whiz vision; I’ve struggled with my own doubts, but like as not, it’s still Capra movies that can renew my sense of Gee Whiz. What I know for sure is that Capra’s was the first directorial vision I came to make out in broader outlines, and with him, to understand the sense of cinema as a means to personal expression. It was an exhilarating revelation, and sent me chasing biographies of other Studio Era filmmakers.
4. A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980, by Robert Ray
My love of Studio Era Hollywood led me to pick up this book early on, when I was still very wet behind the ears — and what a wild ride it turned out to be! Robert Ray was my introduction to a whole range of critical theories, from the Frankfort School to Myth Criticism. His slightly-more-jaundiced take on Hollywood production methods and goals was also my first experience of having my own experience of a particular film or films challenged by an academic– and so launched me on that noisy enterprise of critical debate, a lifetime of wrestling over ideas and interpretations and approaches. Strangely enough, certain debates have a way of becoming lifelong friends, or at least companions, especially the sort that provoke you back again and again to the library or bookstore tracing down sources or mapping entire landscapes of discussions or critical perspectives.
5. Storytelling & Mythmaking Images From Film and Literature and The Spoken Seen (Film & the Romantic Imagination) by Frank McConnell
Frank McConnell introduced me to a kind of film criticism that is wound inextricably with literary criticism and discussion of all the arts, and philosophy and anything else that wandered into his insatiable net. With a breezy tone and polymathic fluency, McConnell could cite Wittgenstein at the beginning of a sentence that ended with a reference to Gilligan’s Island — the sort of fireworks that has made rock-star-thinkers like Slajov Žižek so popular. Such a holistic approach gave me a vision for a much bigger Big Picture, along with a taken-for-granted sense that film and popular culture could be taken serious and discussed learnedly.
6. Parkway Theater Schedules
Another key influence, and even if it isn’t a book it certainly testifies to the power of the written word (and images). When I first moved to Chicago, I’d occasionally pick up one of these free schedules for a dive theater I never made it into. The printed schedules had the same hypnotic and wonder-provoking effect on me as those Famous Monsters covers, triggering an almost unbearable sense of possibility. Alas, my crowd and my small circuit never took me to the Parkway back then; the place was later converted into an optical company. But those amazing double-features (Eraser Head + Freaks; The Postman Always Rings Twice + Chinatown; MASH + Catch 22; Cheech & Chong + The Three Stooges) — they haunt me every time I create a film schedule or design a poster. And those old schedules still provoke wonder.
7. An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis
Turns out the fairy-tale loving creator of Narnia had a day job, as professor of literature: this slim volume represents a lifetime summing up of his belief in the power of reading. The striking thing is how much of what Lewis has to say about literature applies to film (after all, another famous film book insists it is possible to “read a film”). Lewis taught me the importance of “laying myself aside” and surrendering to both literary and cinematic works, to learn to receive what is there rather than imposing my own preconceptions or preferences. His insight that plot is secondary, even an excuse for, Something Else encouraged me to loosen my grip on plot and go (to cite another Lewis quote) “further up and further in” with films. Lewis’s unquenchable thirst for ever-new and diverse literary visions has inspired me to the same sort of wide-ranging curiosity and eagerness to, as he says, “enlarge my being.”
8. What Is Cinema? (Volumes 1 & 2) by Andre Bazin
The congruency of C. S. Lewis’s approach to literature and Andre Bazin’s approach to film has illuminated both for me. Bazin (and one of his favorite filmmakers, Roberto Rossellini) brought me down from the heavenlies of eternal ideas back to earth, matter, and time. Accordingly, Bazin has given me almost as much from his infectious love of life and material creation as he has with his theories: his is a Franciscan love of all things that inspires me to love life more, including films. Bazin belongs to that very special community of influences in my life and thinking which includes Chesterton, Romantic poets and existential philosphers who have reminded me that the “aboutness” of life — the theories, philosophies, all the talk-talk-talk of criticism — are nothing without the “isness” of concrete reality.
9. The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy
This is not a volume of criticism, but a novel: it concerns the shift in perspective of the title character (one Binx Bolling) from abstract ideas and universals to concrete engagement with the particulars of human existence. I’ve learned so much from Walker Percy about how to see, and how to avoid the common traps that promise sight but end in blindness or self-absorbed ruts — and I’ve also learned to acquire a measure of grace for myself and others for falling so often into those traps. The comparison between the stance of abstract spectator versus a more engaged level of existence is worth pondering at length — and Percy does so here and other novels and essays, so many of which have bearing on engaging better with movies and life.
Plenty of other books might conclude this list, as I’ve read and own dozens and dozens. I’ve re-read many more than once, spent hours digging through the “Film” section of used bookstores and sales, devoted whole evenings to scribbling in margins and underlining key points. Yet these examples above offer a representative set of markers on my own Film Journey. Besides, leaving a Top Ten list just short of “ten” scratches my itch to convey a certain nagging ambivalence about this notion of books on film, which at some point necessarily becomes yet another means to dance about architecture. Still, I wouldn’t be able to convey even that thought if I hadn’t pulled up a chair at the Great Conversation and listened in on a century’s worth of discussion about cinema.
And therein lies the paradox concerning words and pictures.