Poster Personas

In "Movie Poster of the Week" at Mubi, Adrian Curry has a fascinating discussion of poster art for In a Lonely Place, the Nicholas Ray film starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. Curry discovers that none of these posters quite gets Grahame's facial features right. I agree; I would argue that in some of them her image recalls either Lauren Bacall or Joan Crawford rather than Grahame herself. (The former makes sense, since the distributors would have wanted to remind audiences in 1950 of Bogart's recent popular cycle of films with his wife; the latter less so, since Bogart and Crawford were never paired on film).

This got me thinking about examples of poster art in which a star is represented in ways that depart markedly from his or her actual appearance in the advertised film. There are, of course, examples of willful abstraction, such as the great tradition of Polish movie posters, which often take key iconographic elements and distill them into simple lines and forms. For example, Bogart again, in Casablanca, for a 2009 re-release:

Is this Bogie, or Don Draper? As if Bogart's face were that sharp! This sort of abstraction replaces the iconic features of the star with a key narrative object - in the case of Casablanca, Bogie's iconic cigarette. These posters sometimes even replace the human figure's presence entirely with these objects, as in this utterly bizarre 1970s Polish poster art for Terrence Malick's first film:

But like Curry, what I'm mostly interested in are attempts at more or less realistic representation that nevertheless diverge from the star's appearance in the advertised film. Katharine Hepburn's image in poster art in the 1930s and 1940s is an interesting case study. This poster for The Philadelphia Story (1940), for example, softens her angularity just a bit, which seems appropriate given the film's own narrative containment of the challenging and often subversive personality she created in her earlier 1930s films:

But even so, this is way too generic for Hepburn -- the blank expression of the figure in the poster is light years away from the sharp inner life she projects on film. By contrast, the earlier 1936 American poster for Quality Street (1936) captured the angularity...

...but it's still not quite right. That chin is a bit too much, and the fawning upward glance doesn't really capture the strength with which Hepburn's characters gazed at their objects of desire in these films.

The French came up with a better representation of the energy Hepburn brought to her madcap 30s comedies. This art for Bringing Up Baby (1938) captures the spirit of her character even as it channels the specificity of her features into caricature. What results is a whirlwind of screwball movement:

Sometimes, though, the posters offer weird contrasts. The photo of Grant and Hepburn in this RKO poster (below) for Bringing Up Baby is certainly great, but there is no steamy romance in the movie as depicted here. Clearly, it's just a staged production photo. The illustration in the bottom left corner does a better job of capturing the comic spirit of the movie, even as it abstracts the iconic features of its stars in cartoon fashion: 

Upon viewing her early 30s films, such as A Bill of Divorcement (1932) and Morning Glory (1933), Hepburn's first critics often compared her to Garbo and Crawford. This is a strange comparison now, but one the poster art played up in an attempt to sell this unfamiliar woman in familiar ways. Hepburn was styled a little softer in these earlier movies, but the poster art for them actually makes her a little more gaunt than she actually was in the films. For all her sharpness, there is a real vulnerability to her character in Morning Glory, a quality this poster fails to capture:

This sharp-edged, Garbo-inflected Hepburn image lingered into the mid-1930s, even as the films themselves, such as Alice Adams (1935) departed from it. The image on the left of this American poster for Alice Adams looks like an outtake from A Bill of Divorcement or Christopher Strong (1933) and nothing like the mousy, uncertain woman Hepburn plays in the film adaptation of the Booth Tarkington novel:

The idea that Hepburn could play a "mousy, uncertain" character seems odd if all you know of her is her later, retrospective status as a figure of independent womanhood. But it reminds us how varied her 1930s characters were - and that same variation is at play in all of these posters, even as the parallels between a given poster and the film it is supposed to represent don't always make sense. By the time Hepburn became something of an American institution in the 1950s, her well-established iconic features encouraged abstraction, as in this art for 1956's The Iron Petticoat, with Bob Hope (a counter-intuitive pairing, if there ever was one. "Hilariously together for the first time," the poster says; it would be the only time!):

But even before the iconic qualities of her on-screen persona began to take more or less permanent shape, the playful unpredictability of Hepburn's poster persona itself seems to give way to a conservative consistency. The poster for Woman of the Year (1942), for example, is just right for the film, but it lacks the strange playfulness of the earlier posters, a playfulness that echoed, in the 1930s, the remarkable variation of her on-screen presence from film-to-film. Which goes to show that trying to find a single poster image that might boil down your favorite movie star to her essential qualities is ultimately impossible, for all the forgotten, contingent variations are as interesting as the timeless iconic qualities.

Killing Them Softly

There is a camera movement near the beginning of Killing Them Softly that tracks across the wide screen, from left-to-right, as two goons smash Ray Liotta through a window. Despite appearances, though, it is not a character-motivated camera movement. The camera moves in advance of the goons, arriving on the other side of the house before they emerge from it; and it centers the window in the frame before Liotta is smashed through it. Most Hollywood films shape their worlds around the movements and desires of their characters, but this one assumes a stylistic posture from which to observe its hapless gangsters and small-time criminals, as if they were dead insects pinned to a dartboard in a seedy urban bar. Or as if they are violent men in a dead-end economy - which they are. It's the antithesis of the long tracking shot following the same Liotta through the nightclub in Goodfellas (1990): the camera in the Scorsese film wants to share the energy of its wise guys. But Andrew Dominik, the smart stylist behind The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and the helmer of this new film, is all too aware that the gangster's violent energy ends only in economic and personal burnout, and so keeps his distance.

This elegant aesthetic distance is why the televisions and radios scattered throughout the movie, all playing snippets of speeches made by Obama, McCain, and Bush II during the 2008 campaign, feel like transmissions from another planet; Dominik's achievement is to make a recent moment in American history strange and unfamiliar, even though we are still living through its consequences. Killing Them Softly's losers are mere footnotes to the recent dismal history of the American economy none of them are fit to change, and which only one of them, a wearily philosophical hitman named Jackie, and played by Brad Pitt, comments upon. The movie is full of interesting moments and longueurs that suggest the glamor of the gangster as a genre figure is as exhausted as the economy which once fetishized him. How else to explain the wheezing, palpably unappealing presence of a disgusting character named Mickey, an alcoholic colleague of Jackie's played by an actor, James Gandolfini, who only ten years ago was this genre's undisputed icon of violent cool in The Sopranos?

Whatever the movie's genre revisionism, its star is still one of its central interests. Pitt has built - perhaps not quietly, but without the salient critical acclaim one might suspect he deserves - one of the most interesting filmographies of any beautiful male star in the history of Hollywood movies, and this audience-displeaser is a fascinating addition to his resume. He is lucky and smart enough to star in American films directed by filmmakers (Dominik, Fincher, Malick, Soderbergh) who demand more of his presence than mere presence, and that ask questions. Do gangsters steal because of tough economic times, or do tough economic times merely provide a new kind of excuse for lowlifes with guns? This is the question Killing Them Softly poses, without answering. I do not know the answer, either, but these times have provided an intriguing context in which to contemplate the lives of men who know the other only through the barrel of a gun. 

Douglas Sirk's All I Desire

Douglas Sirk's All I Desire (1952) arrived just before the German-Danish director helmed several key 1950s women's pics in Hollywood: Magnificent Obsession (1954), All that Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), Imitation of Life (1959). It shares with those films a concern for a similar central figure, a heterosexual, middle-class woman with repressed desires; but it locates this interest in a turn-of-the-century character who prefigures the more modern figures played by Jane Wyman and Lauren Bacall in the later movies. Naomi Murdoch (Barbara Stanwyck) was a wife, a mother of three, and a lover, illicitly; however, when Sirk joins her, she is living a fiction of her own creation. Having left her former life upon the community's discovery of her affair with another man, Naomi is at the tail end of a failed acting career. But in her letters back home to daughter Lily (Lori Nelson), herself an aspiring actress, Naomi claims she has found success as a Shakespearean player in Europe. In contrast to the later Sirk films, in which women are often isolated from each other (think of Wyman staring into her reflection in the TV set in Heaven, or Bacall suffering alone through a miscarriage in Wind), Naomi's bond with Lily is the chief emotional interest in All I Desire. But this bond slowly unravels when Naomi returns home, after years away, to see Lily's earnest performance in an amateurish high-school theater production.

There is every indication that Sirk wanted to shoot this film in color. (He lost out on that, and on the ending, too, a ridiculous bit of tacked-on happy business reconciling the wife and husband in an uncomplicated and unconvincing manner). His 1952 film Has Anybody Seen My Gal is shot in sumptuous Technicolor; by contrast, the shadowy silver sheet of All I Desire must find other strategies to locate the emotions that find their signature expression in his color films. For a viewer who looks at this after the later Sirk melodramas, in fact, it's hard to believe that All I Desire is not in color. Some subjects demand color: the unbridled passion expressed through Dorothy Malone's feverish bedroom dance in Written on the Wind is unimaginable in black-and-white (at least, who would want to imagine Malone's ridiculous jitterbug in anything other than its vibrant reds and pinks?), just as the melancholy blues that color All that Heaven Allows ground the the film's enabling soap-opera conventions in a painterly style.

But Sirk's methods in 1953 still manage to suggest the emotional undercurrents that the color of the later melodramas would amplify. In the first shots of All I Desire, his camera placement (in a high angle, looking down at the small town below) prefigures a camera position that would become the opening signature of All That Heaven Allows:

These sort of high-angle shots imply an omniscient view, a knowing figure outside the film who can frame, cut, and color the repressed emotional undercurrents of the fiction but is not subject to those same undercurrents himself. In Vincente Minnelli movies, there is a push-and-pull between the director's and the characters' control over mise en scene, exemplified by the glorious widescreen palette of The Cobweb (1955), which conveys the characters' dueling wills to control the color of curtains in a mental institution. In Sirk melodramas, by contrast, the mise en scene is often established, almost entirely, by forces beyond the control of the figures in the film.

There is a brief exception to this rule of Sirk's cinema in All I Desire, however, and it's an exception manifest in the film's play with black-and-white shadows and light. All I Desire, like the later Imitation of Life, is about an actress, so it is telling that its most salient emotional revelations arrive when characters are self-consciously performing for others. At a dinner party, Lily implores her mother to perform a reading of an Elizabeth Browning sonnet, one of her ex-husband's favorites. Immediately Naomi controls the mise en scene, turning down the lights for her reading and taking the "stage" at the top of a staircase. Cloaked in low-key lighting, Naomi seems to have designed her stage presence in this domestic space in order to avoid being seen, even as the servants spy her performance from the "wings" of this makeshift theater, and just as her daughter and family watch her reading from below:

Naomi later moves down the steps, and addresses her "audience" in what is surely the best bit of acting in her career (if not Stanwyck's): 

As narrative, this scene works to bring Naomi closer to her husband. Interestingly, this narrative push gradually erases the control Naomi wielded over the environment just a moment before: as Sirk begins cutting to more conventional close-up shots, the low-key lighting Naomi has insisted on for her reading is replaced by relatively even illumination:

These moments are not "written" by the character, ultimately. Although she begins by expressing herself through the control of light, the words on the page are not her own (they are written by another author, and they signify, in this context, a bond with a husband responsible for the repression of her desires). What is ostensibly a moment of emotional fullness achieved by a character (a connection established between Naomi-as-actress as her family, and specifically her husband) is subsequently re-framed as a loss of control and agency, one that prefigures the forced ending in which Naomi is thrown (not by Sirk, but by the film's producers) into the arms of her husband, who will bring her no closer to the successful acting career she desires. (An aging actress herself at the time this film was made, All I Desire's disappointing ending is content to suggest that Naomi/Stanwyck's best years are behind her).

If this sequence in All I Desire effectively encapsulates the loss of agency which is a recurring motif in Sirk's melodramas, it is also quite different in its assumption that this woman has some control over her social world in the first place; in the later Sirk movies there is no pretense for such control, and no other Sirk woman after All I Desire is able to fully control environment in the way Stanwyck, at least initially, does in the above shots. In Written on the Wind Lauren Bacall is a Madison Avenue advertising secretary (with a lot of control over the images she produces within the mise en scene)...

...but this is not when the film actually joins her. In All I Desire we first meet Stanwyck as her character explains the relative control she has over the fictional life she leads as an "actress," but the plot joins Written on the Wind at the end of its story, with Bacall colored in humid, warm colors which anticipate her fainting spell:

What I am suggesting here (and it is a hypothesis in need of testing via more re-viewings of Sirk's films, particularly Imitation of Life, which is also about an actress) is that as Sirk's authorial identity was fulfilled as the 1950s progress, the identity of his characters-as-authors was thoroughly effaced. The auteur's color gives us emotional plenitude and satisfaction as viewers, and it helps create his signature; but it carves out emotions from the women on the screen, leaving them empty and without agency.

The Master

I was a big fan of Paul Thomas Anderson in the late 90s and early aughts. In watching Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, and Boogie Nights, I was witnessing a director claiming and channeling the influence of directors such as Scorsese, Altman, and Kubrick with the same zeal and energy I spent watching their movies. Indeed, P.T.'s early films are driven by the confident enthusiasm of immature cinephilia. They rarely stray beyond southern California, and when they do, it's to the even more comfortable world of an alternative cinematic universe where a rainstorm of frogs and a deliriously complex tracking shot or two carry as much emotional weight as human relationships. But there was more to the young P.T.'s talent than just youth and there was more to those films than invigorating immaturity. He was chronicling the present-tense movie-filtered reality of the American southwest through characters living special, fraught, distinctive lives; they talked and acted in a certain way - and to each other - that felt as distinctive as Quentin Tarantino's movie people, but deeper. Whatever show-offy pleasure P.T. was taking in discovering and wielding his enormous cinematic skill with those first movies, he was also getting at real human pain (in Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, especially) which suggested that simple technical skill would never be enough by itself. 

With his last two films, Kubrick is now the primary source of P.T.'s anxiety of influence, and perhaps my dislike of The Master simply boils down to my personal preference of Altman and the loose, jaunty film aesthetics he emblemizes. But to have to make this choice seems false in the first place. In retrospect - and even at the time - the shift represented by There Will Be Blood seemed sudden, and simply weird. Much of P.T. was still there, of course, and enough to suggest the same auteur was in place: The seductively obtrusive music, which offered the ear an aesthetic signpost through which the eye could find ways into the widescreen imagery; the willingness to give over a meticulously crafted narrative to the work of actors; the gestures of camera movement and framing, regarding the characters askance even while giving over the narrative drive to their thirsty ambitions. But much else was lost. The great warmth, and love, for the characters - a nearly musical love in Punch-Drunk Love and Magnolia - was replaced by a visionary, epoch-grasping fascination for their greedy ambitions, and for the new way this fascination, as the primary source of a skeletal cause-and-effect, seemed to provide an excuse for exquisite images. The Altmanesque interest in collaboration was still there, to the enormous credit of Anderson and his crew; the most focused and exciting performances in any Anderson film can be found in the work by Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano in There Will Be Blood.

But instead of great stories, with the characters themselves taking us on miraculous journeys (that end in frog rain or love-soaked sojourns in Hawaii), Anderson's films now have vision. Rather than following his characters the director is now relentlessly, distantly looking at them. The grunt and shit of war, the reason why Freddy Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) is the way he is after World War II in The Master, is never quite felt, which makes his eventual turn to a strange pseudo-religion known as "The Cause" more enigmatic and puzzling than revealing. I admire any filmmaker who eschews simple, pre-digested psychological explanations, but the early P.T. films eschewed those, too, and remained interested in exploring psychology, in guessing, in the heat of the emotional moment, at how it might work. By contrast, I am not sure what Anderson means to say through the relationship between Philip Seymour Hoffman's Lancaster Dodd (the eponymous Master of "The Cause") and Phoenix's Quell. Athough their relationship takes up a good share of the running time, their bond is not developed enough to take on the complexity of the father-son pairings in his earlier films, and for some reason the film also pulls its punches with the homoerotic subtext (which would have been a new shade to Anderson’s oeuvre but is barely a suggestion here). The real frustration with the movie, however, is, now squarely with Anderson's now strangely unloved characters. Everyone in this film is a figure, an abstraction, rather than a character; and that seems strange for a director who burst out of the gate a postmodern humanist.

Abstractions, of course, are not an inherent problem. Lawrence of Arabia pivots around a dizzily beautiful, politically fascinating Anglo-Saxon abstraction played by Peter O'Toole. But what remains fascinating about that film (ongoingly, in a startlingly beautiful 4k digital restoration screened on October 4 at many of the same theaters also showing The Master) is the ability of David Lean to find an emotional and physical context for that abstraction, and to poetically uncover a few of the historical mechanisms which made that enigma a possibility. Although Lawrence's motivations for uniting Arabia remain locked behind Peter O'Toole's thirsty blue eyes, Lawrence is ultimately interesting because of the historical and physical landscape into which his confused quest is thrust. In The Master, by contrast, both history and landscape are foreshortened where they should be explored, framed in fussy still images when we should be moving through them.

There Will Be Blood has a grand vision and a great performance at its middle, and although I don’t emotionally connect with it, I feel that grandeur in every frame. There, Anderson's vision was enough; it resulted in a suitable shaping of form and content into a passionate moral investigation into the fraught marriage between American capitalism and religion. By contrast, The Master shapes images and frames people without investigating them, composes theses in shot compositions instead of making us feel its ideas. Both films are important works of art, and should be seen, repeatedly; The Master's mastery is never in question. What is mastered here, and to what meaningful purpose, is another story.

Teaching performance

This semester I've had my first crack at teaching Film Performance and Stardom as an upper-level undergraduate class. This subject brings the empirical and the theoretical closer together than anything I've taught before: students learn how to closely follow and interpret the moment-by-moment work of an actor, but they also learn to mediate that emotional/intellectual attachment through theories of star-image construction and a larger understanding of historical trends in acting.

It's been a class of good conversations. By far the best conversation we've had so far was about the luminous ending of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights - no surprise, since there's so much to talk about in that final scene. A six-page reading of the film in Andrew Klevan's Film Performance: From Achievement to Interpretation (London: Wallflower, 2005) guided our thoughts. Klevan is very good on placing the performance in the context of the whole film. For most of its running time, as Klevan shows, City Lights places Charlie in various states of obliviousness, and our relation to his character as an audience is often one of superior knowledge. Two things change in the final sequence: the close-up "closes off," in Klevan's words, Charlie from the surrounding context, prompting us to deal with the subtle details of his facial expression, at the exclusion of his bodily gestures, for the first time. We are no longer in a position of superior knowledge, since we, like Charlie, have no idea how the girl will react to him now that she can see:

Klevan's approach is big on the idea of the "moment-by-moment" interpretation of what an actor is doing. This has its virtues: it implicates our subjectivity in the performance's meaning and pays close attention to the larger aesthetic contexts that frame what actors do. If the approach has a drawback, it's that Klevan's "viewer" is not informed by theories of spectatorship. But that's OK, I think; many of the other readings we're tackling this semester will fill in that gap.

Here's the full slate of films I'm teaching this semester, along with a brief note of the readings we're tackling for each:

North by Northwest (Klevan's introduction; James Naremore's Acting in Cinema)
Far From Heaven (a chapter from Cynthia Baron and Sharon Carnicke's Reframing Screen Performance)
City Lights (Klevan)
Eyes Wide Shut (Pam Cook's work on Nicole Kidman)
Training Day (material on Denzel Washington from SUNY's Stars series, as well as a chapter from Reframing Screen Performance on Laban's acting theories)
The Artist (David Denby's article on silent acting; Janet Staiger on acting in early cinema)
Holiday (Naremore on Katharine Hepburn)
On the Waterfront (Naremore on Brando)
Some Like it Hot (a portion of Dyer's Heavenly Bodies)
Raging Bull (director-actor collaborations; Sharon Carnicke, "Screen Performance and Directors' Visions," in More Than A Method: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Film Performance)
Avatar (performance and CGI: articles from Matthew Solomon's recent edited dossier in the Winter 2012 Cinema Journal )

Films recently seen

During an early conversation scene in Killer Joe, there is a clear eyeline mismatch in a shot/reaction shot, a choice I took to be artistic until I realized that it never happened again during the film and that it served no motivated purpose during its single appearance. This kind of aesthetic shagginess is arguably suited to a story that hovers around crooked trailer park denizens in Texas cooking up a murder scheme for insurance money; but for a film that seems to want to insist on the flavor of its location (the backwaters of Dallas), no sense of place or milieu is ever really developed. The film’s political allegory is either incoherent or painfully obvious - I can't decide which - and, in any event, it is at least five years out of date. And while Matthew McConaughey’s desire to distance himself from Zellwegerian romantic comedies is commendable, I want to gently suggest that performing an orgasm with a fried chicken leg inserted into the mouth of one of your co-stars while keeping your pants on is perhaps going too far in the other direction. Killer Joe is a strange, discordant footnote in the actor's recent, and otherwise mostly entertaining, career re-direction. 

***

The Proposition is about the procedures of emasculated civilization attempting to claim frontiers previously governed by the mysterious laws of hyper-masculine violence. And this is what makes John Hillcoat interesting as a director; most filmmakers intrigued by masculinity push it to the forefront, as if mere bloodshed is an insight into the gruff male’s condition. Hillcoat, by contrast, keeps violent maleness brooding in the shadows, emerging into light only in quick, startling, blood-curdling flashes that are over as soon as they begin: a shovel over the head, a knife across the throat. Lawless is, setting aside, about pretty much the same thing as The Proposition, the earlier film’s themes distilled into a simpler scenario and more economical scenes. Now civilization comes in the form of a flamboyant Chicago fed played by Guy Pearce, and the mysterious, brooding hyper-masculinity is embodied by Southern-fried bootlegging brothers Tom Hardy and Jason Clarke. Shia LaBeouf, playing the youngest moonshining brother, is caught in the middle, lacking both Hardy’s brooding physicality and Clarke’s traumatic Great War experience. LaBeouf tries his hand at outwitting Pearce and wooing a local church girl, two incommensurable tasks that give the movie fleeting tension; his scenes with Mia Wasikowska are the best in the film and give it a momentum it sometimes lacks. Nick Cave’s script develops a perspective for its violence about halfway through, when an intriguing ellipsis and, later, a possibly unreliable voice-over suggest that all of this brooding alpha-male posturing is little more than American mythology without content. 

Gary Oldman’s presence falls somewhere between a cameo and a rumor. He disappears after about an hour. I do not have the space or time to adequately transcribe the glow of Jessica Chastain’s gestures, so I will settle for an appreciative inventory of the objects in Lawless that come alive only after she touches them: several cigarettes, a misplaced hat, a potato peeler, a coffee pot, a bed railing, a shawl, Tom Hardy. 

***

Spike Lee’s passion was never in doubt. In his best films, this passion finds vibrant aesthetic correlatives that impact the audience. In Do the Right Thing, it’s the hot reds of a set design meant to indicate the hottest of hot New York summer days and the percolating tensions in a racially divided community; in Malcolm X it is how the intensity of his camera movements meet Denzel Washington’s stirring turn in an enlightening historical groove; and in 25^th Hour it is his unflinching look at the wounds of 9/11 at a time when most Hollywood movies were erasing all reference to the twin towers. Red Hook Summer is full of passion but, unlike these earlier films, I do not think it ever finds ways to consistently convey the feeling to the audience. Its main motifs suggest that it is a transitional work in Lee’s career, looking back at his origins in independent film but at the same time wondering where this return to indie filmmaking might go. Red Hook follows a young character named Flik (Jules Brown), who arrives in Brooklyn to spend the summer with his grandfather, a preacher named Deacon Zee (Thomas Jefferson Byrd). The generational gap between the two of them is evident from the beginning: Flik frames the world through his iPad 2, documenting the world around him through visual means, while the preacher insists on the Word, using his sermons as a means to draw young Flik into the religious fold. The preacher’s work makes for an entertaining spectacle, but Flik is the real story, and his sweet friendship with a teenager named Chazz (Toni Lysaith) provides Red Hook with most if its grace notes. 

Lee is interested in exploring the contours of this community circa 2011, and it clearly is in tatters: where Do the Right Thing saw divisions in a community through race, in this semi-sequel the divisions are primarily economic, intra-communal, and religious. A strange and unexpected plot development, about 90 minutes through, reveals that these communal seams might have their origins in deep-seeded psychological traumas. However, this narrative turn never quite settles into the larger narrative context surrounding it, and Lee’s performers, who are mostly non-professionals, are not quite able to convey the gravity of the situation. 

Unpacking my (film) library

A visitor to my home would be forgiven for thinking me a literati. The bookshelves on the first floor are lined, mostly, with novels (flanked by some philosophy and art history). I don't think of this as a "collection," though, and my personal attachment to these volumes is a little chilly. I have never thought of them as particularly valuable or irreplaceable, and I am not sure that all of these novels, taken together, enjoy much of the personality of a collection. They are a bunch of books I read once and (mostly) enjoyed. And then I put them on a shelf. I am happy to still have them, to open a page and reread a paragraph and have the themes and the characters and the world of the story come flooding back to me. But they don't tell much of a story about me.

It's upstairs, with the film books on my office bookshelves, that I am to be found. Walter Benjamin, in his essay "Unpacking My Library," identified the book collector as one who has a special relationship with the collection as material forms with their own kind of life. This is why his essay identifies the activity of collecting with the unpacking of books: the handling of them, the appreciation of them as artifacts as well as repositories of knowledge. None of my film books (to my knowledge) is particularly valuable in monetary terms (although until recently, Gilbert Adair's out-of-print Flickers went for a pricey amount on Amazon). But many of them have a place in my personal history that, for me, far exceeds exchange value, and even anything that is actually written in them. "Not that they come alive in him," Benjamin wrote about the books of a collector, "it is he who lives in them."

The first film books I owned were about Charlie Chaplin, whose films I fell in love with, at age 12, after seeing and liking the Attenborough biopic; Peter Haining's Charlie Chaplin: A Centenary Celebration contains all sorts of beautiful film stills from the Chaplin movies I had enjoyed on VHS in the darkness of my suburban bedroom on a 13" television screen - plus plenty of stills from Chaplin films that weren't available at my nearby mom and pop video store, but that I could imagine by looking at the images in this book:

French cinema was what I fell for next; I saw my first Truffauts and Godards while I was a senior in high school. I can hold Eric Rohmer's Taste of Beauty in my hands and have all that personal history flood right back to me; a few underlined passages (and even the creases on certain pages, and certain folds on the paperback cover) remind me of being in certain places and times and reading this -- and also at how deadly seriously I took this book when I was about 21 years old. There was a six-month period (at least), a long time ago, when every film I saw I judged on the aesthetic principles articulated in this book. Not recommended as an approach! Nevertheless, this book still helps me understand Rohmer's cinema, and winding my way through Rohmer's sometimes dense academic prose prepared me well, in retrospect, for my first film theory classes:

Apart from Chaplin's autobiography (which I did a book report on in eighth grade - I have sadly lost my copy of that book over the years), my first memorable acquisition of a biography was Bernard Eisenschitz's Nicholas Ray: An American Journey. I bought it because I really liked Rebel Without a Cause and They Live By Night, and read it all the way through even though I hadn't seen any of the other films. (I promptly re-read it, several years later, after having seen the rest of Ray's work). I remember reading his chapters on The Lusty Men and On Dangerous Ground and just from his descriptions I knew that I would love the films (and I eventually did):

During my PhD years I grew fond of small paperback books of film criticism and theory from the 1960s and early 70s -- books that contained mostly "impressionistic" auteur and genre criticism but also the first flowerings of theory. My battered copy of Peter Harcourt's Six European Directors (which still contains some of my favorite writing on Godard) is my favorite of these:

Often used books contain inscriptions bearing the names of recipients. I recently bought a copy of Garson Kanin's book on Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in a local used book store. Several weeks later, when I finally opened it, I noticed that it had been signed, dedicated, and dated in 1972 by Kanin to its owner, a man named Jonathan Phelps (likely the Atlanta radio broadcaster who passed away last year at the age of 83). So, here is a book signed by Kanin, who not only wrote about Hepburn and Tracy but also knew them intimately, and was instrumental in creating the public mythos of their relationship. And he wrote Adam's Rib! It's sad that this book had to be orphaned, but I'm glad it ended up with me: 

I think any cinephile should be able to trace a very important part of a personal history, a way of thinking about movies, through all the film books he or she has owned.