The publication industry surrounding film studies is incredibly constrained by time. Books go in and out of print faster than you can look up last weekend’s box office gross. Because of this, I’ve enjoyed purchasing the bulk of my film books from used and second-hand bookstores. There has been a lot of good critical and historical analysis written about the movies, especially since the ’60s and the rise of film academia, and many wonderful books still exist in dark, dusty corners of neighborhood bookstores.
Recently, I came across one such findóCinema: A Critical Dictionary edited by Richard Roud, which is a collection of lengthy critical essays by British, French, and American writers (such as Bernard Eisenschitz, Henri Langlois, Andrew Sarris, and Robin Wood) on various directors and movements published in 1980.
Browsing the two-volume set has been a real treat. Here are some excerpts from Volume I:
Richard Roud on Robert Bresson:
“The first five films are similar in that they are films about redemption, films which because of this produce in the viewer a sense of exultation. Redemption is not necessarily a more worthwhile subject than despair or suicide; but it is the exultation born of the redemption theme which counters Bresson’s tendency to greyness, to a glumness . . . It is the dialectical struggle between glumness and glory that makes the first five films so enduringly effective.”
Richard Combs on John Cassavetes:
“Such a gestalt form of filmmaking is clearly part and parcel of what happens in the films, with their loose formation of encounter group situations for sounding out human problems.”
Jonathan Rosenbaum on Walt Disney:
“In some respects, there may be no cultural figure in the West as potentially controversial as Walt Disney (1901-66), even though love and hatred for what Disney represents are frequently felt by the same people. However, there is certainly no other filmmaker whose aesthetic and ideological preoccupations have permeated so much of modern life that, paradoxically, his omnipresence verges on invisibility.”
Tom Milne on Carl Theodor Dreyer:
“Although latterly Vampyr and Gertrud have become increasingly recognized as the most nearly flawless pearls Dreyer created, the critical norm has settled more or less definitively on the heavyweight spirituality of Jeanne d’Arc, Day of Wrath and Ordet, slow, majestic chronicles of human suffering illuminated by a piercing ray of divine grace.”
Richard Corliss on Robert Flaherty:
“There were, and are, three Robert Flahertys: man, myth and moviemaker. And to judge the third, it would be helpful if we had never heard of the first twoóif we could bring to the criticism of his films the same ‘innocent eye’ he brought to his film subjects.”
Penelope Houston on Alfred Hitchcock:
“But because with Hitchcock the means and the end are often indistinguishable, so that the films proceed with a series of impositions of the director’s will, his planned control of immediate reaction, larger meanings and mysteries slip through the cracks.”
Keep an eye out for this collection and the many other treasures of film writing.