CINEMA VISIONS FOR THE COFFEE TABLE
May 2, 2004 | 12:00am
When film-maker Stanley Kubrick died back in 1999, they rolled the inevitable "film-clip" montages during news broadcasts and on Oscar night, and you couldn’t help noticing one thing: the guy might have been difficult to work with, but he had a genius for creating lasting, vivid images. Whether it was the ape wielding a bone in a killing frenzy in 2001, or the sight of Jack Nicholson leering through a doorway in The Shining, every Kubrick film had at least one resonant, identifying moment, and usually several. Obviously Kubrick knew something that only a handful of great directors truly grasp: People file away those snapshots in their minds, more than just the great action scenes and acting moments.
The power of movie images. More than paintings, more than photographs, stills from motion pictures have a way of demanding our full attention. It could be that certain images have entered the collective pop consciousness, so we simply respond reflexively to the sight of Elliot and E.T. riding across a silhouette of the moon, or the upraised leg of Mrs. Robinson beckoning Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. Maybe it’s because movie images are a language that we all speak fluently.
Phaidon Press of the UK traffics in such images, bringing out a book of resonant, seductive photos every couple of years. They’re the ones who put out The Art Book, an alphabetical compendium of Western painters, each represented by a gorgeous reproduction and suitable for coffee tables everywhere. Then there was The Photo Book, a survey of noted photographers from the birth of the medium to the present day. Photojournalists shared the pages with innovative fashion shooters, surrealists and realists were all dutifully catalogued and compiled. And the images were amazing.
But these two books aren’t as immediately seductive as The Movie Book, which brings together some 500 names – actors, actresses, directors, cinematographers, film scorers, makeup artists, even producers – who have shaped film, made it into an art, and ultimately left us caressing the many memorable images that make up its history. Perhaps because film interacts with us on so many levels – sonic, visual, intellectual – we are inextricably drawn to its images, almost frozen by them, even as they are frozen before our gaze. Film images bespeak an entire narrative experience which we, the movie viewers, collectively share. This is not true for most photographs or paintings, which rely on imagination and greater subjective interpretation.
As a resource, The Movie Book is quite a treat as well. The write-ups, as always, are smart, pithy, in-the-know and detailed, if a bit too short. They bring a little of the swaggering British attitude that one associates with Time Out and hipper British mags. Some will quibble with the choices, which focus primarily on American names – but there are many well-researched surprises, too, such as the entry on in-vogue-again ‘50s director Douglas Sirk (whose melodramas were painstakingly homaged in Far From Heaven), or Rene Clair, the French director whose A Nous la Liberte was directly ripped off in Charlie Chaplin’s later classic, Modern Times. There are side trips into the history of film noir, and stirring black and white images that make you want to rent every Claude Chabrol or Jean Cocteau film you can lay hands on. There are appreciations of breast-obsessed director Russ Meyer and weirdo-obsessed director John Waters, as well as an (almost) up-to-date entry on Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-Wai.
Then there are the images. Sure, you’ll flip through familiar, iconic scenes like Eisenstein’s bullet-through-the-lens shot in Battleship Potemkin, or the cast of The Wizard of Oz huddled together on their technicolor yellow brick road. There’s the lovers rolling on the beach in From Here to Eternity, the descent of the Mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the sight of Kong clutching Fay Wray on his mountaintop in 1933’s King Kong, and the dated shot of Julia Roberts, back when she was simply a Pretty Woman.
But there are also stills, no less powerful, from obscure classics like Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds, Tod Browning’s controversial 1932 film, Freaks, Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising. A nod to Hammer horror master Terence Fisher (whose bloody Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell is depicted) is also welcome, as well as a brief look at maverick American director Sam Fuller (whose raw ‘60s films like Shock Corridor influenced Scorsese, Tarantino and others).
Pick up The Movie Book and you’ll instantly be drawn into the cinematic moment of Cary Grant fleeing a deadly cropduster in North By Northwest, relive Julie Andrews’ romp in the hills in The Sound of Music, and relish the Passion-like pose of Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean in Giant. And if you’re any kind of film freak, you’ll probably be compelled to dig up your old video (or preferably DVD) copies of these screen gems and watch ‘em all over again.
The only drawback to The Movie Book is its price: the hardcover cost is as hefty as its 500-glossy-page weight. But there’s always the smaller, cheaper paperback edition instead, if you don’t mind dealing with tiny type and less-than-lifesize images. Because when all is said and done, it all comes down to those images.
The power of movie images. More than paintings, more than photographs, stills from motion pictures have a way of demanding our full attention. It could be that certain images have entered the collective pop consciousness, so we simply respond reflexively to the sight of Elliot and E.T. riding across a silhouette of the moon, or the upraised leg of Mrs. Robinson beckoning Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. Maybe it’s because movie images are a language that we all speak fluently.
Phaidon Press of the UK traffics in such images, bringing out a book of resonant, seductive photos every couple of years. They’re the ones who put out The Art Book, an alphabetical compendium of Western painters, each represented by a gorgeous reproduction and suitable for coffee tables everywhere. Then there was The Photo Book, a survey of noted photographers from the birth of the medium to the present day. Photojournalists shared the pages with innovative fashion shooters, surrealists and realists were all dutifully catalogued and compiled. And the images were amazing.
But these two books aren’t as immediately seductive as The Movie Book, which brings together some 500 names – actors, actresses, directors, cinematographers, film scorers, makeup artists, even producers – who have shaped film, made it into an art, and ultimately left us caressing the many memorable images that make up its history. Perhaps because film interacts with us on so many levels – sonic, visual, intellectual – we are inextricably drawn to its images, almost frozen by them, even as they are frozen before our gaze. Film images bespeak an entire narrative experience which we, the movie viewers, collectively share. This is not true for most photographs or paintings, which rely on imagination and greater subjective interpretation.
As a resource, The Movie Book is quite a treat as well. The write-ups, as always, are smart, pithy, in-the-know and detailed, if a bit too short. They bring a little of the swaggering British attitude that one associates with Time Out and hipper British mags. Some will quibble with the choices, which focus primarily on American names – but there are many well-researched surprises, too, such as the entry on in-vogue-again ‘50s director Douglas Sirk (whose melodramas were painstakingly homaged in Far From Heaven), or Rene Clair, the French director whose A Nous la Liberte was directly ripped off in Charlie Chaplin’s later classic, Modern Times. There are side trips into the history of film noir, and stirring black and white images that make you want to rent every Claude Chabrol or Jean Cocteau film you can lay hands on. There are appreciations of breast-obsessed director Russ Meyer and weirdo-obsessed director John Waters, as well as an (almost) up-to-date entry on Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-Wai.
Then there are the images. Sure, you’ll flip through familiar, iconic scenes like Eisenstein’s bullet-through-the-lens shot in Battleship Potemkin, or the cast of The Wizard of Oz huddled together on their technicolor yellow brick road. There’s the lovers rolling on the beach in From Here to Eternity, the descent of the Mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the sight of Kong clutching Fay Wray on his mountaintop in 1933’s King Kong, and the dated shot of Julia Roberts, back when she was simply a Pretty Woman.
But there are also stills, no less powerful, from obscure classics like Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds, Tod Browning’s controversial 1932 film, Freaks, Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising. A nod to Hammer horror master Terence Fisher (whose bloody Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell is depicted) is also welcome, as well as a brief look at maverick American director Sam Fuller (whose raw ‘60s films like Shock Corridor influenced Scorsese, Tarantino and others).
Pick up The Movie Book and you’ll instantly be drawn into the cinematic moment of Cary Grant fleeing a deadly cropduster in North By Northwest, relive Julie Andrews’ romp in the hills in The Sound of Music, and relish the Passion-like pose of Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean in Giant. And if you’re any kind of film freak, you’ll probably be compelled to dig up your old video (or preferably DVD) copies of these screen gems and watch ‘em all over again.
The only drawback to The Movie Book is its price: the hardcover cost is as hefty as its 500-glossy-page weight. But there’s always the smaller, cheaper paperback edition instead, if you don’t mind dealing with tiny type and less-than-lifesize images. Because when all is said and done, it all comes down to those images.
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