Into the Eye of Rapture's Needle
Five new books that tell 'secret histories' of film
Some writing about film requires its own language. Film is, after all, about "vision," not simply in the sense of sight but also as a gateway into a world of dreams, desires, reveries, nightmares, and other spectacles. Some books attempt to imagine the answers to questions that movies and their characters have left unanswered. These might be said to constitute a "secret history" of film.
The two pillars of cinema's "secret histories" - and two of my favorite books on the subject - are David Thomson's Suspects and Geoffrey O'Brien's The Phantom Empire. (My hardcover of Suspects and paperback of Phantom Empire even share the very same "Torn Movie Poster" by Walker Evans on their covers.) Thomson's first novel compiles stories from a rogues gallery of detectives, mugs, dames, and femmes fatale, only later to reveal itself as a Faulknerian genealogy of many of film's most famous fictional characters. Subtitled Movies in the Mind of the Twentieth Century, O'Brien's The Phantom Empire is an utterly original and phantasmagorical excavation, as a celluloid-obsessed spectator ponders the history of film. Both books acknowledge the way certain images, lines, gestures, and characters from our moviegoing experiences forever inhabit our unconscious.
Five recent books about film offer their own "secret histories," whether seen through the eyes of a preeminent critic, L.A. filmmakers who stand apart from mainstream Hollywood, our 37th President, American cinema's most celebrated enfant terrible, or a film student who stumbles upon a cabal of film cultists. These are not to be apprehended with a single reading; these are books to keep on your shelves to return to, to choose films from, to quote from, to quarrel with, and, most of all, to get lost in.
* The Rapt Viewer *
The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, David Thomson (Knopf). Even if Thomson's latest book (due out in paperback next February) doesn't ultimately qualify as the same sort of "secret history" as Suspects or even his metabiographical Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes, it is an unmistakably subjective history. His journey through film carries us chronologically through each decade, but - like his unabashedly opinionated yet irresistible reference work The New Biographical Dictionary of Film - what he leaves out tells us as much as what he includes. With its title taken from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon (one of the five epigraphs that open the book), Equation is an incisive examination and an intimate elegy. Thomson writes, "For the movie is a rapture that likes to take other rapturous conditions as its subjects - it is as if only such elements could sustain the folly and the beauty of those lustrous close-ups, or the stealth of tracking shots that thread us into the eye of rapture's needle."
* The Setting *
The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, David E. James (University of California). James, author of the classic '60s-movies text Allegories of Cinema, provides an extraordinarily exhaustive study of the filmmakers who transformed the movies and the city in which they worked. Los Angeles, not New York, becomes film's avant-garde capital. The Most Typical Avant-Garde forces us to rethink both our understanding of filmmaking in Los Angeles and the accepted definitions of the avant-garde. This comprehensive examination takes in all forms of filmmaking and includes such familiar names as Maya Deren, Curtis Harrington, Roger Corman, and Charles Burnett as well as others such as Boris Deutsch, Stan Whitsitt, Stanton Kaye, and Pat O'Neill. It belongs alongside such avant-garde cinema tomes as P. Adams Sitney's essential Visionary Film and does for film in L.A. what Mike Davis's City of Quartz did for urban theory and civil inequity.
* The Moviegoer-in-Chief *
Nixon at the Movies: A Book About Belief, Mark Feeney (University of Chicago). More than any other American president, including Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon was powerfully influenced by film. He screened more than 500 movies while Chief Executive, and, although known for his repeated viewings of Patton during the Cambodian invasion, he watched Around the World in 80 Days just as many times. Feeney's audacious and engrossing book argues that such works as Double Indemnity, Mister Roberts, Sweet Smell of Success, The Conversation, and even Elvis movies reveal "a series of 'alternate Nixons,' the character and image of each refracting and illuminating who Richard Nixon was and is in the American imagination." The author examines these many cinematic incarnations of Nixon as well as his later representations as a figure in film. The book concludes with a 16-page appendix, "What the President Saw and When He Saw It," detailing every movie Nixon watched as president. Feeney offers both a fascinating cultural history of film and an unique contemplation on the many roles Nixon played and the "production values" of his presidency.
* The Touch of Welles *
Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios, Clinton Heylin (Chicago Review Press). Heylin, who has written about Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, turns his attention to the travails of another pioneer of 20th-century culture, from the triumphs of Citizen Kane to the tumultuous creation of The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil, and The Stranger. "Welles was undone by real people," writes Heylin, "with real motives, and by circumstances found in a single time and place - Hollywood at the end of its golden era." The author attempts to reconstruct events to "deconstruct" the notion that Welles was the cause of his own undoing and to uncover what the director's films might have looked like if he hadn't met with so much industry resistance. Like Heylin's other works, it's assiduously researched and aims to settle some old scores by debunking statements about Welles by Simon Callow, David Thomson, and Pauline Kael and championing those of Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. For a writer interested in finding fault with others, however, Heylin should sometimes be more careful himself; for example, contrary to what he says in his filmography, a Criterion DVD of F for Fake was released before the publication of this book.
* The Secret Historian *
Flicker, Theodore Roszak (Chicago Review Press). Orson Welles appears as a lover of one of the characters in this great, haunting novel. The expanded edition of Roszak's long-out-of-print 1991 cult thriller has been published in anticipation of the film version, to be directed by Darren Aronofsky. The novel relates the story of forgotten filmmaker Max Castle, "the dark god whose scriptures are the secret history of the movies," as told by film student Jonathan Gates, whose passion for cinema draws him into a world where the movies may have the power to change history, or at least our perception of it. The boldest novel about film since Suspects, Flicker is at once an investigation into film and film culture and a cerebral mystery with elements reminiscent of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. The new edition includes an appendix called "The Secret History of the Movies" containing documents that, like deleted scenes on a DVD, show what Gates - and Roszak - left on the "cutting-room floor."
Published: 11/23/2005
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