Take One (Jan 1978)

ome ee ee BOOKS NEWS Peter Cowie is positively the hardestworking person we know. How he manages to run London's prestigious Tantivy Press (and edit their annual International Film Guide), and still show up at as many film festivals as he does has always been something of a mystery. Now, the crazy fool has embarked on yet another project that might —all by itself—daunt weaker souls: a World Filmography. This is a series of books (to be published over a 15-year period) that will eventually cover (year by year) every year from the birth of cinema to the present day. The book covering each year will list the credits for every feature film made anywhere in the world that year, classified by country and indexed by titles, alternative titles and directors. The 688-page World Filmography 1967 has just appeared, signalling the start of this mad and exciting enterprise. It includes well over 1500 features (over 1000 metres in length), from Bonnie & Clyde to Playtime and The Firemen's Ball, from such varied countries as Algeria, Ceylon, Finland and North Vietnam, as well as the more traditional sources. Here, at Take One, we'll be keeping it right next to our dictionary. Tantivy Press, London, 20.00 pounds Sterling; Barnes & Co., New York, $35.00. New in print: The folks at Cinemateca Distrital (Cra 7 No. 22—79, Bogota, Columbia) have sent along a copy of Vol. 1 No. 1 of their new monthly, Cinema Teca, with articles (in Spanish) on Woody Allen, Frankenstein, Swiss Cinema, as well as—of course—plenty of coverage of filmmaking activity in Latin America. If you think you might be interested in subscribing, contact Isador de Norden at the Cinemateca Distrital. Chamba Notes has been revived (after a gap of three years) as a quarterly ($4 a year) on the independent Black film scene from a world Pan-African perspective. Write St. Clair Bourne, Publisher, at P.O. Box U, Brooklyn, NY 11202 (212-757-6300). Another quarterly debuting this month is Millenium Film Journal (66 East 4th St., NYC 10003; 212-673-0090). It features articles, interviews and reviews dedicated to avant-garde film and to film theory. Mindrot (‘‘The Fanzine of the Hollywood Animated Cartoon’’) has had eight issues out, the work of David and Kathy Mruz (3112 Holmes Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55408), but only numbers 5-8 are still available (at $1.25 apiece). Issue 8 includes articles on Betty Boop and George Pal, plus lots of news, letters and funny drawings. And our good friends at Kodak have put together a 56-page guide to preparing and producing effective magnetic sound tracks, called Sound—Magnetic Sound Recording for Motion Pictures. Written for professional filmmakers as well as cinema students, the book has a suggested list price of $6.25 and is available from many Kodak dealers, or from Bud Morrison, Communications Department, Kodak Canada, 3500 Eglinton Ave. W., Toronto, Ontario M6M 1V3 (416-766-8233, ext. 6637). Up-coming Books Putnam has scheduled Groucho, the authorized biography, by Hector Arce, for this spring. ... Also due, from Random House, is 170 Years of Show Business, by Jack Gilford, his wife Madeline, and Kate Mostel. Zero Mostel was also involved until his death—in this anecdotal history of two generations of showbiz families. ... Columbia Pictures has signed Paige Mitchell (author of Covenant) to write a novel about Houston—to be called The Cutting Edge—which will then be filmed. ... Scribners has scheduled for May A// About Mankiewicz, by Kenneth Geist. ... And our own contributor Stuart Kaminsky will have his John Huston: Maker of Magic published by Houghton Mifflin in March. REVIEWS How to Read a Film 4y James Monaco. Oxford University Press. 1977. 391 pages plus glossary, bibliography, and chronology. With 36 diagrams by David Lindroth. $15.00. James Monaco’s How to Read a Film has the awesome subtitle ‘‘The Art, Technology, Language, History and Theory of Film and Media.’’ All-inclusive as the subtitle sounds, it is appropriate, for How to Read a Film is the most comprehensive single volume on film I have seen. Monaco’s background as a teacher is evident (he is a member of the faculty of the New School for Social Research and has taught at other major New York City universities), for the book seems to have been designed as a textbook for introductory colfege students in film, media, and communications courses. That does not mean however, that How. to Read a Film would not be of great value to more advanced students or to the general film-going public. What is impressive about Monaco’s book is not just that it encompasses so much, but that Monaco is adept at explaining both technological and theoretical approaches to film and media. In addition, he integrates the two approaches and demonstrates how they affect each other. Monaco begins his book by placing film, historically and aesthetically, into the context of the other arts, and thereby provides a framework for what will follow. Part of film’s uniqueness is determined by its technology, and it is Monaco’s section on the recording and reproducing of image and sound that is one of his strongest. It is in this section that the lucid diagrams by David Lindroth are especially valuable. In his chapter on the language of film, its signs and syntax, Monaco subscribes to the dictum of Christian Metz that ‘‘A film is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand.’” Within essentially a semiotic mold with room for other approaches, Monaco confronts the basic issues of semiology and makes them not only understandable, but relevant to the unsophisticated reader. Along with Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, Monaco’s chapter offers film students a suitable introduction to the science of semiology. Unfortunately, the section on film history sometimes lapses into superficiality. In an attempt to mention as many people and films as possible, this chapter at its weakest point consists of little more than lists. The film theory section, on the other hand, contains in-depth discussions of Vachel Lindsay, Hugo Minsterberg, Rudolf Arn heim, Siegfried Kracauer, the Russians, Bazin, Godard, Metz, and others. This chapter, as a companion to J. Dudley Andrew’s The Mayor Film Theories, is an indispensable aid to the introductory film student. Monaco wraps up the book with a sketchy, but interesting chapter on media, not from a McLuhan point of view, as is often the case, but from an aesthetic and social stance. The appendices which follow would by themselves almost make the book worth buying. A well-conceived and rather complete standard glossary of terms for film and media criticism is followed by a annotated bibliography (which even includes lists of journals, guides, and film bookstores) and by a chronology of some important dates in film and media history. Monaco’s approach is frequently dialectical, and as in Eisenstein’s editing, the dialectics are used to elucidate and to create tension. It is through the dialectics that he presents oppositions so meaningful to an understanding of film: ‘*....between filmmaker and subject, film and observer, establishment and avant garde, conservative purposes and purposes of liberation, psychology and politics, image and sound, dialogue and music, montage and mise en scéne, genre and auteur, literary sensibility and cinematic sensibility, signs and mean 43