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Me and My Shadows
15 years ago
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WARNING SHADOWS: HOME ALONE WITH CLASSIC CINEMA by Gary Giddins (Norton, 978-0-393-33792-1
http://www.amazon.com/Warning-Shado.....wn_review_prod
Gary Giddins seems to have seen and read everything, which one would expect of a professional critic, yet his literary voice is that of a populist, a thinker who lives and breathes aesthetics but writes from the conviction that cinema, like jazz, is fundamentally a folk art, however rarefied.
This is where things get dicey. Public exhibition, Giddins argues in his opening essay, "Home Alone with Classic Cinema," is an integral part of the movie watching experience: "Only in a crowd is the viewer borne away on waves of joy and sorrow and recognition." Freed by our DVD players from lack of parking, overpriced concessions, and babblers in the audience, we have virtually unlimited access to good films, and fewer people to watch them with. If Giddins is right, that isn't cinema; it's television, or parlor entertainment.
Still, when it comes to an informed appreciation of those films, it's a pleasure to read him. Recent blockbusters don't interest him; as he says of one little-known, European avant-garde director, "[his] films are the sort about which mainstream reviewers remark, 'not for every taste.' Nor is THE DARK KNIGHT for every taste." What interests Giddins are the pleasures of Bette Davis's operatic acting; the Freudian fantasies of German Expressionist cinema; the energy and intelligence of Sidney Lumet movies; Hollywood biopics worthy of their subjects (YOUNG MR. LINCOLN, LUST FOR LIFE); and, among other bits of movie history, the wonderfully weird story of how Walt Disney and Nelson Rockefeller joined forces to fight the Nazis with cartoons and samba.
WARNING SHADOWS (those on Plato's cave wall, of course) is both an elegy for the near-extinction of the moviegoing experience and a celebration of a large number of movies that made it all worthwhile.
http://www.amazon.com/Warning-Shado.....wn_review_prod
Gary Giddins seems to have seen and read everything, which one would expect of a professional critic, yet his literary voice is that of a populist, a thinker who lives and breathes aesthetics but writes from the conviction that cinema, like jazz, is fundamentally a folk art, however rarefied.
This is where things get dicey. Public exhibition, Giddins argues in his opening essay, "Home Alone with Classic Cinema," is an integral part of the movie watching experience: "Only in a crowd is the viewer borne away on waves of joy and sorrow and recognition." Freed by our DVD players from lack of parking, overpriced concessions, and babblers in the audience, we have virtually unlimited access to good films, and fewer people to watch them with. If Giddins is right, that isn't cinema; it's television, or parlor entertainment.
Still, when it comes to an informed appreciation of those films, it's a pleasure to read him. Recent blockbusters don't interest him; as he says of one little-known, European avant-garde director, "[his] films are the sort about which mainstream reviewers remark, 'not for every taste.' Nor is THE DARK KNIGHT for every taste." What interests Giddins are the pleasures of Bette Davis's operatic acting; the Freudian fantasies of German Expressionist cinema; the energy and intelligence of Sidney Lumet movies; Hollywood biopics worthy of their subjects (YOUNG MR. LINCOLN, LUST FOR LIFE); and, among other bits of movie history, the wonderfully weird story of how Walt Disney and Nelson Rockefeller joined forces to fight the Nazis with cartoons and samba.
WARNING SHADOWS (those on Plato's cave wall, of course) is both an elegy for the near-extinction of the moviegoing experience and a celebration of a large number of movies that made it all worthwhile.
