Film Studies

Author and literary theorist Stanley Fish is, among other things, a professor of law specialising in constitutional law, media law, the First Amendment, and jurisprudence. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that over the course of his book Law at the Movies he shows a forensic knowledge of the judicial system in the United States. This is no casual checklist of films that feature lawyers as characters, but a dissection of how particular statutes and legal procedures are represented on screen. He conveys how, in the hands of gifted filmmakers, ‘dry as dust soil of legal doctrine flowers into something truly substantive and dramatically compelling’.

Film critic’ rather undersells the breadth and depth of David Thomson’s engagement with the medium. A distinguished historian, biographer, novelist, and encyclopedist of film, he has also made documentaries, written screenplays, and been a respected judge on the international film festival circuit. He is widely regarded as the greatest living writer on film. It is fitting, then, that after more than twenty books on cinema he has finally turned his attention to war, a matter whose scope and import across the history of film provides a true match for his gifts.

There might be a million stories in the naked city, but the early childhood of Stanley Kubrick was one of the more typical: born in 1928, in the Bronx, to upwardly mobile, artistically sophisticated Jewish parents, one generation out of the Pale. ‘I’m not Jewish but my parents were,’ he liked to joke.

This attractive and fascinating volume is billed as ‘the first illustrated book on the 1948 Old Vic tour’, and, sure enough, it is jammed from stage-left to stage-right with scores of images – especially of the eternally photogenic two superstars who led the tour. Not among them is one particular photograph – more of a snapshot, really, just 6 x 4½ inches in 1948 measurements. It was taken on the night of 17 May 1948 at a post-performance party at a family home in Melbourne’s St Kilda. Four of the seven people in shot are unidentified; but two of the others, unmistakably, are Vivien Leigh and her husband, Laurence Olivier: she is in a fur coat, sitting in an armchair, a plate of food balanced on her lap; he is two along, perched on a piano stool. But who is that man in the middle in half profile? None other than Chico Marx, who was also in Melbourne, with his own show at the Tivoli.

The second edition of Kathryn Kalinak’s modestly titled Film Music: A very short introduction arrives thirteen years after the publication of its predecessor, extending its chronology of film music from the inception of cinema in the late nineteenth century to 2022. What makes it unique is the global reach of its documentation of significant events and developments in film music history. This offers a broad coverage from countries and cultures other than Hollywood and the West, and illustrates how practices and ideals vary globally.

Early in Gail Jones’s novel Black Mirror (2002), an Australian artist dives into the Seine to retrieve a bundle that may contain a drowning baby. Before rising to the surface, she experiences a kind of epiphany in the face of possible death – ‘a willed dissolution, a corrupt fantasy of effacement’. Later she revisits the experience in dreams, swimming through a surrealist underworld of discarded bric-a-brac: plainly, a metaphor for dreaming itself, as an act of plunging into mental depths and searching for hidden treasures.

The dilemma faced by the Australian film industry after a decade – and about fifty feature films – of revival is neatly put by the Foreword and the Introduction to The New Australian Cinema. One kind of pioneer, Phillip Adams, to whom some credit for the early impetus is due, has one kind of warning. ‘Our politicians, film corporations and investors are insisting on the need for commercial success in the U.S.’, he says, and reminds us of the reasons some of us thought an Australian film industry was important: ‘We needed to hear our own accent. We wanted our voice to be heard in the world.’ Another and earlier kind of pioneer, Ken G. Hall, speaking from the bitter experience of the immediate post-war years (when, as he says, ‘I made newsreels’) has the opposite warning; ‘There will be no enduring film industry in this country unless it is based on commercially successful films.’

‘Call me Ismail,’ it could plausibly begin: a screenplay not of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick but of the real-life relationship between two filmmakers renowned for their adaptations of a string of other classic novels. Ismail Merchant first met James Ivory on the steps of the Indian consulate in Manhattan in 1961. ‘Call me by your name,’ the Ivory character might wittily retort in this imagined biopic. That, of course, was to be the title of the film scripted by Ivory nearly a decade and a half after Merchant’s death in 2005, but it captures something of the symbiotic nature of their partnership.

Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon is perhaps the best-known film never made. But what about others that never happened? What might a closer look at these reveal about the state of filmmaking? Such unmade films constitute the ‘dark matter’ of British director Michael Winterbottom’s book Dark Matter: Independent filmmaking in the 21st century. The invisible dark matter of the cosmos shapes our universe; without it many galaxies would fly apart. For Winterbottom, an examination of cinematic dark matter ‘might help to explain the wider landscape of British independent cinema’ this century.

The history of cinema began twice. All art forms are shaped by technological change, but the advent of the talkie in the late 1920s – only a few decades after the first silent films – did not so much develop the medium as kill it and replace it with something new. So abrupt was the change that the strange visual operas of cinema’s earliest years became imbued with a certain innocence, now almost impossible to replicate. To this day, silent film has an aura of mystery, a quality that cultural critic Peter Conrad addresses in his erudite new book.