“A Complete Guide to the World Cinema” promises the subtitle of The Film Book, a thick tome put out by DK Publishing in October. Tall order, but I have to say that writer Ronald Bergan more or less delivers on it.
Coming in a tin box resembling a film reel canister, The Film Book successively takes six different approaches to exploring the first century of changes in cinema: by going through the history of film, decade by decade; by taking a quick look at how movies are made, from pre- to post-production; by exploring movie genres; by going around the world to take the pulse of various national cinemas; by profiling some of the most important directors; and finally, by establishing a list of the top 100 movies of all time.
Filled with photographs and illustrations as well as various pull quotes, graphics, sidebars, bits of trivia and, in the case of the “Story of Film” section, a timeline, Bergan’s book is very enjoyable to flip through, even if you’re already a well-versed cinephile. I was amused to see a behind-the-scenes shot of Leo the Lion posing for MGM’s studio logo, and fascinated by a photo of a dashing Humphrey Bogart, accompanied by his wife Lauren Bacall, leading a march against the McCarthy witch hunts.
For those who complain that there are not enough movies for grownups these days, who lament the current popularity of cartoons and family movies, it’s interesting to see in old box-office charts that, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to The Jungle Book (1967), Disney movies were systematically the biggest hits of every decade. The late 60s and early 70s brought along influential new American auteurs and more graphic depictions of sex and violence on screen, but in the end it’s movies like Star Wars, Superman and Grease that proved most attractive to audiences.
The chapters on movie genres are a bit skimpy. Only westerns (“not only the oldest of all film genres, but it is the only home-grown American cinematic form”), musicals and comedies are given their proper due (four pages each), while the action movie is forced into a hybrid called “action-adventure,” so that Arnold Schwarzenegger has to share space with Douglas Fairbanks. Likewise, science-fiction and fantasy are unfortunately bunched together.
The section on international cinema also cuts some corners, though it’s understandable in many cases. It may seem odd to be done with all of Africa after only a two-page chapter, but as Bergan writes, “many African nations did not have a film industry before they became independent of colonial rule in the 1960s and 1970s.” Relatively extended looks at France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Japan, Spain, India and the U.K. follow, and then there are single-page snapshots of countries like, say, Canada. Our film history is reduced to the creation of the National Film Board of Canada and the rise of “cinéma vérité” (an unfortunate error, it should read “cinéma direct”), with a few essential filmmakers like Claude Jutra, Denys Arcand, David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan being name-checked. Visually, we get a shot of Marie-Josée Croze in Arcand’s Oscar-winning Les Invasions barbares and, for some reason, a still from Jacob Tierney’s Twist.
The chapters devoted to directors stick mostly to long-established (or dead) filmmakers. Among many, many others: Allen, Antonioni, Bergman, Buñuel, Cassavetes, Chaplin, DeMille, Eisenstein, Fellini, Ford, Godard, Griffith, Hawks, Herzog, Hitchcock, Huston, Kazan, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Lang, Murnau, Ozu, Pabst, Ray, Renoir, Scorsese, Spielberg, Tarkovsky, Truffaut, Welles, Wilder. The only name I found questionable was Luc Besson, and I kind of wish Bergan had found a way to include some of today’s best, notably Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Christopher Nolan, Darren Aronofsky…
Then again, his Top 100 Movies list does include Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, so that’s something, I guess (I would have gone for either Pulp Fiction or Inglourious Basterds, but hey). As for the rest of the selection, it generally consists of classics that have been accepted into “the canon,” your Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Bicycle Thieves, Rashomon, Singin’ in the Rain, Vertigo, La Dolce Vita, etc. Among the most recent inclusions, we find The Lord of the Rings, City of God and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which are all defendable picks, even though I’m sure you probably have some personal favourites from the last decade you would have put in their place instead.
Come to think of it, this might be one of the most valuable things about The Film Book – leave it on your desk or coffee table, let your friends and colleagues dig into it and spend a whole lot of time discussing what it did right and wrong. Is this really “A Complete Guide to the World Cinema”? Of course not, but it’s a good enough starting point.
The Film Book
by Ronald Bergan
DK Publishing, 352 pp.
