Off the Book Shelf
by Andre Soares
I’ve been reading James Reid Paris’s The Great French Films. Published in 1983, Reid’s pictorial history book discusses approximately fifty French films, from Abel Gance’s 1927 epic Napoléon to Alain Resnais’s highly cerebral 1980 drama Mon oncle d’Amérique. The text is informative and concise - Reid provides each film’s background, synopsis, and commentary - though inevitably, considering the number of films discussed and the large amount of photographs, Reid’s analysis is at times somewhat superficial.
Among the other books I’ve read - or that I’ve tried to read - lately, was Parker Tyler’s 1962 pictorial film history tome Early Classics of the Foreign Film. Unfortunately, Tyler’s cluttered, rambling - and usually pointless - prose put me off, and I wasn’t able to finish the book.
Another book I couldn’t finish was Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which I found only a notch above the level of a supermarket tabloid. (In his foreword, Biskind does mention the importance of The National Enquirer to his research. It shows.) I managed to plod through the first two chapters, one on Bonnie and Clyde and the other on Easy Rider, but gave up on the book after that. Biskind is much more concerned with who was screwing who, where, and how, and what types of drugs they were using and how often they were getting high, than with the actual process of filmmaking.
Much of the information also felt rather dubious - the sort of bullshit storytelling that has no place in a serious history book. Worse yet, Biskind displays a woeful lack of knowledge about both Hollywood history and film history in general.
And finally - and this has nothing to do with films - while I was ill I managed to finish Hermann Hesse’s Rosshalde. Hesse is one of my favorite authors - I find both Demian and Siddhartha brilliant - but Rosshalde, written in 1914, may well be the weakest of all his books that I’ve read. A conventional story told in a conventional - and surprisingly perfunctory - fashion, the book even boasts a "hopeful" ending that feels irritatingly phony. That’s hardly the sort of quality one would expect from the unusually visceral Hesse.
While I’m at it . . . Recommended reading: The Woman in White and The Moonstone, both by William Wilkie Collins. These are delightful mystery-romance tales, both of which have been made into movies. I read them late last year.
I’d also highly recommend Steven Saylor’s Roman Blood, a mystery-thriller set in Ancient Rome. It’s the sort of well-told, gripping novel that begs to be transferred to the big (or small) screen.
AltFG’s Best of the Best of 1995
Giuliani Time in New York City
The Lost World at the Paramount Ranch
Academy’s “Great To Be Nominated” Series: Judgment at Nuremberg
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