Harriet Margolis, Sean Cubitt, Barry King and Thierry Jutel,
Studying the Event Film: The Lord of the Rings.
Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008
ISBN: 978-07190-7198-0
UK£55 (hb)
358pp
(Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press)

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is in many ways unique, particularly the grand scale and complexity of its production and its immense popular and critical success. As such, it could be a useful case study for throwing into relief institutional and aesthetic topics in contemporary global cinema. This is one assumption that underpins Studying the Event Film: The Lord of the Rings, the goal of which is “to introduce students and general readers to a relatively recent phenomenon, the event film, in order to outline the phenomenon’s size, shape, and complexity” (p. 1). The anthology also aims to provide “a unique perspective” on the trilogy by examining its impact on New Zealand’s culture and film industry. Most of the editors and contributors are natives or long-term residents of New Zealand, and they pose a number of interesting questions about the relationship between Peter Jackson’s fictional Middle-Earth and the real places and people that contributed to its representation.

The book is divided into seven sections or large-scale topics (e.g. “Stardom and the Event Film” and “Reading for Meaning: The Lord of the Rings, Middle-Earth, and Aotearoa New Zealand”). Each section begins with a “dossier”, the aim of which is “to provide a factual context within which an individual author’s contribution takes on some particular component of LOTR that stands out from that perspective” (p. 16). Each dossier is followed by one to five brief “chapters”, i.e. stand-alone essays on the topic in question, the longest of which is eight pages. This rather gimmicky and confusing organization is justified by Margolis in the film’s introduction as reflecting one of the book’s goals: “to exemplify the different sorts of readings contemporary film studies is capable of in the face of a new development to be studied” (p. 16).

The dossiers themselves are the book’s most valuable contributions, despite the inconsistencies in their approaches; i.e. some of them are full-blown essays with arguments while others are compilations of almost-undigested data. For example, Sean Cubitt and Barry’s King’s “Economics” de-mythologizes Jackson and New Line as entrepreneurial risk-takers, demonstrating that the amount of money the studio risked was relatively small when one considers investments by international distributors, the lack of unionization in New Zealand’s film industry, as well as tax breaks and other subsidies provided by the New Zealand government (e.g. 300 military extras received only regular Army pay) (pp. 80-83). In contrast, the dossier “Production and Post-Production” lacks an overarching argument but compiles an impressive amount of primary sources to report on technical elements from the choice of camera and film stock to the use of miniatures, mattes and motion capture.

Unfortunately, many of the book’s (surprisingly brief) chapters lack this attention to detail and/or provide little new insight into the trilogy’s form, style, production, dissemination or reception. For example, Craig Hight’s essay, “One (Special Extended Edition) Disc to Rule Them All”, concludes that, as with most special edition DVDs, the LOTR’s DVD design “ultimately serves the wider corporate interests of the studio that owns the rights to the films” (p. 38). This is hardly a startling claim to make about the product of a profit-driven industry.

Too frequently the authors draw on complex methodologies or trendy theories that are employed for their own sake, rather than for any understanding they provide. And the brief length of the chapters makes it difficult to say much about the trilogy or its specific inter-textual relay when so many pages are devoted to explicating the theory. For example, Kevin Fisher’s “Sonic Resonances of Nature and Supernature in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy” is, at seven pages, one of the longest chapters in the anthology and one of the few to examine the film texts themselves. The essay makes several interesting observations about the design and function of diegetic sound, but the analysis of the films ultimately takes a back seat to the explication and illustration of Michel Chion’s theory of “audio-vision”. As with too many essays in the book, theory is not used to illuminate the film, rather the films are used to illustrate or explain a theory.

There is certainly something to be gained from the book but, given its size and scope, separating the wheat from the chaff is difficult. As one who teaches contemporary film, I was disappointed to find little in this book that would be of use in an undergraduate course or seminar (the exceptions being the King and Cubitt’s dossiers).

Jane M. Greene,
Denison University, USA.

Created on: Sunday, 18 April 2010