Pam Cook and Mieke Bernink (eds.),
The CInema Book. 2nd ed.
London: BFI, 1999.
ISBN 085170 726 2
AU$80.00.
(Review copy supplied by Peribo)
Uploaded 1 November 2000
The fact that a book gets reprinted in a second edition says something about its popularity and usefulness. When that book originates with and is reprinted by the British Film Institute, its profile becomes that much clearer.
When, in 1985, the BFI published The Cinema Book, edited by Pam Cook, the Institute’s international reputation as a source of educational and research material was well established. By 1999, when the revised edition of The Cinema Book appeared, the original edition had itself become a part of film history, in keeping with its “central premise . . . that cinema is kept alive not just through systems of production, distribution and exhibition, but also through the circulation of debates which provide the cultural context in which it can flourish” (v).
As Cook wrote in 1985, ” The Cinema Book began life as a catalogue of the film study extract material held by the British Film Institute Film and Video Library, selected over the years by the BFI Education Department to facilitate the teaching of film” (v). What resulted, both in the original and in the second edition, is the sort of thing that one can send students to, confident that the subject will be covered and that one can generally feel safe that the information will be correct and accurately presented. It’s also the sort of treatment that could reasonably challenge MA-level students.
With three columns per page of fine point text, The Cinema Book is a daunting prospect for anyone to read cover-to-cover. It is without question a reference work. The layout and formatting are clean and nicely done, although for study purposes highlighting terms might have been helpful.
In addition to a 23-page bibliography, suggestions for selected readings appear at the ends of sections throughout the text. These selections do not necessarily include all texts referred to within a given section. Because the bibliography is connected with the sections yet presented as a whole, it can be difficult finding the specific reference one needs. While the table of contents provides a thorough outline of the book as a whole, it can be a bit frustrating having to work through the outline, one way or another, in order to track down references parenthetically mentioned in a particular section which then appear in complete form somewhere in the bibliography. It’s a small point, but putting authors’ first names rather than last names first doesn’t make finding bibliographic entries any easier. The index is fine, but it doesn’t include the bibliography. Yet there’s no denying that the bibliography is a tremendous resource.
The text itself is divided into sections written by different people with different perspectives on film studies. Cross-referencing is one effort toward unifying the text. Another unifying attribute is the use of “grey boxes,” which focus on individual films, according to Mieke Bernink, in order to link the more theoretically oriented main text “to the concrete analysis of specific films” (vii). Credits in these boxes do not include performers nor crew beyond the director. The emphasis varies from box to box, appropriately connected, for example, with whether a film is of historical significance, or perhaps to do with its critical reception, and so forth.
Differences between first and second editions include new sections that reflect changes in film studies since 1985. These new sections range from feminist film theory and spectator studies through early cinema and marginalized cinemas to updates on technology and current Hollywood practices. The influence of feminist film studies on film studies generally permeates this second edition, along with a more international perspective on cinema. The chapter headings suggest huge changes (only “Genre” and “Authorship and Cinema” have remained, with expansion of the former to include such things as comedy and “the teenpic,” while the latter has added very brief discussions of Jane Campion and Peter Weir as exemplars of the ’90s). Yet much of the material in the original gets covered under a different name or in a different section of the new edition.
The lengthy descriptions of films for which extracts were available to teachers are gone, along with their category listings; a website (http://www.bfi.org.uk/cinemabook) supposedly now provides this information. However, it was not in working order in September 2000, although Mieke Bernink’s introduction to the second edition announces the website as being “launched in conjunction with the new Cinema Book ” (vii). The new edition easily fills those 116 pages plus another 40 pages or so with coverage of developments in film studies in the intervening 15 years. Meanwhile, smaller changes at the level of sentence or paragraph have to do with updating coverage, both to add new material and to omit things that are no longer appropriate. These smaller changes are particularly obvious with regard to temporal references, e.g., a vague reference to “until recently” shifts to the more specific “until the mid-1970s” (50 in the first edition; 33 in the second).
Contributors, mainly academicians with institutional affiliations, come primarily from Great Britain and the United States, although the odd Australian, Indian, or European slips in. For example, Mieke Bernink, who is apparently responsible for editing this second edition, is editor of the Dutch publication Skrien. Where 11 contributors were originally credited (and by and large remain in the new edition), now there are 34 contributors, and the increase is primarily among U.S. scholars (such as Richard Abel, Kathe Geist, Thomas Schatz, Robert Stam, and Pamela Robertson Wojick). Taken as a whole, though, the book reflects the international perspective that exists in film studies itself, both in its selection of material to cover and in its approach to that material.
Harriet Margolis