Cahiers du Cinéma presents The Hollywood Interviews.
Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006.
ISBN: 9 7818 452044 19
£9.99 (pb)
151pp
(Review copy supplied by Berg publshers)

This book serves no useful purpose. It is a translation of six interviews with Hollywood filmmakers selected from the 1995 collection of such interviews published under the title 15 ans de cinema américain, which brought together a larger number of such interviews that had been published in Cahiers du Cinéma between 1980 and 1994. The six selected here – with Scorsese, Eastwood, Coppola, de Palma, the Coen brothers and Tim Burton – are mostly from interviews published between 1990 and 1994, though the de Palma one dates from 1982. They are thus somewhat dated, and deal with a limited number of films directed by each of these directors.

Their assumed interest lies in the fact that these are all in some ways outsiders to the Hollywood industry, so have had to struggle to make their individual voices heard above the mindless babble of its routine production. This might be of some use if they had anything of real interest to say, or if the interviewers had pushed them in interesting directions. Unfortunately the series begins with the longest and worst of the interviews – a rambling, inarticulate 30 pages from Scorsese. None of the others is quite so bad, but one would struggle to find in them any of the ‘insights’ promised by the introduction. Because of the auteurist approach of the interviewers, those interviewed are encouraged to talk of their struggles to find funding, their battles with production companies, whether they consider the reception of their films by the viewing public or are simply ‘expressing themselves,’ which other great directors influenced them, and what are their recurrent themes. Coppola in particular, comes across as intelligent, articulate and culturally aware, but even in his case no great revelations await. Moreover the reverential insertion of [Laughter] after various of their mundane observations comes across badly, as ingratiating.

The framing of the interviews is particularly unfortunate. The quotation on the inside cover which asserts that François Truffaut invented auteurism (“defined a new way of seeing cinema as an artform and its directors as artists and auteurs”) is completely unjustified, as anyone who is acquainted with film history will testify, since numerous examples of auteurism can be found from 30-50 years before him. A similar statement concerning the ground-breaking work of Cahiers du cinéma is equally unjustified; and if these interviews are typical of “Cahiers’ famously in-depth, critical and engaged style,” then it’s hard to see what a shallow obsequious style might look like.

The six-page introduction is a rudimentary and perfunctory presentation of auteurism, which begins with a naïve and ignorant generalization and deteriorates thereafter. It demonstrates a total lack of understanding of film history, and sees all change as brought about by inspired individuals, or later and somewhat contradictorily by “natural cycles.” It is full of clichés and uses flip, imprecise terms in an attempt to sound trendy. Finally, the translation is flawed in several places, full of misprints, often so clumsy as to be hard to comprehend, and occasionally saying the opposite to what is intended.

This is a hastily produced, condensed version of a dated series of interviews based on a dubious set of premises. Not worth buying.

Colin Crisp,
Australia.

Created on: Saturday, 2 June 2007