Murray Pomerance (ed.),
Cinema and Modernity.
Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
ISBN: 0 8135 3816 5
US$24.95 (pb)
373pp
(Review copy supplied by Rutgers University Press)

Edited collections of essays are a sticky proposition. No matter how many such volumes pervade the marketplace, my experience has been that most editors bristle like a wet dog when you mention the format. Difficult to sell; difficult to assemble, they argue. I’ve been a contributor to more than one. In some cases, I feel like I’ve been affiliated with others who speak a common language, while on other occasions, I wonder whoever thought that person and I inhabited the same planet! As a reader of these projects, sometimes I find that collections hone to a single theme with a vengeance, whereas other times, something more vagrant seems to connect the selections. Essay collections often can resemble intellectual smorgasbords. You immediately ingest the most appetizing articles, sample the more dubious selections and shy away from the more resistant items.

Murray Pomerance has been a veteran of the format. Consult his homepage at the site of his resident institution, Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, and you will find assemblages devoted to such disparate subjects as the cinema and New York City; American films of the 1960s; Jerry Lewis; the Lord of the Rings; the cinema of childhood; and guns and popular culture. Somehow, he manages to slip past the obstacles that imperil anthologies and comes up with crackerjack material more often than not. Pomerance has a proven track record of attracting well-established scholars and acquiring inspired material by them. Part of that may well be his own frequent participation at conferences in Canada and abroad as well as his moderation of events at Ryerson. (My essay on Robert Aldrich that appeared in Screening the Past was originally read at one such event, which led to the 1999 volume Bang! Bang! Shoot! Shoot!)

The introduction to Cinema and Modernity establishes a rather loose principle of affiliation for the contents: “All of the sixteen essays in this volume make a similar attempt – to understand the modern experience by light of cinema, and cinema in light of the modern experience” (4-5). A pretty broad agenda, certainly, but the contents are anything but random. Pomerance divides the materials into four parts, followed by a ruminative conclusion he dubs “Modern Thoughts.” First comes “Dark Utopia,” in which appear “analyses of the shock, pain, and excitement of modernity as seen onscreen” (5). The second, “Capital Advances,” takes up “various aspects of the relation between modern culture and high capitalism as reflected onscreen. Modernity invoked a culture that favored the garrulous, tenacious, and, as Thorstein Veblen called it, ‘predatory,’ personality, able to circulate wildly and adapt to any kind of circumstance” (6). The third, “Strange Personality,” examines how much “a central feature of modern social life involves confrontation with the stranger. In a world of constant social circulation and high social and geographic mobility, where travel and transportation of goods, images and people is the mainstay of the world economy, local community is fragmented and strangeness becomes a pervasive feature of modern life” (7). Fourth, “On The Move” tackles “aspects of modernity’s obsessive and rhythmic pulsion, its linkage to systems of transportation, its abnegation of stasis, stolidity, permanence, and placement in favor of what Wolfgang Schivelbusch, writing about the development of railway travel, called ‘panoramic perception’” (8). Finally, “Modern Thoughts” presents pieces by Tom Gunning and William Rothman that establish new wrinkles on subjects that have pervaded their work: in the case of the former, the shock and irruptions brought about in early silent cinema, and in the latter, the account of modernity to be found in the corpus of Stanley Cavell.

For my tastes, some of the most successful material here tackles familiar subject matter, but adopts a fresh angle upon it. Two of the best pieces concern themselves with sound, either musical or verbal. Krin Gabbard, a frequent analyst of the use of music in film, pens an inspired account of the use of Miles Davis as a soundtrack composer as well as how his recordings have been interjected into pictures. Gabbard inquires about the consequences of white directors using the music of a black man to illustrate the behavior of their white characters. He addresses the matter for “the constant use of black music in films about whites needs to be questioned if only because it is so seldom mentioned by film critics and other personnel from the American film industry” (159). Part of what fascinates the critic is how when superior jazz is incorporated as accompaniment, it tends to divert the audience’s attention from the narrative. Such is the case for him in Louis Malle’s Ascenceur pour l’echafaud (France 1958), whereas the material he provided for Jerry Schatzberg’s Street Smart (USA 1987) comes across as almost altogether extraneous. Grabbard critiques it as “the typically modernist practice of recruiting the music of black Americans to sexualize the lives of white Americans in Hollywood films” (163). Grabbard also points out how the appearance of jazz in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (USA 1999) underscores how the two central male figures engage in masquerade: the expatriate rich boy, Dickie (Jude Law) as a ‘white negro’ and the sociopathic Tom (Matt Damon) as a heterosexual. Gabbard dispenses some genuinely sharp comments in lucid and engaging prose.

Joe McElhaney’s “Fast Talk” takes up the dialogue in Preston Sturges’ work: a frequently discussed subject, but McElhaney does not rehash the same old points about the director’s wit or mixture of forms of diction or coinage of neologisms. He focuses instead on the velocity of the actors’ delivery. “To talk fast,” he writes, “is to be a type of modern character, someone whose brain – machine-like – quickly processes information, responds to the stimuli of the world, and then just as quickly turns the impulses back into spoken language” (274). He couples the focus on speedy speech along with the frequent inclusion of accelerated action in Sturges’ films, those moments of slapstick where bodies become as out of control and exaggeratedly animated as a machine with a loose sprocket. In addition, McElhaney makes the crucial point that the power of Sturges’ dialogue does not lie in its capacity as written speech alone. These comments are not reducible to bon mots, nor is Sturges to be put in the category of a Wilder or a Mankiewicz. “For Sturges,” he writes, “language in film achieves its power through virtue of being spoken, of being delivered in the most colorful, forceful, and public manner possible” (285). By taking this approach, he is able to combine attention to the speakers and the scenario, whereas too often the two are separated.

Some of the contributors attack material they have covered in previous publications. William Luhr and Peter Lehman, authors of a two volume study of Blake Edwards, speak about the director’s tense thriller Experiment in Terror (USA 1962), but one in no way feels as if previously dug ground is being unearthed. Their thoughts on how this picture situates itself between the canonical period of noir and its subsequent neo-noir phase are particularly illuminating. Tom Gunning picks up on his trend-setting observations on the ‘cinema of attractions’ and critiques some of his detractors. What might sound in summary like an act of self-defense in fact comes across as a clear-headed, thoughtfully written re-articulation of his points and a well-focused dissection of his opponents.

Others may find alternative points of interest in this well assembled and thought provoking collections. Wherever you dive in, bon appetit.

David Sanjek,
BMI Archives.

Created on: Sunday, 17 June 2007