John Belton (ed.), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-521-56453-0. 177 pp. A$29.95 (pb)
Lloyd Michaels (ed.), Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 ISBN 0-521-65698-2. 191 pp A$29.95 (pb)
Nick Browne (ed.), Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather Trilogy. Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-521-55950-2. 191 pp A$29.95 (pb)
(Review copies supplied by Cambridge University Press)
Uploaded 1 March 2001
The Cambridge Film Handbooks series prides itself on its pluralism. According to its General Editor, Andrew Horton, the five or six (mostly) original essays in each volume are intended to offer a “prism” approach, “a variety of theoretical, critical, and contextual perspectives” on a particular film (or, in the case of the Godfather trilogy, series of films). The breadth and diversity of the spectrums refracted from these ‘prisms’, however, varies a good deal from volume to volume. So, inevitably, does the quality both of the individual contributions and of the volumes in their entirety.
In addition to the essays that make up the bulk of each volume, each handbook also includes a range of supplementary materials: a small selection of contemporary reviews, a filmography, and a select bibliography. Like the essays, these vary considerably in their usefulness from volume to volume. Some of the bibliographies, for instance, are more selective than others: the Rear Window volume itemizes 21 reviews, the other two volumes none. The filmography in the Godfather volume manages to overlook Coppola’s two most recent films (not a bad idea, perhaps, given the films, but still not the sort of thing that inspires confidence in a reader). But it is, of course, on the essays that each volume stands or falls.
Of the three volumes under review here, John Belton’s collection on Rear Window is the most theoretically and methodologically coherent, in that most of its contents reflect, in one way or another, the ‘turn to history’ in academic film studies, particularly in America, over the past decade or so. The volume begins with a concise but remarkably comprehensive and detailed production history by Scott Curtis, an exemplary piece of archival research which traces the story of the film from the original publication of Cornell Woolrich’s short story in Dime Detective Magazine in 1942 through to Universal’s marketing of the 1983 re-release.
In the first of two feminist pieces, Elise Lemire, claiming that both of the most influential previous feminist accounts of Rear Window, the feminist psychoanalytic film criticism of Laura Mulvey and the ‘difference’ feminism of Tania Modleski, have been insufficiently attentive to ‘the historical specificity of gender dynamics’ (64), contextualizes the sexual politics of the film (plausibly enough, if somewhat predictably) in terms of the postwar ‘crisis of masculinity’. Sarah Street offers a more tightly focussed, but equally historicized, take on ‘fashion and femininity’ in the film, exploring the gender and (more unexpectedly) the class connotations of the film’s costuming in the context of the New Look couture of the early fifties. Recent criticism has seen a politicizing, as well as an historicizing, of Hitchcock’s films, a tendency reflected in Armond White’s view of Rear Window as an examination of social alienation no less political in its implications (if less obviously so) than such later ‘remakes’ as Sisters (1973)and The Conversation (1974).
The only contribution to the volume wholly untouched by the ‘turn to history’ is a short essay by Michel Chion on the role of offscreen space in the film. Suggestive on its own terms, Chion’s piece is nevertheless clearly the product of another time and place (originally published in Cahiers du cinema in 1984, it appears here translated into English for the first time) and sits somewhat oddly in this context.
Chion’s piece also differs from those around it in not being directed, as the others so clearly are, to an undergraduate audience. The contributors have apparently been instructed to take absolutely nothing for granted on the part of their readers, with the result that they feel obliged to define ‘aspect ratio’ and explain that ‘patriarchy’ means ‘male-dominated society’ (59). The occasional irritations (or amusements)of this primer style notwithstanding, though, the actual substance of the contributions is consistently intelligent and informed, and the volume as a whole represents the series at its best.
Lloyd Michael’s collection on Persona (1966) marks the other end of the scale in both kind and quality. If the dominant approach of the Rear Window volume is clearly contextual, that of the Persona volume is unmistakably intertextual, more concerned with the film’s relationship to other artworks than to the social world of its production and reception. The opening of Birgitta Steene’s essay, with its insistence on the need to see Bergman’s films as ‘filtered through an indigenous Swedish mindscape’ (24), momentarily seems to promise a more comprehensive cultural contextualization. But what this ‘mindscape’ really comes down to, as it turns out, is simply the influence of Strindberg on Bergman’s work generally, and of The Stronger and A Dreamplay specifically on Persona.
Steve Vineberg takes up The Stronger again in his discussion of the role of the theatrical motif (more specifically, ‘the seduction and power of acting’ 111) in the film’s thematics. Strindberg’s influence on Bergman is inarguably crucial, but it is scarcely news. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster offers an altogether more original take on a related subject, mobilizing recent work in queer feminist performance theory, especially that of Judith Butler, to produce what she openly acknowledges as a ‘projection of meaning on Bergman’ (132).
Despite its title, “Scenes from the Class Struggle in Sweden,” Christopher Orr’s concerns also turn out to be less extra-textual than intertextual. His real subject is the film’s reflexiveness, which he characterizes (somewhat predictably) as Brechtian and (considerably less predictably) as Sirkian. The generic categorization of Persona as ‘subversive melodrama’ (88) turns out to be quite productive, and for once the invoking of Brecht serves to open up serious questions about audience affect, rather than glibly closing them down.
Steene, Vineberg, and Orr all at least have something to say about their various intertextual observations, if not always anything very original. Wheeler Winston Dixon’s essay, on the other hand, which purports to place Persona in the context of the French New Wave and the other new cinemas which emerged in its wake in the sixties, is an exercise in freestyle name-dropping: at one point Dixon manages to mention fifty directors in eight pages without saying anything of substance about any of them. A sample is necessary to catch the flavour of his critical style: “The film’s famous set pieces,” he breathlessly assures us, “… have become cinematic landmarks, along with Charles Foster Kane’s dying words and Ingrid Bergman’s and Humphrey Bogart’s airport farewell in Casablanca” (45-46). Indeed.
Like Belton, Michaels reprints one older piece among his original contributions, in this case Susan Sontag’s essay on Persona from Styles of Radical Will (1969). This is quite possibly the best thing ever written about the film, but since (unlike the Chion piece) it is widely available and has been previously anthologized, it’s difficult to understand the rationale for its reprinting here. As it is, its main effect is to make the rest of the volume look lacklustre (at best) in comparison.
Nick Browne’s volume on the Godfather trilogy falls somewhere between the other two. If the overall standard of its contributions is not quite as consistently high as that of the Rear Window volume, there is certainly nothing in it as utterly vacuous as Dixon’s piece on Persona. And wittingly or unwittingly, the critical concerns of its contributions seem to shift consistently over the course of the volume from the contextual to the intertextual.
The volume opens with an account by Jon Lewis of the ways in which the production of the three Godfather films was influenced by the financial vicissitudes and Byzantine corporate politics of Paramount Pictures over a period of two decades. Lewis’s case-study of the New Hollywood at work provides an instructive contrast with Scott Curtis’s of the Old in his production history of Rear Window: where Curtis is concerned with making a movie, Lewis’s focus, like that of his players, is on making deals.
Alessandro Camon provides a short social history of the evolution of Mafia mythology, as shaped both by the Mafia itself and, increasingly, the media, interesting on its own terms but relevant to the films only as general background. Vera Dika’s discussion of the films’ ethnicity assumes a more complex, ideologically mediated relationship between film and social reality: her concern is not with the ‘accuracy’ of the films, but rather with what she calls their “Italianicity” as “a construct fashioned to the needs and dictates of a society at a distinct period in American history” (77). Glenn Man, heavily influenced (as is Dika) by the work of Frederic Jameson , explores the different ways in which each of the three films explores the ideological contradictions inherent in the gangster-film genre. Both Dika and Man are rightly insistent on the differences among the three films, and both offer spirited defences of the much-maligned Part III.
Descriptions of the Godfather films as ‘operatic’ are commonplace, but Naomi Greene, in the most original of the volume’s contributions, takes the description seriously. Greene uses the operatic performance in Part III as the starting point for a discussion of operatic elements in the films’ dramaturgy (such as their use of choral scenes) and of narrative and thematic parallels with specific operas (particularly Cavalleria rusticana and Rigoletto).
With these most recent releases, then, Cambridge Film Handbooks continues to be, like most such publishing projects, something of a mixed bag. If the Persona volume is, shall we say, something of a disappointment, the Godfather volume is a serviceable student reference, and the Rear Window volume one of the best of the dozen or so titles that have appeared so far.
David Boyd