Michael Wood (2) (1936–)

Well, this book is a pretty unnecessary addition of the trove of books on Hitchcock. I picked it up in the library bookshop for a song; I'm glad I didn't spend the $20 list price on this slender volume. It consists mostly of fairly complete plot descriptions of his films, so if you haven't seen them all, there's some spoilers here. But I didn't think Wood had any particularly insightful comments to make, and the most interesting ones are quotes from Hitchcock scholars. Wood writes mostly about fiction, not film, and it shows. His approach to reviewing is like one you'd do for literature, so it's absent any analysis of Hitch's cinema (except for a few mentions of camera angles). I suspect he was commissioned to write this book as part of Houghton's Icon series; as such, its audience must be those with short attention spans and low expectations. The "Wood" you want to read on Hitch is Robin Wood.… (mehr)

I have never really taken much interest in going to the cinema. I tend to go along when friends invite me, and I quite enjoy it, and I buy the occasional DVD that’s been recommended to me, but films have never had an impact on me in the way that books do. But from time to time cinematic style impinges on the books I read, so occasionally I have felt the need to find out more about this art form. I have a copy of The A List: The National Society of Film Critics’ 100 Essential Films and 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die both of which are dispiritingly full of films that I do not want to watch. I have a subscription to Quikflix, and I get foreign films from them once or twice a month but I often forget to watch them until Quikflix nags me about them. Perhaps Film, a Very Short Introduction might persuade me that I should invest more time in watching film?

The Contents consists of:
Before the titles – a brief introduction
Moving Pictures
Trusting the Image
The Colour of Money
References and Further reading
Around the world in 80 films (I’ve seen four of them: La Dolce Vita from Italy, Wild Strawberries from Sweden, and Brief Encounter and The Third Man from the UK.

It took a while for Wood to get to what I wanted: some explanation of why film matters, what’s good about it, and why I should watch it. In ‘Moving Pictures’ there’s stuff about the invention of film, and yes, I did hunt out some of them on You Tube: Lumière’s La Sortie de l’usine Lumiere à Lyon (Leaving the Factory), and L’arroseur arose (The Waterer Watered) and then there’s stuff about film techniques and editing so I watched the *yawn* six-and-a-half minute introduction to Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. I came across some new vocabulary: ‘montage’, ‘shot transition’, ‘shot-countershot’, and its opposite – ‘parallel editing’ a.k.a. ‘cross-cutting’. And there was this:

The moviegoer works less hard than the reader of books, in one sense, since so much is shown to her, pictured as complete. But she also works harder in another sense, since she has a whole surrounding world to create, and all the syntax is in her head rather than on the screen. (p.22)

(But none of this answered my question: is what the moviegoer gets out of it as worthwhile as what the reader gets? Does the viewer of The Grapes of Wrath become as sensitised to the issues raised by John Steinbeck’s book? And just exactly how does watching Terminator II (which I haven’t seen) or 42nd Street (which I have) count as anything other than ephemeral entertainment?)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/10/28/film-a-very-short-introduction-by-michael-wo...… (mehr)