Book review: IN GLORIOUS TECHNICOLOR

FRANCINE Stock’s project here is not to identify the best or most important films of all time, but to select films that seem to carry a particular cultural weight or symbolism – from Nanook Of The North to Basic Instinct, and Bambi to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

IN GLORIOUS TECHNICOLOR

Francine Stock with Stephen Hughes

Chatto & Windus, £18.99

The selection for her “Century of film and how it has shaped us” is perforce subjective and debatable. Some might question the predominance of Hollywood in Stock’s set of titles, or the mere smattering of documentary and avant-garde examples, but she has an enjoyably instinctive approach.

Stock’s prose vaults gracefully between reference points, so that The Birth Of A Nation can lead her to The Lion King and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers to The Lord Of The Rings. Associations that can initially seem eccentric take us to illuminating places. Along the way we examine film and history, film and fashion, film and war, film and psychiatry, and many other marriages – including film and marriage.

Stock is known as a broadcaster rather than a print film critic, but her analyses here are impressively fluent and insightful. She neither overwhelms with chummy references to herself, nor affects omniscience – both attitudes being pitfalls of similar works.

There’s just enough subjectivity to remind us that we are in the company of a passionate film fan, but not enough to take us into that tedious realm of how-I-felt-when-I-first-saw-Star-Wars. (Star Wars, incidentally, is not one of the main selected titles.) She is an agile and entertaining writer with a vast bank of knowledge and research on which to draw.

Pursuing the academic study of film, as I did, has of late taken on a not quite wholesome taint. In straitened times, it can seem an indulgent thing to have undertaken – the legacy of a not-too-distant but still quaint past in which it seemed reasonable to fritter years and pounds away poring over the media and its effects, rather than studying, say, plumbing, or Chinese.

This book caused me to recall not only why I loved the work of contextualising and analysing film texts, but why it was, and is, useful. In its marriage of high art and popular culture, bin its high commercial stakes and incessant technical evolution, and in its cross-cultural power to seduce and absorb, cinema provides a connecting point between countless sectors of human knowledge and endeavour.

In studying it one studies elements of literature, politics, art history, sociology, psychology and science. Film scholarship is often seen as hermetic and obsessive; Stock’s book emphasises just how expansive and inclusive it can be.

The future of the serious film critic in the age of blogs and social networking is now so often queried that one sometimes suspects the future of the serious film critic might largely consist of penning articles fretting about the future of the serious film critic.

Anyone, we’re told, can write on film these days, so why do we need professionals at all? This book offers a simple answer: we need professionals because not just anyone can write on film this well.