As anyone who has ever tried to struggle through its sacred texts will know, film theory doesn’t exactly make for easy reading. Mostly, it’ll drive you mad before it will change the way you think. So hooray for Filmish by Edward Ross, an Edinburgh-based, comic-book artist and writer. His new graphic journey through film bulges with such hefty names as Laura Mulvey (Todd Haynes’s theorist of choice) and André Bazin (the co-founder of the renowned French journal Cahiers du cinéma), and yet you will be able to whip clean through it in just a couple of hours. Even better, it promises to leave you with a long list of pictures you will want either to revisit, or to see for the first time. Top of mine is John Carpenter’s 1988 They Live, in which, I learn, a nameless drifter finds a pair of sunglasses that enables him to see that the ruling classes are in fact aliens.
The book is organised thematically. There are seven chapters, on the eye; the body; time; architecture and sets; voice and language; power and ideology; and technology and technophobia. Ross narrates (he has given himself a pair of spectacles whose lenses are as big and as square as cinema screens), illustrating his talk with a series of key scenes, whether from blockbusters or cult classics. Most are pretty recognisable, but there are full explanatory notes at the back (and also an excellent bibliography). The text is occasionally a bit earnest, but mostly it does its job very well, whether it is trying to pin down the pros and cons of the idea of the director as auteur, or to explain all the subtle and, er, rather complicated things Andrei Tarkovsky does with time and memory in his autobiographical masterpiece of 1975, The Mirror.
Ross’s reach is wide, his narrative taking in both cinema’s earliest days (it begins with the Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat from 1896), and its future (I’d forgotten, if I knew in the first place, that the Nigerian film industry – aka Nollywood – is now the second largest in the world). He gives a particularly good account both of the feminist theory of the male gaze, and the way that Mulvey effectively did away with narrative voyeurism in Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), an experimental film shot on a camera that rotated dispassionately through 360 degrees. That said, I was more interested in the stuff that was completely new to me. How amazing to learn that when John Ford made his western Cheyenne Autumn in 1964, the Navajo cast, unbeknown to him, used lewd language – “this man has no penis” – that had nothing to do with the script.
Doubtless this isn’t a book for the kind of film fan who subscribes to Sight & Sound; he or she may consider it beneath their dignity. But for the rest of us, popcorn and black turtle necks at the ready, Filmish is just what the projectionist ordered.
Filmish is published by SelfMadeHero (£14.99). Click here to order a copy for £11.99
