Around 8,000 books on film history are available in English. Of these, over 200 purport to cover the whole of the subject. Some, such as those by Robert Sklar, Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, are outstanding. They cover every period and most countries and between them run to over a million words.
Eleven decades into the history of the medium, we have surely reached saturation point with such books. There are only so many times you can read about the marvel of Citizen Kane or the influence of Kurosawa. Bernardo Bertolucci recently reacted wearily to news of a new single volume history to be published this month: "Another history of cinema? Something I didn't think I needed." I'd be as sceptical as he is were it not for this fact: I wrote it.
To justify adding to the groaning bookshelves on the subject, I should at least have been revisionist. Yet at the centre of The Story of Film is the traditional assumption of modern film criticism, that the director is an artist. Worse still, I show little interest in accounting for cinema in economic or sociological terms. I even begin with a quotation from Lauren Bacall - "the industry is shit, it's the medium that's great" - the position of the aesthete that has been around since at least the 1960s.
So why fell all those trees for a book which doesn't sound particularly new? Because cinema isn't how it appears in most film books. The majority misrepresent it in three ways. The first is the most obvious. They focus on entertainment cinema. This is like telling the history of art by looking to what people flocked to in the Parisian salons - splashy history works, sentimental scenes and so on. Cinema set out from the start to divert us, and some of its greatest glories have been made in the Hollywood idiom. But narrative, "escapist" cinema is nothing of the sort. Unlike painting, theatre, music or literature, film is, as a photographic medium, inextricably linked to the real world. Directors stage and modify that world for the camera, but cinema is less good at being escapist than any other art form. For better or worse, as André Bazin, perhaps the greatest film critic, argued, it is shackled to life.
From this perspective, Hollywood musicals and Bollywood love stories are not the norm, but rather a fascinatingly successful mutation from it. The thousands of such films made every year (about a quarter of a million since cinema began) do not represent the essence of cinema so much as an unstoppable spin-off, wedded to traditions of storytelling and fuelled by Freudian wish-fulfilment. Great stuff, but not central to what cinema is. A serious history of the medium needs to recognise this.
Related to cinema's dizzy Freudianism is the second area in which many film histories seem to fall short. They call the grammar of such cinema "classical." If classical in the proper sense means equilibrium between form and content, order, symmetry and measured expression, then the films of the great popular directors are nothing of the sort. They are utopian. They strain for emotional effect. They are romantic.
But if the works of Frank Capra, William Wyler, Nicholas Ray and Mehboob Khan are romantic, then the question arises: does cinema have a classical tradition? The answer, I would argue, is that films like Gone with the Wind are at one wildly emotional extreme of the expressive spectrum of cinema, and the ultra-minimalist works of Robert Bresson, Andy Warhol, Chantal Akerman and the like are at the other extreme. Somewhere at the centre is the work of filmmakers like the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu: neither overly optimistic nor pessimistic, understated but not austere, concerned not with the peaks and troughs of the human condition, but its quotidian reality. Ozu's form, his placement of the camera and his use of space, is also ordered. This is cinema's real classicism.
The third problem with film books is an evaluative one. Most accept that there was a golden age of entertainment cinema - the 1930s and 1940s - and a new wave of innovation and modernism in the 1960s, but that it has been downhill ever since. Such pessimism does not stand up to scrutiny. The 1990s, and the years since, have been remarkably productive. Iranian directors have rethought cinema. Taiwan and Korea have produced astonishing work. Russian filmmakers have excelled. Denmark's Dogme movement revitalised film language. Latin American cinema has been innovative. Australia has had its best period since the 1970s. And America has developed a thoughtful independent filmmaking scene. Digital filming allows directors to work more personally and explains some of these advances, but its effects have not yet been fully felt. Many of the best film critics and historians came to cinema in the 1960s because, at last, there were films which were worthy of their skills, But those who deify that period at the expense of the remarkable diversity of the digital age are distorting the truth.
The treatment of these questions of entertainment, classicism, influence and perceived decline weaken many film books. Dogme, the revival of documentary, even Peter Jackson's claim at the Oscars that "fantasy" is a dirty word in the movie world, all point to the fact that cinema has reconnected with the real world in recent years. It was time for a book to describe that fact.
