Off the Shelf Extra. - Review - book review

Film Comment, Nov, 2000

An extended selection of new publications

Faber and Faber's Projections series rolls around with a New York--focused edition, edited by Tod Lippy (332 pp, $20). Less insider-clubby than Mike Figgis' L.A. issue, Lippy's lashes together an interesting cross-section of Gothamites both old and new from all areas of the industry. Though a few notable absentees loom large over the proceedings, the book gives a fair impression of the wacky diversity of the New York City film scene, including the Coen Bros., David O. Russell, composer Carter Burwell, Ulu Grosbard, and many others.

A Silent Siren Song: The Aitken Brothers' Hollywood Odyssey, 1905-1926, by Al P. Nelson and Mel R. Jones (Cooper Square Press, 288 pp, $25.95), covers the story of Harry and Roy Aitken, Wisconsin farmboys who started the now forgotten Triangle Film Corp. Up against moguls such as Goldwyn, Warner, and Zukor, the brothers nevertheless were involved with some of the most enduring films of Hollywood's early years.

Also from Cooper Square, the newly reprinted Film Culture Reader, edited by P. Adams Sitney (464 pp, $18.95), compiles decades' worth of articles from this most venerable of high-minded film journals. A must for any fan of avant-garde and art film.

City Lights reprints The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, edited and translated by Paul Hammond. An essential collection of writings both on films loved for their surrealist implications and those made as part of the Surrealist project, the book delves into the curious and beguiling ways in which the eccentricities of the mind are so deeply expressed in the cinema.

Cinema Nation: The Best Writing on Film from The Nation, 1913-2000, edited by Carl Bromley (Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 528 pp, $15.95), is a fine collection of sensitive film writing from one of the first homes to serious film writing in America. Featuring nine otherwise unavailable articles by the perennially potent Manny Farber, the book also features extended coverage of the Hollywood Blacklist as it happened, Oliver Stone sparring around JFK, and writing by James Agee, Edward Said, Stuart Klawans, and many others.

During the 1970s, Tony Macklin conducted a stunning series of interviews for the magazine Film Heritage, dealing with all aspects of the industry, from costume designers to critics, writers, directors, and stars. These interviews are compiled in Voices from the Set: The Film Heritage Interviews, edited by Macklin and Nick Pici (Scarecrow Press, 335 pp, $39.50). Macklin was working at a time when an old guard was still around and a new one was coming in, enabling him to speak to what now seems a veritable dream team, including Hitchcock, Altman, Hawks, Scorsese, John Wayne, Warren Beatty, and others, covering the spectrum of personalities and responsibilities that make a film happen.

At once timely yet curiously out of place, Jan Stuart's The Nashville Chronicles (Simon & Schuster, 349 pp, $26) is an exhaustive/ing account of the production of Robert Altman's critically canonized Nashville. Much like its subject, the book is so jam-packed as to remain frustratingly out of focus. Far from the final word, Stuart's book leaves one with the impression that there is much still unsaid about this like-it-or-not gotta-see-it film.