This collection of essays from Peter Wollen spans the past decade and a wide range of topics over its three broad headings, "Directors and Film Makers", "Films and Movements" and "Themes and Styles".
While Wollen's knowledge of film, culture and theory are impressive and his writing always stimulating, these essays also seemed to convey to me a sense of impasse: Wollen looking backwards rather than forwards.
To be honest I'm bored with reading about the usual suspects. Another piece about Hawks, Godard, Hitchcock, The Rules of the Game or Blade Runner is bad enough, but when the same set of films and filmmakers have a tendency to crop up in every second essay, it starts to get tiresome. New examples please!
Accordingly, I appreciated the pieces on less well known figures and films – Viking Eggeling, Jean Rouch, British spiv films of the 1940s – better. At least here there was more a sense of real discovery, of something new to check out should the chance ever arise. But, alas, it probably never will, thanks to the way in which the whole idea of a Canon seems to dominate official film culture to the exclusion of all else.
Thus, for me, Wollen's probes don't go far enough to disrupt the established order: Don't mention Anthony Balch by way of William Burroughs; tell me about Balch in his own right, with an analysis of Horror Hospital and the place of Robin Askwith in the construction of masculinity in 1970s Britain. Don't waste paper on Blade Runner; cast your insightful eyes towards Dark City , The 13th Floor or even The Matrix and tell me what they signify. Don't bother with another piece about Godard's (?:post)?modernist strategies; do the same for Jesus Franco. Etc, etc.
Ultimately one comes to think that Wollen and his cohorts are too much part of the problem to present a solution, that film studies is a business where it's all about buying low and selling high, investing cultural capital and doing intellectual work on some raw text before bringing it to market. And there just isn't the percentage in it for the old order to look far beyond their established horizons.
YMMV.
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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