Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema
- ISBN13: 9780393337921
- Condition: New
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A brilliantly insightful and witty examination of beloved and little-known films, directors, and stars by one of America’s most esteemed critics. In his illuminating new work, Gary Giddins explores the evolution of film, from the first moving pictures and peepshows to the digital era of DVDs and online video-streaming. New technologies have changed our experience of cinema forever; we have peeled away from the crowded theater to be home alone with classic cinema. Recounting the technological
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(out of 2 reviews)
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#1 by Michael Samerdyke on September 1, 2010 - 11:26 pm
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Review by Michael Samerdyke for Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema
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This collection of essays on films and filmmakers is a delight to read. It gave me the feeling of listening to an informed and charming person who can talk about films without ever once resorting to academic jargon.
I came away from “Warning Shadows” impressed by the depth and breadth of Giddins’ knowledge. Not only does he write sensibly about Orson Welles, John Huston and Alfred Hitchcock (and say interesting things about these filmmakers) but he can also pinpoint the best film made by the nearly forgotten John Brahm, offer perceptive comments about lesser-known films of the Weimar era (which is where he draws the title of his book) and even view the “Indianerfilm” of the former East Germany with intelligent curiosity.
The only drawback with “Warning Shadows” is that most of the essays are about four pages long. (They were originally written as DVD reviews.) Giddins should use his expertise on film to attack a subject at a longer length.
Still, if you think film history is too important to be left to the professors, this is a book to read.
#2 by Roochak on September 1, 2010 - 11:42 pm
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Review by Roochak for Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema
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Gary Giddins seems to have seen and read everything, which one would expect of a professional critic, yet his literary voice is that of a populist, a thinker who lives and breathes aesthetics but writes from the conviction that cinema, like jazz, is fundamentally a folk art, however rarefied.
This is where things get dicey. Public exhibition, Giddins argues in his opening essay, “Home Alone with Classic Cinema,” is an integral part of the movie watching experience: “Only in a crowd is the viewer borne away on waves of joy and sorrow and recognition.” Freed by our DVD players from lack of parking, overpriced concessions, and babblers in the audience, we have virtually unlimited access to good films, and fewer people to watch them with. If Giddins is right, that isn’t cinema; it’s television, or parlor entertainment.
Still, when it comes to an informed appreciation of those films, it’s a pleasure to read him. Recent blockbusters don’t interest him; as he says of one little-known, European avant-garde director, “[his] films are the sort about which mainstream reviewers remark, ‘not for every taste.’ Nor is THE DARK KNIGHT for every taste.” What interests Giddins are the pleasures of Bette Davis’s operatic acting; the Freudian fantasies of German Expressionist cinema; the energy and intelligence of Sidney Lumet movies; Hollywood biopics worthy of their subjects (YOUNG MR. LINCOLN, LUST FOR LIFE); and, among other bits of movie history, the wonderfully weird story of how Walt Disney and Nelson Rockefeller joined forces to fight the Nazis with cartoons and samba.
WARNING SHADOWS (those on Plato’s cave wall, of course) is both an elegy for the near-extinction of the moviegoing experience and a celebration of a large number of movies that made it all worthwhile.