How badly I wanted to read this book! And how great my disappointment turned out to be! It’s much easier to list what’s wrong with this book than to find anything good about it.
In Russian the book is titled How Film Works: Theory and History of Cinema and was marketed as “an extensive study presented as a stylish and engaging comic.” But contrary to the title and description, it’s not about how cinema works at all. Frankly, the translators share some of the blame here, as the original title is Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film, which didn’t claim to be about how cinema works, nor about theory or history.
So what is it actually about? If I were to sum it up briefly, I’d say this: it’s a collection of completely unrelated paragraphs that try to appear as a scholarly article with deep insights. More often than not, these “insights” come from other people, whom the author frequently quotes throughout the book. This is criticism in its worst form, where the writer attempts to explain what the filmmaker intended to convey, or what they were thinking. But reality shows that often the filmmaker wasn’t thinking about anything of the sort (there’s a great example with the horse in the film Afonya, which Georgiy Daneliya wrote about in his memoirs).
And it wouldn’t be so bad if it were just poor criticism wrapped in a beautiful package. But there are no redeeming qualities in anything else either.
The book is called a comic. But as a comic, it’s completely uninteresting. There’s no action, no characters. Occasionally, the author’s persona appears, supposedly delivering the text, or the people he quotes. The rest are poorly drawn frames from movies. In many cases, you might not even be able to tell who is depicted by this so-called artist (for example, I only realized that one of the “frames” depicted Megan Fox in her role from Transformers thanks to a footnote). Even though the author refers to certain movie frames, it would have been much more useful to include the actual frames instead of his own drawings. It brings to mind the old Soviet-Jewish joke about Caruso:
Two Jews are talking.
“I don’t get why everyone is so impressed with this Caruso. He’s unclear, nasal, and when he sings, you can’t understand a thing!”
“Have you ever heard Caruso sing?”
“Yes, Rabinowitz sang me some of his songs over the phone.”
And here, Edward Ross is like this Rabinowitz. What’s more, to save himself some effort, he reuses the same illustrations multiple times.
By about halfway through the book, I realized I had stopped looking at the pictures and was just skimming the text. As I mentioned, the drawings have nothing to do with actual film frames, and as standalone works, they have absolutely no value.
But what about the text? It’s just as bad. If you set aside all the abundant quotes, what’s left is the author’s attempt to impose his wild worldviews (or to cater to fashionable Western political correctness), mixed with downright ridiculous statements. I usually don’t speak this harshly about books, but here I can’t help it.
Many of the things he praises as the brilliant achievements of certain films are, first and foremost, the excellent work of screenwriters or the original literary material. Of course, it’s later beautifully translated to film, but initially, the foundation is the story.
Or when he talks about Buster Keaton, he constantly emphasizes how the actor reveled in his physicality, in his movements, but throughout the entire book, he never explains why movements and facial expressions were so exaggerated in silent films. The reason is obvious, right? So why bother telling the reader? After all, the book isn’t about the history of cinema.
And the author’s obsession with the oppression of every possible group isn’t just tiring; it’s actually off-putting. He starts the book with this idea, and it runs as a central theme all the way to the end. According to him, almost the entire history of cinema is a tribute to the mistreatment of women, Black people, Native Americans, Arabs, and sexual minorities. He turns everything inside out and only sees what fits his combative theory. For example, he claims that Native Americans were almost always portrayed as villains in films. But what about German films with Gojko Mitic? In my childhood, Native Americans were the heroes! We all wanted to be Native Americans.
In some cases, you really want to know what kind of “bugs” are in the author’s head. Just take these facts (the author’s opinion, not mine):
- The movie Back to the Future is a “fatalistic view of time travel.”
- The cartoon Aladdin implants in children’s minds the image of aggressive Arabs.
- The charismatic King Louie from The Jungle Book (noting from me, a direct reference to Louis Armstrong) is an “intentional comparison of Black people to monkeys.”
Author, what weed have you been smoking?! And that’s just a small part of his “views on cinema.”
It seems that as he worked on the book, random ideas popped into his head, and he tried to back them up with his own speculations about the films he watched.
In the last part, Edward Ross writes that cinema has always been a bearer of ideology. No argument there. But his own book is also a bearer of ideology, and definitely not a good one.
Initially, I planned to give the comic to my kids, since it’s supposedly about how cinema works. But honestly, even adults shouldn’t be reading this.
My rating: 1/5
