CUT PRINT
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Readers' Holiday
by Ray Zone
As the year draws to an end, it is time once again for Cut/Print’s annual guide for the avid (or Avid) readers on your gift list. Here are some recommended choices.
Polanski, A Biography
by Christopher Sandford
Palgrave Macmillan
400 ppd., paperbound, $29.95
ISBN: 0-230-60778-0
When Christopher Sandford first started writing his unauthorized biography of director Roman Polanski, it was with the fond thought that it might in “some small way” help rescue the director from his detractors––“particularly those, still quite vociferous 30 years on, for whom he’ll always be tainted by the events of 1977-78.” It seemed to Sandford that the time might have come for all parties to move on, along with the middle-aged victim Samantha Geimer, who was 13 years old at the time Polanski was convicted of having sex with her. The author found, however, that the “alleged rehabilitation would have to proceed without the director’s help.”
Sandford interviewed 270 people for this biography, in the absence of a direct discussion with Polanski. The biography opens in 1962 when Polanski was making his way to Paris after completing his first feature film, Knife in the Water, which had received a decidedly mixed reception in his native Poland. When the film was released on March 9, 1962, Polish State Party Secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka expressed his dislike for it by hurling an ashtray at the screen. The film went on to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film, and netted Polanski the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film festival. Nineteen years later, he returned in triumph to his native country to direct and star in a Polish stage version of Amadeus.
After making an array of 17 wildly eclectic feature films and winning an
Academy Award as Best Director for The Pianist in 2002, Polanski
still carries an air of controversy and mystery as a “polymath, felon
and reluctant subject of countless PhD theses: the chief one being that he
seems to be several different people.” To his friends, Polanski remains
“a rare example of someone who can entertain as well as challenge his
audiences, with a life story even stranger than his fiction.” Students
of Polanski’s films will enjoy Sandford’s well-researched biography.
Screening Sex
by Linda Williams
Duke University Press
432 ppd., paperbound, $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4285-4
In the acknowledgements to her book, Linda Williams notes that it began as an amateur movie in the 1990s when she bought a video camera and amused herself by asking friends to recall the most erotic moments they had experienced at the movies and recording their responses. Despite the great variety of answers, Williams notes that “they all revealed the role movies have played in our sexual coming of age and development,” and, more particularly, “they all demonstrated that screening sex was both a revelation and a concealment.”
Williams’s book is at once personal and scholarly. The question she once had asked of others she here poses to herself. Not surprisingly, she came of age during the 1960s and ‘70s, at a time when there was greater explicitness for depiction of sex onscreen with films ranging from Two Women (1960) to Last Tango in Paris (1972). By examining “how America went from being a culture that did not screen sex to one that does,” Williams illuminates the double meaning to be found in the verb “to screen” as a continuously evolving dialectic between what is shown and what is hidden (as behind a screen).
Fundamentally, with her history of the auditory and visual transition of sex onscreen, Williams argues, “Supreme Court rulings notwithstanding, prurience has always been an important reason for interest in the movies.” Her work underscores the importance of movies as a certain form of education. “Moving images are surely the most powerful sex education most of us will ever receive,” she writes.
Movie Guide – 2009 Edition
Edited by Leonard Maltin
A Plume Book
1644 ppd., paperbound, $20.00
ISBN: 978-0-452-28978-9
Exactly 40 years ago, Leonard Maltin got the assignment to work on the first edition of this book, then called TV Movies. The original edition included capsule reviews of 8,000 movies and the new 2009 edition has more than twice that number. It’s a motherlode of a book, in many ways still the best book of its kind. Maltin points out that “the day will come when this publication will be superseded by a database delivery system––be it on a computer monitor or a Dick Tracy-type wrist radio.” It’s already available to PDA users through Landware at www.landware.com.
More than 300 new movies grace the new edition and credits have been checked for such rising stars as Amy Adams, Amy Ryan, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen and James McAvoy. Casey Affleck, this edition notes, made an uncredited appearance in American Pie back in 1999.
In Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide (published in 2008 and still in print), more than 7,000 obscure, vintage and foreign films are listed that are not in the latest edition of the 2009 Movie Guide. I weighed this new 2009 edition and it tops the scale at just under four pounds. That’s a whole lotta paperback, but at $20 it’s worth every penny. A team of editors keeps all the information up to date. I use it just to check the release dates of movies and it is solid information.
The Dark Knight
Featuring Production Art and Full Shooting Script
Text by Craig Byrne; Screenplay by Jonathon Nolan and Christopher Nolan; Story
by Christopher Nolan &
David S. Goyer
Universe
240 ppd, hardbound, $35.00
ISBN: 978-0-7893-1812-1
You could find no finer gift book this year than the gorgeous hardbound edition of The Dark Knight, with production art and full shooting script. This full color casebound hardback––from the front cover board of Heath Ledger’s Joker and the green and purple endpapers to the chromatically brilliant digital production design art and back cover board of Christian Bale’s Batman––is a knockout that is beautifully designed by Mike Essl and Alexander Tochilovsky. Even the half-title page, a double-truck spread in full color of Christopher Nolan’s garage where The Dark Knight was designed and conceived, is brilliant.
Want to learn about Batman’s new whole outer body suit? All the details are here. The genesis, early designs and realization of Batman’s two-wheeled Bat-Pod motorcycle are thoroughly reviewed. The storyboards that are reproduced are particularly revealing and reflect the fact that Nolan shot the opening and other key sequences of The Dark Knight for 70mm IMAX film. It’s an awesome transition in the film when the letterboxed 35mm frame opens up to the eight-story-high screen in the IMAX theatre and the storyboards show how both aspect ratios were combined in the storytelling.
This is a must-have book, reasonably priced at $35, for all fans of The Dark Knight. It’s one of the season’s coolest gifts, a beautifully produced and informative work for filmmakers, screenwriters and visual effects artists as well as anyone interested in this enduring icon of our popular culture.
Ray Zone can be contacted at r3dzone@earthlink.net.