Defining Moments in Movies, edited by Chris Fujiwara
I picked this one up at Barnes and Noble just after the holidays. Someone charged with removing a bunch of “20% off” coupons from throughout the Nicollet Mall store apparently decided it was only worth removing roughly half from the monstrous pile of copies of this book, as well as the two sister volumes covering music and books (both of which I passed on — Stevie Wonder appeared only twice in the index of the former, and if I’m going to read about books, I think I will just read books instead).
I’ll be honest and say I bought it because Chris Fujiwara was the editor and because I saw a number of familiar names among the contributing writers, including a few linked up in the right column. What I wasn’t prepared for was to just what extent this book, in its glossy-paged disguised, was actually smuggling hardcore cinephilia/academia into its coffee table format. Seriously, at least 10 percent of the titles included in the book I’ve never even heard of.
Fujiwara obviously recruited authors who specialize in certain niches to be filled (and to the brim). Someone stunts for silent films (Paolo Cherchi Usai), Paolo Bertolin seems to have been charged with cherry-picking from recent Bollywood, Fred Camper and Jonathan Rosenbaum rep for their laundry list of faves (Kubelka and Kiarostami, respectively). It almost feels as though David Sterritt and Matt Zoller Seitz were brought in to keep some small portion of the book cognizant of sea changes in the mainstream.
If there’s one single entry out of the 1,000 “moments” (which actually cover more ground than that — there are scenes, performances, people, writings about film, even one or two personal reminiscences) that epitomizes the book, it’s Dina Iordanova’s appraisal of Ella Shohat and Robert Starn’s 1994 Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media: “This landmark film-studies work criticized the biased representation of non-Western cultures and argued in favor of a new, multicultural media pedagogy.”
Chew on that while you double-check the fanboy-friendly cover art. Seriously, I truly dig this book. How could I not when it finds room to mention every movie Jerry Lewis directed from The Bellyboy up through The Patsy (excepting The Errand Boy, the weakest of the span)? It’s the Kashi of list-based mind candy for cinephiles, and a simple glance through some of their picks for the last five years or so confirms their gonzo commitment to auteurist zombiedom: “My Funny Valentine” in the rain, The Company; chase through the Louvre, Looney Tunes: Back in Action; Emmanuelle Devos finds the letter from her father, Kings & Queen; the midpoint of Tropical Malady; John Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns installment of Showtime’s “Masters of Horror” series.
It also includes a key speech from Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and closes out the book with a picture of the poster for Little Miss Sunshine, which points up to why I am having an even better time picturing all the people who pick this one up expecting all the entries to be along those lines: shower scene in Psycho; “put your lips together and blow,” To Have and Have Not; singin’ in the rain from that movie; jump cut from bone to spaceship in 2001. Oh, wait … all those are in there, too. I don’t know what most people will get out of this behemoth mix of the known and the unknown (The Awful Truth and Make Way for Tomorrow are both here), the high, middle and low cultures all given consideration, but with the most emphasis on the high. I imagine a few books might end up getting returned, not unlike the time I returned Entertainment Weekly’s book of 1,000 video musts when I was 11 or so, simply because I hadn’t heard of enough of the movies listed. It’s been awhile since I’ve picked up a canon fodder tome and been able to experience that same feeling of disorientation, but this time I’m keeping the book.