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The Moving Image, edited by Jan-Christopher Horak. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Fall 2001. Trade paper, $30.00 per year (subscription, two issues), 198pp, ISSN 1532-3978.
We don’t normally review journals but had to make an exception in this case. The Moving Image is an excellent collection of articles on the preservation and restoration of film, television, video, and digital moving images. This seems especially important at a time when large numbers of films continue to disappear and digital technologies threaten to overtake celluloid as the moving-image medium of choice.
Some of the material here is more for the academic specialist than the casual fan, but the latter will still find much of interest. Charles "Buckey" Grimm’s "A History of Early Nitrate Testing and Storage: 1910-1945" tells the fascinating story of how the studios, scientists, and various government agencies dealt with the highly dangerous, limited-life material of film over a 35-year period. Included are such tantalizing details as the fact that during World War I the Army Signal Corps shot over 1.8 million feet of film of historic events. In "Digital Preservation of Moving Image Material," Howard Besser admirably explicates this complicated issue with straightforward explanations of the technologies involved and the efforts made to date in the area of digital preservation. Other articles explore the presentation and preservation of home movies, the evolution of preservation from 1967 to 1977, and the "racial body" in early silent cinema. Also of interest are in-depth reviews of Disney’s anniversary rerelease of Fantasia, Disney archivist Scott MacQueen’s look at Image’s DVD Treasures from American Film Archives: 50 Preserved Films, and two reviews of Ken Burns’ Jazz (by Stephen J. Casmier and David Klowden) that beautifully skewer this reactionary series and the tired aesthetic behind it. Well illustrated.
The Women of Warner Brothers: The Lives and Careers of 15 Leading Ladies, by Daniel Bubbeo. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2001. Trade paper, $35.00, 272pp. ISBN 0-7864-1137-6.
It’s hard to take too seriously a book of this title that includes Nancy Coleman but not the actress whose early ’30s work for Warners (Three on a Match, Strange Love of Molly Louvain, etc.) is among that studio’s best, Ann Dvorak. Clearly an effort by the author to remind us of the existence of these talented, spirited stars at a time when cultural memory threatens to forget them, The Women of Warner Brothers covers the 1930s and ’40s and includes such well-known stars as Olivia de Havilland and Ann Sheridan, along with lesser lights such as Glenda Farrell and Andrea King.
The writing is workmanlike, if sometimes too casual in the manner of movie zines (starting a sentence with "Oh yeah" may not endear the author to all of his readers). There’s nothing particularly new here, but the book is useful as a one-stop source for longer profiles of its subjects and their films than can be found elsewhere (excluding stars like Bette Davis whose careers have been written up in exhaustive detail). And the lack of Dvorak is at least partially compensated for by the inclusion of such vanishing worthies as Joan Leslie, Andrea King, Eleanor Parker, and Alexis Smith. Fans of these actresses will find this a diverting read.
White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film, by Gary D. Rhodes. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2001. Illustrated case binding, $65.00, 360pp. ISBN 0-7864-0988-6.
In the cinephile’s ideal world, every film would get the deluxe treatment McFarland has given to White Zombie in Gary Rhodes’ book. It’s hard to imagine why this 1932 horror film, a primitive but atmospheric Gothic directed by Victor Halperin, was chosen, but we’re not complaining. Rhodes is aware of the film’s dubious rep ("Many lovers of classic movies agree with what many critics said in the beginning, that this is a silly, badly played example of penny-dreadful filmmaking"), but is determined to rehabilitate it by examining it from every possible angle from the historical to the sociological to the analytical. Rhodes is persuasive in outlining the film’s attractions. There’s the contribution of the inestimable Bela Lugosi ("leaner and more wolfish than in any of his other pictures"); the fantastic mishmash of sets (from The Cat and the Canary, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and others) that together make for a compelling otherworldly atmosphere; the chiaroscuro cinematography; the film’s foreshadowing of the mood-drenched Val Lewton B films ten years later; and the film’s standing, in the author’s words, as "an important work of 1930s cinema, of independent filmmaking, and of the horror film genre."
Rhodes thoroughly investigates the evolution of White Zombie from a myrid of sources classical (Faust), popular (Trilby), and exploitative (the 1929 nonfiction voodoo book The Magic Island), through preproduction, postproduction, and finished film to its purportedly wide influence on "subsequent voodoo and zombie related books, articles, films, and plays." Rhodes deserves kudos for seeking out a wide range of original sources, including the director’s widow who supplied him with biographical information on Halperin missing from all other accounts. A series of detailed appendices cover everything from reviews of the film to box-office grosses to pressbook reproductions. If the author’s (freely admitted) obsession with White Zombie sometimes carries him over the edge — the "Victor Halperin Family Scrapbook Photographs" is nice but is it necessary? — it’s easy to forgive him considering the breadth and depth of this obvious labor of love. Included in the feast are 244 images and photographs.
Movie Poster Price Almanac: 2002 Review, edited by John Kisch. Hyde Park, NY: Separate Cinema Publications. Cloth, $49.95, 800pp, ISBN: 0-9661482-4-X.
Price guides have always been one of the more controversial items in the collectibles field. Movie poster aficionados have traditionally had to rely on the whims of self-styled experts deciding on the value of a particular poster — a value that might be based as much on the expert’s desire to sell the item (the author-dealer phenomenon is much too common for comfort) as on an objective, research-based analysis of market value. John Kisch’s Movie Poster Price Almanacs have effectively killed the need for other guides through one simple stroke: basing values on actual recorded sales.
Kisch’s mammoth guides have been around for several years now, and they cull auction and sales results from 264 dealers (e.g., L.A.’s La Belle Epoque, Canada’s Memory Lane) and auction houses (Sotheby’s, Christie’s). Ebay, of course, is here, providing an enormous amount of information since it puts thousands of poster auctions a week within reach of the collector.
The entries, over 86,000 by my reckoning, are arranged in a simple format: title, date, stars, country (if not U.S.), size, price condition (including whether it’s linenbacked), origin (Internet, auction, ad, or catalog), date of sale, and dealer’s name. One of the intriguing things about these results is the wide range of prices realized on the same poster from different venues. It’s quite common to see a 20 to 50 percent difference in desirable posters like the one-sheet of Attack of the 50-Woot Woman. A near-mint linenbacked copy went for $4,050 from dealer Deke Richards in October 2001; a month later Christie’s auctioned a very fine linenbacked copy for $6,463. The spread shown on Ulmer’s seminal Detour one-sheet is from $1,675 to $3,000 from April 1999 to October 2001. (Kisch: "Because many rarer posters are seen so infrequently, we include several auction results from the past 3 years" — useful in tracking a poster’s increasing or sometimes plummeting popularity.) The rarity of some items can be gauged by their lack of representation here: you’d be hard pressed to find a single Mizoguchi, for example. (There are plenty of Kurosawas on the other hand.) This annual guide is a must-have for any collector of movie memorabilia.
April 2002 | Issue 36
Copyright © 2002 by Gary Morris
ALSO: More book reviews
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