3 - That Summer Feeling
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2020
Summary
Abstract
This essay offers a personal reflection that traces two major influences on Adrian Martin's work in film criticism and film analysis, both of which he encountered during the impressionable years of early adolescence. The first influence is the classical approach of British scholar Victor (aka V.F.) Perkins (1936-2016), whose famous 1972 book Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies offers a reasoned, logical, sensitive systematic approach to analysing the expressive functions of narrative film style. The second influence is the formalist work of the theorist and filmmaker Noël Burch (1932– ), whose equally famous Theory of Film Practice (1973) introduced to the English-speaking world a different, highly materialist approach to film style and technique. The essay compares and contrasts them.
Keywords: Film criticism, film analysis, V.F. Perkins, Noël Burch, formalism
Occasional collisions unexpectedly encountered determine the direction of a lifetime.
– Elias Canetti, Auto da FéI tend to believe that the cultural experiences we encounter in our impressionable youth – the films we see, the music we hear, the books we read – form us in ways that we seldom recognise, scarcely understand, and often resist.
I am not talking here about the movies that we set out to see in the first militant flush of cinephilia – viewings full of expectation, learning and acculturation – but the movies we, in a sense, never meant to see, that were part of no self-advancement programme, but that grip us until the day we die, crystallising some obscure, unconscious part of our identities. Jonathan Richman once sang, so poignantly and memorably, about this moment: “That summer feeling is gonna haunt you / The rest of your life”. At the age of fifteen, I started reading my first film books. I was already nurturing my cinephilia, but had not yet crammed any particular cineliterary taste – I did not (yet) take an imaginary side in the wars between Cahiers du cinéma and Positif or Movie and Screen, I had not yet settled on an allegiance to Manny Farber over Pauline Kael. I read seriously – hungry for knowledge – but also haphazardly.
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- Information
- Mysteries of CinemaReflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982–2016, pp. 33 - 38Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018