Stumped for celluloid reading material? Look no further than FOC/left-brain cohabitator Anthony Miller's recent round-up of cinema's secret histories in LA CityBeat. Ah, but what construes a secret history?
The two pillars of cinema's "secret histories" – and two of my favorite books on the subject – are David Thomson's Suspects and Geoffrey O'Brien's The Phantom Empire. (My hardcover of Suspects and paperback of Phantom Empire even share the very same "Torn Movie Poster" by Walker Evans on their covers.) Thomson's first novel compiles stories from a rogues gallery of detectives, mugs, dames, and femmes fatale, only later to reveal itself as a Faulknerian genealogy of many of film's most famous fictional characters. Subtitled Movies in the Mind of the Twentieth Century, O'Brien's The Phantom Empire is an utterly original and phantasmagorical excavation, as a celluloid-obsessed spectator ponders the history of film. Both books acknowledge the way certain images, lines, gestures, and characters from our moviegoing experiences forever inhabit our unconscious.
Five recent books about film offer their own "secret histories," whether seen through the eyes of a preeminent critic, L.A. filmmakers who stand apart from mainstream Hollywood, our 37th President, American cinema's most celebrated enfant terrible, or a film student who stumbles upon a cabal of film cultists. These are not to be apprehended with a single reading; these are books to keep on your shelves to return to, to choose films from, to quote from, to quarrel with, and, most of all, to get lost in.
Read the whole thing here.
N.B.: The cinetrix is reduced to a raving fanboy on the subject of The Phantom Empire. The closest she can come to describing the experience of reading it is to liken it to seeing Sans Soleil for the first time. Both left me tongue-tied, wild-eyed, and feverish.
