The American Movie

A Tour of the Thomas H. Ince Studio 1920-1922

WILLIAM K. EVERSON. The American Movie. Pp. v, 149. New York: Atheneum, 1963. $4.95.

Time added a useful category to contemporary literary criticism with its term "nonbook," a genre loosely defined by the presence of a ghostwriter or by an excess of pictures to significant words. The present volume might be called a "near-book," because when the author is speaking of the silent era-"the movies' gentlest years"-he writes with the authority and insight of an aficionado.

But his ten brief chapters are four-fifths devoted to the period before 1940, two-thirds before 1930, a sure sign of the silent-film buff at work. Indeed, Mr. Everson was consultant for the superlative television series, "Silents Please," a service that puts us much more in his debt than this sketchy survey. Skimming over his categories-a beginning, the formulative years, the first masterpieces, the innocent years, the twenties, comedy in the twenties, the coming of sound, the thirties, the forties, the fifties and sixties, Mr. Everson has virtues that derive from his vice of overemphasizing silents. He is very valuable in his summaries of early plots, description of the emergence of a "grammar" for the language of movies, and analyses of the diverse styles of creation employed by pioneers like Griffith and Ince.

When one approaches the modern period, however, the partisan of the film as an art form must have evidence for apodictic statements such as: "The fifties and early sixties were less productive of good American films than any other period; and this is a statement that in a very general way can be applied to the films of other countries, too" (p. 134). Perhaps so, but the reader who assented to the logic and evidence of his assertions about silent classics must remain skeptical about this Golden Age of Film theory.

A more basic criticism of the near-book is the poor quality of many of the stills, their curious size-on many pages there are six supersized stamps, often of long shots-and their lack of relation to the text. What we have, in effect, is a brilliant short essay on the silent movies of which Mr. Everson is fond, a less convincing dismissal of most of what has happened since sound, and fifty-four pages of pictures, not including the stamp-sized illustrations that consume some of the out-sized margins on fewer than a hundred pages of text.

This is not to imply that all use of pictures with text need result in a near-book. Every issue of Life and Look re-minds us of the possibilities of eloquence in juxtaposing, with utmost consciousness, word and image. But a book like this one, while superficially designed with the forceful austerity of a Mondrian, ends as not much more than an album of nostalgic pictures cheek by jowl with somebody else's text.

This is a pity, because the newer media badly need historical criticism, and it is unlikely that the university community will attend to them if they do not originate in the print media. In passing, it should be noted that the ideal way to "write" the history of the media is to use radio, television, and film themselves. "The Movies Learned to Talk"-"The Twentieth Century," CBS-TV-and "Marilyn Monroe"-Malvin Wald for David Wolper Productions-are good examples of this superiority. Until the university community creates an adequate esthetic for the newer media, we will continue to see non-books, near-books, and other such insufficiently communicative uses of the modern media.

Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 351, The Changing Cold War (Jan., 1964), pp. 200-201 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of Political and Social Science