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Cinema Nation
The Best Writing on Film From The Nation, 1913-2000
Carl Bromley and Stuart Klawans
October 2000
ISBN: 1560252863
"A fine collection of sensitive film writing from one of the first homes to serious film writing in America. Featuring nine otherwise unavailable articles by the perennially potent Manny Farber, the book also features extended coverage of the Hollywood Blacklist as it happened, Oliver Stone sparring around JFK, and writing by James Agee, Edward Said, Stuart Klawans, and many others."
--Film Comment
What readers are saying
"A fine collection of sensitive film writing from one of the first homes to serious film writing in America." --Film Comment
"The hefty volume..follows the principle that more is more, or, When in doubt, stick it in. I for one am grateful for that generous spirit of inclusiveness: Even the weakest entries carry a flavor of the times.... The anthology is organized thematically ("Early Days--Fatty and the Wobblies," "Hollywood Goes to War," etc.), which allows it to be more open than it otherwise might to industry reportage and the occasional guest appearance by a star writer (James Thurber, George S. Kaufman, Nelson Algren, Edward Said) with a whimsical notion or axe to grind.... Many, however--especially in the early decades--partake of that breezy condescension that cultivated people liked to exhibit towards the moving pictures in particular and popular culture in general.... It is not until James Agee serves on The Nation's staff (1942-48) that we get a professional movie critic who is comfortable with the medium.... Manny Farber succeeded Agee.... Farber is, in my book, the best movie critic this country ever had.... Among the more recent critics who have occupied The Nation's film chair, Andrew Kopkind showed how clever, wellwritten, and sophisticated a thematic/political analysis of movies could be. Kopkind was your man to pulverize Rambo and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom from a left-wing perspective, or to celebrate a multicultural, polymorphous sexuality stew like My Beautiful Laundrette; but one misses any mention of these films' visual styles. It is only when one gets to the end of the book, to the six last pieces by Stuart Klawans, that one encounters the genuine heir to Agee, Farber, and Kopkind: someone who can mix political and esthetic analysis with a lightness, sanity, humor, indignation, and elegant prose style that is dazzling to read."
--Phillip Lopate, Cineaste
"A fabulously contrarian view of the movies.... An editorial from 1920 with the too-modern title, 'Film Censors and Other Morons,' 14 years before the studios established the Production Code of self-censorship, anticipates the New York City art controversies and congressional hearings of recent years, and bemoans what may be lost if filmmakers pay too much heed to culture monitors who want 'life petrified.'... Hollywood is a company town in "Cinema Nation," with union struggles and cutbacks and opposing camps fighting for their say. A chapter is devoted to pieces that dissected the ravages of Joe McCarthy's blacklist, and the reviews from the great Manny Farber and James Agee, among others, don't shy away from knocking favorites like 'Strangers on a Train' and 'Star Wars' ('It is an outrageously successful, what will be called "classic," compilation of nonsense')."
--Christopher Borrelli, The Toledo Blade
"If it wanted to, the Nation could, with some truth, install a plaque on its waiting room wall which read 'Modern Film Reviewing Began Here.' What James Agee wrote in The Nation in the late '40s picked up on what Otis Ferguson wrote in the New Republic a few years earlier and forged the mold for what came after. What this varied and terrific anthology does is show the world how superbly attentive to the movies the magazine has been since the punching of the first sprocket holes. In 1926, they had a piece by Eisenstein, no less. In 1992, they picked up Nora Ephron's town hall discussion of truth and reality and the writing of 'Silkwood.' Sidney Lumet and Oliver Stone make their cases here--Lumet flinching at an anticipated political reaction to 'Prince of the City' that never came, Stone recoiling from a 'JFK' firestorm that did. And with all that, Susan Sontag, Manny Farber, Lincoln Kirstein, Diane DiPrima and, hilariously, Michael Moore and Nelson Algren are part of a first-rate roster of writers about the 20th century's most influential art."
--Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News
About the Authors
Stuart Klawans began writing film reviews for The Nation in 1988. His book Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Awards.
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