9 of the best… books about filmgoing
If you’re seeking a late gift for the bibliophile film nerd in your life, I’ve enjoyed three books this year that might be up their street. Some academic and older options are also included.
Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova (Atlantic Books, 2022)
The Paradise is a battered, beautiful old picturehouse in Edinburgh, and anyone familiar with the city may recognise parts of it. The author worked in the Cameo as an usher when she first arrived in the city, and captures the foibles of the audience regulars and the ‘basically unemployable freaks’ on the staff. When the owner dies and the place is taken over by a chain, the novel stirs in corporate satire along with gothic horror.
Final Cut by Charles Burns (Jonathan Cape, 2024)
Emerging after a long period of writer’s block, this beautifully illustrated book draws on its author’s own Seattle adolescence to tell the story of a group of friends shooting a super 8 movie in the mountains. Storyboarding the action is Brian, a depressed movie-mad illustrator with an alcoholic mother and a growing infatuation with his star, Laurie. There’s an attempt to break through his solipsism by giving parts of the narrative to Laurie, but it’s clear where Burns’ interest lies.
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky (Fitzcarraldo, 2024)
A mostly autobiographical account of the author’s decision to resurrect the Alkotmány Mozi in the rural south-east of Hungary – ‘a decaying cinema in a half-abandoned village.’ Alongside tender attention to the venue and its ghosts, and the locals she encounters, there are broader reflections on filmgoing and how watching in the dark ‘expands the world and stretches time.’ Last year Fitzcarraldo also published Jeremy Cooper’s Brian, a portrait of a council employee who escapes his traumatic past in the cinema. Zadie Smith is apparently trying to adapt it for the screen.
3 academic picks
Probably too pricey for a casual purchase, but worth hunting down if you have access to a university library or login.
Picturegoers edited by Luke McKernan (University of Exeter Press, 2022)
Wonderful anthology of eye-witness accounts of the communal film experience, encompassing everything from Barthes and Calvino to Schwarzenegger and Mandela. Particularly good on the silent era, and you can get a flavour of the book from McKernan’s Picturegoing blog.
House Full: Indian Cinema and the Active Audience by Lakshmi Srinivas (University of Chicago Press, 2016)
In her ‘immersive ethnography of film reception’, Srinivas draws on fieldwork in the Bangalore movie houses of her youth to argue that different cultures enjoy cinema in very different ways. Does the Eurocentric model of the individual film spectator risk ignoring the importance of the group experience?
An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory by Annette Kuhn (Bloomsbury, 2002)
Both of the above – and our own Wonderland project – owe a debt to this pioneering study, which uses oral histories to build up a rich and complex picture of British filmgoing in the 1930s.
3 older picks
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (Vintage, 1970)
Morrison’s debut novel is a brutal, lyrical depiction of the self-hatred forged by racism. Moviegoing only appears peripherally, but Hollywood-made beauty standards loom large throughout. ’She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen.’
The Witnesses Are Gone by Joel Lane (Influx, 2009)
The work of Birmingham writer Joel Lane has enjoyed a recent surge of interest thanks to Influx’s excellent reissues. Lane was a keen cinephile, as is clear from this tale of a doomed quest for a lost film sparked by the discovery of a decaying videotape in a shed in Tyseley. Includes a cameo for the 1990s incarnation of the Electric Cinema.
The Accidental by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton, 2005)
A novel about a mysterious stranger who turns a family upside down, The Accidental owes a clear debt to Pasolini’s Theorem. Smith’s father was an electrician who worked on Scottish picturehouses, and the central character is named Alhambra after the site of her conception. ‘My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the cafe of the town’s only cinema.’