Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema (review)

Book Reviews | Regular Feature tions. Thus, he takes some famous Gallic-American pairings, or clusters, such as Pepe le Moko (1937) and Algiers (1938), or A bout de souffle (1960) and Breathless (1983), and tells us who made them and why, what the plots are, what interesting differences they display, which version is the most successful and, well, that's it really: next chapter please, and let's do it all again. Bobbing on a sea of disconnected comment, the reader is forced to grasp for coherent meaning in the professor's incidental perceptions , or off the cuff thoughts, not that either of these help much, because he isn't dedicated to the great Johnsonian principle of turning opinions into knowledge. For example, we get rather too many orotund passages like this, which is a discussion ofhow "time has been kinder" to Pepe, and not so sweet to Algiers: "This may be due in part to the fact that its [the French film's] spectators, both here and in France, are more likely to be analysts—over here, because the audience for old French movies is limited and self-selecting; in France, perhaps because artifacts tend to age less quickly. In our culture, 'old' can easily acquire negative connotations; 'old' in other countries may be venerable or interesting." This isjust a flatulent way of saying that the non-art house American is about as culturally clued-up as the Beverly Hillbillies, while the French are a superrace ofBelmondos or Moreaus who canrecite the whole ofTartuffe as easily as stubbing out a Gauloise. Grossvogel has an unhappy genius for these major banalities and minor snobberies; he worries away at them while he remains oblivious of more pressing issues. You will look in vain here for any consideration of precisely why Hollywood has remade so many French films since the beginning of the sound era (over sixty), or how national cultures express themselves through the medium offilm and the economic, political and industrial factors that inform it. After a while, the whole exercise seems pointless , and so we find ourselves back with the sage of Bloomsbury: why this muddle, this mystery? The answer, like a last-minute cavalry charge, comes trumpeting to the rescue in the final pages. Here, the good professor is winding up his amiable little tour by contrasting Luc Besson's original La FemmeNikita (1990) with its American doppelganger, Point of No Return/The Assassin (1993). Having noted that Besson's film is anAmerican-influenced action story with all the flashiness that the term implies, Grossvogel points out that it nevertheless retains a complexity of characterization that the American remake, where the people are subservient to the plot and the general bang-bang, lacks. Now, at last, the man from Goldwin Smith comes clean. His voice rising by a note, he goes on to argue that, in essence, American films are crude; traditionally dedicated to "a narrative seen from the outside," and therefore lacking introspection; they are becoming an increasingly dehumanized scramble for sensation where "the less shockable the spectator, the greater the stimulus." In other words, this is not so much a comparative study as a jeremiad against tendencies in mass culture. It is a crying shame that Grossvogel didn't start with this point and then work through its implications for the rest of the book. After all, a belief in value and art in these postmodernist times is a mighty hard thing to read about: Mazdon, by contrast, is a fully paid-up member of the bricolage gang; it would have been useful to have another, Arnoldian, perspective balancing hers. As it is, this study is a lost opportunity. The real mystery—and it is a mystery, not a muddle—is that the publishers were prepared to issue it in such a scrappy and ill-considered state. David Lancaster University of Leeds dlancaster@icsserver.novell.leeds.ac.uk Chon A. Noriega. Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise ofChicano Cinema. University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 328 pages; $19.95 paper. Grossly Underrepresented In 1969, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigated hiring discrimination in the motion picture industry and the radio and television...