Sure Seaters: The Emergence of the Art House Cinema (review)

Book Reviews | Regular Feature reference glossary would have been helpful. I am also disturbed that the quantity of information contained in each chapter is going to deter the lay reader from appreciating the author's message . I agree that there is an urgent need to preserve all film footage for future generations to appreciate and enjoy, but to activate the public you need to keep your reader absorbed. I understood the message and the urgency, but this book is written more with the professional in mind than the lay film enthusiast. I would recommend that since a decade has passed since Anthony Sfide wrote Nitrate Won't Wait, there is a serious need for anupdate. The update should be directed at the general public because aroused, they can rally to the cause. The book's appendices are valuable compendiums, but after ten years need revision. Issuing the book as a paperback eight years after its original publication brings potentially dated information to the public, but at a more affordable price. The reader might incorrectly assume that sufficient action has now been taken. This diminishes Slide's sense ofurgency recorded in each chapter of the book. I did feel that Slide offered serious issues in 1992, that still need resolution and, therefore, I want a progress report. How long does preservation of a film last? What are the archival standards and who sets them? Are film companies and archives entering a more cooperative phase and raising the necessary funds together? How are films selected forpreservation and storage? Ifboth nitrate and safety decompose, what new alternatives are there now? Is there aprofessionally trained staffofarchivists to oversee these activities ? Should the process offilm preservation and restoration be centralized in a government agency, private companies, or both? Anthony Slide offers a model ofcooperation for filmpreservation and restoration in Scandinavia. He makes good points about the smooth efforts among four countries that we cannot achieve as one! The author also provides an example, the film The Saga ofAnatahan, to illustrate the process of preservation and restoration. This is a good book but for professionals and now dated. Nitrate Won't Wait is a hot topic. I am concerned that the age of the content and the quantity of detail may be throwing cold water on a nationally important issue. William Paquette Tidewater Community College tcpaquw@tc.cc.va.us" Barbara Wilinsky. Sure Seaters: The Emergence of the Art House Cinema. University of Minnesota, 2001. 179 pages; $18.95 paper. Not Mainstream BarbaraWilinsky's Sure Seaters is a book ostensibly dedicated to the renewed interest in the urban art house cinema in the years immediately following the Second World War. In the text, Wilinsky investigates the surge in the production of primarily (but not exclusively) foreign art films and their increasing distribution and exhibition within the United States. The author also chronicles the efforts of art house managers and owners who sought to distance themselves from mainstream Hollywood film exhibitors by transforming their cinemas into places of sophistication and high culture. Referring to these transformations, Wilinsky quotes the general manager of a chain ofNewYork City theaters, speaking in 1947 of his art house remodeling plan, as saying: "the manager will be a man of culture, with some knowledge of letters, music, and art; he will wear slacks and sport jackets and will smoke a pipe. We plan to change the name of the theatre, add a music and game room; one large foyer will become an art gallery in which we'll show the finest contemporary art. We're also going to try some special new services. And, who knows, maybe it will work. We believe it will." Although the subtitle and the introductory pages of Sure Seaters explicitly state that the object of analysis for the book project is "the emergence ofthe art house cinema," the text itself proves to be less about the exhibitors who showed art films in art houses and more generally about the heightened interest in the art film itself during the postwar years. In the first chapter, "Reading for Maximum Ambiguity," Barbara Wilinsky details the often slippery definition of"art cinema," a term whose meaning changes depending upon to whom...