Film & Art (review)

Book Reviews | Regular Feature scholars. There can be no criticism made against their quality of work. The essays are, however, written for a specialized audience who need to be familiar with scholarly language and the field of cultural studies. This book was not written for general readers. That said, the book is clearly a professional effort and it makes an important contribution to a topic that has been an enduring aspect of film and popular culture. Michael Strada West Liberty State College and West Virginia University mjstrada@cs.com Bruce H. Hinrichs. Film & Art Press Publishing, 1999. 172 pages, $16.95, paperback. Eclectic and Bold As an introduction to the basic concepts of motion pictures , Bruce Hinrichs' Film & Art works very well. The author wants the movie novitiate to experience "being mentally on the inside versus being an outside observer," which his clear prose and verbal economy make highly accessible. Hinrichs' top skill consists of synthesizing vast information, as well as wise insights , palatably for those not yet among film's true believers. While few authors choose to cross the lines separating the historical , the technical, and the aesthetic approaches to cinema studies, Hinrichs is eclectic and bold enough to do so. Memorable quotations are sprinkled throughout the text, which also should help to hook neophytes willing to think more complexly about films. Pablo Picasso's resonant statement that "Art is the lie that tells the truth," is used effectively to open a chapter on assessing the meaning of films. Readers whose cinematic paradigm derives from standard Hollywood fare will benefit from Professor Hinrichs' dissection of the tension inherent in each of these dichotomies: commerce versus art, movies versus films, and foreign versus U.S. films. With key terms in bold type, then defined concisely in an appendix, student readers should feel emboldened to employ useful words like "oeuvre," "shot," and "montage." The films he discusses are well chosen and broad enough to appeal to a varied readership. The appendices providelogistical supportby capsulizing FilmHistory, Movements in Art, Key American Films, Important Foreign Films, a Glossary, and Bibliography. This solid contribution, however, does manage to disappoint on two scores: 1) in its brevity; and, 2) in its redundancy. The first three chapters make up one-third of the book, "Thinking About Film," but are skimmed over in only 17 pages. Chapter three deals with "Analyzing Films," and covers film theories, themes, and styles. But these essential concepts could have been fleshed out more palpably with many more cinematic illustrations . The book weighs in at only 131 pages oftext, which seems inadequate for such a perennially vital subject of controversy. Hinrichs exhibits little faith in the attention span of his reader. Concerning redundancy, repetitiveness reigns when the reader is exposed to essentially the same film history three times, as well as three doses of the major artistic movements (such as Realism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Existentialism). Counter-intuitive as it may appear on the surface, brevity and redundancy do seem to peacefully coexist here. The title of this book, Film & Art, can be interpreted as revealing something about the author, who teaches psychology courses, film studies courses, and also works as a professional artist, with his works exhibited regularly. Such trifurcated roles suggest compartmentalization: social science scholarship (psychology professor); humanities scholarship (film studies professor ); the fine arts (performing artist). This division oflabor may help to account for why Hinrichs has chosen to examine Film & Art(as two parallel, butfundamentally separate endeavors), rather than Film as Art (which would have explored the relationship between film and art more symbiotically). Surely other interesting links between film and other artforms could have been forged by an author with such rich personal resources to draw upon. Film & Art should find its place as an incisive introduction to film studies. That is, as a textbook. However, no explicit raison d'être appears in this book. On the one hand, it professes textbook-like objectivity regarding the key question it raises: "Is film an art?" It even divides the "pro" and "con" perspectives on this issue into discreet chapters (9 and 10). But the neutrality is only skin deep, as Hinrichs passionately lambastes the way film has evolved. The chapter arguing that film is...