2021 was one of the best years for books about film in recent memory, a statement I make with no self-interest whatsoever. As noted in our holiday gift guide, the year yielded must-have explorations of genre cinema, behind-the-scenes exposés, and book-length celebrations of filmmakers like David Fincher, Spike Lee, and Gus Van Sant; if you’re paying any attention at all, your to-read stack (or your Wishlist) is piled high already.
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But the publishing industry doesn’t slow down for you to catch up, and the spring promises three exciting new books for cinephiles, from three of our favorite writers. Slate film critic and “Culture Gabfest” co-host Dana Stevens’ affection for Buster Keaton is no secret to her readers; she takes her Twitter handle (and the name of her now defunct blog) from the silent comedian’s first solo short film, “The High Sign.” But her new book “Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the 20th Century” (Atria Books, January 25), is more than merely a Buster biography (wise, since there are plenty of them).
Stevens instead begins her exploration of his life and work with one key fact: he was born in 1895, the same year the Lumiére Brothers held the first public screening of motion pictures. In other words, Buster Keaton and the movies were born at roughly the same time, and they came of age together. “More and more,” she writes, “I became convinced that to understand his life was to understand the history of that medium’s first century.” But those aren’t the only parallels Stevens’ smart prose forges; she draws copious connections between his art and American life in general, tracking the overwhelming changes in technology, politics, social mores, and parenthood.
Such games of connect-the-dots can be tricky, particularly at book length; if the connections are too tenuous, the text falls apart. But “Camera Man” moves like the General; it’s a runaway train of a volume, energetic and joyful, bursting not only with historical and biographical context, but with the author’s palpable love of the subject. Her joy is infectious.
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If “Camera Man” shakes up the conventions of the biography by viewing them through the lens of history, Isaac Butler’s “The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act” (Bloomsbury, February 1) does the reverse: it’s a cultural history reconfigured as a biography. Method acting may not be a person, to be sure, but as Butler writes, “the Method had parents, obscure beginnings, fumblings toward its purpose, a spectacular rise, struggles as it reached the top, and an eventual decline. Some people even claim that it is dead.”
It is not, of course – but, far worse, it is misunderstood. “He/she is a Method actor” (usually he) is trotted out as an excuse for all kinds of bad behavior, from the obnoxious to the abusive, on stage and screen; it is, conversely, often used to explain away great acting, as if it were some kind of magical elixir that renders the actor credible, connected, and in the moment. Butler goes back to the origins of the Method, to the “system” developed by Russian actor Konstantin Stanislavski as a stark contrast to the type of ham-fisted presentational acting that was far more common before the 20th century.
Butler’s ingenious approach allows him to track not only the history of Method acting, but of theater and television in their golden eras – as so many of the greatest of our actors and directors practiced the ideas and ideology of the Method, or at least brushed up against them. And track that history he does; this is an exhaustively researched and meticulously sourced volume, yet it never crushes under the weight of its material. It’s an engaging and informed read.
“The Age of Cage: Four Decades of Hollywood Through One Singular Career” (Henry Holt & Co., March 29), by former AV Club editor and Dissolve co-founder Keith Phipps, is a similarly biography-but-not affair. The subject here is Nicolas Cage, but Phipps isn’t terribly interested in Cage’s personal life, his marriages, and other tabloid fodder – or at least not interested unless they intersect with, and affect, his work. The “unusual and divisive actor,” Phipps writes, “has appeared in virtually every sort of movie made over the last four decades, from sweet romantic comedies to assaultive action films, while at almost every point staying true to his artistic impulses, strange as they sometimes seemed.”
That last clause is typical of Phipps’ droll voice, a bit of an understatement, and “The Age of Cage” is a survey of a career that has often been defined by friction, counterintuitive instincts, and purposeful subversion, to say nothing of earth-shifting changes in the industry. This is a comprehensive work – the essentials are covered, but so are the throwaways, both in the main body of the book and the chronological collection of starred capsule reviews at its conclusion. The author’s style is both thoughtfully analytical and breezily conversational, lifting “Age of Cage” from the typical entertainment biography into an absorbing contemplation of what it means to be a movie star.
