The Movie That Changed My Life

Twenty-three writers discuss the films that most influenced them, and share the personal memories each film evokes

These 23 essays by leading writers are not so much reminiscences of "the best movie I ever saw" as an exploration of the diversity of filmgoing experience. For some, a movie provides a "necessary seed" for change--as did Z for Louise Erdrich, by offering a "first view of the world" when she was 13.184, 185 Others, like Russell Banks and Francine Prose, analyze how a film that pleased them as children ( Bambi and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers , respectively) sheds light on gender roles. Phillip Lopate shows how Diary of a Country Priest introduced him to "a habit of mind that I may as well call spiritual, and a mental process suspiciously like meditation."190 Through these epiphanies the book also reflects varieties of the personal essay, all of them revealing, as Joyce Carol Oates notes in her piece about Dracula , that we are "involved in a ceaseless and bemused search for the self we used to be, as if this might be a way of knowing who and what we are now."65 The anthology is eloquent testimony to movies as our most widespread means of examining our images and places in society. Rosenberg is the translator of The Book of J . First serial to Harper's and Mirabella .
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A brilliant idea dullishly done, as Rosenberg (ed., Testimony, 1989; trans., The Book of J, 1990) asks 23 well-known novelists, poets, and literary critics to name their earliest life-changing movie--and then to sit through it again today via videocassette. The job finds many of Rosenberg's contributors recalling the theaters and neighborhoods where the first viewing took place--a theme that gets tiresome. Critic Harold Bloom takes the zany approach, however, choosing W.C. Fields's glorious The Fatal Glass of Beer, a 20-minute short that so knocked him out on first viewing that he had to be carried out of the theater for a drink and missed the main feature. Bloom, of course, recognizes his opportunity to enthuse about ``the aesthetics of outrage'' he finds embodied in the farce and compares Fields's film more than favorably with Titus Andronicus and Gravity's Rainbow. Which hints at a flaw in perhaps half of the contributors, who tend to overblow their themes. Meg Wolitzer, though, does well in recalling Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt as the first picture ever to reveal the confusions of a real adolescent girl faced with a male world, while Joyce Carol Oates on the ``cinematically immortal'' and ``mythopoetic'' figure of Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning's version of Dracula wavers between real feeling and ground-out academicism. Perhaps the most moving single moment in the book is Philip Lopate's description of taking a girlfriend to see Carl Dreyer's Ordet, with its audacious climactic resurrection scene in a which an atheist Danish farmer's dead wife sits up in her coffin and holds out her arms to him: Lopate cries and his girlfriend punches him. ``You see, you can take it in films, but you can't take it in life!'' she says. Other contributors include Jayne Anne Phillips on The Premature Burial, Russell Banks on Bambi, Leonard Michaels on Gilda, and Leslie Epstein on The Devil in Miss Jones. Too heavy-handed, too archetypal by half. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This book's introduction promises a highbrow collection of 23 essays. However, the novelists, poets, and critics who analyze seminal films from their youths deliver often disturbing dissections, and at times discover or conjecture ugly or naive underpinnings in some cherished movies. Doubtless we learn as much about the writers' worldviews as we do of the films. Some of the movies explored in seven categories are Bambi (Russell Banks), Shadow of a Doubt (Meg Wolitzer), The Thing (Clark Blaise), Love Me or Leave Me (Bharati Mukherjee), Z (Louise Erdrich), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Francine Prose), and The Birth of a Nation (David Bradley). Recommended only for large film and popular culture collections.
- Kim Holston, American Inst. for Property and Liability Underwriters, Malvern, Pa.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.