|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Hollywood Gothic
| Article
# : |
18638 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
1,973 Words |
| Author
: |
Mark Schaffer
Mark Schaffer, who lives in Washington, D.C., writes
frequently on fiction and popular culture. He is the coeditor
of the forthcoming More Office Humor and is currently working
on a book about the Warner Brothers television studios of the
fifties. |
FLICKER
Theodore Roszak
Simon & Schuster, 1991
592 pp., $ 19.95
What are "the movies?" Mild diversions from our humdrum, mundane lives? Something to do on a Saturday night? Dazzling imaginative flight and dramatic sagas that have the power of ancient myth over us? Perhaps they're all of those. And perhaps, as Theodore Roszak speculates in his latest fictional outing, the movies are much, much more than we have ever conceived. For, when we gather like tribesmen of yore in those dark caverns, buttered popcorn at the ready, we may be participating in events the outlines of which we can barely discern. One thing is certain: Those reading Flicker, Roszak's wildly imaginative and haunting tale of one man's search for the story behind the story of the movies, will do well to consider the trite term "magic of the movies" in a harsh new light.
Flicker is many things: a loving tribute to the heady art film era of the fifties; a maddening mystery adventure into the prehistory of cinema; a globe-trotting, sexual smorgasbord; and an incredible piece of historical scholarship, which, if based on fact, should make us all think long and hard on the prospect before us. Spanning twenty years, Roszak's story centers on the education of Jonathan Gates, a young film student at UCLA who becomes enamored of the allure of the first fresh wave of foreign postwar cinema that saw life in America in the late fifties. Stoking his adolescent lust on neorealist earth mothers like Anna Magnani and Sylvano Mangano, Jonathan slowly drifts into the murky world of the art house film buff. Roszak has painted a lovely reminiscence of a lost epoch of the recent past, when black-clad hip young men and women would gather in dank basements to unspool the latest European treasure just arrived--perhaps a new Rossellini or an unseen Fritz Lang silent. Then to the coffeehouse to endlessly argue camera angles and pacing over bad espresso, then to bed with the night's companion. Daring at the time, our jaded decade makes Roszak's charming tableaus seem innocent; a time when film seemed to open up possibilities that no other art could.
This bohemian universe becomes Jonathan's world, as he begins to spend more and more time in the innards of "The Classic," the funky little hole in the wall movie den run by an odd twosome who will play major roles in his young life. Clare Swann, the brilliant, intense film lover and scholar who serves as Jonathan's erotic mentor and film illuminator, becomes his avenue to both undreamt of
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
