Read Instead…in Print

A photo of a good book about cinema or filmmakers. No discursive, pretentious analyses, no verbose scrutiny. Because the idea is to invite you to read the book, not read about it here. But instead of using social media, I use my journal. Back to basics. Take it as a wish to break free of over-reliance on social media (even if it’s just for posting a photo of a good book) for presenting my work, cultural finds and interests. These are things to be enjoyed as stand-alone pieces in a more substantial and meaningful way than showing them in the black hole of Instagram thronged with an audience with a short attention span. This is also a look through my voluminous collection of books about film that I use as research in my adamant decision to rely less and less on the online and more on more on print materials.

Read instead…in print #17.

Just as Martin Scorsese writes on its cover, Nathaniel Rich’s San Francisco Noir “puts you right in the middle of some wonderful movies”. An urban setting is key to many films noir (without a particular placement, a rainy derelict city street lined by tall buildings and lighting poles helps achieve the odd camera angles and deep-focus photography, the nocturnal and shadowy atmosphere, and even the cynical tone of film noir), but what the settings in the films collected here do is even more important than that: they give the story a sense of place. And Nathaniel Rich achieves this really nice balance of content related to the film, scene and location. It’s the kind of writing, not analytical and remote, but personal and engulfing, that immerses the reader in the story, to the point of almost becoming a viewer.