The Novel and the Cinema, by Geoffrey Wagner (Fairleigh Dickinson, 394 pp., $15). Cinema is literate, it partakes of literature, but must it consist of narrative literature? In a study of exquisite depth and stylistic grace, Professor Wagner attempts to answer that question, showing after many breathtaking leaps and turns that as film is the art of a technocracy, it is “ineluctably narrative.” The whys and wherefores of film’s connection with narrative literature consume Wagner’s attention; he takes up a thought of Sir Herbert Read’s—“reduce the art of writing to its fundamentals and you come to this single aim: to convey images by means of words. But to convey images’’—and enlarges upon that, drawing into his weave a stunning array of perceptions and examples to explain what happens to the medium of the written word when translated into that of the visual image. Several of the most memorable films of five decades receive here expert dissections, both as films and as filmed treatments of written works. Wagner is that most sophisticated of writers, for whom how what is being conveyed is more significant than just what is being conveyed. The Novel and the Cinema makes for hard but compelling reading. Its scope is vast. It should grasp the attention of any serious appreciator of the cinema; more than that—which is sufficient in itself—it is (in the non-psychedelic-drug sense) a mind-expanding item, the reading of which should add layers of pleasure to one’s future viewing of the movies discussed and those of their quality that will surely follow. Books about film are every day clogging the shelves of any decent bookstore; decent books about film are everywhere available; great books about film, like Geoffrey Wagner’s, are godsends.
DAVID BRUDNOY
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