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Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media
Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton
Collects all published film criticism by Andrew Britton, a singular voice in film studies whose promising career was cut short by his untimely death.
533 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2008
About the author
Barry Keith Grant
74 books7 followersBarry Keith Grant is Professor in the Department of Communications, Popular Culture, and Film at Brock University. He is the author or editor of many books, including 100 Science Fiction Films, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and four editions of Film Genre Reader.
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September 17, 2022I have claimed here on Goodreads to have read this book. That is largely a lie. I have read parts of the book and I believe that I will continue reading more of it. But I know that I won't finish it - not because it is so long and not because it is so uninteresting. It is...well, read a brief selection, please:
"Jargon" aside, this is the exact tone of the literary gentleman recoiling from the horrors of "Technologico-Benthamite Society," down to the very vocabulary ("the organic community") and the aside about bingo halls and football matches; though, one should add, the nearest analogy is not so much Leavis, who has a highly, if inaccurately, developed sense of social dialectic, as Eliot/Sir James George Frazer refurbished with the idealism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Clearly, psychoanalysis supplies the requisite re-saturation of the superego and, in the predictable form - doctrinal, hierarchical, absolute - the religious paradigm. The persona which Lacan has so assiduously developed is that of le maître, the shaman (see Lévi-Strauss's remarks on shamanism and psychoanalysis in Structural Anthropology), the Parisian reincarnation of the holy man of those "traditional societies" where persons who have gained access to the mysteries can count on receiving the proper respect.
The golden age pastoral of Lacan's myth of origins obtains much of its force in this context. As anthroplogy, it is somewhat more than absurd, but as an Edenic fantasy, which Lacan's language openly celebrates, it is indispensable. It describes a state in which "the life of natural groups" is governed by a set of perfectly congruent acts of exchange which correspond to "the laws of number" (Ecrits, 276-77, italics mine), a state in which mathematics mediates the synthesis of Nature and Culture, and which is ratified by "the Word." This sublime "harmony" has now, alas, been lost, and we are left today in a "social hell," cursed by that "isolation of the soul" which is the cost of individuality. "The cosmic polarity of the male and female principles," nicely catered to by the kinship system, has been "abolished" and we can see the "social consequences in failure and crime" (unspecified), which are entirely attributable to subjective dysfunctions in "man." (Ecrits, 123-24) The vaporization of a set of nonexistent "forms and keepings," the ostentatious refusal of historical specificity, the belief in therapy and in the therapist as priest of the Word, the fear of the collapse of cosmic principles - the conjunction is certainly familiar, though never before under the name of Marxism.
I frankly do not understand much of this. I do not think that this is the kind of pseudo-academic gobbledygook that frequently makes its way into books about film. I suspect that it would make sense, if I were both more intelligent and better educated. However, I am not, and this reminds me of the (calculated) babblings of the late Irwin Corey - but his were intended to be incomprehensible.
One of the first pages in the book states that:
Andrew Britton was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, in the United Kingdom in April 1952. He graduated in 1974 with a first-class degree in English and American Literature from King's College, London, and went on to study as a postgraduate at the University of Warwick with noted film critic Robin Wood.
Britton went on to teach at universities in England and Canada. He contributed work to periodicals and books about film as well as publishing books of his own. He died in April, 1994, still in his early forties.
The passage in bold print that I quoted above is from a section of the fourth chapter of the book, "Film and Cultural Theory." That is the most complex (and the last) section of the book. The first three chapters were more of what one might expect in a book about film: "Part One: Hollywood Cinema"; "Part Two: Hollywood Movies"; and "Part Three: European Cinema." The "Hollywood Movies" section deals with specific films: Meet Me in St. Louis, Spellbound, Detour, Pursued, The Reckless Moment, The Lady from Shanghai, The Exorcist, Jaws, Mandingo, 10, The Great Waldo Pepper, and The Other Side of Midnight This was the part of the book that was of most interest to me. I have seen only eight of these, all but one so long ago that I do not remember them in detail. The one that I watched recently was Pursued; Britton found this of considerably more significance than I did. (We also differed greatly in what we thought about specific aspects of it.)
The discussion that was the most surprising to me was of Mandingo, a film about life in the antebellum South of the United States. Much of this is concerned with slavery. I had always thought of this film as probably being of little value. Britton raves about it. I suppose that I should try to see if I agree.
I must point out that this was not written as a book. It consists of a number of articles from various journals. It was edited by Barry Keith Grant. The introduction is by Robin Wood, who states that "Andrew Britton was, and remains, quite simply, the greatest film critic in the English language."
There are a few photographs, all movie stills, scattered through the book. The cover photograph shows Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman from the very fine film Notorious, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
I have not read enough of Britton on Film to give it a rating.
I do not mean to be dismissive about this book. There is a comment on the back cover from a film professor, Christopher Sharrett, with which I agree, stating that Britton's "film criticism is distinguished by its keen intelligence, profound erudition, and consistent seriousness." Britton is not one of the film critics whose work I most enjoy reading, but clearly he was very bright and, perhaps more importantly, he loved films.
"Jargon" aside, this is the exact tone of the literary gentleman recoiling from the horrors of "Technologico-Benthamite Society," down to the very vocabulary ("the organic community") and the aside about bingo halls and football matches; though, one should add, the nearest analogy is not so much Leavis, who has a highly, if inaccurately, developed sense of social dialectic, as Eliot/Sir James George Frazer refurbished with the idealism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Clearly, psychoanalysis supplies the requisite re-saturation of the superego and, in the predictable form - doctrinal, hierarchical, absolute - the religious paradigm. The persona which Lacan has so assiduously developed is that of le maître, the shaman (see Lévi-Strauss's remarks on shamanism and psychoanalysis in Structural Anthropology), the Parisian reincarnation of the holy man of those "traditional societies" where persons who have gained access to the mysteries can count on receiving the proper respect.
The golden age pastoral of Lacan's myth of origins obtains much of its force in this context. As anthroplogy, it is somewhat more than absurd, but as an Edenic fantasy, which Lacan's language openly celebrates, it is indispensable. It describes a state in which "the life of natural groups" is governed by a set of perfectly congruent acts of exchange which correspond to "the laws of number" (Ecrits, 276-77, italics mine), a state in which mathematics mediates the synthesis of Nature and Culture, and which is ratified by "the Word." This sublime "harmony" has now, alas, been lost, and we are left today in a "social hell," cursed by that "isolation of the soul" which is the cost of individuality. "The cosmic polarity of the male and female principles," nicely catered to by the kinship system, has been "abolished" and we can see the "social consequences in failure and crime" (unspecified), which are entirely attributable to subjective dysfunctions in "man." (Ecrits, 123-24) The vaporization of a set of nonexistent "forms and keepings," the ostentatious refusal of historical specificity, the belief in therapy and in the therapist as priest of the Word, the fear of the collapse of cosmic principles - the conjunction is certainly familiar, though never before under the name of Marxism.
I frankly do not understand much of this. I do not think that this is the kind of pseudo-academic gobbledygook that frequently makes its way into books about film. I suspect that it would make sense, if I were both more intelligent and better educated. However, I am not, and this reminds me of the (calculated) babblings of the late Irwin Corey - but his were intended to be incomprehensible.
One of the first pages in the book states that:
Andrew Britton was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, in the United Kingdom in April 1952. He graduated in 1974 with a first-class degree in English and American Literature from King's College, London, and went on to study as a postgraduate at the University of Warwick with noted film critic Robin Wood.
Britton went on to teach at universities in England and Canada. He contributed work to periodicals and books about film as well as publishing books of his own. He died in April, 1994, still in his early forties.
The passage in bold print that I quoted above is from a section of the fourth chapter of the book, "Film and Cultural Theory." That is the most complex (and the last) section of the book. The first three chapters were more of what one might expect in a book about film: "Part One: Hollywood Cinema"; "Part Two: Hollywood Movies"; and "Part Three: European Cinema." The "Hollywood Movies" section deals with specific films: Meet Me in St. Louis, Spellbound, Detour, Pursued, The Reckless Moment, The Lady from Shanghai, The Exorcist, Jaws, Mandingo, 10, The Great Waldo Pepper, and The Other Side of Midnight This was the part of the book that was of most interest to me. I have seen only eight of these, all but one so long ago that I do not remember them in detail. The one that I watched recently was Pursued; Britton found this of considerably more significance than I did. (We also differed greatly in what we thought about specific aspects of it.)
The discussion that was the most surprising to me was of Mandingo, a film about life in the antebellum South of the United States. Much of this is concerned with slavery. I had always thought of this film as probably being of little value. Britton raves about it. I suppose that I should try to see if I agree.
I must point out that this was not written as a book. It consists of a number of articles from various journals. It was edited by Barry Keith Grant. The introduction is by Robin Wood, who states that "Andrew Britton was, and remains, quite simply, the greatest film critic in the English language."
There are a few photographs, all movie stills, scattered through the book. The cover photograph shows Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman from the very fine film Notorious, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
I have not read enough of Britton on Film to give it a rating.
I do not mean to be dismissive about this book. There is a comment on the back cover from a film professor, Christopher Sharrett, with which I agree, stating that Britton's "film criticism is distinguished by its keen intelligence, profound erudition, and consistent seriousness." Britton is not one of the film critics whose work I most enjoy reading, but clearly he was very bright and, perhaps more importantly, he loved films.
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