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Contemporary Cinema JOHN ORR, 1988
Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 14.95 (pbk), 243 pp. ISBN 0-7486-0836-2
Contemporary Cinema by John Orr begins with the opening foreword; `To encompass the infinity of contemporary cinema is an impossible task. To ignore its prehistory is the height of naivety' [Foreword, page ix].
However, the author manages to encompass a comprehensive study of contemporary cinema from the 1960s to the present day, with seemingly effortless ease in this book, and in so doing makes no attempt to ignore the prehistory. The book is founded on Pasolini's doctrine of the `Cinema of Poetry' (page 3). The research that has gone into this book is outstanding and would encompass several normal lifetimes and hundreds of hours film watching.
The book is divided into eight chapters which takes the reader on a cinematic journey from Pier Paolo Pasolini's enduring case for the `Cinema of Poetry' with `The Red Desert' to John Dahl's cyanide 1990s Noir `The Last Seduction'.
The chapter headings are cryptic clues to the mysteries of the cinema that have never been fully solved, and may never be so. What this book does wonderfully is draw upon a huge pool of contemporary cinema, and...