“Of course I’ve been influenced by all the people who were good before me.”
—Thelonious Monk
The two most cherished film books in the pile on my bedside table are in a language my command of which is rudimentary at best. But since both Jacques Lourcelles’ Dictionnaire du Cinéma – Les Films as well as Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Bertrand Tavernier’s 50 ans de cinéma américain have never been translated from French into either English or German, I gladly make do, filling the gaps with a mixture of autodidactic guesswork and occasional dictionary consultation, which for all its drawbacks has proved to be a viable method. These reference works offer riches to be found nowhere else, and are designed to be read in a piecemeal fashion and returned to for stimulating dialogue with their authors’ personal and well-considered assessments rather than skimmed for quick evaluations and then forgotten like so much of today’s on-the-surface, star-rating film culture. The English-language neglect of the Coursodon-Tavernier tome (nearly 1,300 pages in its revised 1995 edition) seems almost perverse: I am hardly alone in considering it the most useful reference work concerning Hollywood, which makes it all the more grating that it never got translated into the language of the films it is about. (Its only translation is into Spanish.)
This may have been a symptom of one of the more unpleasant side effects of cinephilia that Tavernier, as both a director and a certified film buff, steadfastly refused to take part in right up to his death from pancreatitis this March, one month shy of his 80th birthday: the recourse to polemics that drives, or at least has driven, much of film criticism, and been vital to the writing of film history in ways both negative and positive. Even as one can comprehend the motivations (some better than others) behind the battles waged between different strands of film culture, in retrospect they have often obscured the films themselves, cloaking the merits not only of those that were dismissed as enemies of “true” cinema, but sometimes also of those that were championed at a certain time (and with certain ulterior motives). While the controversy around the works themselves is dated and only of historical interest in retrospect, by taking a second, unbiased look one often finds that many once-maligned films hold up surprisingly well. When dealing with film history, which he did extensively and in ways
