Hollywood's America Book

While it is something of a landmark text for film criticism, blending a Marxist socio-psychoanalytical approach that was novel at the time, the book is also a cumbersome collection of jargon and phraseology that weighs its own arguments down. By far, its best chapters are the analyses of Blonde Venus and The Birds. That said, I've often thought that Nichols and those like him live in a world of academic criticism that simply has no connection to or knowledge of filmmaking per se. His assumptions work better at the level of the story and the script but not with the final product of the completed film. This book and similar sorts are one reason I think that anyone publishing on films should first be required to make a film, even if it is only a five minute short. "Images" are less frequently driven by political and psychological motivations than they are by what is available, what makes a sequence fit, a scene work. Films are not so conspiratorial as Nichols thinks, either consciously or unconsciously, either driven by the confines of the system under which the produced or in reaction to that system. Some things he writes are just nonsense uttered by a man without a camera.