A Family Affair: Cinema Calls Home
2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: 51; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/screen/hjp044
ISSN1460-2474
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoPomerance's edited anthology is a book about the family in largely, but not exclusively, recent Hollywood films. However, in neither its title nor in the first lines of its introduction is the focus on Hollywood made explicit, which is indicative of the book's pervasive attitude towards Hollywood's traits and values as somehow more universal than they are. This is a large anthology, so to make it more manageable the chapters are grouped under three subheadings: ‘Family, Genre, Auteur’; ‘Politics, Family, Society’; ‘Troubles, Dreams, Family’. The last grouping is a bit of a ragbag of chapters that do not really fit elsewhere. Jerry Mosher's entertaining discussion of Burl Ives, size and patriarchal power is set alongside Nathan Holmes on screen teens and suburbia and Adrienne L. McLean on 1950s fan magazines' depictions of stars and their families, which means that Mosher's illuminating discussion of Ives's ‘big daddy’ persona is lost in a collection largely uninterested in the quirkier fringes of families on film. A Family Affair, though it undoubtedly contains some immensely worthwhile contributions, is too sprawling to be a curate's egg – which always suggests something rather more neatly flawed – and too inconsistent to be enduring. William Rothman's chapter on the family in Hitchcock is unfocused and odd (dwelling too long in a chapter purportedly about the family on the director's supposed fixation on Ingrid Bergman); and how Wheeler Winston Dixon can still be arguing that It's A Wonderful Life is ‘a sentimental Christmas film’ (p. 13) is beyond me. By contrast, there are contributions that are both entertaining and enlightening, such as Lucy Fischer's essay on Imitation of Life and All I Desire, an exemplary lesson in how to identify a narrative motif (the actress mother as a vehicle for examining the tensions between motherhood and work) and broaden it out into a satisfying argument about a filmmaker's style.
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