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Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster ReviewWarren Buckland's "Directed by Steven Spielberg" is a welcome addition to the growing shelf of books that take a serious look at the films of Spielberg. His approach is to do a deep analysis of Spielberg's visual style, and he comes up with some fascinating results. It's no news to me that Spielberg's movies are way smarter than a lot of people tend to assume, but Buckland makes a good case for "Jurassic Park," which I'd previously considered to be one of the lesser movies in his career. Buckland is similarly insightful on the subjects of the rest of the movies he covers.
However, I have reservations about certain aspects of the book. For one thing, it's a dry, dry, dry read. This is acdemic writing, and frankly, academics don't know how to write nine times out of ten. Buckland is great at analysis; he's less good at presenting his analysis. Therefore, unless you're a pretty serious Spielberg fan (or a serious film-school student), you're likely to have a hard time making it through some sections of this book.
Secondly, Buckland's concentration on Spielberg's visuals lapses in certain places. Whenever he begins discussing elements of Spielberg's films that he doesn't like, Buckland almost immediately shifts away from visual analysis and toward more traditional criticisms of plot and character, etc. These are quite possibly valid critical arguments, but they are a betrayal of Buckland's intent in writing the book. And quite frankly, a visual analysis of some of these sections might have been useful, even revelatory.
Another issue is with Buckland's analysis of "Poltergeist." He takes a statistical analysis -- a fascinating one, in fact -- of the movie in order to determine who "really" directed the movie. (If you weren't aware, it has long been a Hollywood controversy over whether credited director Tobe Hooper was in fact just a patsy for Spielberg, who has been rumored to have actually done most of the directing himself.) Buckland's findings, surprising even to himself, is that while Spielberg obviously wielded some influence, Hooper was also extremely active in the movie's visuals. This is great stuff, but it seems to settle the controversy in favor of Hooper, and fails utterly to take into account the fact that Spielberg wrote the film (he's credited with "story by," but did an uncredited full rewrite of the final draft of the screenplay). Whether or not he physically directed it, it's a Spielberg movie. To be fair, this is a problem with film criticism at large; the writer of the film is often ignored, and ought not be.
Finally, at the end, there are short analyses of several Spielberg movies not covered in full. One of these is "A.I.," and Buckland opts not to approach the movie's visuals at all. Instead, he offers up the analysis that the majority of the movie is a dream sequence from the point of view of the sick child, sleeping within the cryogenic chamber. This analysis is so poor, so entirely off-base, that it's hard to believe I'm supposed to take it seriously. It's so wrong-headed, in fact, that it calls Buckland's overall credibility somewhat into question. This is a problem coming at the end of an otherwise solid book.
Don't let these problems put you off from buying it if you're a serious Spielberg fan, though. There is a lot to like and appreciate here.
Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster OverviewAlthough the blockbuster is the most popular and commercially successful type of filmmaking, it has yet to be studied seriously from a formalist standpoint. This is in opposition to classical Hollywood cinema and International Art cinema, whose form has been analyzed and deconstructed in great detail. Directed By Steven Spielberg fills this gap by examining the distinctive form of the blockbuster. The book focuses on Spielberg's blockbusters, because he is the most consistent and successful director of this type of film - he defines the standard by which other Hollywood blockbusters are judged and compared. But how did Spielberg attain this position? Film critics and scholars generally agree that Spielberg's blockbusters have a unique look and use visual storytelling techniques to their utmost effectiveness. In this book, Warren Buckland examines Spielberg's distinct manipulation of film form, and his singular use of stylistic and narrative techniques. The book demonstrates the aesthetic options available to Spielberg, and particularly the choices he makes in structuring his blockbusters. Buckland emphasizes the director's activity in making a film (particularly such a powerful director as Spielberg), including: visualizing the scene on paper via storyboards; staging and blocking the scene; selecting camera placement and movement; determining the progression or flow of the film from shot to shot; and deciding how to narrate the story to the spectator.Directed By Steven Spielberg combines film studies scholarship with the approach taken by many filmmaking manuals. The unique value of the book lies in its grounding of formal film analysis in filmmaking.
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