Faber Editor's Suite: Article #1

By Richard T. Kelly

By way of introduction to the Faber page within FilmInFocus, Faber book editor Richard T. Kelly looks back over the history of the company's publishing on cinema and looks forward to how that lineage of essential movie writing will now be extended through Film in Focus.

Who famously proposed that writing about music was as useful as tap-dancing about architecture? I've long believed it was Frank Zappa, though a quick browse around the Web yields a few claims for Laurie Anderson. (Like a lot of people these days, I do a fair bit of so-called 'fact-checking' online; it's a vulnerable process, and as someone in the publishing business I ought to know better.) But the Zappa line has always interested me for what it implies about the usefulness of art criticism more generally. What about the scholarship of cinema? What is the success of the written word in reflecting the moving image? I have a love of books about movies that stretches back to my teens, when I was first discovering the possibilities of cinema: I was hungry for information, but it wasn't always easy to find the films themselves, not in a small town without a repertory cinema, when video rental was still a young business. So what a blessing were such books as Hitchcock by Truffaut, or Luis Buñuel's My Last Sigh, or Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer! On the strength of these readings I became convinced that prose can do a creditable job of accounting for the myriad of artistic decisions that go into making movies. I would argue that books about film are vital to the appreciation of the medium, and to the proper development of that appreciation. But then it's also my job to believe that: at Faber and Faber publishers in London, my colleague Walter Donohue and I edit a list of books devoted to cinema.

Walter started this Faber film list in the mid-1980s, having come to Faber directly from Channel Four Films, where he had played a key role in the development of such films as Neil Jordan's Angel, Wim Wenders' Paris Texas, Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette, and the early features of Peter Greenaway. Coming from a practitioner's background, Walter's intention was to publish film books that were not works of criticism or theory or narrative histories of the medium but, rather, books that were created either by or in collaboration with filmmakers themselves; and devoted to the creative and practical process of filmmaking–a record of how filmmakers arrive at the decisions that shape their films.

Among the first film books Walter published in the UK under the Faber imprint were three that are now considered classics of insight into the tension between creativity and commerce in the film business: these were Money Into Light, John Boorman's diary of what he went through to make The Emerald Forest; Final Cut, the account of the disaster of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, by the executive at United Artists who green-lit the film, Steven Bach, and My Indecision is Final by Terry Ilott and Jake Eberts, about the rise and fall of the UK's Goldcrest Films, from the Oscar success of Chariots of Fire and Gandhi to the financial wipe-out of Absolute Beginners and Revolution.

From the start, Walter also decided to publish screenplays as books between covers. This was an interesting move because whilst the scripts of classic movies had been published in the past, these usually were not the screenwriter's final draft but rather a post facto continuity script that matched what you saw on screen. Walter wanted to show interested readers the film script as a writer's vision and a blueprint, realised or otherwise. He began with UK titles such as Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette, David Leland's Mona Lisa and Wish You Were Here, John Boorman's Hope and Glory. He added the rising US generation: the Coen brothers and Steven Soderbergh, alongside the more established Paul Schrader.

Then came two flagship innovations for the list: Walter initiated a series of Q&A books that would be definitive career-length interviews with the world's leading directors: the first of these was Scorsese on Scorsese, edited by Ian Christie and by David Thompson. That list too began to grow–Cronenberg, Schrader, Malle, Kieslowski. And then Walter and John Boorman also established an annual publication called Projections, which was intended to offer dispatches from the frontline of whatever was going on in film that year through contributions, diaries, essays from filmmakers of varied stripes.

That's how the list started and that's really how it has continued. Successful memoirs and general books added to the list have included Robert Evans' The Kid Stays in the Picture and Peter Bogdanovich's Who the Hell's In It. Screenplays have carried on, the greatest success being with the early scripts of Quentin Tarantino; the directors Q&A books have moved between Burton on Burton and Lynch on Lynch to Almodovar and Herzog; Projections has continued, 15 volumes now, with occasional guest editors including Martin Scorsese and Mike Figgis.

I said up top that I decided from an early age that books about fabled filmmakers were incredibly exciting. But then my era was the mid-to-late 1980s. Film fans today have a very different–and differently exciting–set of resources to draw upon in exploring their nascent love of film. DVD releases can be fascinating in their range of scholarly supporting features. YouTube and its imitators can give privileged access to entire movies, even avant-garde rarities. The technology poses a particular challenge to traditional film scholarship that has always existed, if dormant for years. Simply put, the poetry enthusiast can happily read a poem and its critical exegesis, side by side on facing pages of a book. Film is different. A book can have integrated photos or a plate section, but the image doesn't move. A web page, however, opens new possibilities–not least the coupling of text with embedded moving images.

This Faber page within Film in Focus marks another stage in our thinking on how serious conversations about movies might be conducted in the years ahead; and we're delighted to find this new form. Here we will hope to carry on offering essential writing on film as a kind of virtual bookshelf, but we will also continue with the making of actual books for the foreseeable future. The book remains not just a Box Of Organised Knowledge but an unbeatable interactive tool: as bibliophiles are quick to point out these days, you can drop a book on the floor, you can stab it with a knife or hit it with a hammer, but then pick it up again and read it unhindered, maybe starting 15 pages back from where you were last, or where you scrawled something in the margin....Until I can do the same with a laptop or e-reader, I won't be burning my bookshelves just yet.