King Vidor on film making [Hardcover]

King Vidor's perspective in 1971 is an elaborate look into the verbiage of cinema, flowing composition, and a comprehensive guide to certain formats of cinema, opinions on film makers (even Kurosawa, John Cassavetes, Ingmar Bergman and his influence D.W. Griffith, and how he was inspired by his interlacing of "Intolerance" to map out the way he was going to employ direction in his movie "War and Peace"), how he started out in film, the pantomime days before his swimmingly easy transition to sound and technicolor and how cumbersome it was. Vidor has collaborated with many people including Bette Daves, John Gilbert (in La Boheme), Lilian Gish, Jennifer Jones, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, Yull Bryner (on Solomon and Sheba) and many other stellars, including his cooperation to Audrey Hepburn, who he says is probably the best female actress he ever worked with. The book cover is appropriately a King Kong logo, which has been superimposed with King Vidor and in among it says "on film making", which is a very hokey title, but it's decent for the book and content.

The book is a very interesting study of the cinema as an art form, and Vidor's advice on that attitude of cinema at the time. He says that Film Studies only really teach you the techniques of cinema, but that he wants to try and add a little bit on to that. It's quite clear that throughout time Film Studies has evolved, and that it's became a place to glean more on characters, 3D characters, scripts, audio and visuals etc. (I know because I have done it, and still plan to do it for a couple of years), but in spite of that, as an existential man having made The Big Parade (1925) (he speaks about how he tried to gear it to a great majority of people and succeeded), Duel in the Sun (1946), Our Daily Bread (1934), Hallelujah (1929) (where he discusses how he shaped the frames for the actors faces, and how it was in post-production for sound, as during that time "The Jazz Singer" had made a milestone for sound, and Vidor availed it) and his magnum opus, The Crowd (1928), to which he tried to use the, as he describes it, "perambulating camera" to bring around perspective to one characters, King Vidor is an important blend of vanguard cinema and the bulk of cinema. The profuse lighting he used, and his advice on special effects, and some of the insurmountable problems that he tried to wade through is an inspiring and possibly even cautionary tale of what happens in post production. He even wanted to be discredited on the Musical "Wizard of Oz" to which he helped out Victor Fleming during his absence, and what he thinks of the man as well. He speaks of Fleming and Capra, his contemporaries in reverent ways, which to any cinema aficionado or film buff familiar with Vidor and those other directors, it may be an essential read (I know what peaked my interest was a closer look into his film "The Crowd", but I didn't expect the book to not wholly be on the man and his films but to be more varied).

The book is also grangerized with ideas that pictorially show Vidor's work on set, and even a process background he used on "War and Peace", which by the sound of his words, marks one of his most challenging movies, and he makes this clear by saying how hard adaptations are and how the book spanned from book to script. He also speaks of how the film embraces all art forms saying how he scored films, and what inspired his scores of films, and how "The Third Man" imbued sound and "The Bridge on the River Kawai". He gives a look into documentary films, actors (including Chaplin, and how he thinks he was great in front of the camera, but not at the back), speaking of how onerous it gets with producers and compromise, and then he reflects on this with an anecdote about David Selznick.

He was a film maker, who always catered, expressed what he felt had to be said between the marriage of reality and films and illustrates this by saying "some film makers hide behind abstraction, and make pseudo-interesting openings to get you interested in the film itself" - in other words, Vidor is an old style film maker, embracing the period of newer films, and even talking about how he's pleased with the border changing its ways with sex and violence in films. Goldwyn he said, once said, (paraphrased) that cinema doesn't have any messages, which Vidor debunked.

He talks about the specs of the camera, the aperture f numbers and explains to novices how it works from the lowest being the one to let in the most light and the highest being the one to let in the least light. He talks about old cameras as well, and how his first ever one was a Brownie Camera, which he used for news reels before he entered the larger medium. He speaks about old 16mm cameras and ones that went up to 70mm.

There is a lot to get out of this book that really supply a lot to the making of a film, the rights of a director, and the box office records. Vidor says he never does screen tests, but he always tries to evaluate his films in other ways. He draws a lot of attention to the old style of the cutting room and how Griffith was the one who proved that you can omit bits out of the finished product. It's interesting because Vidor published this book 11 years prior to his death, and it feels so rigorous on the way that he accounts his films. He even mentions how he goes to festivals to learn more about film as well, even criticizing a film thinking that it lacked sufficient movement, and then realizing that this was his own way of manoeuvring the camera and staging the actors in his silent days. It's amazing how conscious he is of all this and remarkable how vivacious he seems - he's not a melancholy - he takes risks in his films as would many of his contemporaries.

The book, however, is not for everyone. It could be indispensable to film studies though, and it's a great guide to cinema itself. It really starts to get enticing for me after he speaks about the early pioneers such as Robert Paul, an insight into more history during the zeitgeist of cinema. He even speaks about the "camera's eye".

In conclusion, Vidor's book is the account of a luminary who would span a lot of decades into cinema, while pioneering some of the methodology of the medium as well. It gives hope to new generations and it edifies them about things like emulsion for images and some of the vocabulary of cinema, as well as his love for simplicity, to which he mentions how hard that is to achieve. It's without a doubt that this book is a thoroughly researched and thoroughly thought out book from a master who we can now look back on through the history of his motion pictures.

"The art form embraces all the arts, but none"