Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2016 August 24 • Wednesday

Comics in the United States are generally associated with superheroes, newspaper comic strips, perhaps the underground comics of the '60s and '70s and, more recently, autobiographical works such as American Splendor and Persepolis.

What comics might do better than any other medium, because of the unique way it combines sequential narration with simultaneity of narrative (and other) elements, is straight non-fiction, the presentation of a thesis, a history, a biography.

One recent example is Edward Ross's Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film.


Ross has an impressive knowledge of both cinema and cinema studies and Filmish is a stimulating look at both.

The book is divided into chapters with titles such as "The Eye", "The Body" and "Time". The writing is thoughtful and the artwork very well thought out and virtuosic in its use of combining faithful and deliberately altered drawings of images from movies with text in balloons and caption boxes to make the author's points.


Ross's enthusiasm for his subject comes through clearly and as an overview of film and film theory it's an unquestionable success.

Inevitably there are things I wish had been done differently. A lot is written about sound, for instance, but nothing about music.

Various theories and ideas are presented without comment, though some of them struck me as wishful thinking, academics asserting their whims and point of views and impressions. There isn't anything wrong with that but these theories or ideas are often not so strong.

Ross quotes Michael North, for instance, on the silent film comedians: "As North puts it they 'seem to have made themselves into little wind up toys, as if their movements were not just recorded but actually created by the hand cranked cameras of the silent period'".

The way that quote is introduced makes it sound like Ross supports this idea of North. To me it just seems silly and North's use of the word "seem" indicates that this isn't anything more than a thought that just popped into his head. Such thoughts might be very significant and lead to greater insight. Or they might not be much of anything.

François Truffaut's quoted take on Rear Window is also problematic: "The courtyard is the world, the reporter/photographer is the film-maker, the binoculars stand for the camera and its lenses".

That can't be right. Hitchcock movies are famous for scenes of voyeurism and Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window is plainly a stand-in for movie audiences themselves, who are engaging in a socially acceptable form of voyeurism. The different windows on the courtyard are all showing different movies of different genres: among others there are a musical, a sex comedy, a domestic drama and, of course, a murder mystery.

I also wish Ross's discussion of how women in cinema are represented had taken into account the very different conventions prevalent in East Asian movies.

But presumably Ross is here to fly us over the terrain, not to dig deeply. The subject is huge and growing larger all the time. Filmish is a great comic and also a great introduction to the world of film and many of its most important elements and ideas. This isn't gospel and I don't think it's meant to be, so best not to take it as such.