A CINEPHILE’S GUIDE TO THE STACKS

Film critic Simran Hans explores the Library for hidden treasures

Photography by Ameena Rojee

On a bookshelf in my childhood bedroom, a copy of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art is gathering dust. I bought it, used, ahead of embarking on an MA in Film Studies nearly 10 years ago. I never read it.

That period of study led me to become a film journalist and, for several years, a newspaper critic, where I tried to juggle my love of movies with an anxiety about not having done the traditionally required reading. Somewhere like The London Library allows me to take a different approach to the prescribed ‘way in’.

What strikes me as unique, and uniquely annoying, about my specialist subject is how many of its students and lovers are encouraged not to stray beyond the bounds of the art form, should they hope to master it. Complete a director’s entire filmography; conquer a canon; treat the decennial Sight and Sound Greatest Films Poll as a checklist. The Library has an extensive back catalogue of this periodical, but also books that reveal what filmmakers have created outside of their main discipline – and that shed light on their politics, their sensibility and their tastes, too.

Simran Hans finds a quiet desk in the Central Stacks, next to B. Biography

Before the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène made films, he was a novelist. Les bouts de bois de Dieu (God’s Bits of Wood ) (1960) is based on his experience of participating in the 1947 Dakar-Niger railway strike, and is alive with the anti-colonial spirit that animates his later films, such as La noire de… (Black Girl ) (1966) and Le Mandat ( Mandabi ) (1968). Gordon Parks, the African-American filmmaker and photojournalist, was an author too. The opening scene of his novel The Learning Tree (1963), which he adapted into a feature film (1969), reads like a screenplay:

Extreme close-up on a swarm of ants from the perspective of 12-year-old Newt Winger as a cyclone approaches in the background; cut to establishing shot of Newt and Big Mabel running through the Cherokee Flats in the rain; sex scene; slow fade (“And though the storm blew on it was not long before Newt completely forgot its blowing”).

On the mezzanine level of the second floor’s sleek Art Room, shelved under A. Photography is Through a different lens: Stanley Kubrick photographs (2018), a collection of black and white portraits by the director (and Library alumnus – his loan card was on show last autumn in the display case outside The Reading Room).

A photo from Through a different lens: Stanley Kubrick photographs (2018), shelved under A. Photography on the mezzanie level of the Art Room

Last summer, while browsing the photography stacks, my eye landed on a pocket-sized volume authored by the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle. Des histoires vraies ( True Stories) (1994, reissued in English 2013), comprises 46 of Calle’s intimate memories, each illustrated by a photo or drawing. A section titled “The Husband” recounts her brief marriage to American artist Greg Shephard, some of which I recognised from Double Blind, the experimental film she made with him in 1992.

“To find out more about Anita Loos and her life, I took myself to B. Biography on one darkening Saturday afternoon”

But director-as-auteur can become a tiresome line of enquiry. A sparkling wit on an eternal quest for fun, the Golden Age screenwriter Anita Loos left as much of an authorial stamp on Red-Headed Woman (1932), The Women (1939) and, of course, the technicolour musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) as the films’ directors. The latter began its life as her 1925 novella of the same name; I hoovered it up in an afternoon. To find out more about Loos and her life, I took myself to B. Biography, in the Central Stacks, on one darkening Saturday afternoon. She was not there, but in English Literature, in the St. James Stacks in the adjacent building, I was able to locate Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments in Fiction (2003), co-edited by her niece Mary Anita Loos and film historian Cari Beauchamp. The book weaves Mary Anita’s personal memories of her aunt with Loos’ unpublished short stories and screenplays, including a detailed treatment for a wartime satire called Women in Uniform.

Desperate for more Hollywood gossip, I dipped into producer Julia Phillips’ infamous memoir, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. First published in 1991, it is unflinching in its depiction of both her struggles with drink and drugs, and of her celebrity colleagues. (Goldie Hawn, it turns out, was “borderline dirty with stringy hair”.)

When researching the Library’s titles on film, I learned that until a few years ago, the A. Cinema shelfmark (housed under Art) used to live in Science, under S. Cinematograph. Other books are hiding in unexpected places, such as James Andrew Miller’s Powerhouse: The Untold S tory of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency (2016), a 700-odd-page tome weighty with history and gossip, which is shelved under S. Industries, or Christopher Andrew and Julius Green’s Stars & S pies: I ntelligence O perations and the Entertainment B usiness (2021) laying low in S. Spies.

Botiquitos (1995) and Purple Lake (1993) - two paintings by Manny Farber from his book, Manny Farber: Paintings and Writings (2019)

It feels fitting, then, to conclude this guide to the Library’s collection on cinema, with a book of paintings. The American film critic Manny Farber, who died in 2008, wrote about art, furniture and jazz too. That early criticism, written for The New Republic in the 1940s, is collected in the art book Manny Farber: Paintings and Writings (2019), which lives in the Art Room under A. Painting. Written contributions from the likes of filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, essayist Durga Chew-Bose, and restaurateur Alice Waters (whose Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse was a favourite of Farber’s) provide fresh ways of close-reading his work, just as he close-read films. The book itself contains glossy reproductions of Farber’s still-life work; each painted tablescape is a kind of miseen-scène crowded with details that tell a larger story. At first glance, the cluttered desk in Farber’s Domestic Movies, 1985, suggests a distracted mind. But its flowers and sticky notes, crayons and film leader reveal a different narrative, of productivity and creation. The table itself is half yellow, half blue; Farber’s allegiance to painting and writing is also split down the middle.

In an essay in the Surface, Depth, Flow collection, Lucy Sante writes about how best to approach Farber’s paintings and essays, neither of which could be described as linear. I have used her advice as a map to my own discoveries: “You start anywhere, and end up anywhere.” •

Simran Hans is a writer and film critic. Her work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, The New York Times, The Sunday Times, GQ and The New Statesman