Film After Film

by J Hoberman

(Verso Books, £16.99)

On the surface J Hoberman's new retrospective on 21st-century film seems a rather fractured affair, divided as it is between two different aspects of modern cinema.

Initially, Hoberman explores the impact of the digital revolution and asks whether the ongoing digital manipulation of the photographic image mark the loss of film's once celebrated ability to represent reality. The author deems popular franchises like The Matrix and Harry Potter films to in fact be "animated movies created from photographic material."

Yet as we drift away from the purity of the photographic image Hoberman also debates how digital cinema has found new ways to simulate reality, the "visceral realness" of computer-enhanced wounds in The Passion Of The Christ being the most alarming example of what, in his reasoned and contemplative prose, the author dubs the "new real."

But then the book abruptly transforms into a stinging and pleasingly wry retrospective of recent cinematic politics in the US.

The shifting tastes of audiences are chronicled in the wake of the World Trade Centre bombing and Hoberman demonstrates how films act as a barometer for public sentiment. Immediately after September 11 2001 studios shelved many violent action projects like Collateral Damage only to take them out of mothballs to cash in on an eruption of patriotism as the US military mobilised for vengeance.

Film After Film also examines how this is linked with the US government's unsettlingly close relationship with the film industry. Politicians use cinema as an ideological battleground, an example being Donald Rumsfeld not only describing the political thriller The Sum Of All Fears as the "ultimate advertisement for homeland security" but providing Pentagon support for its production too.

But it's also clear that the relationship of 21st-century politics with film isn't limited to the silver screen.

As Hoberman points out, while critiquing the jarringly fabricated world of Republican Party conventions, US conservatives have "perfected the art of making a movie in 'life.'"

While Film After Film's sudden change in subject and writing style might have rendered it structurally fractured, instead its two strands serve to subtly bolster one another.

This fresh, bold, witty and authoritative book reveals a medium still striving to recreate reality while still cynically being used to shape it.

Steve Richards