Images in the Dark

Starting with a writer watching his story, mostly painfully, being adapted for a medium that sometimes doesn’t know what to do with words and mostly doesn’t know what to do with silences (John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman).

A child actress, who at five became part of a film that would pass into legend, recalling the daily haircuts and a day without food that was her contribution to it (Shampa Banerjee, The Little Durga).

A son putting together his past through the cinematic journey taken by his family, leading up to a scribbled date in his father’s diary marking the day his older brother went to the last and ‘‘best’’ film (Arabian Nights) of his life (Ian Jack, The Best Picture He Ever Saw).

A critic describing two years of darkness when ‘‘terrible movies starring Russell Crowe seem to come bounding towards you from every space in the culture, leaving you no choice but to reach quickly for the elephant gun and fire’’ (Andrew O’Hagan, Two Years in the Dark).

Australian Thomas Keneally giving a warm account of walking into a ‘handbag studio’ in Beverly Hills one fine morning — at a time and age when people in the Northern Hemisphere mistook Australia for Austria — and coming away with the story of Schindler’s List.

Extract from the book Art by Directors, by Karl French, featuring sketches and illustrations made by greats like Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray and Martin Scorsese during the course of their productions. Ray’s sketches hinting at the beauty he would later reproduce on the screen in Pather Panchali — the scene where Durga and Apu run through the fields to see a passing train. Scorsese’s childishly graphic illustrations, complete with red streaks spraying out from body parts, sketching out the final, bloody end of Taxi Driver.

But reading through the collection, what strikes immediately is that there are no stars in Granta’s world. A lot of the film system is driven by big names and big egos, and while this has been written about, a look into it could have enhanced this issue.

After all, the writers too seek to underline cinema’s compelling hold over such a wide audience, and most of that hold comes from the names it makes stars of. If at one level the collection is serious — like demystifying John Cassavetes — at another it talks of the innocent joy that a nine year old coming back to the movies holding the hands of his parents finds hard to express.

Andrew O’ Hagan asks his esteemed fellow critics to re-learn the art of enjoying a film, while holy cows, apart from Cassavetes, Wim Wenders and Miramax, come in for attack. No one gets it worse than Miramax, and that alone makes the magazine a delight for filmgoers who of late can’t seem to leave that name alone. ‘‘The company is so pretentious, acting as if they are saving world cinema from collapse and upholding great quality, when in actual fact their bigger movies are just bloated with a familiar Hollywood cretinism.’’

There are also the rats. An article on how 13,000 of them were imported, trained and sacrificed in the making of Nosferatu (Maarten ’t Hart, Rats). Director Werner Herzog wanted to depict the plague. No one thought of the rats that almost to the last one died in the exercise.