Copyright smh
There is no suggestion of the more usual linear account of a director’s films. She sums up her intentions in chapter one thus: “To investigate Lean’s films as a philosophical task is not, therefore, to hate them or to love them. It is to seek the characteristics that clue us into the premises that put film as art on trial.” I’m never wholly convinced by the idea of Lean as a “philosopher”, but Goehr maintains interest in what she sees as his concern with, say, images of trains and other modes of transport, or contracts between art and technology, or class and love. In the detail with which she pursues these and other matters of ongoing interest to her, she makes clear that this is not so much a book for film buffs as for those with a scholarly addiction to film. What is really astonishing is the quality of the research. It is not just a matter of exploring Lean’s films in extreme detail, remarkable as that is, but of how she also responds to the views of hundreds of other critics, and other filmmakers, authorial sources in other media. For instance, she is very much alert to how Lean and Noel Coward worked so closely together on Blithe Spirit and Brief Encounter to produce films with much in common with their theatrical antecedents while devising visual and vocal means that embrace the new medium – and while retaining crucial elements from the former. One critic, Catherine de la Roche, praised the way “Lean’s cutting was moving towards ‘the real stuff of cinema’: no ‘excessive dialogue’ and no plodding through every stage of a story in a kind of literary fashion”.
