The Academy Awards, or Oscars, are known to film audiences the world over. The awards began in 1929 when the names of 15 winners were announced at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in front of 250 guests each paying $10 each. For the first 15 years the winners received their Oscars at private dinners, and it was not until later that media coverage began with a live, hour‐long, local radio broadcast. Did you know that the awards have been postponed on three occasions, but that they have never been cancelled? The Oscar statuette, officially referred to as “The Academy Award of Merit”, takes 12 workers five hours to hand cast and complete at the Chicago factory of R.S. Owens; the original Oscar was solid bronze but is now made of britannium alloy, roughly 90 percent tin and 10 percent antimony; the base is made of brass and R.S. Owens produce brass name plates with the winner's name and category.
These fascinating facts are from just the first section Academy Awards of the initial volume of this four‐volume Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film. However, it is not a work of amazing film facts (although there are many amazing facts!), rather a detailed and scholarly, but extremely readable, encyclopedia on the subject of film and the cinema. These four volumes approach cinema as art, entertainment, and industry, and have entries on all of the important genres, studios, and national cinemas, as well as relevant technological and industrial topics, cultural issues, and critical approaches to film. Volumes run:
- 1.
Academy Awards to Crime Films.
- 2.
Criticism to Ideology.
- 3.
Independent Film to Road Movies.
- 4.
Romantic Comedy to Yugoslavia (an A to Y encyclopedia sounds slightly odd!)
What a shame the editor was not able to find a “Z” film subject to discuss – how about “Zorro” for the next edition?)
The encyclopedia contains a total of 200 entries and these are all of substantial length – varying from 1,500 to 9,000 words. Each entry is followed by a detailed bibliography – the editor has decided to exclude website references for the most part because of their more “fleeting nature”, quite a reasonable decision. With the entries coming from 150 contributors from 20 countries, an excellent task has been performed in maintaining an evenness of style. The entries cover a wide range of topics, and to just pick out a handful does not really give a true impression of the content of the encyclopedia. Obviously the various genres and sub‐genres are covered as well as the cinema of many different countries. Within the section on Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Cinema, it is explained that, in the last 20 years, the study of gay and lesbian cinema has expanded greatly beyond simplistic image analysis, and that “Queer”, once a pejorative epithet is now used to describe the broad expanse of sexualities, and, thus, any of the theoretical issues raised by queer theory have found their way into gay and lesbian filmmaking within a movement known as New Queer Cinema. Within this section, a sidebar gives the biography of Barbara Hammer, considered by far the most prolific lesbian filmmaker. Other sections in the encyclopedia cover Camp, Gender, Queer Theory, and Sexuality, and probably others are to be found. It can be seen from this that there is plenty of source and starting material for students who wish to explore themes in depth.
Other subjects include Acting, Casting, Censorship, Animal Actors, Auteur Theory and Authorship, B Movies, Child Actors, Cinephilia (“love of the cinema”), Film Stock, Editing, Holocaust, Latinos and Cinema, Makeup, New Wave, Pornography, Sound, Special Effects, Video Games, Vietnam War, Yiddish Cinema, Yugoslavia, but no “Z” … .
In addition to the main entries, there are more than 230 sidebars. A “sidebar” in this work refers to “boxed” articles profiling important individual accomplishments. They are colour‐coded to give a broad indication of the type of achievement discussed – green for actors, blue for directors, yellow for those involved in other aspects of film production, etc. Among those included are Charlie Chaplin, Shirley Temple, Mae West, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Thomas Alvar Edison and others. The encyclopedia's entire table of contents, as well as the 114 page comprehensive index is usefully repeated in each of the four volumes. Volume 4 also includes a section of notes on advisors and contributors as well as a glossary with concise definitions of terms used in the entries and other basic film studies terms.
The encyclopedia is a truly sumptuous work. It contains 150 photographs in colour and 350 photographs in black and white, and they are all of excellent quality. A black and white photograph needs elements of pure black and pure white, and then the shades between (that statement might sound obvious, but this reviewer has seen many otherwise fine books with poorly reproduced grey photographs!). Contrast has been handled magnificently, and so, a photograph of Marlon Brando in sweaty vest in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) contains a full range of tones, but a photograph from King Kong (1933) is reproduced in the characteristic high contrast (“soot and whitewash”) that we would expect from that film. The colour photographs are another joy including one from The Wizard of Oz (1939), signalling the triumph of Technicolor. This photograph features in the section on colour. Within that section the explanation about Technicolor is dealt with comprehensively and technically, but interesting for all neither a “talking down” nor a “dumbing down”. It was interesting to pick up another point about Technicolor, in a section on Archives, in which it is pointed out that recent DVD “restorations” of some classic Technicolor musicals no longer look like the original Technicolor – which is characterised by garish colour and a slightly soft focus – because it is now possible to eliminate these “defects” digitally. For teachers of film courses this is just one example of the use of this book for ideas for class discussion topics. Should we take advantage of modern technology to “enhance” the original? Did the producer really want “garish colour” and “slightly soft focus”? Or was the producer simply limited by the technology available at the time, and would have taken advantage of our “new” technology had it existed then?
The editor states that the encyclopedia is intended as a standard reference work in the field of film studies. It is most certainly worthy of that title, and, if it were not for the fact that the entry on Academy Awards makes it clear that “Oscar” is covered by strict copyright, I would have awarded Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film my personal “Oscar”! This work is excellent for students on film and video, media, and acting courses, at any level, including university, as well as readers in public libraries (and not forgetting film quiz compilers!)
I nearly forgot – Best Picture at the first Academy Awards was Wings, Best Actress Janet Gaynor (1906‐1984) for her roles in Seventh Heaven, Street Angel, and Sunrise and Best actor was Emil Jannings (1884‐1950) for The Last Command and The Way of all Flesh.
