Hit and miss in reel life

The Shadowcatchers tells Australia's film history through the experience of cinematographers including Dion Beebe, seen here working on Memoirs of a Geisha.

Tom Ryan, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports

It was on December 28, 1895, at the Grand Cafe in Paris, that a film was first publicly projected on to a screen. Or was it December 22? In their snapshot-style histories of the cinema, David Parkinson, in the very pedestrian 100 Ideas That Changed Film, and Jean-Baptiste Thoret, in the less-than-orderly Talk about Cinema, give different dates for the momentous occasion. They agree, however, that those responsible for it were the Lumiere brothers, Louis and Auguste.

I'd advise nobody to go to either Parkinson or Thoret if they're interested in anything more than an approximate overview of 117 years of film history.

Or should that be 116 years, six months and three weeks, give or take a day or two?

In place of the clearly demarcated, linear trajectories and attention to detail of the usual textbook histories that you'll find recommended on film studies courses around the world, the British-based Parkinson and the French Thoret provide quick-bite glimpses of the route the cinema has taken from the distant past to the present.

Both of their books belong to ongoing series that aspire to offer insights into various aspects of popular culture as we move through the second decade of the 21st century.

Among the subjects that the Talk about editions have dealt with to date are design, contemporary dance and contemporary architecture; the areas that the 100 Ideas collection has so far placed in the spotlight include fashion, architecture and graphic design.

Each of the books is designed to be dipped into rather than read from cover to cover, although for the purpose of reviewing them I've had to take the latter approach.

In that context, Thoret's offering is much more rewarding and, while he clearly prefers throwaway musings to systematic grapplings and the results he achieves are generally sketchy, his writing is also occasionally concise and thought-provoking (even if the print size is infuriatingly small).

He's especially good on the TV series The Twilight Zone and The Prisoner (films, TV, same difference!).

For him, the former ''became a cruel and ironic vision of a phoney and antiseptic 1950s American society, whose dark side is slyly exposed in episode after episode'', while the setting for the latter is ''the ancestor of the prison village in The Truman Show, [resembling] a prophetic forerunner of what is today called 'the global village'''.

At the same time, his scatter-shot methods can be frustrating.

In a section entitled ''Models and Innovation'', he writes about ''the children'' of John Ford, Jean-Pierre Melville and Luis Bunuel, introducing the last by asking, ''What strange and unexpected link is there between Marco Ferreri's Max, My Love (1985) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1973)?''

Setting aside the fact that Max My Love was directed by Nagisa Oshima - anyone can make a mistake! - I was still interested to see how he was going to develop the ''link'' between the two films. But, bizarrely, he makes no further mention of them or it, leaving us to draw our own conclusions.

If Thoret's book, translated from French, is a bit all over the place - with sections devoted to ''key dates'', questions of style, ''seminal'' films and key filmmakers - Parkinson's treads a predictable and not especially illuminating path from magic lanterns to computer-generated imagery.

And whereas Thoret is much more circumspect - in his preface, he wisely notes that ''no one in their right mind (the author of the current volume included) would seriously embark on a history of cinema in its 'totality''' - Parkinson takes himself way too seriously, beginning with the grandiose claim that he's providing an ''alternative history of cinema''.

Even his title turns out to be a misnomer (although it might well be the vagaries of publishing that have foisted it on him).

Instead of 100 ''Eureka!'' moments, he conjures up only a few alongside others that would be more accurately described as ''developments in the history of film'', such as poetic realism, criticism, Free Cinema, teenpics and feminist film theory.

In a case of saving the best for last, cinematographer, documentary filmmaker and film lecturer Martha Ansara's The Shadowcatchers is a much more satisfying enterprise than the accounts of the past offered by Thoret and Parkinson.

Filtering Australia's film history through the hands-on experiences of the men (and very occasional women) who've wielded cameras Down Under, it's an impressive coffee-table volume that also features some handsome illustrations in both black and white and colour of practitioners at work.

Industrial and technical issues are to the fore rather than aesthetic ones, but Ansara tells a compelling tale about a special bunch of Aussie battlers for whom work has always been a struggle.

Featuring profiles of major cinematographers - including Frank Hurley (1885-62), the legendary war cameramen Damien Parer (1912-44) and Neil Davis (1934-85), John Seale (born 1942) and Dion Beebe (born 1968) - along with anecdotes from a host of others, she takes us from the birth of moving pictures in Australia in 1896 through the coming of sound to the internationalisation of the industry in more recent times.

The shadowcatchers' stories aren't just about hauling heavy equipment around, improvising ways out of impossible situations and sometimes facing life-threatening situations (both Parer and Davis tragically lost their lives on the job). They are also about the problem of finding useful, ongoing employment, especially in the light of the stranglehold of US studios on film exhibition in Australia (and thus on film production) since the First World War.

Still, in the years before the renaissance of the 1970s, cinematographers were more fortunate than others in the business because, as Ansara points out, ''from 1913 through to the 1960s, almost all Australian cameramen had worked on newsreels in one form or another, at one time or another, in their careers''.

Published under the auspices of the Australian Cinematographers Society, Ansara's accomplished book celebrates the endeavours of a group of unsung heroes, drawing attention to the contribution they've made to the film business and coherently evoking the big picture in ways that completely elude Talk about Cinema and 100 Ideas.