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Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. We're about to head into a series of election related programs, so today, I'm changing the subject. Two guests, who have been on the program in the past to talk about their respective books, are back with me today to talk about a new book they've written together. James Charney and Noah Charney have coauthored, “The 12-Hour Film Expert: Everything You Need to Know about Movies”. Dr. James Charney is a practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist on Yale University's medical school faculty and he's the author of, “Madness at the Movies: Understanding Mental Illness through Film”. Dr. Noah Charney is an art history professor at the University of Ljubljana and specializes in art crime. And among his many books is, “The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art”. James, Noah, welcome back to the program, it’s good to see you both.

James Charney: Thanks for having us.

Noah Charney: It’s good to see you too.

GR: Well, so congratulations on this book. And before we get into the book itself, there's just something, it's not a question, I just wanted to say it. I wanted to tell you both I was very touched with your acknowledgments and where you each write while you're grateful for the other. It was a very nice tonic, particularly these day, so thank you for that. And James, I'll start with you. A basic question, why is it important to have a deeper understanding of film rather than just watching them and saying, I like this, I don't like it. What do we gain with a deeper understanding?

JC : I think to understand how something works to affect your emotions and affect your level of interest and to be kind of tuned in to the mastery of the better films, and helps you kind of kind of distinguish between a film that might be a casual entertainment and one that is going to be that thought provoking or touch you in a more personal way. And so I think watching a movie just for the fun of it is wonderful. But very often, I think it's often better for you to go back and watch it the second time and at that point start noticing some things, the kind of things that we point out in our book.

GR: Well, on that note, you've convinced me to go back and re-watch a movie that stayed with me for a very long time, ”Memento”, because you trace the lineage of that back to Citizen Kane, which is a movie I'm very familiar with. So I'm very keen to go back and do exactly what you just said. On the book itself, Noah, the two of you, you divide up your lessons into subject based categories like Comedy, Western, Suspense and so on. And when I first thought of this topic before I actually saw the book, I imagined that the two of you might have more abstract topics like using dialog, flashbacks, using spoken narrative, special effects, that kind of thing. So just explain why you made the choices that you did in terms of dividing the book up in the way that you the two of you did.

NC: Well, the idea was to have the one-stop book for anyone interested in a deeper appreciation of film. So it's not meant to be in that zooming level of detail for any one of the particular genres or subcategories of things that we could study when we look at film, but meant to be that first gateway drug, shall we say, if you're interested in the subject. So the way we divided it is largely by genres, and but we didn't have time to include every genre in the book, not enough space. But I think people search by genres. If you go on to Netflix, for example, the categories are based on genres and I think it's the way that most people tend to think about movies, but they don't necessarily know what goes into the genres, even if they know what they like.

GR: Now, that makes sense. And so, well, I'm going to use the host's prerogative here, and I'm going to pick a couple of the subject areas that are in your book that I like, though I like them all, but some that I tend to spend a lot of time watching. And James to come back to you, the Westerns, what are the essential things that our listeners ought to know about Westerns?

JC: I think the most essential thing is that it is one of the first and most popular genres of movies going back to the silent age. And that there was a fascination with the whole concept of the ever expanding frontier and there's a lot of mythmaking about the Western and many of the myths are reinforced and played with in the in the best movies. And it was only probably not until the mid-1960’s that that there was an attempt to correct some of the myths of the West, particularly in terms of attitudes toward Native Americans and this whole sense of a certain grandeur about the lone outlaw kind of taking the law into his own hands.

GR: Has there been a, it seems to me the newer Westerns that I've been watching, whether they're series on Netflix or an actual movie itself, they've changed it seems to me, the way they think about the characters, but I'm having a hard time sort of putting it into words. What’s your sense of, has there been some sort of a tectonic shift in Westerns?

JC: I think there has. It's gone in fits and starts, and I'm not exactly sure where it is now, but definitely in the late sixties and early seventies, there was a sense of revising the story of the West and understanding that the white settlers and ranchers were not necessarily the good guys with the Native Americans being some version of evil and savage. And yet that was the message that many, probably for the first 30 or 40 years of the movies was what the stories were about. So that change happened in the late sixties and has been carried over. But it's also interesting that at a certain point the Western lost popularity and there are significantly fewer of them except lately on a lot of streaming services. All of a sudden Westerns are a thing. I'm not exactly sure why that is.

GR: Yeah. I'm thinking in particular of the, sort of the Kevin Costner series, there's like three different versions of it now. There's a prequel series to the other series.

JC: So, I'm not at all embarrassed to say I haven't seen any of those. (laughter)

GR: (laughter) Okay. Well, you can only watch so much. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Noah and James Charney. The father and son teamed up to write, “The 12-Hour Film Expert: Everything You Need to Know about Movies”. So, Noah, I don’t know, maybe I was just sort of assuming each of you would have an expertise on one or the other. So don't take this as an insult, but I wanted to ask you Noah, what's the essential thing about film noir that I should know?

NC: It's a wonderful genre for someone like me, who is a professor of art history, because it has a very specific esthetic. And when we look at films and genres, they're usually things that are about them that have been established by early masterpieces of the genre that help set the tone for what comes. And then we come to expect those elements in newer versions of films within that genre. But the expectation of them doesn't detract from the fact that we like them. So if you have ‘meet cutes’ in romantic comedies, it happens in every romantic comedy, but that doesn't detract from it. If you have, you know, a gun-slinging shootout at high noon in Westerns, we expect that to happen and the expectation can be part of the fun. In film noir, we have a really dramatic aesthetic, lots of chiaroscuros. So just looking at a film, not knowing the film, a still, you can probably tell if it's film noir. They're often in black and white, even more modern ones. And they look at the dark underbelly of the world, particularly postwar world wars, involving espionage. We can expect that there will be dirty dealings, that there will be double crosses and things lurking in all those wonderful shadows we see.

GR: Interesting. So to follow up on that and maybe slightly different topic, but I suppose one might think of this film as being, have one foot in the film noir, but a smaller question, but one of my favorite movies is Alfred Hitchcock's, “The Birds” and I notice that the two of you put that in the category of suspense rather than horror. I remember seeing it as a kid and I thought of it as a horror movie. Tell me why it's a suspense movie instead.

JC: Oh, that's a good question. It's a suspense movie because it is, at least for me, a wonderful demonstration of a master of suspense in Hitchcock. And moment after moment I find suspenseful rather than terrifying. But you know, go figure. There are moments that are as scary as any horror movie. But I think the best of that movie is the moments where nothing is happening. But you're anticipating something terrible about to happen.

GR: Yeah, those crows aligning on the telephone wire line. Yeah, yeah I remember that.

NC: Maybe the distinction, Grant, that comes to mind with films like that, a lot of the genres bleed into each other. So you can even have, like, horror comedies about zombies and whatnot with slapstick elements, but with, “The Birds” the question, I think, is whether the thing that you're watching it for and that you come away with is the moments of suspense where nothing's happening, but you're anticipating it. And then there brief moments of viol