| THE CINEMA OF
GEORGE A. ROMERO Knight of the Living Dead Tony Williams |
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The Cinema of George
A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead is the first in-depth
study in English of the career of this foremost auteur working at
the margins of the Hollywood mainstream. In placing Romero’s
oeuvre in the context of literary naturalism, the book explores
the relevance of the director’s films within American cultural
traditions and thus explains the potency of such work beyond ‘splatter
movie’ models. The author explores the roots of naturalism
in the work of Emile Zola and traces this through to the EC Comics
of the 1950s and on to the work of Stephen King. In so doing, the
book illuminates the importance of seminal Romero texts such as
Night of the Living Dead (1968), Creepshow (1982),
Monkey Shines (1988) and The Dark Half (1992).
This study also includes full coverage of Romero’s latest
feature, Bruiser (2000), as well as his many screenplays
and teleplays. 2003 |
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contents ‘There have been books about Romero’s zombie trilogy
but this look at the films of Pittsburgh’s most famous director
is a first. It covers all his features from Night of the Living
Dead to Bruiser.’ ‘For all the recent critical attention to the explosion of personal and politically committed filmmaking in America in the 1970s, the genre in which some of the most subversive and revolutionary work of the era was being done has received relatively scant coverage. While the achievements of artists such as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Warren Beatty, and other 1970s icons are clearly significant, their contributions to film culture have obscured the equally potent work of those independent filmmakers who, working on the margins and in the culturally disreputable field of horror, exposed the contradictions and complexities of post-Watergate America in a manner more provocative and unsettling than their Hollywood counterparts. George A. Romero is one of the most important and distinctive of these filmmakers (a group that includes Larry Cohen, Wes Craven, and Tobe Hooper), and in Tony Williams' critical study he has been given the kind of thoughtful consideration his work warrants. While other writers have dissected Romero's films with eloquence and intelligence – Robin Wood's essay on Day of the Dead comes to mind – this is the first study of the director that is simultaneously broader (it covers all of the director's films from early obscurities up to the 2000 release Bruiser) and deeper than all of the Romero scholarship that has preceded it. Williams' examination of the artistic, financial, and political influences on Romero's work, from EC comics and literary naturalism to Reaganomics and the changes in the Hollywood studio system, yields a startling array of insights into the immense complexity of the director's oeuvre. Whereas most writing on the director has focused almost exclusively on his zombie trilogy (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead) and has repeatedly covered the same ideological ground (analyzing the films as allegories for the dangers of unrestrained capitalism), Williams argues that Romero's art reaches much further than even his champions recognize. Throughout the book, Williams helps the reader look beyond the obvious to recognize Romero as a chronicler of American society whose vision is as complex as that of a John Ford, Howard Hawks, or Orson Welles. Perhaps the most provocative component of Williams' argument is his case for Romero as the cinematic heir to Zola's tradition of literary naturalism. At first this assertion seems slightly ridiculous, given that horror is a genre known for excess, and Romero is one of the form's most celebrated practitioners of such excess. Yet Williams makes the case that Romero's concern with citizens who are the victims of forces beyond their control is an extension of Zola's deterministic fiction, and that both artists skillfully navigate the tension between such determinism and the potential for societal and personal change. Throughout the book, Williams draws instructive parallels between Zola's work and Romero's, illuminating the themes and styles of both authors and the times in which they live. This sense of historical context is Williams' greatest strength as a scholar (it was also evident in his excellent 1997 book on the films of Larry Cohen), and it gives The Cinema of George A. Romero a scope wider than that of a simple auteur study. As Williams traces Romero's career on a film-by-film basis, he also provides an informal history of America's shift toward conservatism and how it affected the film industry in ways that were not favorable to an anti-establishment artist of Romero's stature and depth. Like Romero's movies, which combine intimate personal drama with cogent political analysis and Godardian commentary on cinematic genres, Williams' book operates on many levels at once, making the work a useful one not only for Romero fans but for historians and political scientists. Interestingly, Williams also sees in both Stephen King's and Romero's work an enormous debt to the horror comic books of the 1950s, an influence that appears to be in opposition to that of literary naturalism. Yet it's exactly this combination of warring traditions and styles that gives Romero's work its complexity, and his best films (such as Dawn of the Dead, which is simultaneously political satire, action film, tragic love story, and apocalyptic horror tale) combine an astonishing variety of influences and tones without becoming incoherent or unfocused. A case in point is the 1982 release Creepshow, an anthology film that skillfully incorporates the influences of King (who wrote the screenplay), EC comics, and literary naturalism. Interestingly, Williams argues that part of the reason Creepshow isn't quite as successful as Romero's other films is that it's too explicit in its approach. Whereas nearly all of Romero's movies are informed by both the visual style and political sensibility of EC comics (which are savage assaults on Eisenhower-era conformism, just as Romero's films attack complacency and consumerism), Creepshow makes the EC influence too obvious and overt, and in doing so loses some of the subtlety and complexity of Romero's other work. Yet Williams points out that Creepshow follows through on Romero's concerns with the tensions and contradictions that define American family life (particularly in the Father's Day episode), and he reveals that even the relatively lackluster second story of the film has links to literary naturalism that make it worth a look. The writer's account of Creepshow's production history, influences, and ultimate meaning is particularly valuable given the fact that up until now even Romero partisans such as Robin Wood have unfairly dismissed it as an unimportant work. The rich commentary on this film is indicative of the author's ability to reveal new meanings in all of Romero's movies; Williams is as adept at rescuing underrated pictures like Creepshow or Knightriders from critical neglect as he is at digging beneath the surface to provide original perspectives on widely studied films such as the Dead trilogy. Each chapter reveals Romero to be a director of uncommon integrity
and complexity whose devotion to realist horror is all the more
valuable now that he's one of its only practitioners. Romero's harshly
critical view of American consumerist culture kept him from attaining
a wide audience in the conservative climate of Reagan, Bush, and
Clinton, and his avowedly anti--escapist approach to horror seems
all the more necessary in a period when Hollywood studios are remaking
classic 1970s horror films (including Romero's own Dawn of the
Dead) and rendering them harmless by stripping them of their
political meanings. As of this writing, Romero is at work on the
next chapter in his Dead series, and given that he often
creates his best work in troubled times, it's hard not to have high
expectations for the piece. In the meantime, one can look to Tony
Williams' indispensable book for an abundance of enlightening observations
about this important American director.' |
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