Forget scholars – this guide to filmmaking goes straight to the sources

6 hours ago 4

By Tom Ryan

July 23, 2025 — 5.30am

CINEMA
Filmmakers Thinking
Adrian Martin
Sticking Place Books, New York, $32.19

Melbourne-born and bred, Adrian Martin is probably best known to readers of The Age for his decade-or-so stretch as its film critic during the late 1990s/early 2000s. He might also be remembered by ABC viewers and Radio National listeners for his film reviews over the years, as well as by the hundreds of students to whom he lectured at universities around the country.

And anyone who happens across Emma-Kate Croghan’s endearing Love and Other Catastrophes (1996) might also recognise him playing a charismatic University of Melbourne professor named Adrian Martin opposite Frances O’Connor, Radha Mitchell and Alice Garner (whose character is writing a thesis about Doris Day as “a feminist warrior”).

He’s also the recipient of several major awards for his writing (including the Australian Film Institute’s Byron Kennedy Award and the Australian Film Critics Association’s Ivan Hutchinson Award), and his massive CV includes audio commentaries on more than 100 DVDs, a dozen or so books and monographs, a series of video essays about films and filmmaking made with his partner, Cristina Álvarez López (to whom his new book is dedicated), and a vast and regularly updated website of his work (adrianmartinfilmcritic.com).

Not just a bloody good film critic, insightful and articulate, even if, at times, infuriatingly idiosyncratic, Martin is also a brilliant and prolific scholar – tireless, constantly curious, forever inclining towards the role of agent provocateur, restlessly moving on to the next intellectual adventure. Now resident in northern Spain, he’s become one of the most respected teachers and writers on film in the world.

In Filmmakers Thinking, his central concern is with the often-complex ways in which meaning is created in films. But, instead of drawing on the work of the many scholars who have furrowed their brows over “the language of cinema” – from Siegfried Kracauer and André Bazin to Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey – he’s turned to actual practitioners for their understandings.

Adrian Martin in 2001, when he was Age film critic.

Over the years, many of them have turned up their noses at film theorists’ ponderings about the art and the craft of cinema. I recall asking one of Australia’s most eminent writer-directors what he thought about Bazin’s notion that the only really honest filmmaking is shooting in wide-shot and allowing the viewer to choose where to look. “Well, he can go and get f---ed” shot back the reply. And Fred was only half-joking.

However, in his book, drawing on essays by filmmakers about what (they think) they’re doing and about the nature of the medium in which they’re doing it, public and private interviews and conversations with them, and details in the films they’ve made, Martin offers an insightful survey of the “threefold dialogue” involved in any filmmaker’s creative work.

As he explains in his introduction, there’s firstly the implicit interaction with a viewer via the images and sounds that are presented and received. Then there’s the one with the reality that’s being recorded and arranged in a particular way. And, finally, there’s the ongoing dialogue between filmmakers, the technology they have at their disposal and the ways in which it’s been used in the past.

Each of these dialogues is elaborated across the 33 short chapters that follow, incorporating a very broad collection of filmmakers’ thinking that takes us from early ideas about cinema all the way to the so-called “anti-cinema” movement which proposes, among other things, that narrative storytelling is but one of numerous ends to which the medium can be put.

Martin takes readers from the views of Alfred Hitchcock to the poetic impulses driving Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jean Renoir and beyond.

Throughout, Martin is exemplary in his impartiality, more concerned to explain than critique, allowing the filmmakers to speak for themselves in ways that open up connections between them that might never be apparent from their work. Like any good teacher, he’s more interested in offering new ways of reflecting on the familiar, encouraging readers to think for themselves rather than telling them what they should think.

His interconnected catalogue of viewpoints begins with Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s account of his approach to what had appeared to be an insoluble challenge during the filming of Alexander Nevsky (1937), illustrating the kind of problem-solving required in any creative work. A subsequent chapter deals with the importance of “preserving the core idea” throughout the process of creation, a notion few would dispute, Martin using it to identify common ground between Federico Fellini, George Cukor, filmmaker-turned-teacher Alexander Mackendrick and Andrei Tarkovsky.

Pushing us beyond our comfort zones, he takes us from Alfred Hitchcock and George Miller’s strategies to keep audiences’ attention, “to keep them awake”, through the very different poetic impulses driving Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jean Renoir, to the provocative thinking of various avant-garde and “anti-cinema” film artists, such as Hollis Frampton, Isidore Isou and Abigail Child. The names of the last three might not be familiar, but their ideas are likely to be eye-opening.

There are also splendid sections devoted to filmmakers’ “statements of intention (sometimes also known as vision statements, or more colloquially as “pitches”), and former critics Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette, Chantal Akerman, Philippe Grandrieux and John Hillcoat, and their “horizons of reference” in filmmaking culture.

It might on occasion be a little difficult to get your head around some of the thinking that Martin examines. But with his encyclopaedic knowledge, wide-ranging interests and conversational writing style, he’s an ideal guide. And anybody who’s ever wielded a movie camera in earnest – to conjure a home movie, tell a story, or venture into the mysterious and sometimes mystifying realm of the experimental – should find plenty to interest them in Filmmakers Thinking.

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