Defining Moments in Movies (Part 1 of 4)

Introduction: During the first decade of the 2000s, I vigorously participated in three ‘encyclopedic’ book projects: the assertively-titled 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (2003) edited by critic/scholar-turned-horror-producer Steven Jay Schneider, which has since churned through many slightly updated editions, and numerous translations (I was paid only for the initial, English-language version!); the excellent Film Noir: The Encyclopedia (aka The Film Noir Encyclopedia, 2010) edited by Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward, James Ursini & Robert Porfirio; and the most intellectually ambitious and creative of the lot, Defining Moments in Movies (2007) heroically edited by Chris Fujiwara, also released in different territories under the name The Little Black Book: Movies, and translated into Italian in 2009 as Cinema / 1000 momenti fondamentali. This brings me to a total of almost 120 entries (or exactly 150 if I add in Scott Murray’s Australian Film tome of the mid-1990s). Composing for encyclopedias might seem to promise some kind of posterity (and bestow some kind of authority), but in truth such books quickly enter a strange, shadow realm: as weighty reference books that sit in dusty university libraries, hardly anybody ever consults or (still less) actually cites them; and as coffee table publications they tend to … well, sit under piles of books, magazines and newspapers on the domestic coffee tables of friends and acquaintances. Some of these short pieces I have reprocessed and expanded for my website (https://adrianmartinfilmcritic.com/); the rest I intend to present here (in my original versions) on Substack, across several instalments, for the first time online, concentrating on the Defining Moments project. (A.S. Hamrah has recently done the same for a chapter of his book Algorithm of the Night.) As its clever title indicates, the book (as Chris outlines in his introduction) is about ‘moments that define film history’ as well as the perennial challenge of ‘defining’ films (in whichever descriptive, critical or theoretical way) in writing. Not to mention figuring out just what constitutes a ‘moment’ (in several senses)! Even when I have also covered the films below on my website, the text here (sticking to the stylistic parameter of a single block-paragraph for each) is entirely different.