Stone Reader
Filmed theater, opera, ballet, and musical performance omit the existential and communal links between performer and audience that their live equivalents rely on. Paintings can be filmed, but films that allow us even some of the freedom viewers have in galleries, museums, and other public and private spaces are rare enough to seem like aberrations. Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet’s 1989 Cezanne–which has the nerve to give us extended views of Cezanne canvases from fixed camera positions–has never been screened publicly in this country because the filmmakers refuse to let it be subtitled, knowing that subtitles would impede our view of the paintings. The more common procedures of cutting between details or panning and tracking across a picture impose itineraries that wouldn’t necessarily be our own.
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These reflections were prompted by Stone Reader, a fascinating and compulsively watchable personal documentary by Mark Moskowitz that runs a little over two hours (showing at Facets Cinematheque through July 24). This is the first feature of a man who’s made his living mainly by shooting commercials for political candidates. He’s also been a voracious reader since childhood. Three decades ago, when Moskowitz was in his teens, he read an enthusiastic review of a first novel, The Stones of Summer by Dow Mossman, in the New York Times Book Review. He bought a copy but got bogged down after about 20 pages. A quarter of a century later he finally read the book through and was blown away. He went looking for other titles by Mossman on the Internet but couldn’t find any. For that matter, The Stones of Summer had practically vanished, though Moskowitz managed to get a few more copies from used-book dealers. And he had trouble finding anyone who’d heard of it or knew anything about Mossman.
It’s important to add that the love of books is distinct from the experience of reading, and Stone Reader has much more to say about the former, perhaps because tangible entities such as books and authors can be filmed and the experience of reading can’t. The film conveys a lot about what it’s like to collect books, cherish them, hunt them down on the Internet, receive them in the mail, and arrange them on shelves. It’s especially poignant in exploring the difference between haunting library stacks or bookstores and cruising the Internet–a distinction that’s become far more significant now that global networks of used-book dealers have made it much easier to track down rare volumes.
Like some novels, the film is split into titled sections, each prefaced by one or more literary quotes, and certain books–The Recognitions, Invisible Man, Catch-22–figure in the ongoing discourse as if they were secondary characters. (The film privileges novels as mythical objects over shorter works of fiction, which seems particularly unfair in the case of J.D. Salinger, whom it labels a one-book author even though “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” is arguably a greater achievement than The Catcher in the Rye.) In a curious yet effective example of how Moskowitz adds visual counterpoint to his offscreen narration, his reveries about Catch-22 are accompanied by footage of a carnival in the daytime and then at night; he also isn’t afraid to use mood music as a catalyst. As this film progresses, his focus is increasingly on time, including the discrepancies between tenses that crop up between lived time and film time. Shortly after he receives the 16-millimeter footage of one of his interviews from the lab he says to the audience, “You’ve probably already seen it, because it’s in the film, but I haven’t.”
