ENDPAPER
A world of words
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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A clutch of non-fiction films seem to focus on books as exciting subjects for cinema.
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I HAVE been delighting in a handful of non-fiction films that seem to relish language, books, and words.
"Wordplay" is a recent documentary about crossword puzzles, particularly the difficult, but engaging, crossword that is featured in the weekend edition of the New York Times and the people who solve them. "Word Wars" is as you can guess — about Scrabble players. "Spellbound", the movie that inspired a new genre — the literary documentary — is about spelling contestants. Though there isn't one yet, I feel sure there's soon going to be a doc on Sudoku players.
Wit and suspense
"Wordplay" revolves around a handful of puzzle-solvers anticipating the annual Crossword Puzzle Tournament. With wit, suspense and craftiness, the film documents the shared humanity of these puzzle addicts who delight in words.
The film's hero is New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz. The films informs us that "since Shortz took over the "Times" crossword in 1993 he reads 60 to 75 submissions a week and writes or rewrites half the clues to the published ones". "Wordplay" illustrates each crossword game and tournament on screen, so that the audience can be in on the clues and the solution.
A nice companion to the movie is Crossworld, a lively book by Marc Romano on the history of the crossword puzzle. It is also a witty, engaging personal account of how he became infatuated with puzzles. From Romano we learn that the game has been around since the ancient Greeks created word squares.
"Bookwars" is a doc that looks at how street book vendors on pavements and carts ply their trade in New York City. It was made by a street vendor who struggled to make some living selling books on the streets to students. It reveals how these vendors source their books (they have a code — they do not touch stolen books) and how knowledgeable they are about what they sell.
"Black Books" from BBC is a comedy about an eccentric bookseller "who loves his books and hates his customers".
"Word Wars" documents the obsessive world of scrabble players and their near neurotic fascination with words. Using flashy graphics and fast-motion effects, it depicts the insular world of five scrabble players and their compulsion with the game. Most of the players declare "they do absolutely nothing for a living". One of them adapts the Beatles' "Across the Universe" as a Scrabble anthem: "Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe."
"Stone Reader", which I have written about earlier, is a non-fiction film about a reclusive writer and one passionate reader's search for other passionate readers. A man named Mark Moskovitz stumbles on an old paperback copy of a book called "The Stones of Summer" by an obscure writer called Dow Mossman. He is fascinated by the book and thinks it to be an overlooked masterpiece. Wanting to learn more about the author, he is shocked to learn he has disappeared. And the book has been long out of print. He decides to go in search of Mossman with a movie camera in hand.
The filmmaker's quest becomes a visual and word-filled meditation on the relationship between author and reader. Though most writers write for themselves, the film demonstrates that it is the reader who completes the book. There has not been, so far, such an uncompromisingly literary documentary. It fulfils a fantasy that many book lovers have had: to see a movie where books and readers and writers are heroes, worthy of being the subject of an entire film.
As a movie paying tribute to books, Francoise Truffaut's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 remains the most poignant. In Bradbury's sly, inventive plot, the world has banned books. But there are secret libraries run by book lovers. When they are found out, the fire squad burns the books — 451 is the temperature at which paper burns. The hero of the film is a fireman who hides one of these books and secretly reads it at night by torchlight. The book turns out to be David Copperfield and thus does he discover reading.
Unforgettable tribute
The story's end is one of the most unforgettable tributes to books. Though it doesn't involve books as actual physical objects, nothing could mean more to readers and writers. Our hero escapes to a hidden island where the only inhabitants are book lovers whose only job is to commit to memory an entire book. The book-loving fireman watches women, men and children walk around the island, reciting the books out loud. The guide who has been showing our hero around points out to various people saying, "Oh, that's The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, that's The Secret Garden, that's Lolita, that's War and Peace Part 1 and that's War and Peace Part 2."
These ardent, dangerous book lovers, these compulsive, subversive readers have become living, breathing, walking, talking books!
I once wrote that movies borrow from books but don't always return the favour. My quibble as a book lover who also happens to be a movie lover was that the literary world is plundered for plots and story ideas but seldom explored as a subject in film. I'm pleased that cinema, through a new wave of literary documentaries or non-fiction film, now sees the world of words, language and books not as arcane subcultures but as exciting, imaginative subjects for cinema.
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