Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film (2015)

This plays out like a short introductory college course on film history and film theory, with the lecturer and his PowerPoint presentation adapted to graphic novel form and each section of the book coming off as a separate class session. There is nothing in-depth here, but it is a decent overview.

I have a quibble that as an artist Ross can barely pull off the likeness of the celebrities and actors around whom the book revolves. Fortunately, he provides endnotes that include identifications of most of the people portrayed in the artwork.

On a broader note, the book highlights a sort of catch-22. By justly disparaging the dominance of white males in the film industry throughout its history and drawing attention to underrepresented peoples here and there throughout the book, Ross made me conscious of how many of his examples for film concepts then do come from movies made by white males. I'm not shaming or blaming, but instead wondering how inclusivity effects how histories and analyses of this nature can be balanced when dealing with times that were so unbalanced. ( )

Subtitled “A Graphic Journey through Film”, Filmish is a non-fiction work told in a black and white comic book format. But it’s not just a straight forward history of film, and rather than simply going through films chronologically, the book is split into several chapters each exploring a different topic. Ross manages to go into a reasonable amount of depth for the short amount of space he has for each subject, and he’s clearly passionate about film. The book doesn’t just talk about film genres and styles but goes into more serious film theory territory, talking about the viewers’ relationship with films, how they can manipulate the way we see things, the relationship between film and technology (and technophobia) and many other topics. He regularly quotes other sources, often scholarly works, and everything is fully sourced. The art work is very well done, and it’s fun just spotting all the different films referenced in the images, though as with the quotes, everything is sourced in the extensive notes at the back. There’s nothing especially new for people who are already familiar with the topics covered, but it’s an excellent and wide ranging overview for anyone with an interest in film. ( )