Cinema is “an invention without a future,” one of the medium’s pioneers, Auguste Lumière, is reported to have claimed shortly after participating in its founding. The quotation may be apocryphal, of course — it is almost too perfectly ironic, too poetic in its underestimation of the art form that would define the 20th century. These futureless images would become one of the primary ways that the past would be preserved, their continued existence into successive generations the closest thing that human beings had invented to a time machine, an apparatus that, in its ability to harness light and shadow, remade the world. 

Early in Peter Conrad’s new book The Mysteries of Cinema: Movies and Imagination, the author offers Lumière’s quotation in this same ironic register; he spends the remainder of the volume exploring the art form’s intangible qualities, offering a deliberately fragmented survey of more than a century of the medium’s works in an effort not to explicate the cinema, but to breathe it in. The Mysteries of Cinema is not really an argument about film’s essential qualities, but a collage of similarities, preoccupations and obsessions that drive not just its filmmakers, but seem to consume the medium itself. Conrad’s approach applies a kind of auteurist framework to the entirety of the cinema, considering its artists in relationship to the art form — the medium’s great directors and stars become the nerve endings of cinema’s corpus, lending the book an organic perspective and structure that seeks to spend time with, but not solve, the enigmas to which its title refers.

Conrad has written many books of criticism on a variety of subjects (literature, biography and more), including one each on Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, but The Mysteries of Cinema is his most ambitious consideration of the medium of film. He organizes the book into 15 thematically grounded chapters, with each unified around one or two concepts that, in his poetic approach, look for motifs, rhymes and allusions across film history. An early chapter, “Wheels and Wings,” explores cinema’s fascination with mobility through a litany of examples of movies set on trains and planes, taken from various points in its century-plus catalog; John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924), Douglas Sirk’s Sleep, My Love (1948) and Andrei Konchalovsky’s Runaway Train (1985) exist alongside one another in Conrad’s approach, each a station along cinema’s journey through time. Brief references to these films, their relevance pithily rendered in Conrad’s fleet and precise prose, speak volumes by drawing out cinema’s oneiric qualities — films appear and then, in the blink of an eye, they disappear. 

Other chapters foreground numerous themes that Conrad has identified, including “Cinegenesis,” in which he examines the medium’s fascination with the act of creation; “The Physics of Film,” a study of various films’ manipulations of time and space, and “A New Eye, An Old Ear,” an investigation of cinema’s realm of the senses. These are just a few examples, but in each case, Conrad makes many films of different eras and produced in different countries of origin speak to one another, as though the art form was constantly in dialogue with itself throughout its history. It is an implicit argument in favor of cinema as a language, with the American studio directors and the Italian Neorealists and the Silent Pioneers and the Japanese Masters and the French New Wavers all unified by its common tongue.

Early in the book, Conrad announces his intent to focus primarily on the silent cinema which, in his construction of the text, offers the art form’s nascent period as incredibly fruitful from a thematic point of view; in this way, the other examples he calls upon from around the world and in subsequent eras demonstrate a continued working-out of the preoccupations of the medium’s soundless age. He calls this period the art form’s “most ingenious and idiosyncratic” days, a privileging of what many critics and filmmakers alike call “pure cinema,” in which the image takes precedence, subordinating the medium’s other elements to the simple complexity and complex simplicity of the individual shot. The result is a book rich in examples from the earliest filmmakers, when the art form was defining itself through trial and error, as a thousand film artists spoke to each other without speaking, responding to the changes to society and humanity induced by modernity, using one of its most powerful inventions.

Throughout the text, film theorists, filmmakers, novelists, historians, politicians and other luminaries — some famous, others notorious — partake in a kind of ongoing Platonic dialogue about the seventh art, their observations about cinema a testament to Conrad’s exhaustive research. Virginia Woolf weighs in, as does Jean Epstein, followed by Joseph Goebbels and Henry Miller. The author creates a similar dialogue among the films and filmmakers he has chosen, a list of figures so well-known to cineastes that their last names suffice to identify them: Welles, Keaton, Lang, Minnelli, Spielberg, Scorsese, Hitchcock, Rossellini, Ozu, Murnau, DeMille, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Fuller, Cocteau, Buñuel, Fincher, Godard, Griffith. Conrad calls them up at will, finding their works in conversation across time and space.   

The ephemeral nature of The Mysteries of Cinema might inspire some readers to urge Conrad to get to the point. In his introductory chapter, “The Cinema Age,” he offers no thesis or guiding principle that will govern the remainder of the work, which runs the risk of setting a more purpose-driven reader adrift. So too will some readers undoubtedly object to the selections of films and filmmakers here represented; the book, however, makes no claim to comprehensiveness, and Conrad’s approach should have the opposite effect — an astute reader should consider the films that are left out in light of the themes he has raised, rather than lamenting their absence. Though the author neglects some truly great train pictures in “Wheels and Wings,” like John Frankenheimer’s The Train (1964) and Robert Aldrich’s Emperor of the North (1973), my own familiarity with them invited comparisons raised by his observations that enriched, rather than limited, the effect of the text. 

Relentless propulsion towards the conclusion is not really the objective of Conrad’s book, and it should not really be read that way. Texts gathered around a single idea certainly serve a purpose, but must, by virtue of their genre, adopt a kind of arrogance — contained in these pages, they argue, lies the answer you are seeking. By contrast, The Mysteries of Cinema foregrounds humility; these chapters yield insight, but do so by virtue of their contented admission that so much more remains to be unraveled. Another entire book might be written in this style, with 15 other chapters on as many singular themes, and not cover the same territory — it could be just as revelatory. The self-deprecation of Akira Kurosawa, while accepting an Academy Award for his lifetime achievements in film in 1990, comes to mind: “I’m a little worried because I don’t feel that I understand cinema yet,” he told the crowd. “I really don’t feel that I have yet grasped the essence of cinema. Cinema is a marvelous thing, but to grasp its true essence is very, very difficult. But what I promise you is that from now on I will work as hard as I can at making movies, and maybe by following this path I will achieve an understanding of the true essence of cinema and earn this award.”

Conrad’s book spends so much time in cinema’s past that one could be forgiven for losing sight of the tremendous changes now facing the medium — its position is arguably more precarious now than at any point in its history, beset on all sides by dramatic shifts in production, distribution and exhibition. Perhaps cinema is a victim of its own success; Conrad suggests as much: “In this second era of the image, we mistrust visual stimuli because they are so prolific, so mendacious, so arousing, and often so mercenary; the state of visual abundance can cause indigestion, or worse.” He might as well be describing “content,” a slur that has come to stand in for anything that subscribers, ticket-buyers or whoever will waste their time pouring over their faces, like open-mouthed monsters bellied up beneath a soft-serve ice cream machine, the lever yanked to flood. While Conrad’s book spends time excavating the seventh art’s many mysteries, offering an exploratory rather than conclusive journey, one thing is certain — it is more than a brain-suck engineered by corporate boardrooms and responsive only to hypersensitive algorithms. It has more mysteries to reveal. 

Brian Brems (@BrianBrems) is an Assistant Professor of English and Film at the College of DuPage, a large two-year institution located in the western Chicago suburbs. He has a Master’s Degree from Northern Illinois University in English with a Film & Literature concentration. He has a wife, Genna, and two dogs, Bowie and Iggy.