Film Studies: Writing on his childhood in Granta's characteristically quirky special film issue, Chris Petit recalls that cinema for him was more real than the everyday.
As the illusion broke down, disappointment set in, a disappointment mirrored by many of the essays in this volume.
In editor Ian Jack's memories of a return to his childhood town, the early death of a younger brother is intercut with the decay of old film stock, reminding him that images are a poor replacement for reality. Jim Lewis's short story, 'Stay Up Late', concerns a ghostly child star, and biographer Gaby Woods muses on loss and death - the murder of Lana Turner's lover - in 'In Lana Turner's Bedroom'.
The disjuncture between the perfection of the cinema image and the imperfections of the movie-making business fuel other essays such as John Fowles's revelatory diary entries on the negotiations over the sale of his rights to The French Lieutenant's Woman. The Great Man's contempt for the hand that generously fed him is hammered home with every full stop. Yet film- makers are artists too, as a central section of paintings and sketches by Kurosawa, Hitchcock and others reminds us.
Nor are most of them as deranged as Werner Herzog, whose request for several thousand rats to add atmosphere to his remake of Nosferatu is the occasion for laboratory scientist Maarten 't Hart's recollections of becoming a reluctant rat handler. Hart knows he ought to have nothing to do with a man who can dictate that cheap white eastern bloc rats be dyed to resemble brown plague rats, a hit-and-miss process that involves several hundred of the rodents accidentally being cooked. Yet he cannot walk away from the set's hypnotic atmosphere.
Perhaps the disappointment comes from the films themselves, always just a little less perfect than they might have been. Adam Mars-Jones wants less film music; Colson Whitehead has one or two things to say about audiences, and Andrew O'Hagan is shattered after spending two years as the Telegraph's film critic. Atom Egoyan laments the documentary he will never make. Its subject, Philip Toubus, aka Paul Thomas and other monikers, has transformed himself from Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar to soft-porn star and maker of multiple volumes of Swedish Erotica.
Egoyan carries in his head the ideal opening moments of the documentary. He knows Toubus/Thomas will never agree to what he asks. Nothing else is worth making. The alternative to this disillusionment is obsessive devotion. In Jonathan Lethem's case, this is to the films of John Cassavetes and their anarchic director; films that draw Lethem in so deeply that the space between artwork and viewer is dissolved.
Obsession stalks this collection. Thanks to an elderly Polish Jew's determination that the events he was part of be recounted, Thomas Keneally walks into a handbag studio in Beverly Hills and comes out with the story of Schindler's List. Shampa Banerjee, the child who plays Apu's older sister in Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, remembers her bewilderment as her father's friend fashioned the film that made Indian cinema grow up. She, on the other hand, like the ghostly child star, would remain forever Little Durga. Film memorialises and trivialises; it infuriates and seduces; without it, like it or not, these writers would have led duller lives.
Ruth Barton is O'Kane Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Film Studies, University College Dublin. Her latest book, Irish National Cinema, was recently published by Routledge
Granta 86: Film Edited by Ian Jack Granta Publications, 256pp. £9.99