Film - Think

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened. - Hemingway

Mark Moskowitz tossed a copy of a book named The Stones of Summer in a box when he was a teenager. A review he had read of the book back then praised it as a masterpiece, as a voice of his generation. This was enough for the burgeoning bibliophile to rush out and buy a copy, but only a few chapters in he found it wasn’t worth his time. Years later, he opens the same box, reads the same book, and realized he was drastically wrong. The book is a masterpiece. While trying to track down a little more information about the book, Moskowitz finds nothing, which sparks an oddly writerly documentarian search for its enigmatic author, Dow Mossman. Camera in hand, Moskowitz makes it his mission to track Mossman down. This proves difficult, and his dramatic crusade for the "voice behind the text" takes him from literary scholars to agents to book jacket illustrators. Most of the film passes these offices and studios, wherein aging literary scholars give voice to a love few die-hard readers are able to articulate. And when the search becomes difficult enough for us to start questioning Mark’s motivation for the ongoing film, he tells us about the first real book he ever read.

He talks about the first time he read Catch-22. This is American literature pre-Vonnegut, when Heller was all there was on that horizon (...can't actually imagine that, but I went along with it). And then after reading Catch-22, Mark read a biographical piece about Heller in the New York Times which revealed that the guy just leads a normal life, works a normal day job, and is working on his next book whenever he can get to it. The piece also has Heller talk about how he writes and how his work simply takes on a life of its own as it progresses. At times he doesn’t even know what it is about until it is finished. Somewhere in this article Moskowitz discovers what the reading and writing of fiction is all about: a strange communion that happens somewhere behind the text. A network of real people reading, writing, and wondering in uncanny networks. His discovery of Heller, the "historical Heller," unfolded a literary subtext in Catch-22 along seams of recognition between author and reader. His search for Mossman is articulated as an extension of this desire for personal encounter through literature, of that odd sensation6 of feeling "the author’s soul pressing out from the text." (Moskowitz' words.) This is Gadamer writ large, the creative transaction between writer and reader a protracted road trip towards a "new horizon," making the camera's eventual discovery of Mossman necessary. At the risk of giving too much away, after having watched this documentary I now find myself wondering how much I really want to know about "the author." When does our desire to "meet" the author of a text become misguided, impossible, or simply unrecommended?

It is often said that filmed adaptations of literature often don’t work because of one simple reason: The things that make books good don’t make good films, and things that make films good don’t make good books. As a documentary about reading, Stone Reader does little to break this impasse, over time building an accumulation of readerly moments that seem to be teaching us a corollary to the classic rule: what makes a good reader does not necessarily make a good documentarian. Moskowitz only really has here about enough material for a tale the size of The Pearl, but manages to stretch it out to Grapes of Wrath proportions. Granted, the avid reader, the bibliophile, the literary junkie, will all willingly hop along for this long ride. It is ripe with little a-ha moments. But the casual reader may find themselves wanting to dog-ear the story about half of the way through.