24 Saturday 1 August 2015 The Daily Telegraph The Daily Telegraph Saturday 1 August 2015 25 BOOKS

won immediate critical praise makers (I’m guessing Arnold World-beating: may sound like small fry, but with his Katalin Varga, shot in and Haigh, at least) were Steve McQueen’s bringing these more hand- Romania. approached but politely declined, 12 Years a Slave crafted, fully independent Our very own Though the following films go “preferring to let their work speak ventures into the fold will be unmentioned in these pages, the for itself ”. a beacon of encouragement to same year gave us Armando Beyond these lacunae, there are many pursuing their own paths Iannucci’s In the Loop, Duncan a few editorial oddities. The from scratch. Jones’s Moon, Sam Taylor-Wood’s chapter on Wheatley, given his Meanwhile, there’s a lot of golden age Nowhere Boy and Eran Creevy’s growing position as a cult hero considered insight to be gleaned Shifty. Andrea Arnold turned in her after Kill List, Sightseers and A Field from Lenny Abrahamson, the second feature, Fish Tank, in England, is peculiarly brief – his invaluable Irish director whose following 2006’s Red Road and her Q&A gets barely more than two four films to date – Adam and Oscar-winning short film,Wasp . pages, right after the 18 deservedly Paul, Garage, What Richard In fairness, 2009 was no freak: the allocated to Strickland. Jonathan Did and Frank – constitute year before, Steve McQueen Glazer, despite the astonishing as rich a body of work as any crossed over from gallery work to achievement of Under the Skin, is addressed here. features with his Bobby Sands another disappointingly skimpy The single most heartening portrait, Hunger, and the year after entry. component, both of this book and saw the emergence of Richard Still, it’s to the authors’ credit the climate it’s describing, is the Ayoade (Submarine), Gareth prevalence of female voices. With Edwards (Monsters) and Clio The authors have all due respect to the likes of Sally We are living through a boom in the Barnard (The Arbor). Potter and Gurinder Chadha, These and other film-makers asked questions British cinema has traditionally British film industry, says Tim Robey, have provided the British film been an unrepentant boys’ club, industry with a sudden, bubbling that film students with occasional brilliant, rude particularly for female directors talent pool the likes of which we will find instructive intrusions from a Lynne Ramsay haven’t seen for at least a (We Need to Talk About Kevin) or collaboration generation. And it’s not some hive- an Arnold to keep everyone on NEW BRITISH between Faber and mind collective or film-studies that they’ve given just-discovered their toes. CINEMA the film company invasionary force. They’ve all come artists as much of a showing here Now the doors have been by Jason Wood and Curzon, New British to film-making from different as bigger names, and asked flung wide open, and in charge Ian Haydn Smith A Cinema makes the backgrounds and with clearly questions about funding strategies Barnard, Carol Morley (The point, almost by its divergent career goals. The likes of and aesthetic approaches that film Falling), Amma Asante (Belle), 282PP, FABER & FABER, existence, that we live in a Edwards (Godzilla), Jones (Source students across the country are Joanna Hogg (Archipelago), £17.99, EBOOK £14.99 revitalised moment for home- Code), Taylor-Wood (Fifty Shades of certain to find instructive. DR Hood (Wreckers) and Sally grown film-making. Every 12 Grey) and Rupert Wyatt (The Hong Khaou, for instance, El Hosaini (My Brother the Devil) months throw out their share of Escapist, Rise of the Planet of the turned to Film London’s to shake things up, hopefully British success stories, but if you Apes) have taken high-profile Microwave scheme to fund 2014’s for good. ÌÌÌÌÌ were to date this brave new dawn Hollywood assignments off the delicate Ben Whishaw drama Any British film industry to a single year, it might have to be back of these calling cards. Lilting, while Harry Macqueen capable of producing a piece of 2009, when an unusual number of Whether or not this disqualified raised a microbudget of £10,000 work with the vast heart, important British debuts graced them from inclusion, you won’t from his own pocket to finance the To order this integrity and social intelligence our cinemas. find that group interviewed here, bittersweet two-hander Hinterland book from the of Barnard’s The Selfish Giant is Ben Wheatley made his mark nor Arnold, nor Andrew Haigh of the same year. Telegraph for worth fighting at all costs to keep with Down Terrace, the wickedly (Weekend, 45 Years). Next to the achievement of £15.99 plus vital and intact, against every lugubrious tale of a Brighton crime A preface by the two authors Steve McQueen with the world- £1.99 p&p, call chip endangered funding wants

family, and Peter Strickland explains that some of the film- DUHAMEL FRANCOIS beating 12 Years a Slave, Hinterland 0844 871 1515 to take out of it.

books that, in his words, reach an the idea has him.” When Bloom productive (Hawthorne and epitome of Whitman’s aesthetic Who’s who in the THE DAEMON “enormous general readership” emerged into the sunlight, he had James, especially), sometimes less eminence intimates Walt as KNOWS: LITERARY in an “incredible number of reinvented himself as a writer for so. Twain and Frost are bundled Hermetic God-Man, Adam, and American sublime GREATNESS AND THE translations”. If readers are a general readership and, with The together because their popularity American Christ, and makes of AMERICAN SUBLIME buying books about literature, Book of J (1990), The Western Canon makes them “national” writers, but us so many doubting Thomases.” by Harold Bloom then you would think one or two (1994), Shakespeare: the Invention of when it comes down to it Bloom Bloom loves to slap these Big are still reading it. the Human (1998) and How to Read really wants to talk about Frost Concepts down without much 528PP, OUP, £22.50, So what is Bloom’s appeal? and Why (2000), became America’s and Wordsworth and not so much explanation, and if this wasn’t EBOOK £21.38 Why do so many people like to most famous living literary critic. about Twain at all. disorienting enough, his close Harold Bloom is a vocal champion of literary be rather imperiously told what With The Daemon Knows: There are the same old virtues readings, too, often digress into books they should read? There Literary Greatness and the and the same old vices. Bloom reminiscences of old chums or greatness in the face of cultural dumbing down. is the reassurance of expertise: American Sublime, Bloom is back is as enraptured as ever by the rants about the “ideologues” of Duncan White welcomes his latest outing ÌÌÌÌÌ Bloom can recommend a poet like to the ranking and rating. He has “aesthetic power” of the books the academy, before eventually a maître d’ steering you away from picked 12 writers who, he argues, he loves and quotes lavishly circulating back. ccording to Harold the plonk. “created the American Sublime”, to support his appreciations. In The Daemon Knows, he is at Bloom, nobody can There is also a snobbish and explains his choices with the He also remains maddeningly his best when he is most direct. In read good books any complicity: it is reassuring to be bombast and brio of Brian Blessed repetitious (both of his earlier writing about the last chapters of more because we among the Bloomian Elect while picking his fantasy football team. works and within this one) and Moby Dick, with Ahab in pursuit A were raised by the grubby masses read Harry The selected writers hold in prone to inadvertent silliness: he of his quarry, Bloom’s grandiose computers and then Potter. Like Uncle Monty (Withnail common “receptivity to daemonic is always describing his writers register fits the subject. Perhaps indoctrinated by the “academic & I), he cosily assures us that we are as titans, giants, seers and sages nobody alive knows Hart Crane’s rabble” to deride great writers one of the last islands of beauty in (Melville even gets promoted poetry more intimately, and rather than cherish them. What the world. What kind of to “titanic sage” at one point). the section on Dickinson is also kind of culture values Stephen Back in the Fifties and Sixties, culture forces its When he starts calling Dickinson enlightening on her relationship King (“immensely inadequate”) Bloom was a young scholar at poems “gnomes” (rhetorical term, with Shakespeare’s work (despite and forces its children to read Yale taking the good fight to children to read I know), it all gets a bit much. one long digression about the JK Rowling (“dreadful”)? Clearly TS Eliot and the New Critics on The problem (if you find it such) Bhagavad Gita, Yeats and Eliot). we’re all going to Hogwarts in behalf of the Romantic poets JK Rowling? is that Bloom is, in his words, an In interviews, Bloom has a handcart. they so derided. Then, in 1973, “experiential and personalising said that The Daemon Knows Bloom has been warning of the he published The Anxiety of influx”, with the daemon being literary critic” who “no longer took him four years to write as impending end for quite a while Influence, a seminal book that, defined as the “god within” or believes in any historicising” (a hospitalisations interrupted his now. In The Western Canon (1994), drawing on Freud, explored the “the poet-in-the-poet”. In essence, claim that is just crying out to be work and, like his 2011 book he made his most strident case for ways poets engage with their it is a metaphor for inspiration, historicised). Poems, he argues, The Anatomy of Influence, it is the Great Books, even going so far precursors. Bloom’s theory the source of which, in Bloom’s should have no context other than reflective in tone. He has just as to list which writers had made was a way of defining literary account, remains unknowable. themselves and their genealogy in turned 85 and concedes that this the cut. The tone, however, was merit: only the best could avoid So, who belongs to the other poetry. That means it’s just is “probably my penultimate not defiant but elegiac: literature becoming derivative. Fellowship of the Bloom? you, Bloom and his subjective book”. was dying out and his canon was a The irony was that his Whitman, Melville, Emerson, judgments, and so everything There is nothing radical or list of species facing extinction. subsequent books were derivative Dickinson, Hawthorne, James, rests on how digestible you find new in it. It will not win over the The problem is that Bloom’s own of The Anxiety of Influence, Twain, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, his idiosyncratic style. To order this sceptics, nor will it disappoint popularity appears to undermine venturing deeper into the jungle Faulkner and Crane. Only Eliot It gets pretty rich. As a sample book from the the disciples: it is simply more his argument. He has continued of jargon he had created (agon, is included reluctantly, the rest of a typical Bloomian sentence, Telegraph for Bloom. And however one feels to rail against the dumbing down askesis, clinamen, and so on). are Bloom’s American favourites. here he is responding to the £18.50 plus about that, at least the death of of the American reader in a series As Christopher Ricks put it in These dozen are then paired Whitman poem “As Adam Early in £1.99 p&p, call literature has been deferred once of fat, handsomely produced 1976: “Bloom had an idea; now off; sometimes the pairings are the Morning”: “This compressed 0844 871 1515 more.