Disaster Mon Amour

Film Scholar Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film) explores disasters both cinematic and actual in this erudite if uneven collection. The title alludes to the 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour, which Thomson argues exemplifies his thesis that “fearsome possibilities cannot escape some irony or romance that may amount to beauty.” The opening essay, “Overture for Two Staircases,” looks at Laurel and Hardy’s short film The Music Box, about the characters’ efforts at getting a piano up a staircase, alongside Sergei Eisenstein’s tragic stairway massacre in The Battleship Potemkin, to demonstrate how closely related the hilarious can be to the horrible. “In San Andreas” offers an analysis of the movie San Andreas and a chronology of disasters in film including the 1936 movie San Francisco and 1974’s Earthquake. The essay also curiously includes a fictional dialogue with an “old lady” who tells him to “get on with your book,” which proves more obfuscating than illuminating. As Thomson moves away from film analysis and into the real world, particularly his views on global warming and the Covid-19 pandemic, things drag and veer more into flat reportage than illuminating critique. Film buffs will find much to consider in his cinema takes, but won’t lose anything by leaving before the curtain falls. (Jan.)