The Mysteries of Cinema: Movies and imagination blends history, criticism, and memoir, and is drawn from a lifetime of movie-going that started when Conrad first encountered ‘the pictures’ as a teenager. ‘It did not occur to me that films might be a work of art,’ he writes; ‘instead they were an enchantment.’ He continues to be spellbound by the subject: his latest work is crammed with ideas and observations on everyone from Carl Theodor Dreyer to Fritz Lang, Hitchcock to the Coen Brothers.

Much of the book is devoted to silent movies, which Conrad believes represent cinema’s acme. He chronicles giddy early reactions to the moving image from modernists and filmmakers. Jean Epstein called cinema ‘the most fantastic voyage, the most difficult escape, that humans have ever attempted’; Virginia Woolf, however, distrusted it, admitting only that it ‘agreeably titillated’ the brain, so you could ‘watch things happening without [being bestirred] to think’. Conrad is closer to Epstein than Woolf and is perhaps channelling the enthusiasm of early pioneers when he suggests that silent film ‘restored a universality that we supposedly lost when the tower [of Babel] fell’. He later spins that into the concept of ‘cine-genesis’, which boils down to an argument that cinema has replaced our need for God.

Readers might be forgiven for finding that a little silly. Conrad is better when he avoids hyperbole and sinks into the lives and works of his favourite directors. Considering Sergei Eisenstein, for instance, he notes how the ‘demagogic appeal’ of cinema allowed the Soviet director to propagate his ideology. In Battleship Potemkin (1925), Eisenstein ‘used the techniques of the art as training in agitprop, with the associative leaps of montage enforcing moral equations’ – such as in the famous maggot sequence or the falling perambulator on the Odessa Steps.

If that last sequence is a masterpiece of cruelty, we are led to ask: how much does film humanise us? Conrad offers no straightforward answer. He notes that Epstein and Germaine Dulac found that ‘modern, metallic inhumanity … was the glory of cinema’, while Jean Renoir refused to accept that vision. Roberto Rossellini, who sought to ‘demythologise’ the camera and its accompanying technology, is identified as another of the medium’s great humanists; while World War II is described as an inflection point in cinema’s history. Here, ‘the camera assumed a new responsibility, as a traumatised witness and a humane conscience’.

Conrad maintains, though, that cinema is complicit in de-humanisation, using Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) as an example. That is surely only superficially true. Lang’s witch-burning scene may depict the inhumanity of the mob, but Metropolis’s robotic imitation of human leadership and charisma is better read as a warning than an approbation. And you have only to think of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) or Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) to realise that one of cinema’s greatest imperatives has been to preserve the human amid an often barbarous and impersonal modern world.

While Conrad is persuasive on individual films, he can use those observations to make questionable extrapolations about cinema as a whole. It is no easier to generalise about film than any other art form. Indeed, it is far harder when those generalisations straddle the boundary where silence ends and speech begins.

The book is full of seductive sentences that under scrutiny mean very little. Conrad enthuses that

[a]s we watch, films turn the once regular laws of physics into a vigorous, arduous physiological experience. Time, altered by the images that flash before us, pulses in our bodies more erratically than usual, and space contracts and expands as the camera propels us through the world.

It is hard to know what to make of it. Which films? Couldn’t you say the same about other art forms? We are told that films release ‘propulsive excitement’ and offer us ‘happy catastrophes’, that they are ‘an exercise in chiaroscuro’; Conrad cherry-picks examples to support these statements, but fails to show how they apply more generally.

Oddly enough for a writer, he also underestimates the importance of words in film. ‘Cinema is about … movement not speech,’ he claims. (Pauline Kael was always adamant the two things had equal importance.) This notion of film as a ‘primarily visual art’ seems to depend again on Conrad’s immersion in early film. René Clair might not have been reconciled to sound in 1946, as the book notes, but we are now in 2021 and our screen culture is comprehensively textual as well as visual. Many of its zeniths have come from its interactions with theatre and literature.

If you can overlook some tendentiousness, The Mysteries of Cinema is not a bad crash course in film’s early decades. Conrad is a critic of formidable erudition, and if he can over-rely on that in the absence of a cohesive argument – a quality that may annoy hardcore cinéphiles – his book remains an intellectually provocative consideration of the artform. One likely effect is that readers will want to put it down and watch a selection of the huge compendium of movies described. That alone makes it worth reading.