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When D.K. Holm recently contributed an entry at GreenCine Daily, I mentioned in the introduction that his book on Quentin Tarantino is "a Pocket Essential guide packed with far more insight than you'd ever believe would fit in a pocket" and that his "Kill Bill: An Unofficial Casebook rivals Barthes's S/Z as the very definition of a close reading."

Here, I have space to emphasize that I really can't recommend The Pocket Essential Quentin Tarantino strongly enough, even for those who aren't QT fans. Particularly while reading Doug's discussion of the filmmaker's "magpieism," you realize that there's simply no understanding of so very much that went on in film in the 90s - not just in the US or in the British gangster films, but around the world - without a thorough briefing on Quentin Tarantino, and in quick, perceptive yet non-academic prose, that's exactly what D.K. Holm provides.

The Kill Bill is not for reading from front to back (except for the truly dedicated, I suppose), but is instead a reference - and a fun browse. Every entry is marked by a time code, the bit of information the film provides at that precise moment, followed by commentary. Example:

Time Code: 00:20:00
Information: Music cue, theme from Twisted Nerve, by Bernard Herrmann

And Doug riffs on that for half a page. The next entry: 00:20:03. That's right, three seconds later. Elle Driver appears and another half a page of commentary ensues.

So again: The Casebook for serious, serious fans; the Pocket Essential for everyone.

D.K. Holm's latest book is Film Soleil, and interestingly, it isn't his first attempt at tweaking the term film noir in order to coin a new phrase. In the Pocket Essential, he plucks a syllable from "reservoir" and runs with it:

A film voir is a crime film with a comic bent tending to juggle the time frame or narrative order, with side helpings of pop culture references delivered in lengthy Godardian conversations and monologues and cast with a blend of achingly hip youngsters and aging cult figures, and then sweetened with vivid if not necessarily excessive violence. Typical examples of film voir might be The Usual Suspects and 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag.

Well, it didn't stick (or perhaps simply hasn't caught on yet), but he might have something here with "film soleil." Before I had a chance to ask him about it, D.K. Holm, prolific as ever, went and interviewed himself.

- David Hudson

Why interview yourself?

It's a fine tradition. Both Edmund Wilson and Gore Vidal did it.

So you group yourself with those intellects?

One has to have aspirations. Goethe had his Eckermann, but in our increasingly isolated society, in which we are all hunched over our computer screens and think we are part of a cozy global village, every man must be his own Eckermann.

You mean "person," of course.

I'm alluding to the titles of Wilson and Vidal's auto-interview essays, which both appeared in the New York Review of Books.

Your new book is something called Film Soleil, from Pocket Essentials. So, just what exactly is "film soleil"?

Film soleil is an aspect of film noir, but one in which the traditional tropes of noir from the period 1939 to 1958 are reversed or revised. Dark nights become sunlit days and urban sprawl becomes under-populated desert. In the book, though, I try to make the case that it is a genre unto itself.

It's kind of an odd title. Might that be an impediment to finding a readership?

Well, it is in line with the other books in the Pocket Essentials series, that is, titles which have the virtue of succinctly telling the reader exactly what the book is about. But yes, "Neo Noir" would probably have been more marketable, and if a second edition comes out, we'll probably change the title. My goal was to carve out film soleil as its own distinct genre with roots in film noir. Neo noir is a wised-up hip extension of old noir, parallel to film soleil, but different.

So how did the notion of film soleil spring to mind in the first place?

The concept came together for me in 1990 with the release of James Foley's After Dark, My Sweet. What had been up until than a vague impression about recent crime films such as Kill Me Again, The Hit, Breathless and many others coalesced into the idea that something new was happening in the genre - in fact, the birth of a wholly new genre in its own right. I reflected on films such as Red Rock West, The Hot Spot, The Grifters and Delusion, among numerous others, and realized that they shared surface similarities, but also thematic, visual, and moral - for want of a better word - concerns.

Seeing these similarities, I decided to come up with a label for them and, pulling out a handy French dictionary, came up with "film soleil." I assume "film soleil" is grammatically correct. No one has told me otherwise, but it might be slightly off, the way the title Dogville, as Von Trier himself has pointed out, isn't quite in line with American lingo for what it is trying to do (it should be "Dogsville"). I continued to write reviews, pumping the "film soleil" line whenever a new one came out, and did a "think piece" on the genre for my then employer, PDXS a small but lively paper in Portland, Oregon. I was gratified when, years later, Foley, in the course of his audio commentary track for Confidence, mentioned film soleil and my original review of After Dark.

How the heck did Foley even find that review?

I've often wondered the same thing. A clipping service, I guess. That, or the publicists really do send reviews on to their corporate masters. It was nice of him to remember it after all these years.

Has the book had any impact on genre studies?

It's too early to tell. It takes a long time for new ideas to percolate up through the academic sediment. I wrote a book on Kill Bill a while ago and new books on Tarantino since then still don't mention it, though maybe that's a good thing. The least I am hoping for is that the phrase "film soleil" finds it way into the next version of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Did you make any other interesting discoveries?

Once I dove into the material, I realized that "film soleil," such as it is, stretches back much further than the late 1980s. I found that High Sierra, Ace in the Hole and The Killing also are, in their own ways, qualified, if only as precursors. One of my pet discoveries was Inferno from 1953. It's a modest little film by Roy Ward Baker in which the great Robert Ryan plays an industrialist whose wife, Rhonda Fleming, dumps him in the desert to die so that she can run off with her lover. As Ryan, with a broken leg, battles snakes and rocks, we follow his innermost thoughts through a voice over, in complete violation of McKeeian mandates. The film was shot by Lucien Ballard, and looks great. But it was also a 3-D movie, which may complicate its DVD release, I don't know. Ryan was also in Bad Day at Black Rock the next year, so he was something of a film soleil specialist. Deserts fascinated America in the 1950s, and lots of war films and sci fi films (Them!) are set there.

Since no one has ever heard of you, give me a pr�cis of your career before this book.

I was a movie reviewer for the pre-Pulitzer Willamette Week for ten years, where I also pulled other duties. The first film I reviewed was Blood Simple so film soleil was, so to speak, in my blood. For five years after that, I wrote for another local paper called PDXS, edited by a great reporter named Jim Redden. That folded in 1999 and, after kicking around for a while, doing DVD reviews for DVD Journal (the New Yorker of DVD review sites), Binaryflix.com and DVD Talk, I ended up at Kevin Smith's MoviePoopShoot.com, thanks to the foresight of its then honcho, a very good writer and editor named Chris Ryall. While all that was happening, I published four other books, two on the cartoonist R. Crumb, and two on Tarantino.

But there are other curiosities attached to your resum�, aren't there?

Well, yes, since you ask. I was once a "lifeline" on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, though he called someone else. My mug was used once for a Pepe Jeans ad. I had a minor non-speaking role in a video performance piece by Miranda July. It was called The Swann Tool. And I play "myself" near the end of James Westby's new movie, Film Geek.

Have you ever heard from Crumb or Tarantino regarding the books you wrote about them?

No.

Do I detect a whiff of bitterness there?

Not at all. One doesn't expect to hear from the subjects of one's critical prose, and shouldn't. The realms of art and criticism interact, for obvious reasons, but are different in their goals and concerns. The godlike artist must create, while the parasitic critic follows in his wake, explicating, analyzing, paying fealty. What could a celebrity possibly say, anyway? They either liked the book or found something wrong with it, or both. I don't dislike meeting people I admire, but it's better to do so on an equal footing. Also, I have the annoying habit, shared by most film geeks, of wanting to talk and not listen.

Share with me a pet peeve.

Imprecision. But that is because I am the most imprecise of writers myself. My imprecision, at least in print, is due to the fact that these days I have to do too much. Back in my newspaper days, I batted out the text and other people rounded up the pictures, formatted the text, fact-checked, and so on. Now I have to do all that myself. Computer technology was supposed to make writing and publishing easier, but all it did was shift the burden of labor back onto the content provider.

As a consequence, for example, I read less. I have years of magazines stacked up. I have books by writers I love, such as Robert Hughes, Frederick Crews, David Bordwell, Cintra Wilson, Ron Rosenbaum, Jonathan Rosenbaum and so many, many others, growing in piles. I have an amateur interest in the works of Thomas Hardy, especially his poetry, Philip Larkin and George Bernard Shaw, yet can't keep up with new writings on them.

What critics and reviewers influenced you?

Well, there was Andrew Sarris. I am an unreconstructed auteurist. I've always had a secret fantasy of updating his book American Cinema and, in fact, took a little step in that direction in the film soleil book (see pages 28 through 32 if you have a copy at hand). I also revere Robin Wood (I'm assembling an online bibliography), Raymond Durgnat, Molly Haskell and James Naremore. I always read Hoberman and John Simon when I can.

A big influence when I was a kid was a non-movie writer, John Lahr, whose theater reviews I followed in the Village Voice and the Evergreen Review. Renata Adler was another inspiration. V.F. Perkins's Film as Film was a key, influential text. I always read David Thomson with interest, and have a terrible feeling that I am becoming like him, that is, preferring books to movies, TV to movies, anything to movies. I have, in fact, become TV-obsessed in the last two years, finding its longer narratives and casting coups more fulfilling than most movies I see. Thank god for old movies. The most recent big influence on me is Kristin Thompson, especially her book Storytelling in the New Hollywood, probably the most important film book of the last ten years. I'm also only now just getting "into," as the kids say, David Bordwell.

That's a nice blend of new and old. But I notice that there are no exclusively Internet writers.

I can easily make myself bleary-eyed from reading movie reviews on the Internet, and I notice certain things. Most Internet writers sound the same, with that casual chatty prose style that so infects the Net. Most writers have nothing much to add, or too often parrot the conventional middlebrow line on new movies. I've always marveled at that lock-step pattern that emerges about a new release, how some early review, say in the Times or Variety or, as far as art films are concerned, the Voice, sets the tone or attitude for all subsequent reviews. It's worse since the advent of the Web. But I don't exempt myself from this charge. I don't do news or any kind of original reporting, which removes one of the prime reasons for reading someone on the Web. And I am beginning to wonder about larger issues related to movie reviews in general. What is their purpose? Why would someone read them? The studios (or should we now just call them distributors?) have successfully neutralized most mainstream hard copy forums of opinion. I'm going through the new Library of America anthology of film reviews and some other collections of movie reviews and find myself pondering these grim questions.

Oh, here's an always-interesting question. What are you working on now?

Well, I have three projects going, and I am desperately behind on all of them. One is a book on Guy Maddin, which I hope will come out in time (if accepted by the publishers) to still be the first critical study of the Canadian director. I'm also doing a "sexy" picture book on the role of the dominatrix figure in popular films. Finally, I'm also doing what I call a Wittgensteinian treatment on independent film. I'm acting like all these books will really come out, but with the publishing industry and my own demons, you never know.

Seen any good movies lately?

Curiously, there is an almost tactile limit to my memory, to my mental landscape. I never know what's out, can't remember what I've just seen. I used to carry a list on a note card, in case people asked. Consulting my archive page, though, I note of late that I liked The Notorious Bettie Page more than most reviewers, liked Brick quite a lot, as well as the remake of The Hills Have Eyes. I was intrigued by Hard Candy and disliked the undercooked and death-obsessed Prairie Home Companion.

Here's a question I've always liked: [Earnestly] If you were a color ? what would it be?

There is a marked deterioration in this conversation.

I give up. I've run out of good queries. If you were interviewing yourself, what would you ask?

One thing I would like to point out is that the image of the film nerd is rarely truly accurate. The media create this image of the film buff as a pimply, ugly, sexless, obsessed person with few if any interests outside of movies. It's a terribly inaccurate portrait. Except for the never having sex part. That's true.

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