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Not Quite a Memoir: Of Films, Books, the World

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For anyone who has enjoyed Judy Stone's perceptive articles over the years, this book is a feast: a look back at several decades of writing and filmmaking. The only problem is that it reminds you of all the books you wish you had read and the films you wish you had seen. But still, in a world where there is more culture than we can possibly take in, it's nice to have this kind of guidebook to the highlights.

"Not Quite a Memoir" flies around the world from the U.S's Gus Van Sant to Iran's Abbas Kiarostami, Israel's Amos Gitai,Spain's Carlos Saura, Chile's Isabel Allende, India's Satyajit Ray...At every landing, Stone creates a portrait of the artist as a force for social change. Intriguingly, the author backs up her portrait in words by capturing - with unassuming genius--astonishingly insightful photographs of her interview subjects...For medical reasons, Kiarostami never takes off those enigmatic sunglasses. Yet Stone's camera flash cleverly shines right through the artist's dark glasses to give us the first glimpse of eyes that revolutionized filmmaking with how they saw the world. Judy Stone's short interviews, like that camera flash, are just as clever and penetrating."
Ari Siletz, author "The Mullah with No Legs and other stories."

Judy Stone's "Not Quite a Memoir" is a rich tapestry of life, politics, philosophy, travel, and insights from an erudite film critic, who has marched to her own (leftist, humanistic) drum for eight decades.

During her 30 years with the San Francisco Chronicle, she became a kind of West Coast Pauline Kael (who herself hailed from here, before becoming a "New Yorker" fixture), writing complex, highly intellectual - and yet honestly visceral - reviews and interviews, concentrating heavily on European and Third World cinema.

A wonderful anthology of Stone's interviews with some of history's greatest film directors appeared a decade ago, in "Eye on the World."

In "Not Quite a Memoir," there are additional scores of interviews, and features - none more memorable and moving than the final chapter, "Encounter in Montenegro," a 1959 story about the discomfort of "being American" abroad, something unhappily valid even today.

The list of interviews is much too long to include here, but - just as a teaser - it includes Nobel-Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, E.L. Doctorow, Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, Korean director Im Kwon Taek, and Maya Angelou.

Stone's interest in the lives and works of Jews, of oppressed minorities, of society's underdogs runs through the book as a thread, but there are also hundreds of unexpected bits here, such as a report of Alfred Hitchcock's 1976 closed-circuit press conference:

"He regaled his interlocutors with stories of his meticulous concern for the infinite advance detail, his cool contempt for improvisation. In measured tones that recall the glory of Winston Churchill declaring war on the forces of darkness, he recalled his unceasing battle to vanquish the ever-present threat of the insidious cliché."

I wonder if Stone realized when writing about Hitchcock that she did a pretty good job describing herself, and her work.

Judy Stone (the sister of I.F. Stone) has been writing these indispensable articles (now collected in an omnibus edition) of both American and international movies for the past three decades.

In between, she has conducted revealing and intelligent interviews (also in this book) with a startling array of directors, actors, and writers from every corner of the world, often traveling to do so. Stone's impressive body of work has actually been collected in two volumes, "Eye on the World" (1997) and this brand new book, "Not Quite a Memoir."

Stone modestly prefers to call herself a reviewer, not a critic, but if any film reviewer has a knowledge of the world as deep as hers and manages to show how films function in that world, I believe Judy Stone has earned the right to be called a critic.

Keep this book around, and you'll find yourself reading it each day, just because it's so much fun and remains so imformative about our world today.

Judy Stone is disarmingly engaging, a trait and quality that has endeared her to many of her fascinating subjects for attention in this thoroughly embracing and terrific journey of conversations and commentary with (incredibly!) 120 filmmakers, writers, and artists from every continent and culture. Reading the stories I felt an unusual intimacy, often forced or lacking in standard interview formats, with stilted questions or stock inquiries, which Stone adeptly avoids. She enables the person to reveal themselves without it seeming intrusive. Her remarkable, incisive curiosity and talent spans generations (from pre-WW2 to the present) and genres, revealing not only what we previously didn't know about the artist or subject, but also illustrating how a creative life is imperative. It is Stone's life that is the real revelation, however. As she writes about the playwright Jon Robin Baitz, he says "Ideas live. Ideas vibrate." So does this book! Get it to discover the astounding array of humanity inside its covers, get it to curl up with this national treasure, Judy Stone!
Not Quite a Memoir: Of Films, Books, the World

Judy Stone's Not Quite a Memoir is the printed equivalent of one of those late-night pub conversations in which the world's great thinkers get together and come up with viable solutions for all the world's problems. And right there in the middle is Stone's unflappable voice, asking the hard questions.