Halliwell’s Film Guide is a collection of film reviews, first published 1977, and reprinted many times over at least 25 years. I still have a copy of this guide, and I’m afraid to say I still use it. My edition is dated 2008, so why still consult it? The answer has a relevance for many digital manuals.
“Manuals” are Ian Sansom’s term for the how-to guide in the age of print. In a column in the TLS (October 25 2024) he looked back nostalgically at how there was once a print guide to everything:
“I was born during the heyday of the cheap paperback manual, the handbook, the textbook and the home encyclopedia: once the backbone of self-education, self-discovery and instruction, they are all slowly but surely disappearing”.
According to Sansom, his generation was the first, and perhaps last, to be book-based, in the sense of using a book to discover things. His generation (born in the 1950s) was one of the earliest to have universal literacy, while more recent generations have moved to online resources. He remembers using manuals for everything, including, even, The Joy of Sex (1972). For films, he consulted Halliwell’s Film Guide.
The print manual is dead, but can the manual still survive in the digital age? The need is still there: we use manuals, or guides, to learn about things but also to assess value. Whether you are choosing a film to watch, buying a dishwasher, or identifying a relevant article or book, a frequent starting place is to look for a reliable review. Not the dreaded Trustpilot, or Amazon reviews. Nor, for films, Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb. Why not? Because their judgements are suspect: they are too easily manipulated, and have too wide an authorship to get any idea of their relevance for me. A horror film might get top marks from the Rotten Tomatoes reviewers who are horror fans, but which would leave a wider audience cold. Halliwell reviewed everything from a single standpoint; in later editions of the Film Guide, additional authors were used, but following a similar editorial brief.
With academic publishing, the criterion of authority, rightly or wrongly, is derived from the number of citations to an article. There are many drawbacks with such a system: again, it is relatively easy to manipulate, and, like most Web-based review systems, it substitutes number of citations for quality of citations. No attempt is made to see who is doing the citing. Nonetheless, the idea of authority is a powerful one – in this case, the judgement of peers. Authority is based on the idea that any article read by many of the author’s peers will be in some way significant. The call is to the authority of the community, in this case selected by authority.
The print manual, or the curated encyclopedia, uses authority by proxy. The assumption is that the author, or the publisher, has established a level of competence that the author or compilers will share. We take an Oxford reference book more seriously because it is published by Oxford.
Halliwell, according to Wikipedia, was criticised by many critics as being out of touch with recent films; Halliwell’s own preference was for movies of the 30s and 40s. That, as it happens, is my preference too, so I’m happy. Once you know the limitations and the strengths of a particular manual, it becomes a very valuable tool. Leslie Halliwell is an interesting case. An inveterate cinema-goer in his youth, he studied English at Cambridge before running a local cinema, which seems to have informed his judgement, which I would describe as populist but informed.
Curated or crowdsourced?
In the digital era, the compilation of the manual has changed by moving to crowd-sourcing. Wikipedia is an interesting example: it is crowd-sourced, but at the same time attempts to present a neutral voice. This is challenging: residents of a village, the most likely authors of a Wikipedia article on their location, are unlikely to be very critical of their home town. So Wikipedia is somewhere in the middle between an external authority and an interested party. Even here, however, any experienced user of Wikipedia becomes adept at interpreting the likely point of view of the contributor.
Today, there are any number of online would-be authorities to provide the replacement for the manual; but I see no reason why the manual, in digital form, cannot live on to provide a single point of view, alongside other sources: I argue for multiple viewpoints. But tonight, when I choose which film to watch, I’ll probably check with Halliwell to see what he thinks, before making my decision.
David Martin
I still use Halliwells too. It is still the best film guide, even 20 years out of date. The ability to grade films and comment accurately but succintly was a rare art when it was written, and even more so now.