Michael Mann: A Contemporary Retrospective

Jean-Baptiste Thoret is a smart chap who has produced several important books in French, including an interview book with Peter Bodganovich, a study of the impact of the JFK assassination on American cinema, and a volume about Michael Cimino. We should all hope that these titles are translated into English and published ASAP. But this book, a pompous, uninspired survey of the films of Michael Mann (who has certainly done some wonderful work over the years, including THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS and HEAT), is a different beast, made ***completely unreadable*** by what is surely the WORST translation I have ever read. It pains me to say this, but I would bet that the translator (who apparently teaches at what is one of the UK's most highly regarded universities) fed Thoret's already troubling text through some AI software, made slight adjustments to what came out the other end, and promptly submitted the result to his editors at White Lion, who published it. There are translation blunders not just on every page, but almost every line. It's not that the translation is "wrong," by which I mean the English is, very broadly, an accurate representation of Thoret's fairly impenetrable French. The problem is that the text is a jumbled mess of awkward phrasing and grammatical mistakes. If you do read this book, you might yet conclude that Jean-Baptiste Thoret has something useful to say about Michael Mann's films. But be warned: significant patience is required as you wade through a wildly clumsy and frustrating translation.