Studying The Lord of the Rings, Anna Dawson, Auteur 2006, £16.99 A4 82pp, ISBN 1903663660

My first reaction to this guide was, why choose Lord of the Rings (LOTR) to study? There are lots of positive reasons, mostly related to ideas of audience and institution. Here is a series, (a trilogy, a triptych?) that together with the Harry Potter franchise, transformed the international film industry at the start of the century in both commercial terms and in the sheer ambition of production. As a production from a major studio’s ‘independent’ brand, LOTR also challenged industry definitions (and boosted the New Zealand economy).

In terms of audiences LOTR has probably defined a whole generation of young film fans. It used to be that students thought cinema began with Star Wars, soon they may think it began with LOTR.

This study guide tackles all three films (and discusses how to describe them). It covers the audience and industry questions in some detail in around eight crammed pages. I could have taken more, but what there is does a good job. Here, I’m more concerned with narrative and representation.

Mainly I worry about the sheer logistics of the enterprise. Presumably students would watch most of the material in their own time? The three DVDs run to over 530 minutes. Cut out 15 minutes of credits and you’ve still got over 8 hours of material. Can you really handle a narrative of that length in detail in a teaching situation? This isn’t to say that there aren’t interesting questions about genre and aspects of film language. Anna Dawson is an experienced and knowledgable guide and in particular I was intrigued by the discussion of costume -- too often neglected.

I have to confess at this point that although I watched all three films in the cinema, I began to get bored halfway through the third one and I was already disturbed by some of the representations. Dawson discusses representation in detail in terms of masculinity, femininity and race. She tackles what she sees as the charges of racism levelled at the film, asserting that the fictional world is shown as being ‘multicultural’ and she suggests that the criticisms that the ‘evil’ characters are shown as black is possibly an extreme reaction. She writes carefully and sensitively, but I’m afraid I don’t buy her argument. The series lost my sympathy when the mercenaries in The Two Towers were presented as recognisable Arab or Persian warriors.

There is useful material on Peter Jackson, a filmmaker well worth exploring for auteur study and the guide also carries the usual Auteur selection of worksheets. The suggestion for research exercises involving internet searches is interesting. Perhaps I could suggest a Google search for <lord of the rings racist>? It threw up 839,000 hits for me, but just the first page was enough to get me started.

If you want to deal with LOTR, this is a good resource and I wouldn’t want my prejudice against the films to put you off Anna Dawson’s work. Please just consider the race issues carefully.

Roy Stafford