Elia Kazan's Memoir A Life

Kazan's perception can be compared to how he describes a camera in his earlier years on the set. He writes, "...it is not a recording device, it's a microscope which reveals what the eye does not see," {pg. 187}. This is just one of the declarative statements that fill Kazan's tome of a memoir. Kazan was best known as a co-founder of the Actor's Studio, and leading director of a number of great actors including, Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden, Kim Hunter, James Dean, Jo Van Fleet, Andy Griffith and a young Warren Beatty and Robert De Niro.

The great amount of detail throughout the book reveals his intricate observations of the relationships that shaped his life. Though, with over 800 pages of detail, without a genuine fascination of the man himself, it can feel like a burdensome task of a book. This urge to skim is perhaps due to the lack of fluidity in how the chapters are broken up. Though it follows a linear path in the telling of his life story, he is sometimes disconnected and abrupt in his thoughts. It often reads like a transcript from his diaries with some of the pages missing. Even though this was a distracting element throughout, it gave the book an overall feel of authenticity as a personal memoir.

His traits as a novelist are seen in the intimate, sometimes lured, descriptions of the people in his life. Anyone can talk at great lengths about themselves, but Kazan does so as only a storyteller can. The stories convey how he played a part in film history and through his love for acting introduced Broadway to the silver screen. Aside from this epic persona created by Kazan as a directed, he is brutally honest with himself and about the other inflated players that shaped the art of screen acting.