The cinetrix emerges from her self-imposed exile! So much to say about so many things. While I get my thoughts together, some entertainments for a wet Friday afternoon.
...By the mid-1970s Farber knew what he wanted from audiences. He wanted them to be Farber. "The audience," he said, "should be fantastically dialectical, involved in a continuing discussion of every movie." He wanted the same from filmmakers: "The person making the movie should be held responsible for everything that's said and shown, and so should the audience seeing it." If this seems a long way from the pure pleasure Kael-ite critics accuse him of deriving from "underground" movies by directors like Hawks, Walsh, or Aldrich, it's not. It's just that Farber feels those directors were aware of a certain kind of responsibility. Ours is a cinematic age of auteurism without responsibility. Every film is A Film By and no director is ever held accountable for making bad movies and no audience is ever ridiculed for liking them. Farber's direction for audiences and filmmakers makes more sense than ever, even as it becomes less possible for working film critics and film directors to follow it.
For the American film critics of the past we still read today, writing film criticism was not a lifelong profession. Today it has become a sinecure for certain writers. It traps them and forces us to witness their long, long, long slides into irrelevance. Because he could paint, and because for him painting and writing film criticism were inextricably linked, Farber escaped this fate. He did not write film criticism his whole life nor did he make it his 9-5 job, but it was something woven into both. When he said "I can't imagine a more perfect art form, a more perfect career, than criticism," the word "career" must have had a different meaning for Farber in 1977 than it does for us today. His definition of "underground" in movies — "it is as though the film has a life of its own that goes on beneath the story action" — applies to his career as well, which sometimes seems as mysterious as Edgar Ulmer's....
- Videogum revisits the Chris Eigeman oeuvre, calling him the Chuck Bass of the 90s.
- Finally, the Guardian film blog Clip Joint recently treated the cinetrix's favorite subject: the use of songs in films:
Maybe it's because you just can't say it all – sometimes dialogue falters, surroundings seem 2D, and it's time to climb to a higher, more emotional plane. Songs used to be the CGI set-pieces of their day, Golden-Age musicals texturing them just as carefully as Yoda's earlobes; now they're fired off with a killer soundtrack swagger, pop cultural bullets to the head.
