The cinetrix has her head down over some [at long last] paid writing, but there's always time to flack her pals.
First off, it's been quite a week for Boston film critic Gerald Peary. Gerry showed three of his favorite films at the Brattle last Wednesday and was feted at the theatre's swanky fundraising gala at the Charles Hotel on Sunday. To mark the occasion, he spoke with a reporter from a paper at BU, where he runs the Cinematheque. [via]
Why is film criticism important?
It’s hard to say why it’s eternally important. But certainly, right now it’s very important because we’re in a strange time where there are too many movies coming out. Every Friday, an extraordinary amount of films are released. And the ones with the largest advertising budgets get people to the movies. So the only way a little movie can be discovered by an educated audience is to have a film critic champion it and write about it in a way that will excite an audience to see it.So the boosterism of criticism is really essential. And that’s not coming just from me as a critic. A lot of distributors are frightened by the fact that, as newspapers are getting smaller, over 30 major film critics have lost their jobs. And since those voices are gone, the films just open and close and nobody has anything to say about them. And it’s very hard for a little film or a documentary — unless it’s about penguins or Michael Moore — to get an audience.
There was a time when you could find FOC A.S. Hamrah in the booth at the Brattle, threading up the day's double feature. Now [among many other pursuits] he contributes to n+1, where he writes about the cinema. The Tisch Film Review recently interviewed Scott about--shocker--the current state of film criticism. Per usual, he doesn't pull any punches and makes it almost impossible for me to choose only one excerpt.
Post-Star Wars, film criticism really started to cave in to the film industry, especially as Kael-era film critics began to age and miss their salad days, when Fellini and Bergman, and then Antonioni and the Nouvelle Vague and, lastly, the New Hollywood of the early 1970s were new to American screens. Many critics essentially abandoned the cinema in favor of blockbuster entertainment. They decided to go along to get along, and all of a sudden they had no patience for anything - but they couldn’t get enough of Jaws. I think they began to identify, even over-identify, with the industry in general, more than they identified with any of the filmmakers they once professed to love. They just didn’t seem to care about anything important anymore, and they did nothing to bring new critics along. The result is that younger critics cling in desperation to the one model they can respect, and they all become the same, interchangeable, post-Hoberman critic, writing like cultural studies grad students auditioning for jobs at Variety.
What are your thoughts on academic film writing?
Being an academic and being a writer are two different things. I know academics I wouldn’t read a postcard from. To me, it’s apparent that, since the mid-1980s, even as young film academics had more and more access to more and more movies -- and know more writing on the cinema from the past -- they were becoming worse writers. I can’t think of one book or article by any American or English academic film writer of the last 25 years that I’ve read and would re-read today. If a lot of film critics write like grad students auditioning for trade papers, a lot of academics write like technical writers who love gossip columns. I’m thinking of the jovial gleefulness of a David Bordwell, which is a classroom version of Leonard Maltin’s television bonhomie. No doubt Bordwell inspires his students just as Maltin entertains his viewers, and both are prolific authors with employees or acolytes. Both know their film history, and both seem like nice guys. That doesn’t make me want to read their books or whatever they put on the web. Having said that, I’d prefer either one of them to the generic film academics of the 1980s and 1990s, practitioners of a discipline that could have been called Blade Runner Studies. I mean the post-Questions of Cinema world of American academic film studies before Slavoj Zizek trounced it. If it has produced anything of lasting interest, please send me a copy.
You begin to see why we're friends.
[The full Peary article may be read here. Read the rest of Hamrah here.
