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Something deep inside cannot be denied

The cinetrix simply must get these papers graded before class tomorrow; another batch comes in Wednesday, and there's a freelance gig to squeeze in, and and fuckin' and. Basically, I am trying to emulate Judy's sang froid in the face of the increasingly absurd scenario that is my life these days. Wish me luck. [via]

Big house, our rules

OK, so a non-movie-geek pal working on a piece asked me for help with the following:

I want to refer to a particular trope in American movies: the evil warden or guard who exerts total control over his facility, turning it into a private hell.  So far I've watched Brute Force and (maybe not quite so much what I'm looking for) The Longest Yard.  I know Cool Hand Luke is supposed to be the archetype here.  Any other ideas?

Your thoughts? [FYI: Brubaker has already come up.]

Thanksgiving wishes

Enjoy all things in moderation. Back tomorrow.

gallimaufry

Here's what I'd be reading and watching today if I didn't have to throw myself into the great Thanksgiving migration fray:

• More Intelligent Life considers Daniel Day-Lewis's CV in advance of Nine.
• Almodóvar charms in this indieWire/Reverse Shot video interview.
• TCM's Movie Morlocks locate William Friedkin's French Connection shooting style in 60s Chicago documentaries' no-nonsense street style.
• Watch it with the whole extended family! A.O. Scott's Critic's Pick is Aguirre: Wrath of God.
• Beck and Charlotte Gainsbourg have a bonkers new video.

Travel safe. Play nice.

Talk talk

It may be ancient history already when measured in blog years, but that fleeting quality specific to online time and its attendant kerfuffles is just one of the reasons that I keep coming back to the shitstorm recently kicked up in the comments to Anne Thompson's post on November 11. Here are her first three grafs:

As I suspected, LA Weekly and Village Voice Media film critic Scott Foundas has accepted the offer of associate film programmer at The Film Society of Lincoln Center.

This means that:

1. Film criticism is a dying art. As one of the best critics working today, Foundas should be anticipating a long and happy career. He’s giving it up to program movies. This should not happen. He’s looking to survive. David Ansen had quite a few more years of criticism in him too, when he accepted a buyout from Newsweek and this week, the new role of artistic director at the Los Angeles Film Festival. The loss of both voices in the critical realm is severe.

2. Unless Foundas screws up (as one-time heir apparent Kent Jones did), down the line he could be in a position to run the New York Film Festival. (Why give up the gig as one of the country’s most powerful film critics otherwise?) Eventually, 22-year NYFF veteran Richard Pena will move back to academia (he’s an associate professor at Columbia University), depending on how long Film Society exec director Mara Manus wants him to stay. She respects Pena and leans on him a good deal. But she is also ambitious for all that the Film Society can be, as a festival, cultural institution and year-round exhibitor. “Scott’s writing is an exhilarating dialogue with artists and audiences alike,” stated Manus. “It is this vibrancy, along with Scott’s deep film knowledge, that will contribute greatly to our growing organization, ensuring we continue to offer (audiences) a vital place of serious film culture.”

It goes on. I'm pretty sure I may have glanced at it through an RSS reader, thought, "Oh, hey, I met that guy at South by," and continued on my merry interweb way. Others, as Movieline gleefully related, did not.

The first shot over the bow came from none other than Manohla Dargis of the New York Times:

Anne,
1. Kent Jones did not screw up at the Film Society and it’s disgusting that you would write something so utterly wrong and insulting about him. 
2. “Film criticism is a dying art”? Did you write that with a straight face?
3. Scott is giving up on slaving for the LA Weekly (meaning, working for those fuckers at Village Voice Media); he’s not giving up on film criticism, which you would know if you actually bothered to talk to Scott - or even read Brian Brooks’s indiewire report: http://www.indiewire.com/article/scott_foundas_i_think_any_organization_has_to_change_with_time/

posted by Manohla Dargis on November 12, 2009 at 11:56am PST

Dargis was quickly joined by Gavin Smith of Film Comment, Kent Jones [who'd most recently held the position Foundas will be assuming], Amy Taubin, Milestone's Dennis Doros, Jim Emerson, and even Foundas himself [albeit with the disclaimer "Given how quickly this comments section devolved into a backbiting cesspool, I had hoped to avoid entering into the fray. I do so now only to clarify a couple of key points"]. Fight! Fight! Fight! Right?

That seemed to be Ray Privett's take:

Nice to see film critics get excited and fight over something.

Too bad the topic is, as usual, themselves.

posted by Ray Privett on November 16, 2009 at 8:08pm PST

And, true, there is something exciting and unseemly about watching leading names in a field squabble in public. It's as queasy-making as watching basketball players fight: Something about the proportions is off.

But there's more to it. Yes, my initial reaction was one of sheer enjoyment at reading Dargis's salty voice unobscured by Times speak. Not to mention Thompson's textbook taking-the-high-road passive-aggressive reply, again in the comments. This, however, was only the first Kübler-Ross stage.

I started to get mad -- pre-emptively -- that two powerful women were fighting and thus could feed errant "Bitches, man" sexist tendencies that, quite frankly, would permeate the film blogosphere to an even greater degree were the male majority not already so caught up in their own pissing matches. [Sorry, fellas, but you know I'm right.] Which is not to say that I'm not guilty of back-channel gossip and carping, because I so am, but I KNOW BETTER THAN TO FIGHT ON THE OPEN INTERNETS. That's a sucker's bet. [Even Emily Gould has reached this epiphany.]

Then I realized the real story here is a generational [not gender] divide and chilled out a little. Here's what the pile-on demonstrated, to me, anyway. Established old-media film writers are online lurkers. Duh. And their choice to air grievances openly, in comments rather than through back channels, while deliberate, suggests only a sort-of savvy that stops short of true deftness in navigating the online gladatorial arena. Because you can't tell me these people don't have one another's email addresses. No, the point was precisely to amend the record and proclaim allegiances publicly. But I really don't think they realized how hard it is to stuff the genie back in the bottle.

All of the seething antipathies from coming up together, inhabiting roughly the same cohort [save Foundas, actually], and gunning for the same gigs since the 1980s were briefly and obliquely laid bare. It's not quite at the level of Team Edward or Team Jacob, mind, but I found this peek behind the curtain fascinating nonetheless.

And yet, everyone seemed to miss the real story, which is this: One film critic voluntarily left a job to take a job that opened when another film critic voluntarily exited an organization for a new position. In 2009. Now, that's news.

The vertigo of lists

Well, that was quick. Only the other day I was musing about "the mythical female cinephilia! What does it look like, if it exists at all? And does it entail counting to 10?" Um, maybe! Via David Hudson, I suspect, comes this interview from Der Spiegel with Signore Umberto Eco, whose residence at the Louvre yielded not only a just-published book but also answers to some of my pressing lis(z)t-o-maniacal questions.

Eco: At first, we think that a list is primitive and typical of very early cultures, which had no exact concept of the universe and were therefore limited to listing the characteristics they could name. But, in cultural history, the list has prevailed over and over again. It is by no means merely an expression of primitive cultures. A very clear image of the universe existed in the Middle Ages, and there were lists. A new worldview based on astronomy predominated in the Renaissance and the Baroque era. And there were lists. And the list is certainly prevalent in the postmodern age. It has an irresistible magic.

SPIEGEL: But why does Homer list all of those warriors and their ships if he knows that he can never name them all?

Eco: Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that. We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are in the same position. They experience a deficiency of language, a lack of words to express their feelings. But do lovers ever stop trying to do so? They create lists: Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone … One could go into great detail.

SPIEGEL: Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can't be realistically completed?

Eco: We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.

So there you go: "The list doesn't destroy culture; it creates it."

Bonus round:

SPIEGEL: You include a nice list by the French philosopher Roland Barthes in your new book, "The Vertigo of Lists." He lists the things he loves and the things he doesn't love. He loves salad, cinnamon, cheese and spices. He doesn't love bikers, women in long pants, geraniums, strawberries and the harpsichord. What about you?

Eco: I would be a fool to answer that; it would mean pinning myself down. I was fascinated with Stendhal at 13 and with Thomas Mann at 15 and, at 16, I loved Chopin. Then I spent my life getting to know the rest. Right now, Chopin is at the very top once again. If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.

I like New York in June. How about you? What do you like this year, this decade, cinematically speaking?

Film muet

Perfect for a rainy Sunday: Anna Mae Wong dancing in Picadilly, 1929. [via]

Comin' 'round the bend

A pal's in town tonight en route to New Orleans and points west. Back tomorrow.

Ars gratia artis

Today's "go there, read this" candidate comes from the excellent Eric Skillman of the Criterion Collection, who posted his answers to 20+ questions a graphic design undergrad asked about his sweet gig. An excerpt:

15. The films obviously dictate the style of the packaging. To what extent do you exert your own personality? How evident is the hand of Eric Skillman in the final release?
I suppose it varies from project to project—Berlin Alexanderplatz has a LOT of me in it, for example, as does most anything with a handmade component (what I call the "arts and crafts" projects), where something like Stranger Than Paradise (which I do think is a fine cover) is more of a direct channelling of the aesthetic of the film, without me adding much to it.

20. Which package makes you envious of the designer?
Good question! There's plenty that I love and wish I had come up with, like Michael Boland's La Commare Secca, Lucian Yang's Floating Weeds, Aesthetic Apparatus's Eyes Without a Face, Ron Miller's Golden Age of Television, or Jason Hardy's Brand Upon the Brain, to rattle off the first few that come to mind. But if I had to pick one design that I never would have come up with in a million years but wish I could, I'd probably point to Neil Kellerhouse's great design for Mishima.

Read the rest here. And dites-moi, which is your personal fave-rave Criterion design?

Ladies first*

So, this tweet [awful word, but what can one do?] from Chuck Tryon caught my eye:

AO Scott's article on the canonical films of the 2000s doesn't appear to mention a single female director: http://bit.ly/2ync3e

Yeah, so, any statisticians in the house to explain how that's so?

[Labored sigh.] Whatever. I was reminded of a tab I've kept open [phraseology that meant nothing when I started blogging but bygones] for some time: David Bordwell's post on cinephilia.

A little more than a year ago, ol' Dave took on the topic of cinephilia and ran through a bunch of scenarios [no data on frame rates] detailing how cinephiliacs communicate, using as a model your copains and mine, Jules et Jim [paging Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, to whom I'll return whenever I get around to Bright Star]. Apparently, there's the cooperative game, as well as the competitive games of upmanship, involving the breadth strategy, the longevity strategy, the depth strategy, eloquence, and the insider strategy. [You are forgiven if the copy from televised erectile disfunction medication adverts comes to mind.]

Oh, and there's this:

One last question: Are these games for boys only? Is cinephilia itself defined as a guy’s thing? In my experience, no, not wholly; but mostly. Have women opted out? Do they play it differently? I might have to recast my dialogues in order to include Catherine.

Ah, the mythical female cinephilia [and, of course, the Greek root and its associations seem to make all subsequent questions moot before they are posed]! What does it look like, if it exists at all? And does it entail counting to 10? As we lurch into the end-of-year/decade list-making season, it'll be interesting to see what forms lady-cinephilia takes.

*