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.
