Some Came Running

Fussell's law, again

Can't be repeated enough. The whole thing, in the essay " 'A Power Of Facing Unpleasant Facts' " in the collection Thank God For The Atom Bomb, is well worth reading, but below is what you might take as the gist. I should point out that none of this should be taken as an endorsement of the indignation that a reviewer who takes himself as having been wronged by the reviewed might express, though. 

"An author places himself uncalled before the tribunal of criticism," says [Samuel] Johnson, "and solicits fame at the hazard of disgrace." Or as E.M. Forster puts it: "Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along." Serious writers of all kinds—classic, romantic, ironic, even sentimental—understand the principle, and they understand it because you can't be a serious writer without deep moral awareness, even if you never let it show. Here's some perhaps unexpected wisdom from Edna St. Vincent Millay: "A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down...If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book, nothing can help him."

John Keats is exemplary because he cared more for his work than for his publcity. When an acquaintance defended him from some bad reviews, he argued that defense was unnecessary and told him, "Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his own works." Note the distinctly premodern ring to that. Today it is the fantasy of celebrity, hardly the love of beauty, that seems to propel most aspirant writers—a term now all but equivalent to "novelists." Thus, unfavorable notices of their work offend deeply because they seem to proclaim their ineptitude to a wide paying audience, and it's a rare second- or third-rate writer who can resist whipping off a letter to the review journal protesting the response his work has occasioned. Such a letter I have called an A.B.M., or Author's Big Mistake, since its effect is simply to reveal to an amused audience how deeply the author's feelings have been lacerated by the criticism he himself has so sedulously solicited. If the bad review has made him look like a ninny, his letter of outrage makes him look like an ass. What, then, is the author's appropriate recourse/ Silence. His appropriate action? Getting busy on the next book immediately, and resolving this time to be as little elated by public praise as downcast by public blame.

Big Ed's used farms

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a big fan of Hitchcock, the kind-of quasi biopic concerning the late film director of the same name, starring Helen Mirren and Anthony Hopkins, written by John J. McLaughlin, and directed by Sacha Gervasi. I understand that in the dramatizing of real events that factual liberties are taken all the time, and have been since (I know, I know) the days of Shakespeare and before. So I understand then too that to complain about factual liberties taken here is to court accusations of,among other things, humorless literal-mindedness. But as I said in my review of the movie for MSN Movies, had the liberties taken with the facts resulted in a motion picture that was either illuminating or entertaining, or both (a lot to ask, I know) that would have gone a long way to forgiving those liberties. I got up early this morning to watch my friend Matt Singer of Criticwire talk Hitchcock, and Hitchcock, on the CBS This Morning program. The clip they showed from the new film features Hopkins and Mirren, as Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville, going over footage of Psycho's shower scene in the editing room. Looking carefully at a single frame, Mirren's Reville coos "Ooh, you imp! You've got nudity in there!" to which Hopkins' Hitchcock replies with an exaggerated air of sang froid, "Well her breasts were rather large, it'd be a challenge not to show them." Most of the dialogue in the film is determined by the same juvenile notion of what constitutes breezy adult banter as that example. So, you know. 

Sometimes you will read a review of a motion picture and wonder if the person writing actually saw the same film you did. In the case of my friend Richard Brody, I have no doubt that we saw the same Hitchcock, as we sat next to each other at the press screening. But he came to some vastly different conclusions than I did, which he lays out in a typically detailed, incisive, provocative, and, for me, exasperating post at his New Yorker blog. He covers a lot of ground in this post, and seems most particularly pleased with the way Hitchcock demonstrates "the personal significance of the story of Psycho." Now, as I understand it, Brody's baseline idea isn't hugely different from Andrew Sarris' definition of Pantheon Directors, that is, those who "have transcended their technical problems with a personal vision of the world." Brody sees an innovation in this biopic, born of his perception that "Gervasi rightly suggests that Hitchcock is no mere puppet master who seeks to provoke effects in his viewers." In discussing the technical aspects of his own films, Hitchcock took not-unjustifiable pride in the fact that with his effects he could, yes,  traumatically "play" the audience, and there's nothing wrong with that. However, Hitchcock himself DID acknowledge, and publicly at that, that within that component of his art there was a strong element of self-expression, so it's not really as if Gervasi has stumbled on to anything particularly new. (Then, of course, there are the reams—more like libraries—of detailed critical studies of Hitchcock's work.) Brody continues:  "[Hitchcock is] converting the world as he sees it, in its practical details and obsessively ugly corners, into his art, and he’s doing so precisely because those are the aspects of life that haunt his imagination." This is all unobjectionable. Where I think Richard goes a little off is in his praise for what he considers the "shaky but bold artistic limb" Gervasi goes out on by introducing the midwestern murderer Ed Gein into Hitchcock's consciousness, making him the stuff of daymares and imagined psychiatric consultations and even forays into marital jealousy that find Alfred crawling about the floor of his bathroom collecting grains of sand with which to confront Alma, who hasn't told him that her writing sessions of late have been taking place at a collaborator's beach house. 

"I have no idea whether Hitchcock gave much thought to Gein, but it doesn't matter," Brody writes. "[I]f it wasn't Gein that obsessed him, it was surely much that was Gein-like." Leaving aside that perhaps overly-confident "surely," I would argue that whether Hitchcock gave much thought to Gein certainly does matter, or at least it matters within the context of this film, because the portrayal of Gein therein is almost by necessity a kind of burlesque. At the time that Robert Bloch wrote the novel upon which Psycho was based, Gein was not the kind of household world that he has since become. As awful and appalling as his crimes were, the singularity of his atrocities underwent a certain diminishment as he was transposed over the years into a kind of pop-culture "brand." The wild-eyed, Midwestern, possibly cannibalistic serial killer, after roosting as a kind of Chiller Theatre Expo hipster icon since some time well before G.G. Allin shuffled off this mortal coil, has since become a sort of post-modern kitsch object. The only way for such a figure to inspire anything resembling real terror in a cinematic context anymore is to stretch him beyond, and then further beyond, reason, as Lynch did with "BOB" in Twin Peaks: Fire Walks With Me and certain episodes of the Twin Peaks television series. In any event, in Hitchcock, the way Gein, almost inescapably, comes off, Michael Wincott or no Michael Wincott, is as serial killer vaudeville. 

In a comment to a prior blog post, the great critic and biographer Joseph McBride, before recounting his own late '50s Gein-tourism experience, chides me a bit: "How can anyone not like a movie in which Alfred Hitchcock hangs out with Ed Gein?" I understand what he's getting at, and had Hitchcock been conceived and executed thoughout as a kind of burlesque, in the style of what McBride's old pals Allan Arkush and Joe Dante often had a go at in the Corman days and beyond, Hitchcock could have been good disreputable/affectionate fun. But that's not what Hitchcock is up to. Brody states that Gervasi recognizes Psycho as a great artistic acheivement, but he doesn't, or rather the movie doesn't, not really; art never enters into this movie's argument, or algebra. Rather, Hitchcock recasts the making of Psycho through a tired Hollywood template: the story of a dreamer with a vision that everybody around him thinks he is—you'll excuse the term—crazy for entertaining, and how that dreamer proves the naysayers wrong...here, not by making a great work of art, but by concocting a motion picture commodity that slays them at the box office. And in the process of grinding out this particular narratvie sausage, Hitchcock also manages to be astonishingly patronizing to its principal characters. In her own clearly ticked-off New York Times review of the movie, another friend, Manohla Dargis, writes, "Hitchcock, you are meant to believe, was himself a little psycho and could only work from a place of madness." She continues: "The real Hitchcock's great flaw, apparently, was that he was at once a genius and a private man, a combination that has allowed some filmmakers to have their insultingly imaginative way with him." She goes on to dismiss "dim fantasies" that to her smack of "spiteful jealousy." I'd say that's pretty spot on. Except I don't even think that Sacha Gervasi understands enough about Hitchcock to know that he maybe should be jealous of him. (There are several interviews with the director that bear this notion out, I'll leave it to readers curious enough to seek them out to do just that.)

As for Hitchcock himself...like DeMille, whom he admired, he was something of a self-made showman, and pronouncements such as "some films are slices of life, my films were slices of cake" were a part of his presentation. As Dargis said, he was a private person, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he worked exclusively and consciously in a vacuum of his own unexamined fancies. As much of a front as he put up, one often doesn't need to read too far between certain lines to understand his own understanding of where his themes came from. In other words: he knew that cinema was the stuff of obsession. There's a droll and poignant passage in Luis Buñuel's autobiography in which the Spanish director recounts a Hollywood lunch in his honor, at which Hitchcock rhapsodized, practically in a swoon, over a particularly salient detail in Buñuel's Tristana: " 'Ah, that leg...that leg,' he sighed, more than once." In the final revised edition of Hitchcock/Truffaut, Truffaut, recalls watching Vertigo and seeing Jimmy Stewart's Scotty trying to remake Kim Novak's Judy Barton into "Madeline;" he writes of experiencing a certain sad frisson knowing that it was Vera Miles, not Novak, that Hitchcock had wanted for that crucial role, and Truffaut sees Hitchcock in Stewart with a kind of sad clarity. In other words, you don't need a bad cartoon—which, finally, I'm convinced Hitchcock is—in order to get it. 

A few citations. Here's a pretty salient passage from the above-mentioned Truffaut study of Hitchcock: 

FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT. Mr. Hitchcock, this morning you mentioned that you had had a bad night and indicated that you were probably disturbed by all of the memories that our talks have been stirring up these past several days. In the course of our conversations we've gone into the dreamlike qualities of many of your films, among them Notorious, Vertigo, and Psycho. I'd like to ask whether you dream a lot.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK. Not to much...sometimes...and my dreams are very reasonable. 

In one of my dreams I was standing on Sunset Boulevard, where the trees are, and I was waiting for a Yellow Cab to take me to lunch. But no Yellow Cab came by; all the automobiles that drove by me were of a 1916 vintage. And I said to myself, "It's no good standing here waiting for a Yellow Cab because this is a 1916 dream!" So I walked to lunch instead.

F.T. Did you really dream this, or is it a joke?

A.H. No, it's not a gag; I really had a dream like that!

F.T. It's almost a period dream! But would you say that dreams have a bearing on your work?

A.H. Daydreams, probably. 

F.T. It may be the expression of the unconscious, and that takes us back once more to fairy tales. By depicting the isolated man who's surrounded by all sorts of hostile elements, and perhaps without even meaning to, you enter the realm of the dream world, which is also a world of solitude and danger. 

A.H. That's probably me, within myself. 

F.T. It must bem because the logic of your puctures, which is sometimes decried by the critics, is rather like the logic of dreams. Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest, for instance, are made up of a series of strange forms that follow the pattern of a nightmare. 

A.H. This may be due to the fact that I'm never satisfied with the ordinary. I'm ill at ease with it. 

F.T. That's very evident. A Hitchcock picture that doesn't involve death or the abnormal is practically inconceivable. I believe you film emotions you feel very deeply—fear, for instance. 

A.H. Absolutely. I'm full of fears and I do my best to avoid difficulties and any kind of complications. I like everything around me to be clear as crystal and completely calm. I don't want clouds overhead. I get a feeling of peace from a well-organized desk. When I take a bath, I put everything neatly back in place. You wouldn't even know I'd been in the bathroom. My passion for orderliness goes hand in hand with a strong revulsion toward complications. 

F.T. That accounts for the way you protect yourself. Any eventual problem of direction is resolved beforehand by your minute predesigned sketches that lessen the risks and prevent trouble later on. Jacques Becker used to say, "Alfred Hitchcock is undoubtedly the director who gets the least surprises when he looks at rushes."

And here is Hitchcock describing his childhood to Truffaut: "I was what is known as a well-behaved child. At family gatherings I would sit quietly in a corner, saying nothing. I looked and I observed a good deal. I've always been that way and still am. I was anything but expansive. I was a loner—can't remember ever having had a playmate. I played by myself, inventing my own games [...] I was put into school very young. At St. Ignatius College, a Jesuit school in London. Ours was a Catholic family and in England, you see, this in itself is an eccentricity. It was probably during this period with the Jesuits that a strong sense of fear developed—moral fear—the fear of being involved in anything evil. I always tried to avoid it. Why? Perhaps out of physical fear. I was terrified of physical punishment. In those days they used a cane made of very hard rubber. I believe the Jesuits still use it. It wasn't done casually, you know; it was rather like the execution of a sentence. They would tell you to step in to see the father when classes were over. He would then solemnly inscribe your name in the register, together with the indication of the punishment to be inflicted, and you spent the whole day waiting for the sentence to be carried out."

And perhaps we should give the last word, for now, to Robin Wood, and this passage from 1989's Hitchcock's Films Revisited. The film to which Wood refers is, of course, Psycho (which I think I might watch this afternoon): "No film conveys—to those not afraid to expose themselves fully to it—a greater sense of desolation, yet it does so from an exceptionally mature and secure emotional viewpoint. And an essential part of this viewpoint is the detached sardonic humor. It enables the film to contemplate the ultimate horrors without hysteria, with a poised, almost serene detachment. This is probably not what Hitchcock meant when he said that one cannot appreciate Psycho without a sense of humor, but it is what he should have meant. He himself—if his interviews are to be trusted—has not really faced up to what he was doing when he made the film. This, needless to say, must not affect one's estimate of the film itself. For the maker of Psycho to regard it as a 'fun' picture can be taken as a means of preserving his sanity; for the critic to do so—and to give it his approval on these grounds—is quite unpardonable. Hitchcock (again, if his interviews are to be trusted) is a much greater artist than he knows." 

Are you not entertained?

While of course I deplore that disaffected readers should be making even ineffectual death threats against critics with whom they disagree, I cannot join in the outrage that some of my respected colleagues are feeling toward the circumstance that permits such things to occur. I'll put it bluntly and shortly, using the unforgettable phrase of Marcelle Clements: the dog is us. We took this tool, the Internet, and molded it to our own ends; we rejoiced at its democratizing properties; we panicked when it started costing us livelihoods; and now we wanna bitch when poorly socialized assholes hijack it with their increasingly bizarre presumptions and proclamations of entitlement.

We called Jeff Jarvis, the Dr. Pangloss of digital culture, a prophet for his cheerily glib "everyone's a critic" pseud philosophizing. Devin Faraci, who represents an outlet called "Badass Digest" and who recently changed the bio on his Twitter feed to "Just happy to be here" after having something rather more incendiary in its place for some time before, had quite a nice little run as a swaggering new media tough guy, as have a lot of bluff know-somethingish anti-highbrows who don't bother to proof their copy before they go on panels gloating about how print newspapers soon aren't even going to be good for birdcage lining. This is your world, fellas. You like it?

Jarvis hasn't weighed in that I can tell. But Faraci doesn't seem to like it much now. Now that "spammers" are calling him a "cunt" and so on. (UPDATE: See Mr. Faraci's comment below. Clearly I am not being entirely fair in my estimation here. I'm not gonna mess with the rest of the copy because I think my larger point kind of holds regardless.) I'm not saying that Faraci asked for this abuse, or deserves it, but the stance he now adopts, accompanied by possibly preemptive primers on how to make what we'll call for the purposes of this consideration "fan culture" a kinder, gentler realm, strikes me as just a touch disingenuous. But I imagine maybe he can't help it. In his rather amusingly condescending "Take Back The Nerd" piece, Faraci sketches the Geek Triumphant: "The nerds have had their revenge. They’ve won. They got laser surgery and discovered Steve Jobs’ fashion sense. Most important of all, they’ve totally taken over the culture." Right. And now, having taken over the culture, Faraci wants the culture to have its Reformation, or maybe its Enlightenment. I'm not sure which and I'm pretty sure he isn't either. 

Only here's the thing: it can never happen, because this thing called "fan culture" or "nerd cuture" or whatever it is you want to call it is largely predicated on emotional immaturity combined with a variety of willed cultural illiteracy. Fan culture doesn't say "comic books can be high art," it says, "comic books are the only art." And, further, "the film of the comic book must provide an analogous heightened experience of the comic book, and YOU, the person on the outside of our purview who is now being gifted with this artifact of AWESOMENESS, must fall into line and PRAISE this artifact and confer upon it the legitimacy it has always deserved but which YOU have been too blinkered by your own pretentious prejudices to recognize." That's what fan culture wants. That's what it demands. "Nerd culture" is Peter Pan as a brain-eating zombie. 

Don't get me wrong here. I like (and consume") comic books, comic strips, graphic novels, and all of that, and I think the form has as much of a claim to legitimacy and greatness as any other. Back in the 1980s, I was friendly with the writer Elaine Lee and her artistic partner, the illustrator and writer Michael Kaluta. Their project at the time was a comic-book limited series called Starstruck, an exuberant multi-tiered fantasy about feisty female space jockeys that frustrated/infuriated almost as many readers as it delighted. It was dense stuff, both verbally and graphically, not all that ingratiating as comic books go, and I remember Elaine and Michael expressing frustration at various times over its reception and over whether it actually had any future as a publication. But mostly I remember their sheer excitement in the creation of the series. Both Elaine and Michael were incredibly conversant with every other form of art, and Elaine had this very distinctive idea/ethos wherein she aspired to create comic feminist art with stresses and accents she had picked up from the likes of Vonnegut, Altman and Pynchon. While they never said it out loud, you could tell that Elaine and Michael were not-so-secret sharers of the perspective of the great filmmaker Michael Powell: "All art is one, man!" I don't see this reflected much in the fan culture that some value so highly. 

THAT splintered culture says: "This is the one art." Another splintered culture, the bourgeois middlebrow chattering class exemplified by an organ such as Slate, says: "Relax, you don't have to watch long boring movies with subtitles; Breaking Bad is TOTALLY art." And so on it goes, and will continue to go. And unlike Howard The Duck, we don't even really have the excuse of being trapped in a world that we never made.

One last thing: In my dismissive account of Internet-tough-guy-ness, I have likely stepped into a giant messy heap of pot-calling-kettle-black. Yes, I understand that I myself have swaggered in an oft-ridiculous way on this blog, on Twitter, on message boards and comments threads and more. There is much that I am sorry for, and a bit that I am not. I can offer nothing really credible in the way of excuses, nor can I credibly promise that I shall go now and sin no more. 

Three films by Dan Sallitt

I hope I'll be indulged if I hew to a journalistic convention that, for reasons that remain obscure to me, has fallen into disfavor in recent years, and begin by making a disclosure. The writer and filmmaker Dan Sallitt and I are friendly acquaintances. We run in a couple of the same social circles and hence see each other at parties as well as at some screenings. We have "done" karaoke together, once. 

That said, we're not "close." There's quite a bit I don't know about him. Until recently, for instance, I was unaware that he's also a musician, and plays in a band, which information I found moderately irritating, as I had been hoping to "corner" the "market" in film-critic-types-who-also-have-bands. While I admire Sallitt's writing on film, we differ in taste more than a bit, and I frankly find myself exasperated by certain of his critical enthusiasms. 

Sallitt has made three feature films since the late '90s; his latest, The Unspeakable Act, plays in New York as part of BAM's CinemaFest on Sunday, June 24. I think it's an absolutely remarkable film, one of the best of the year so far, and if you're around, you should definitely see it. I'm hoping it gets wider distribution, because, not to be crass or anything, I think it more than establishes Dan's bonafides in terms of deseving a wider audience, funding for more films, and all that sort of thing. If you're already familiar with Dan's films, or even if you aren't, this lengthy "conversation" at MUBI is worth reading; and below are some of my observations on Dan's work so far. 

Made in 1998, Sallitt's first feature, Honeymoon, is clearly the work of a real film artist, albeit one who is testing his fully-formed voice against his technical facility. Let me talk about its strengths first. The movie tells an unusual New York story; Michael and Mimi (Dylan McCormack and Edith Meeks, seen above) longtime friends who toil in mid-level positions in publishing, are best friends who impulsively decide to marry without, not to be crude or anything, having established whether they can get it up for each other. One of Sallitt's immediately visible strengths as a writer and director of actors is his ability to comprehensively portray an actual social type (one that was more plentiful in 1998 New York than it is in 2012, admittedly): what I used to refer to as the Too-Brilliant-Copy-Editor, e.g., the genuinely gifted and genuinely sensitive and aesthetically attuned soul that never breaks through what you might want to call a glass ceiling for reasons that are entirely their own and are not unrelated to a certain social awkwardness. This social sect is the only one, I believe that could contain non-religiously committed individuals who would marry without even getting a sense of what their sex life could be.

The resultant spectacle of two painfully smart people tormenting themselves and each other in the most civilized way possible has its farcical aspects, naturally, but Sallitt doesn't caricature his characters, and many of the scenes operate on a low-frequency but definitely palpable level of emotional pain and physical mortification that's incredibly absorbing even while largely cringe-inducing. There’s a knife-edge on which the performances teeter between naturalistic and weirdly clumsy, and at times this actually messes with the suspension of disbelief you might need to fully invest in the action. That said, the two leads are remarkable, particularly Meeks, a woman who's not necessarily conventionally attractive and yet is able to exude, in performance, a demanding, even querulous sexuality that's seemingly at odds with her intellect and politesse and preferred mode of living. 

Sallitt's shooting and editing style here is surface-plain but, as with one of his cinematic heroes Eric Rohmer, deceptively canny, but total control occasionally eludes him; now and again in a shot you get the feeling of the performers having a too-acute awareness of the camera, holding themselves back so as not to get too close to it, and so on. None of this finally compromises the film's cumulative power, which it accrues by continuously threatening to send one of its characters into a Pialat-style rage blowout but...well, I don't want to spoil it for you. You can acquire the movie for viewing in various formats/platforms at Dan's home page. 

Dan's second film, All The Ships At Sea, made in 2004, displays more directorial assurance from its very first, still shot. It also displays Sallitt's admirable powers of compression perhaps to a fault, as 64 minutes is a pretty unusual length for a feature film. This is a fully-realized work though, once again featuring the extraordinary Meeks in a lead role. She plays a woman recently escaped, or expelled, from a religious cult, and the attempt of her Catholic theologian sister (Strawn Bovee, in the still above), to reconnect with her, and help her put her life back together. 

In a sense this picture harks back to Rohmer's 1969 My Night At Maud's, a feature-length chat about religious philosophy disguised as a sex comedy. Although Ships has neither the sex nor (for the most part) the comedy (there is a fair amount of mordant humor, as when a character you don't expect this kind of language from says "Ohio, Iowa, what the fuck's the difference?"). "We believe that a lot of the spiritual turmoil in the world is happening for a reason," Meeks' Virginia tries to explain to her sister Evelyn. Eventually we come to understand that at issue here is not belief or difference of belief or lack thereof of any of the above but plain and horrific disconnection, exemplified in the simple-as-death confidence Virginia confides to Evelyn about a childhood treehouse: "No one knew about it. I built it myself." Nevertheless, Sallitt gets a lot of implied spookiness out of the shadow of the cult that hovers over Virginia. I believe it is a testimony to Dan's equanimity as a person that he has not even considered, as far as I know, taking a polo mallet to the kneecaps of the makers of Martha Marcy May Marlene.

 Still courtesy of BAMcinemaFest/Static Prods.

The Unspeakable Act is a fully realized—sure, I'll say it—masterwork, an emotionally wrenching character study that puts its uncomfortable truths forward without recourse to conventional psychology. That is, the powerful attraction super-precocious teen Jackie (Tallie Medel) feels for her older brother, the equally brilliant but possibly more well-adjusted and socially accomplished Matthew, doesn't "make sense," yet makes total sense in the context Sallitt creates for it. And once again, that context has its roots in an actual (or is it "probably actual"?) social milieu, the shabby-genteel bohemian Brooklyn that's been priced out of the Heights and whose diaspora, such as it is, extends to the likes of Ditmas Park, where the film was shot. 

Using a variety of dislocation techniques (some of which are discussed at length in Sallitt's talk with Keller), the movie brings us uncomfortably into Jackie's world, and her bedrock obsession, to the point that, fifteen minutes in, when Jackie admits "I've never slept with anyone," the sigh of relief from the viewer is apt to be seismically palpable. Once what's at stake is laid on the table, Sallitt deploys his characters in what I can only describe as alchemical chess moves. Particularly upside-the-head-smacking is how we're shown the way that the amiable and ostensibly sane Matthew actually gets off on the attentions of Jackie. When a therapist enters the picture (she is played, beautifully, by Caroline Luft, who, I should disclose, is a friend of myself and my wife's, albeit one we don't see as often as we would like; in fact, I did not recognize her on my first viewing of the film), that character gets to play not-quite-irresistable force to Jackie's seemingly immovable object. Rarely does cinema treat us to the spectacle of a person inflicting what can only be called metaphysical damage to him or her self (despite its topic, the last thing Sallitt is making here is a "social problem" picture). One of the wonders of Tallie Medel's performance, besides the way she uses her slightly-sexually-ambiguous physicality, is how she documents that damage as vividly as if she were actually physically cutting into herself, even as Jackie the character believes she's giving nothing away that she doesn't want to. 

The movie is dedicated to Rohmer, but it is entirely a Dan Sallitt work. I hope his next film comes sooner than six to eight years from now.

Andrew Sarris, 1928-2012

The New York Times' obituary.

The only thing in my mind right now is what Jean-Luc Godard said of Orson Welles: "All of us will always owe him everything."

I believe in criticism

So for some reason or other the "film criticism, que-est-ce-que c'est" question is heating up again, in venues far and wide. First it's the topic of discussion between the ever-insouciant David Carr and my screening-room buddy A.O. Scott at the New York Times' new kinda-video-podcast series "The Sweet Spot," which kind of proceeds from Carr's misapprehension that the function of criticism is buzzkill. Mr. Scott strives mightily to correct Carr's misapprehension, to very little avail, if the cutaways to Carr squinting in apparent disbelief are to be believed. "You're just defending your posse," the intelligent but querelous Carr parries, and it's a measure of how much film critics in particular are disrespected that Carr seems so much more willing to buy Roberta Smith's rationale for the existence of criticism rather than Scott's. Never mind that seven minutes and change is hardly sufficient time to really begin to address the question of what criticism actually IS, its ideal form, its history, how it both interesects with and differs from the practice of "reviewing" and so on. 

The video spurred some social-media rumination from the ever laid-back and relaxed and terse movie blogger and entertainment journalist watchdog David Poland, who, on discovering a further rumination from my friendly acquaintance Michelle Dean, which quoted the infamous "Don't be critics, you people, I beg you" screed from Saint Dave Eggers, jumped on that shit like he'd just dug up a new Dead Sea Scroll (the Eggers piece in question is over a decade old, but no matter), and wrote up this commendation of it. Which in turn led to a really quite fascinating and ongoing comments thread which features, among other things, a lively exchange in which writer and scripter Drew McWeeney presses Poland to name the movie he actually worked on that apparently gives him, David Poland, the Sacred Dave Eggers Dispensation To Write Movie Criticism Because He's Actually Worked On A Movie. (In case you'd like more than just an inference, by the way, I'll come right out and say it: I have a lot of friends and colleagues in common with Eggers, etcetera, but I think that riff about critics and criticism is one of the bigger barrels of horseshit I've ever fallen face-first into, and it's pretty damn hippy-dippy horseshit at that. Examination and or analysis, which I figure to be the two key features of real criticism, do not amount to the same thing as sticking a pin through a butterfly's innards. Of course examination and or analysis don't really figure in a lot of stuff calling itself criticism these days, but that's hardly the point. The assertion that the critical impulse derives from the worst part of the self is itself absolutely despicable and nothing but a glob of Egger's own phlegmy resentment, of what I have no idea I'm sure.)

What comes out most plainly in this particular wash (and what a messy wash it is) is Poland's own aiding and abetting of an old myth about critics, that is, those who can't do, criticise. And, more specifically in this field, that every film critic is somehow a failed filmmaker. Poland actually comes out and admits that he "ended up in journalism and criticism, which I never wanted." He hastens to add "but I loved the idea of what would become The Hot Button." Yeah, me too. While Poland's admissions are apt to confirm the prejudices of critic-haters everywhere, I should like to say that, speaking strictly for myself, I did not enter criticism as a failed filmmaker. 

Or did I? See this post for some background. And savor again the immortal line "There's nothing wrong with getting a hard-on in a movie theater." (And, if you're wondering how Danny Amis is doing, well, he's better these days; see here.) The Beach Movie experience was instructive, but did it sour me off the film business? I can't say it did; a move to L.A. was something I never considered, then or ever after. Before it, and after it, I was an avid reader of criticism and a spotty writer of material that I thought aspired to criticism. My heroes were Lester Bangs (whose band I saw a few times at CBGB; one of said bands had Billy Ficca on drums; Billy now plays in Gods and Monsters with my great friend Gary Lucas), James Wolcott, and Robert Christgau, among others. While I dicked around with making music in the late '70s/early '80s (and am currently dicking around with music again, and with the same group of dicks, or at least some of them), my biggest ambition at that time, I'm not kidding, was to write about rock and roll, in the Village Voice, and have Robert Christgau as my editor. And in 1984, at 24 years of age, I fulfilled that ambition. I wrote about the album The Naked Shakespeare, by Peter Blegvad (whose now-adult daughter, Kaye, a wonderful artist in her own right, who was not yet a gleam in Peter's eye when Shakespeare was made,I'm having coffee with tomorrow); a record Bob Christgau didn't like too much but which I had hectored him into allowing me to review over a correspondance beginning in the summer of 1983. Having thus acheived my ambition, I somehow had to fill out the rest of my professional life. Sigh. I did a lot of work as an editor, but criticism was something I always held as sacred even as I never really believed I was practicing it. To be entirely honest with you, I think in all the years I've been publishing, there's maybe two dozen pieces of mine that I could point to and say, "Yes, this is actual criticism." (One of those pieces is in this upcoming book.) I don't think reviewing and criticism are incompatible; indeed, they can't be. But reviewing, or deadline criticism if you want to call it that, has its own set of demands and stresses. To me, "real" criticism needs temporal and mental space to clear the field for a thorough examination OR, to go back to Eggers' imagery, to follow the "butterfly" on the path it takes. Or the work in question's pattern of reverberation if you will. This is not a realm where reviewing necessarily has the ABILITY to go. 

But I love criticism, always have, and I love it as it was practiced by Baudelaire and I love it as it was practiced by David Foster Wallace and, well, and so on. I love it as it was practiced by Nick Tosches, even when he was writing about albums he never even listened to. I often tell people that I would have been happy to have aged into the Stanley Kaufmann of Premiere, had the magazine lasted. I am in complete concurrence with Manny Farber: "I can't imagine a more perfect art form, a more perfect career than criticism. I can't imagine anything more valuable to do, and I've always felt that way." SO in case you wonder why I tend to take the pulings and mewlings of pseud jagoff opinion-mongerers calling themselves "critics" so personal-like, well, it isn't JUST because I'm a reactive sorehead lunatic. 

The current logistical irony is that, in the contemporary environment, I'm compelled to explore making a living in other forms of writing. One of which, as it happens, is....well, I imagine you can guess.

UPDATE: David Poland is, as you'll see in comments below, not thrilled with my characterization of him. Seriously, while I admit that I'm quite prone to going overboard when making sport of other writers, the point of this piece was not meant to be "David Poland's an asshole," or any such thing, and I regret having given the impression, if I did. I have my differences with Poland on a lot of things, including modes of expression, but I'm not in a position to make real judgments on the guy, and I do believe that if nothing else that his heart is in the right place, integrity wise. But as another man once said in a not-entirely dissimilar context, these are the jokes, people.  

Samuel L. Jackson, meet Paul Fussell

 

I have dealt with the actions of Victor Gollancz and the Wharton School and Richard Nixon because, although lots of time and space separates them, their behavior when faced with unpleasant facts and honest talk they don't like strikes me as so instructively typical of a modern moral insensitivity among otherwise quite sophisticated people. I have authors especially in mind, those authors who, not liking the reviews their books receive, feel obliged to insist publicly that the comment of the reviewer is, variously, unfair, perverse, stupid, irresponsible, or otherwise not at all what it should be—that is, laudatory.

I have descanted on the subject before, [...] and indeed the topic has been a favorite ever since encountering Samuel Johnson's classic observation, in his Life of Pope, addressed to softies who might think the bad writers ridiculed in The Dunciad somehow unfairly maligned: "An author places himself uncalled before the tribunal of criticism," says Johnson, "and solicits fame at the hazard of disgrace." Or as E.M. Forster puts it: "Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along." 

Serious writers of all kinds—classic, romantic, ironic, even sentimental—understand the principle, and they understand it because you can't be a serious writer without deep moral awareness, even if you never let it show. Here's some perhaps unexpected wisdom from Edna St. Vincent Millay: "A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down...If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book, nothing can help him." 

John Keats is exemplary because he cared more for his work than for his publicity. When an acquaintance defended him from some bad reviews, he argued that defense was unnecessary and told him, "Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his own works. Note the distinctly postmodern ring to that. Today it is the fantasy of celebrity, hardly the love of beauty, that seems to propel most aspirant writers—a term now all but equivalent to "novelists." Thus, unfavorable notices of their work offend deeply because they seem to proclaim their ineptitude to a wide paying audience, and it's a rare second- or third-rate writer who can resist immediately whipping off a letter to the review journal protesting the response his work has occasioned. Such a letter I have called an A.B.M., or Author's Big Mistake, since its effect is simply to reveal to an amused audience how deeply the author's feelings have been lacerated by the criticism he himself has so sedulously, solicited. If the bad review has made him look like a ninny, his letter of outrage makes him look like an ass. What, then, is the author's appropriate recourse? SIlence. Getting busy on the next book immediately, and resolving this time to be as little elated by public praise as downcast by public blame. 

—Paul Fussell, " 'A Power Of Facing Unpleasant Facts'," in Thank God For The Atom Bomb And Other Essays, Summit, 1988

A J. Hoberman Top Ten

1) "Eraserhead's not a movie I'd drop acid for, although I would consider it a revolutionary act if someone dropped a reel of it into the middle of Star Wars."—The Village Voice, Oct. 24, 1977 (Hoberman's first review for the paper.)

2) "It's a melancholy fact of life that, for too many people (including, I suspect, Tarkovsky himself), the praise of Stan Brakhage is something like the kiss of death. Stalker and even The Mirror have done surprisingly well in limited runs downtown at the Film Forum but, dog knows what sort of audience exists for Tarkovsky in the foreign film ghetto of Lincoln Center and environs. Something tells me he's an unwelcome guest, one more orphan of the storm toting a shopping-bag full of junk across upper Broadway. Like, who invited this long-winded Russian prophet into the world? I mean, who needs this guy whose movies pretty much demand to be seen twice or not at all?

"Who indeed? You can loath Tarkovsky or you can adore him. What's mindless is to pretend that his particular genius doesn't exist."—"The Condition His Condition Was In," The Village Voice, Jan. 10, 1984

3) "Since America was a land Kafka knew only from books, the place he describes is as imaginary as Karl May's New World or the land so numbingly detailed in the Impressions of Africa Raymond Roussel published at his own expense in 1910. Still, it was an escape hatch he must have pondered. Even as a child, Kafka planned a novel about two warring brothers 'one [of whom] went to America, while the other'—the good one, naturally—'remained behind in a European prison,' the writer's own European prison (a castle, perhaps)."—"Once Upon A Time In Amerika: Straub/Huillet/Kafka," Artforum, Sept. 1984

4) "Much of what has been written about Shoah glosses over the film's provocations—its repetitions, its absences, its Talmudic system of cross-references. Review after review contains a flash of recognition—to experience the Holocaust onscreen is still, on some level, to experience the Holocaust—followed by a movement to put the film at arm's length. 'If this isn't the best film of 1985, what does that category mean?' one well-known TV film critic asked his partner. (What does that category mean? Less than a month later, he answered his own question with The Color Purple, an altogether more upbear film about brutality and oppression.) In light of the extravagant praise Shoah received, Pauline Kael's negative appraisal in The New Yorker—which reportedly held her copy for several weeks before tacking it on to the December 30 reviews of Out of Africa and The Color Purple—would seem particulrly nervy. But Kael's response is something more complex than a personal distaste."—"Shoah Business," The Village Voice, Jan. 28, 1986

5) "Blue Velvet is a triumph of overall geekiness—a fat man in shades walking a tiny dog, the deadpan Dick-and-Jane detective who wears his gun and badge in the house, the references to Jehovah's Witnesses, the strategic use of the world's loudest flushing toilet. As the demiurge of raunchy, lower-class sexual menace, Dennis Hopper is a virtual Harkonnen on Main Street—a violent, volatile hophead, periodically dosing himself with ether to further addle his turbulent, fuck-obsessed stream of consciousness."—"Return To Normalcy," The Village Voice, Sept. 22, 1986

6) "Featuring everyone from Yiddish theater impresario Maurice Schwartz to noir axiom Mike Mazurki to the young Cyd Charisse and the strongman from Freaks (1932), Mission to Moscow features such ineffable moment as Paulina Molotova, commisar of cosmetics, telling Walter Huston's wife that, Ninotchka notwithstanding, 'feminine beauty is not a luxury.' This scene added after the film wrapped, was one of several created to satisfy Mrs. Davies' desire for a larger role. 'Yes, I guess women are the same all over the world,' the actress who playes the ambassador's wife replies. 'Primarily, they want to please their men.'" —From the chapter "A History of Communism," The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism, Temple University Press, 1998

7) "Television, in Time's McLuhanesque formulation, had assumed Hollywood's traditional function, and 'cinema' was now 'the favorite art form of the young.' This generational relationship was clinched when the newsweekly's December 26 issue ran a letter by an eighteen-year-old college freshman from Peoria maintaining that Bonnie and Clyde was 'not a film for adults'—which was why it incurred such establishment wrath. Nor was it Bonnie and Clyde's violence that shocked his peers: 'The reason it was so silent, so horribly silent in the theater at the end of the film was because we liked Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, we identified with them and we wanted to be like them.' What did that mean? Can one imagine such a letter being written in defense of The Dirty Dozen—and imagine it being published?"—From the chapter "Born To Be Wild: Outlaws of America, 1967-1969," The Dream Life: Movies, Media, And The Mythology Of The Sixties, The New Press, 2003

8) "In a sense, Inglourious Basterds is a form of science fiction. Everything unfolds in and maps an alternate universe: The Movies. Even Shosanna's Parisian neighborhood bears a marked resemblance to a Cannes back alley, complete with a club named for a notorious local dive. Inflammable nitrate film is a secret weapon. Goebbels is an evil producer; the German war hero who pursues Shosanna has (like America's real-life Audie Murphy) become a movie star. Set to David Bowie's Cat People title-song, the scene in which Shosanna—who is, of course, also an actor—applies her war paint to become the glamorous "face of Jewish vengeance," is an interpolated music video. Actresses give autographs at their peril. The spectacular climax has the newly dead address those about to die from the silver screen."—"Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds Makes Holocaust Revisionism Fun," The Village Voice, Aug. 18, 2009

9) "The Red Menace spends a surprising amount of screen time explicating Marxist dogma. Indeed, in exposing the Party leadership as cynical and manipulative, The Red Menace intimates that the Communists are betraying their own ideals. Several true believers—Molly and her Negro comrade Sam Wright—have disapproving parents operating under the spell of more acceptable religious leaders. In one tumultuous scene, the cell's resident Jewish poet, Henry Solomon, is attacked for denying an immaculate-conception view of Communism: 'We contend that Marx had no basis in Hegel!' the requisite fat, sweaty Party secretary sneers."—From the chapter "The Ministry Of Truth, Justice, And The American Way," An Army Of Phantoms: American Movies And The Making Of The Cold War, The Free Press, 2011

10) There is no number ten, because, the incredibly bone-headed (and that's the NICE term for it) decision of The Village Voice to can Hoberman today notwithstanding, I trust or at least believe or at least hope that we will be hearing from him again in print and/or on the internet very soon. Now I have plenty, PLENTY of stories pertaining to Hoberman's personal menschiness, and of my own longtime admiration for him, and the like; but I figured the most apt tribute to his career up until this sad point would be something in his own always witty and acute words. Nine other passages could just have easily filled the spaces above, and provided similar wisdom, elucidation, idiosyncrasy, and so on; nine hundred other passages could have served as well, too. This space, then, is symbolically reserved for something mind-expanding to come from Hoberman in the future. Good luck, J.

UPDATE: Mr Hoberman speaks, and displays his typical modesty and nobility and common sense, in a letter to the Village Voice staff reproduced at his blog.

A little more Pauline Kael

In all this excitement I nearly forgot that, for a feature for the Nomad "vertical" Wide Screen, I interviewed Brian Kellow, the author of the biography Pauline Kael: A Life In The Dark (Viking). 

I fondly remember back in the mid-eighties at a Red Krayola show at Danceteria, my man Mayo Thompson wryly thanking a powerful NYC rock critic who had somewhat warily preview-picked the show for "providing us with two stools to fall between." I try to pitch Nomad Wide Screen between the two stools of general interest and informed cinephilia, and while I wanted to format my interview with Kellow as more a conversation of sorts, I also aimed for a particular form of detachment. Anyway, I reproduce a portion of the piece below; you can read the whole thing here and I do, really, encourage you to subscribe to the thingamajug; it's cheap, for one thing, and every week delivers good stuff from the likes of Vadim Rizov, Karl Rozemeyer, Simon Abrams, Tony Dayoub, and sometimes even the fabulous Self-Styled Siren. And yes, sometimes myself.

WIDE SCREEN: It’s interesting, from the account in your book, it seems that if Andrew Sarris hadn’t taken Kael’s writing about his writing so personally, their feud, such as it was, might have gone differently.

BRIAN KELLOW: Well, yeah. A few people have mentioned in print, she’s not the one that kept bringing it up. It wasn’t really a feud. It was kind of a one-shot out of the cannon. I interviewed him for the book, very nice man. And I felt that I’d been keeping him maybe a little too long. And I finally said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I just have a few more questions, do you mind if we just continue for 10 more minutes?” He said, “No, no, no; let’s get it done. I don’t want to have a conversation about her again!”

WIDE SCREEN: Clearly you’d have to say that Kael was powerful. And that she sensed herself as being powerful. She was angriest at Andrew Sarris, not because of his theories but because, for example, he would refuse to champion Last Tango in Paris. She felt she was going to be at the advance of championing these movies she thought were great and everybody had to follow. By the same token, I think today’s film critics look at certain of the more famous anecdotes: Sitting in the back of a limo with Otto Preminger and Andrew Sarris and telling them that Hurry Sundown is a piece of shit. Or Schickel’s account of how she destroyed the ego of David Lean so that he couldn’t work again. Clearly the reality of David Lean’s case has more to do with money than Pauline Kael destroying his ego. So in terms of actual power, does she represent a sort of high-water mark that’s never going to happen again? Or is there a certain amount of just perception involved in this thing? Or do you merely look at the situation and say, well, this was a different era?

BRIAN KELLOW: Sure. I think that’s the whole point. I think it was a very specific time in movie history and cultural history. It’s not going to come again. That,great dialogue between the audience and the screen that she talked about, it was really happening then, in a way that, to my mind, it has never happened since. Movies don’t have that hold on the culture that they did. I can remember as a college student going to everything. I wanted to see even the stuff that I had a hunch wasn’t going to be very good. I was sort of in an Andrew Sarris archival-interest mode. And there were a lot of us who felt that way back then. This would have been in the middle, late ’70s. I just think it was a once in a lifetime thing. I think it was painful for her to see — because she was right in the vortex. I think she was right about a lot of the reasons it faded away. America did become much more of a money culture. It still is. And different things were driving the movies. 

WIDE SCREEN: Sure. A lot of it’s technological. Cinephilia has become kind of privatized. And the conversation as a result is different. It’s migrated to the Internet.

BRIAN KELLOW: Yep.

WIDE SCREEN: Robert Warshow wrote, at the end of the day, you have to admit that a man is in a theater and you are that man. And that was her approach to writing: “the immediate experience.” But some might say she adhered to that idea almost to a fault, citing her ostensible refusal to watch a movie more than once. What I see is not so much a disinclination to watch films more than once, but a passion, almost approaching a mania, to get her immediate response down on paper. 

BRIAN KELLOW: Absolutely. Because she thought that was the truest response.

WIDE SCREEN: Let’s talk about that in terms of an actual critical ethos. How do you feel that worked for her in terms of the larger body of work, and what do you think the liabilities for that approach were? It has to be exhausting to write from that perspective so much of the time. Or do you feel like she had so much energy that this was just her default mode?

BRIAN KELLOW: I think it was. She had an amazing amount of vitality. This was what drove her. The fact that she didn’t have the foundation of theory that a lot of other critics have had is one thing. But I think the great gift of doing criticism the way she did it was to the reader. And of course she was terribly concerned about her reader. The way she wrote for the ear, the way she had to read it out loud because she wanted to make sure it had that certain immediacy, and that certain sexiness and drive and pulse — I think that’s very endearing. I wish that more critics thought about their readership, frankly. That was the great benefit of her doing it the way she did. We picked up on that first rush of excitement, on that initial response.

The other thing you have to say is, it wasn’t like she was 21 years old. She was established; her intellect, her taste level, her aesthetic, whatever you want to say, it had all coalesced very nicely by the time she sat down to write her first movie review. So it wasn’t like she was going to be learning, learning, learning, and grammatically changing her mind about a lot of big things. I first started reading her when I was very, very young. It was like a great performance in the theater, when you feel that the actor or the singer or whoever it happens to be is performing directly to you, speaking directly to you. I felt certain that she was talking right to me. And I’ve never come across that same thing in any other movie critic.

WIDE SCREEN: Going through her work over the years, it’s interesting to see how on and off she was in her pronouncements pertaining to what a film said about the zeitgeist. It’s interesting to see her try and balance her own immediate response to a larger social view. And sometimes it’s a little weird. She comes off as weirdly priggish when, in her review of Breathless, where she’s talking about how Michel and Patricia are the youth of the day and they don’t care about anything. And then she’ll seem to be excited about something almost not in spite of but because of an amorality going on there. And also her tendency to cite contemporary music. The whole urge to be current, to say, as James Wolcott related, “David Bowie” and not “John Wayne.” Do you attribute this to the vitality you talked about?

BRIAN KELLOW: I think she was obsessed with staying current. At the same time there was this other side of her. Her nephew, Bret Wallach, told me that when he was participating in campus demonstrations at Berkeley, she was very much against it. He was stunned because he had always thought of her, I guess, as rebellious Aunt Pauline, constantly giving the finger to the establishment. But she was not in favor of anything that was going to lead you to a point of alienation or isolation. She wanted to be in it. In the vortex, at the vortex. You can see it in a lot of her reviews of early ’70s films, like her comments on Joe and Five Easy Pieces. She doesn’t see the value in this point of view of dropping out and living a life of despair and nothing works and the government’s terrible and what are we going to do, except grow mushrooms and live in the woods. She was not in favor of that at all. She was much more interested in the established order.

Theory, heresy, coffee-table anomie

 

You will search Kael’s collected work in vain for a theory, a system, or even a consistent set of principles.—A.O. Scott, “Mad About Her: Pauline Kael, Loved and Loathed” (with Manohla Dargis), The New York Times, October 14, 2011

 

Kael’s attraction to the art of the mass audience—the audience that includes our family and our neighbors—is about as far as you can get from Sontag’s prostration before the exalted and the disaffection from the mass audience it entails. Kael was wary of anything as humorless as exaltation. She was wary of anyone who took himself too seriously—such as Sontag’s adored Bresson, whom she charged with “inhuman pride.”—Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Counterpoint, 2004

 

Bloggers and the writers who turn out well-crafted pieces on their own Web sites are free to write what they want. The best of them, such as Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule or Kim Morgan at Sunset Gun or Farran Nehme Smith at The Self-Styled Siren, give public voice to the way movies function as private obsession. Their film knowledge is broad and deep, but they wear that knowledge lightly. They understand that the true appreciation of any art begins in pleasure (and not in the “work” of watching movies). To read them is to read people grounded in the sensual response to movies, in what the presence or look of a certain star, or the way a shot is lit stirs in them. —Charles Taylor, “The Problem With Film Criticism,” Dissent, Fall 2011 (available on the internet to subscribers only)

 

Reading long, detailed arguments about a difference of millimeters in the aspect ratio of a new Blu-Ray disc, the only shrinking millimeters I’m aware of are those of my open eyes narrowing.— Taylor, Dissent

 

When the writer Dan Kois advanced the heretical notion in the New York Times that he couldn’t pretend to enjoy movies he found boring, the reaction he got made it seem as if he had said movies could never deviate from convention and audiences should never try anything new. The film historian David Bordwell even used the word “philistinism.”—Taylor, Dissent

 

In college, a friend demanded to know what kind of idiot I was that I hadn’t yet watched Tarkovsky’s “Solaris.” “It’s so boring,” he said with evident awe. “You have to watch it, but you won’t get it.”

He was right: I had to watch it, and I didn’t get it. I had to watch it — on a laserdisc in the university library — because the intimation that there was a film that connoisseurs knew that I’d never heard of was too much to bear. I didn’t get it because its mesmerizing pace was so far removed from my cinematic metabolism that several times during its 165 minutes, I awoke in a panic, only to find that the same thing was happening onscreen as was happening when I closed my eyes. (Seas roiling; Russians brooding.) After I left the library, my friend asked me what I thought. “That was amazing,” I said. When he asked me what part I liked the best, I picked the five-minute sequence of a car driving down a highway, because it seemed the most boring. He nodded his approval. —Dan Kois, “Eating Your Cultural Vegetables,” The New York Times Magazine, April 29, 2011

 

The reaction to Kois was a sustained example of bullying masked as erudition.—Taylor, Dissent

 

What is interesting is the impression of a giddy, widespread abdiction of all time-consuming enterprises, from building an argument to watching a movie, and the accompanying implication that anything beyond an immediate gut-level response is suspect. Sometimes the abdication and the uses to which it is put are “market driven,” sometimes angst-ridden, sometimes politically cunning, and sometimes, as in Kois’s case, gleefully nonchalant. “My taste stubbornly remains my taste,” writes Kois as a summary statement: this is not film criticism, but rather its gleeful renunciation.—Kent Jones, “That was SO THEN, This is TOTALLY NOW,” Film Comment, September/October 2011 (Print only)

 

[Branded To Kill is] also a movie of rain and shadows, and Mr. Suzuki’s use of angular, minimalist 20th-century-modern interiors to convey blankness and isolation makes you wonder why anyone ever consented to be bored by Michelangelo Antonioni’s coffee-table anomie. —Charles Taylor, “New DVDs To Warm Your Toes By,” The New York Times, October 28, 2011

 

 

Images from Blow-Up (with Jeff Beck, 1966), Zabriskie Point (with Daria Halprin, 1970), The Passenger (with Maria Schneider, 1975) and Identification of a Woman (1982), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.