Film Criticism

[hearthesilence]

That's a pretty boneheaded excerpt - also, Scorsese is known to heavily re-write his scripts uncredited, often in close collaboration with actors. I get the impression the inaccuracies and double standards are a classic case of someone letting his general distaste or inability to understand an artist's body of work (or at least what others see in it) distort his own critical judgment.

[MichaelB]

People have just started using “auteurism” as synonymous with great singular genius narratives. It’s destined to be misused forever at this point.

Which is a real shame, because the original auteur theory is so much more interesting and stimulating. But the situation that gave rise to it - i.e. a conveyor-belt system of production with directors assigned to projects that they might not independently have chosen - no longer exists any more and hasn't done for decades.

I daresay you could stretch it as far as the turn of the Eighties by including people like Alan Clarke, who worked primarily for the BBC under very similar circumstances to the Hollywood studio directors of old, but there haven't been too many other more recent examples that aren't a massive stretch.

[Michael Kerpan]

MichaelB -- People don't seem to realize that there were writer-director-maybe producers who were considered the essential element in the making of their films BEFORE the auteurist approach was ever created. What the "auteurist" critics brought in that was new was that directors could also (sometimes) bring a unique and recognizable style into films they did not write that were produced under the constraints of domineering studios. It wasn't that writer-directors who explicitly controlled the making of their films were not consider "auteurs" but that mere "for-hire" directors could ALSo be "auteurs". (Or at least that's the way I'v always understood things).

[MichaelB]

One thing that can't be emphasised enough is that in the studio system authentic two-hatted writer-directors were incredibly rare - almost unheard of in the 1930s, and even over the next decade or so (i.e. still prior to the original auteur theory being coined) people like Sam Fuller, John Huston, Preston Sturges, Orson Welles and Billy Wilder were outliers.

[colinr0380]

I don't know if this is actually the case but I have presumed that in the early decades of film after a number of directors got into trouble with their expensive productions (such as Erich von Stroheim, Buster Keaton, Orson Welles) that led to a general pulling back from the idea of singularly genius filmmakers, at least from the point of view of those putting up the financing! And then the studio system pipeline was consolidated in Hollywood (I would guess due to the war destroying the film industries of many other competing countries, the distribution through theatre chains, the Hays Code) into something that would make production practically easier if you had an in house stable of directors, actors, costume designers and so on under contract to draw on, or swap between studios in deals similar to sports teams swapping players.

Which would seem to negate the grand idea of an 'auteur' but there was always the idea that filmmakers even in those kind of systems were getting known for their particular affinity for working on gangster films, musicals (Busby Berkeley), thrillers (Hitchcock), westerns and so on. With smart studio executives recognising that the director who was particularly good at war films might be better left to their own devices, within reason, to produce a run of them. And there is the apparently key aspect that as a whole swathe of films suddenly arrived in post-war France all at once (and to an extent in Britain), which helped to make it more obvious to the critics there to note the commonalities between films by a same director, or even entire subgenres such as film noir which is a trend that might have been overlooked, or actively played down, in the US market. Which itself led to the auteur theory and slow 'reclaiming' of films as works of art to be treasured from particular artists rather than just production line quickies to be made, shown in theatres and then forgotten about for the next production. So you get the championing of Budd Boetticher directed Randolph Scott western from the others Scott made. Or the discovery of Douglas Sirk's 'women's pictures'. Or the teenager and portraits of suburbia with Nicholas Ray's works. Or Val Lewton being noted for his production of horror films.

But it took longer to catch on back in the US of course! And it kind of took the whole collapse of the studio system in the mid-60s, as the studios were unable to keep up with the changes in the wider society for the "Director" with a capital D to come back to the fore (which is why it is so telling that Scorsese ends his "Personal Journey" documentary at that point, at the end of that era and the beginning of the one he was involved with). With the New Hollywood types of Bogdanovich and Schrader key to this. We get the glorious decade of the 1970s where the studios seemed to place their faith in 'auteurs' to lead the way of the medium. Which inevitably collapsed once the studios hit on a new trends that worked commercially and could be sequelised and marketed beyond their original creators and entered the "Blockbuster" era with Jaws and Star Wars as the leading lights; combined with the more feted auteurs having troubles with ever more expensive and grander scaled films flopping. Which kind of showed the limits of the auteur theory, in that it was always about identifying unifying qualities of a particular creator's work, and no guarantee that said creator was going to always produce guaranteed masterpieces! (And that is where the auteur theory is a great tool, in going past notions of good or bad and showing that even a 'bad' film can have interesting qualities to it, especially in context of a wider body of work when a particular favourite technique or idea that the filmmaker likes to focus upon might stick out more when it is not working quite as successfully! Which can help a viewer appreciate the films where it does work even more!)

We are still in that situation now, although the situation seems much more extremely polarised between arthouse theatre films on one hand (which are going for that "singular genius narratives" approach that may be the trend from which Koehler is coming from. Which has its own issues and biases if applied in a blanket manner) and Marvel movies on the other. Marvel (and Star Wars) does seem to be consolidating back to combining the worst traits of the factory-style production line process with the post-70s blockbuster focus on the box office, and treating the director as another interchangeable element to be slotted into the process. Although we may not see a new 'auteur theory' appearing from that trend partly because the films are so rigid in plot and style that even when bringing in interesting directors to helm films there appears to simply be no room for a director to leave their mark on the production. Because on one side there is too much money on the line to risk it all for them to take things in a more personal direction (so only the executives in charge of the entire production, such as Kathleen Kennedy or a JJ Abrams, are able to leave their mark, for better or worse), and on the other that there is a question there about how much control that an individual director can actually have over something that is 95% CGI created, with the live action filmed on a greenscreen stage and slotted in as an afterthought in order to connect the action sequences together.

[Black Hat]

Too bad. I do have broad sympathies here. Film criticism is more and more marginal, and what film criticism there is, is bland and often caught up in the enthusiasms of the age. This has always been the case for as long as we've had criticism, but it's especially the case now. It'd be nice to have better critics, but even nicer to have better defenders of criticism.

To be fair, critics today are missing one thing that helps - job security. Without it, most people's writing will be more conservative. Most of the critics with staff positions, the few available, are bland, boring and forgettable for a reason. Magazines want to keep access.

What has also damaged criticism is Film Twitter, as well as so many critics having to funnel their way to NYC. While fantastic in terms of building friendships, and creating a real community of people who care about the same thing, it's terrible for challenging each other's opinions. Much easier to challenge people you don't know. Moreover, the insularity has created a mentality where writers write more for one another than for the general audience.

The result of all this? Really boring, boilerplate shit, that'll help you get an adjunct teaching position somewhere but not many readers of your writing.

edit: another thing that's hurt film writing is podcasting, a lot of film podcasts do shockingly high numbers

The best critics going these days are A.S. Hamrah, the aforementioned Pinkerton (someone please tell substackers editing is allowed!), Kam Collins and the Lazic sisters.

Sidenote: I find board members who have perpetually been loud critics of Film Twitter, and internet culture in general, who are not only hyper-aware of it but display the same ignorant, judgmental qualities that have made this place an occasionally unpleasant environment for many of us to participate very amusing.

[soundchaser]

Sidenote: I find board members who have perpetually been loud critics of Film Twitter, and internet culture in general, who are not only hyper-aware of it but display the same ignorant, judgmental qualities that have made this place an occasionally unpleasant environment for many of us to participate very amusing.

I think it's one thing to have occasional clashes of personality, as will happen in any community. It's another to be consistently, relentlessly negative in your self-expression, whether inside your work or outside of it. I like the Lazics, as well as a few critics who came out of the Little White Lies scene, so it's not as if I have a pathological aversion to people cooler than I am.

The forum equivalent of subtweeting (another terrible internet habit!) is probably not helping your case either way.

[Black Hat]

I apologize for challenging the readers of this forum with reading comprehension, which incredibly, you failed!

Friend, I've played a lot of parts on this forum, but one thing I have never shied away from is confrontation.

<<<It's cool to see I've aged to the point where there are newish members here unaware of my legend.>>>

[soundchaser]

Nearly 8 years is "newish"?

If you think I've misunderstood anything, you're free to clarify or elaborate.

[colinr0380]

Cinema Scope has published its final issue.

It was the one of the last North American print publications dedicated to film as an art form (with the help of Canadian government funding). Very few left.

Every article in this issue is available to read online.

An article looking back on the history of CinemaScope

[Matt]

Jonathan Rosenbaum has a new collection of essays coming out in May: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader

A culmination of nearly six decades of writing from the mind of iconoclastic film, literary, and music critic Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Looking back at his more than 50 years of writing, where many flights of fancy and fantasy prove to suggest certain duties as well as privileges, Jonathan Rosenbaum has teased out three threads in particular: the film criticism he is mainly known for (especially during his 20-year stint at the Chicago Reader), the literary criticism he has also been publishing over the past half-century, and the jazz criticism he has been writing during the same period.

Believing that these three art forms are interrelated and have often been intertwined in his perceptions of them, he builds a manifesto out of a hundred of his best pieces, arranged chronologically, taking on such disparate figures as Stanley Kubrick, Thomas Pynchon, Sonny Rollins, Michael Snow, Philip Roth, Duke Ellington, Spike Lee, Roland Barthes, Keith Jarrett, Jean-Luc Godard, Vladimir Nabokov, and Ahmad Jamal, and such diverse subjects as Adam Curtis documentaries, Mad, Peanuts, Louis Armstrong, Italo Calvino, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Shoah, Johnny Guitar, PlayTime, Chantal Akerman, Kelly Reichardt, Kira Muratova, William Faulkner’s Light in August, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, and, in a final essay dealing with all three art forms, a film of a jazz cantata by André Hodeir derived from a passage in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

[therewillbeblus]

Thanks, Matt!

And for those who aren't boycotting, this is half off the link's price at Amazon right now

[Mr Sausage]

There is no reason for a 320 page hardback to be $60. Guess I’ll bug my library to get it.

[TechnicolorAcid]

There is no reason for a 320 page hardback to be $60. Guess I’ll bug my library to get it.

Luckily it appears to $40 through the direct link and around $21 through Amazon.

[therewillbeblus]

Maybe not for Canada?

[TechnicolorAcid]

Oh right that makes sense.

[knives]

Anybody know of some good writing on Edward L Cahn?