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Didn't know where to put this. But has there been any attempt in modern film criticism to classify the millennial anxiety/Y2K sci-fi of the late 90s? Which I would say was around 1995-2000. Films like Johnny Mnemonic, The 13th Floor, Dark City, The Matrix, Strange Days, Existenz, possibly Hackers and others.

There's a brooding undertone to these films and a sort of hazy dread, along with a magical view of technology, no doubt stemming from the coinciding computer/information age, not yet understood but enough to know it would change everything. They also lean heavy into existentialist themes.

I feel like this was a special if brief time in Hollywood filmmaking, with a focus on scripts and imaginative aesthetics, that didn't yet overindulge CG in the way that was common in the 2000s. It was also decidedly introspective, which was less the case during the Bush years.

I am not aware of any specific writing on that trend but I remember at the time just taking the sci-fi shenanigans for granted! If pushed I would probably suggest that they are relatively darker and more muted takes on the goofier and more vibrant 'virtual reality' period from the early to mid 90s. As mentioned Hackers and The Net would fit into the trend of films trying to make people sitting at computers typing intently look action packed! (1992's Sneakers too) I would throw in the films of Brett Leonard into that trend as well, however they did feel as if they were indulging in CGI as much as they possibly could for the era: Lawnmower Man of course but I'm also thinking of the rather overlooked now (because it is completely insane!) Virtuosity.

If pressed I wonder if things turned as you identify in 1995 with things getting a bit too over the top (Virtuosity and especially Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace with the originally virtually created star Max Headroom, Matt Frewer!), so we start getting those darker, rather more technologically muted takes on virtual worlds. After the rather silly excesses of CGI those later films you mention have more reflective, noirish, paranoia filled takes which also seem to end up pushing the theme of never being entirely certain of which layer is the real world any more, or what even reality is anyways.

Re: Siskel & Ebert's "Dog of the Week," I wondered why they changed dogs, and fortunately Ebert's site reprinted a 1983 article by Tom Shales that explains why. (It was actually a petty money issue of all things - PBS didn't want to pay Spot's contractual "overtime" rate anymore. Then Sparky, the replacement, died from kidney failure.)

RIP Film wrote: Wed Aug 19, 2020 1:12 am Didn't know where to put this. But has there been any attempt in modern film criticism to classify the millennial anxiety/Y2K sci-fi of the late 90s? Which I would say was around 1995-2000. Films like Johnny Mnemonic, The 13th Floor, Dark City, The Matrix, Strange Days, Existenz, possibly Hackers and others.

Screen Slate covers part of this topic in their book 1995: The Year The Internet Broke

I just heard Cineaste is looking for a proofreader to help them out. I have an email address I can pass along if anyone's interested (you need to submit a resume with a letter of interest), but here's what was passed on to me:

Cineaste is seeking a proofreader. The position, like all other editorial positions at Cineaste, a nonprofit magazine published by an all-volunteer staff, is not salaried, but it does include a number of perquisites, details of which will be made available to applicants or interested parties.

The basic requirement is previous or current professional proofreading experience, including the skill and ability to commit to proofreading 50% of the material in each quarterly issue (another proofreader now on staff proofs the other half of each issue), within an approximately two-week period. To receive the full benefits of the various editorial “perks” available, our preferred applicant would live in the New York City or nearby surrounding area, and be enough of a film scholar or film buff to be familiar with the sort of specialized journalism and criticism that we publish.

hearthesilence wrote: Sat Sep 12, 2020 8:48 pm I just heard Cineaste is looking for a proofreader to help them out. I have an email address I can pass along if anyone's interested (you need to submit a resume with a letter of interest), but here's what was passed on to me:

I would appreciate it, if you want to PM me!

HinkyDinkyTruesmith wrote: Sat Sep 12, 2020 9:03 pm

hearthesilence wrote: Sat Sep 12, 2020 8:48 pm I just heard Cineaste is looking for a proofreader to help them out. I have an email address I can pass along if anyone's interested (you need to submit a resume with a letter of interest), but here's what was passed on to me:

I would appreciate it, if you want to PM me!

Just sent!

hearthesilence wrote: Sat Sep 12, 2020 8:48 pm I just heard Cineaste is looking for a proofreader to help them out. I have an email address I can pass along if anyone's interested (you need to submit a resume with a letter of interest), but here's what was passed on to me:

Cineaste is seeking a proofreader. The position, like all other editorial positions at Cineaste, a nonprofit magazine published by an all-volunteer staff, is not salaried, but it does include a number of perquisites, details of which will be made available to applicants or interested parties.

The basic requirement is previous or current professional proofreading experience, including the skill and ability to commit to proofreading 50% of the material in each quarterly issue (another proofreader now on staff proofs the other half of each issue), within an approximately two-week period. To receive the full benefits of the various editorial “perks” available, our preferred applicant would live in the New York City or nearby surrounding area, and be enough of a film scholar or film buff to be familiar with the sort of specialized journalism and criticism that we publish.

I would also love the contact info if you are willing to share. Many thanks for the post!

Professor Wagstaff wrote: Sat Sep 12, 2020 9:55 pm

hearthesilence wrote: Sat Sep 12, 2020 8:48 pm I just heard Cineaste is looking for a proofreader to help them out. I have an email address I can pass along if anyone's interested (you need to submit a resume with a letter of interest), but here's what was passed on to me:

Cineaste is seeking a proofreader. The position, like all other editorial positions at Cineaste, a nonprofit magazine published by an all-volunteer staff, is not salaried, but it does include a number of perquisites, details of which will be made available to applicants or interested parties.

The basic requirement is previous or current professional proofreading experience, including the skill and ability to commit to proofreading 50% of the material in each quarterly issue (another proofreader now on staff proofs the other half of each issue), within an approximately two-week period. To receive the full benefits of the various editorial “perks” available, our preferred applicant would live in the New York City or nearby surrounding area, and be enough of a film scholar or film buff to be familiar with the sort of specialized journalism and criticism that we publish.

I would also love the contact info if you are willing to share. Many thanks for the post!

No problem, just sent!

I've been meaning to ask this for a while.... What do the folks here think of Susan Sontag criticisms?

FrauBlucher wrote: Sun Sep 13, 2020 12:26 am I've been meaning to ask this for a while.... What do the folks here think of Susan Sontag criticisms?

I've only read "Against Interpretation" (just the essay, not the whole book). I strongly disagreed with her thesis at the time, but it stuck with me and has undoubtedly influenced my thinking about movies and texts in general.

I thought about it a lot as I read Geoff Dyer's Zona, a book that talks about (among other things) Stalker's anti-symbolism. Not only do things not mean something; the things actively eschew the very idea that things mean things. I came away thinking that any appreciation of Tarkovsky's Stalker that is overly concerned with symbolic meaning is going to degrade the beauty of the film itself.

I still like when things mean things, though. But Sontag and Dyer have encouraged me to look at texts a bit differently.

I'm not sure this all answers your question.

TheKieslowskiHaze wrote: Thu Sep 17, 2020 2:19 amNot only do things not mean something; the things actively eschew the very idea that things mean things.

FWIW - I take this approach (more or less) to (at least some of) the works of a fair number of favorite directors -- particularly Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Luis Bunuel, and Jacques Rivette.

I've now read three of Sontag's books––Styles of Radical Will, On Photography, and Illness as Metaphor, along with a few interviews and write-ups and a couple of her essays from Against Interpretation. I like her quite a bit, more for her rigor and personality than for her ideas, which I take and leave. I've never considered her a particularly astute observer of cinema, even if she was a filmmaker, but rather of that sort of intellectual who approaches cinema with a rarified intelligence. Her criticisms of film always come off as excessively heady and dissociated from the physicality that cinema contains (at least, that it contains for me). She is, I think, a true intellectual powerhouse and a vigorous writer and thinker, and "Against Interpretation" was very important for me––not as permission to discredit meaning in texts, which, after all, is not what she's arguing––but to embrace the bodily aesthetic sensations that texts can provide (the very thing, I think, that the pomo films she most often engaged in allowed her to avoid). And it was reactionary, importantly. She felt that an "erotics of art" had been undeveloped and had left engagement with texts as excessively intellectual, something she very much would come to regret in her own interactions with art decades later as is expressed in a New Yorker piece on her. For what it's worth, the second piece in Against Interpretation, "On Style" is great as well, and at least the first half very eloquently lays out the problem with much discourse around "style."

In other film critic news, Ringer critic Adam Nayman, in promoting his upcoming PTA book, teased that his next will be about David Fincher.

I read and loved his Coens book. It's also just a beautifully produced object. I look forward to the PTA one.

This is old news now, and might be well known and/or thoroughly debunked by now, but might be of interest to those like me who hadn't heard cinematographer José Alcaine's theory before:Could there be a Hollywood inspiration behind Picasso's 'Guernica'?
(The writer has evidently forgotten Betteridge's Law).

Here is a video essay by Alcaine, in Spanish without subtitles RTVE, and a shorter version CCMA.

Reading through Sarris' The American Cinema I noticed in his critique of Cukor that he doesn't mention Gaslight. I find that odd. Does he think Gaslight is a minor Cukor? Granted his short essays don't have a lot of depth to them but Gaslight does deserve a mention in my opinion

As I recall, Sarris often elided films he hadn't seen from discussion in the book, I imagine it's the same story here

It's hard to imagine how scant availability there was for films then, even for eminent critics searching for famous titles. I remember an interview with Molly Haskell where she said that early on in her career, if there were relevant films she needed to reference and couldn't get her hands on, she would have to ask Sarris or other cinephile friends to describe everything they could remember about them, which inevitably lead to factual errors and colorful subjective readings.

Red Screamer wrote: Wed Nov 18, 2020 12:40 am It's hard to imagine how scant availability there was for films then, even for eminent critics searching for famous titles. I remember an interview with Molly Haskell where she said that early on in her career, if there were relevant films she needed to reference and couldn't get her hands on, she would have to ask Sarris or other cinephile friends to describe everything they could remember about them, which inevitably lead to factual errors and colorful subjective readings.

The first inkling I had of this was reading Donald Spoto's Hitchcock study published around 1976 when Vertigo, Rear Window, Rope, The Trouble with Harry, and The Man Who Knew Too Much were still unavailable (and had been since 1961 or so). If memory serves, I think he was pretty upfront about how difficult that made it to write about those films.

Anyway, if you have Indicator's Night of the Demon, there's an extra where someone goes into great detail about what it was like to be a cinephile before home video. For most people who couldn't afford to rent or purchase films themselves, and especially those who lived too far from repertory houses, they were pretty much at the mercy of local TV stations. [shudder]

In this context I'm always amazed by the stuff in books by midcentury film historians like Georges Sadoul, where he's obviously doing his best to recall details from one Paris screening of some Japanese or Swedish film from some 30 or 40 years earlier. Meanwhile I can't remember what I ate this morning.

I remember before IMDb existed having to rely on the synopses and credits in the printed American Film Institute (AFI) Catalog of Feature Films. It had a little icon of a pair of glasses to indicate that the writer of the synopsis (an/or compiler of the credits) had actually viewed the film in its entirety to verify it (which is replicated on the website version, but as an eye next to the title).

hearthesilence wrote: Wed Nov 18, 2020 2:00 am The first inkling I had of this was reading Donald Spoto's Hitchcock study published around 1976 when Vertigo, Rear Window, Rope, The Trouble with Harry, and The Man Who Knew Too Much were still unavailable (and had been since 1961 or so). If memory serves, I think he was pretty upfront about how difficult that made it to write about those films.

This was a problem with the first book on Hitchcock by Chabrol and Rohmer too. I remember trying to use it for a paper on Mr and Mrs Smith and it was pointless as they got large details wrong-- though again, at this time especially, they were at best going off one-off screenings at the Cinematheque for the more obscure titles

That disappoints me to read these old criticisms when all they go by was recollection or other's recollection no matter the legacy of the critic

Adrian Martin posted on Facebook he will have a new book published in January.

FrauBlucher wrote: Wed Nov 18, 2020 11:45 pm That disappoints me to read these old criticisms when all they go by was recollection or other's recollection no matter the legacy of the critic

But that's just how it was, in the days before home video. Unless you had direct access to a collection like the Cinémathèque Française—and even then—you were reliant on the decisions (indeed, the whims) of studios and distributors to much of anything older than a few years. We've discussed this elsewhere on this board, in terms of the relative uniformity of "top ten lists" in the mid 20th century: compared to today, at least, every cinephile was watching from the same smallish group of movies, at the same time. (Of course, it mattered whether you were in a capital of Culture—but people in New York, Paris, Los Angeles, Moscow, etc. are the people who have written most of film history and the film criticism we tend to remember.)

Has anyone written something on this situation in general? Not just about issues of access in a particular place or era, but about how the entire economy of access sustained an entirely different relationship to individual films and indeed broad conceptions of the "history of cinema"? I'm sure people like Sadoul cultivated remarkable—if imperfect—memories for individual films in part because they knew they wouldn't get a chance to see them again, if not ever, then for a long, long time. Whereas most of us can choose to watch any of many thousands of films over and over again, at our leisure. There's a kind of fetishization that can promote, but it's hospitable to a certain forgetfulness, too.