FILM CRITICISM IN CRISIS?: A New York Film Festival panel discussion hosted by Film Comment September 27, 2008, at the Walter Reade Theater
Participants:
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Emmanuel Burdeau, Cahiers du cinéma Editor
Kent Jones, Film Comment Editor-at-Large
David Hudson, GreenCine Daily Editor
Jessica Winter, O magazine film critic
Pascual Espiritu (aka Acquarello) of Strictly Film School
Seung-hoon Jeong, former critic for Korean film weekly Cine 21 Moderator: Gavin Smith, Film Comment Editor
Gavin Smith: To my far left is Jonathan Rosenbaum, who probably needs no introduction. Next to Jonathan is Emmanuel Burdeau, the editor of Cahiers du cinéma. To my immediate left is Pascual Espiritu, who some of you may know as Acquarello. She has a website called Strictly Film School. To my immediate right is Seung-hoon Jeong, who used to be a critic for the Korean film weekly Cine21, who is currently doing a Ph.D. in the Yale film program. Next to him is a gentleman who is described in the current issue of Cineaste as the most powerful person in the blogosphere, David Hudson the editor of Daily GreenCine. To David’s right is Jessica Winter, who is the critic for O Magazine. And all the way at the end there on the right is Kent Jones, editor-at-large at Film Comment and international man of mystery. I’m going to just say a few words and try to get the ball rolling. I guess first would be a confession: we called this panel Crisis in Film Criticism, question mark. The question mark was hedging because it’s debatable whether there is a crisis, or what that crisis is. And to be honest with you, crisis is just one of those really sexy dramatic words that you can use to make people think that something important is being discussed. We hope that what will be discussed here will be important and interesting to you, but I think it would probably be more honest to say that this discussion will be very wide-ranging and we’ll really be talking about the state of film criticism, not just in America but in the world at large, hopefully. Also, in the last few years there’s been a lot of debate, especially on the Internet, about the conflict between people who write online and people who write in print, and so maybe a lot of you here are hoping to see a kind of a showdown between the bloggers and the dinosaurs that still work in print. I don’t think that’s what we’re going to be doing. I think that that’s an argument that’s really finished, it’s over and done with, and it’s time to move on from that debate and to look at the bigger picture. I think this is something where we’re all in it together. That’s why, hopefully, this panel is ecumenical. It includes people who work only in print, people who’ve migrated from print to the Web, people who only write for the Web. That’s something I was hoping to let you know if you were expecting, you know, fur to fly and lots of bitchy comments about the differences between the Web and print. That said, I think there’s a lot to be discussed about those differences and the new possibilities of the Web. So, having said all of that, I just want to ask each of the panelists to address the question: Do they feel that film criticism is in crisis right now? Or is it simply a transition from one moment to another moment, some kind of a paradigm shift perhaps? Maybe we can begin with Kent Jones.
Kent Jones: I’m really so happy that there’s no crisis. There’s certainly an economic crisis, given all the people who’ve been dropped from newspapers and magazines, and that’s an alarming development. It’s alarming to note the difficulty which magazines and newspapers are having just staying alive right now. On the other hand, I do think that it’s not a crisis in film criticism per se, because there are a lot of very devoted and very eloquent and hard-working people out there who are writing criticism—some of them are writing for the love of it, some of them are writing for very little money and some of them are writing for better money. But the point is that there’s a multiplicity of voices and that many of them are eloquent ones. I do think that at any given moment, particularly with film, there’s a lot of—you know the old distinction between criticism and reviewing. One could say that there’s a lot of reviewing. The people who are sitting on this panel all take the practice of criticism very seriously. There are a lot of other people who don’t, but for me and for everyone else here I think, criticism is writing, and writing means rewriting and it means refining your argument and working very hard at your final objective and reworking your final objective as you’re going along and looking at the film over and over and over again until you really know the object in front of you, so that you can describe its parameters. A lot of people don’t take it that seriously and certainly a lot of newspaper editors and magazine editors don’t take it that seriously, but encourage writers to move in an opposite direction in order to supposedly get into greater synergy with their readership. That’s an alarming development but the fact is that as long as there are people who really do take the practice of criticism seriously, there’s not a crisis. I think that there might be a difficulty now trying to figure out the parameters of what it is that constitutes cinema. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It makes things kind of exciting actually.
Emmanuel Burdeau: I would say there is a very big crisis in film criticism and of course one could say that there’s always been a crisis in film criticism or there’s always been a crisis in French cinema. It’s been debated for like 10, 20, 30 years. Whatever. If I want to be honest what’s on my mind, what I think about when hearing that question, I can only talk about the current situation at Cahiers du cinema. As you probably know, this French monthly magazine has been owned by one of the biggest French newspapers in France called Le Monde, for the past 10 years. When Le Monde bought Les Cahiers, the magazine —it’s not only a magazine but also a publishing house and a website, but let’s stick to Les Cahiers—was losing something like a 100,000 euros a year, which is quite a lot. A 100,000 euros is something like 300,000 dollars, so it’s a lot of money. So the Cahiers are losing something like 700,000 euros in 2007. So the economic situation Kent Jones just talked about is really dramatic. The enterprise itself doesn’t mean anything right now—it is worth absolutely nothing. What is still worth something is the brand, the staff, and the history. But the company itself isn’t worth anything.
Gavin Smith: Does those financial losses translate into something in terms of readership?
Emmanuel Burdeau: Yeah, sure. The Cahiers have been losing readers for five to 10 years. Fewer and fewer readers buy the magazine, we have something like 15,000 subscribers and 6,000-7,000 newsstand sales. But what I want to emphasize is that at this very particular moment when what’s supposedly the most famous cinema magazine in the world is for sale, it has started to seem like a major business matter. You have 20 candidates, from film producers to very rich publishers, like the English company Phaidon, to Les Inrockuptibles, which was willing to buy the Cahiers. And Le Monde did not make it clear that it’s not business question—because if you want to buy the Cahiers du cinéma you just have to put the one euro on the table. So if it is a business question it is how much money you can put up to reinvent it, not buy it and give the money to Le Monde, but what kind of money that you can put on the table and say “Okay, we’ll invest this much with the Cahiers.” And as the editor and as someone who has been writing for Cahiers for like 12, 13 years, I decided that this crisis —and that’s the kind of rhetoric that we’ve been using for five months—is an economic and a critical and an editorial crisis at the same time. I used to say, “If you ask the question of what the Cahiers is, can be, or should be in the future, you also have to ask the question of whether they should move to the Internet or not, which is both an economic and a critical question. If you want to reinvent the Cahiers, which is on the one hand, the most famous film magazine in the world, and on the other hand is still a very provincial magazine, you have to ask yourself whether you want to do a bilingual version or not. Which is a critical question, because if it’s bilingual, that means not all the articles will be written in Paris, but some of them will be written in New York or Beijing or whatever. It means the topical issues won’t all be Parisian. And that’s an economic question too because of the cost of translation, and whether we should have a bilingual version on the Internet or not. Let me give you two more examples. We’ve been noticing for, I don’t know, three or four or five years —and I’m sure it’s been even more dramatic here—that more and more movies that we love, made by directors that are really important, don’t get released. They’re having more and more difficulty getting released in Paris. I’m talking about Abel Ferrara, who is very famous in France. His two last movies, the one about the Chelsea Hotel and Go-Go Tales, haven’t been sold to any French distributor. I’m also talking about probably one of the greatest filmmakers today, Pedro Costa. When you talk about Pedro Costa, there have been great articles in Film Comment, in Artforum, and other places. And when the film is shown either in museums or festivals, there’s always a crowd, and the film was selected in competition in Cannes. But when it was released in Paris, in three weeks five hundred people went to see it, whereas at festivals you could have three times more in a couple of nights. So that’s an economical and a critical question—Cahiers du cinéma covers the films that are released every month. But what happens if the most important movies—made not only by obscure filmmakers—do not have their most important life in theaters but elsewhere? Should we change, should we not be a monthly anymore or should we change the way we organize every issue, or not? That was one of the things I was thinking about, because I actually proposed a plan to rebuy the Cahiers, which I thought still had a chance. But when I got here people said “Sorry to hear that it didn’t work,” so I think the news traveled faster than I did. We said, if Ferrara or Shinji Aoyama in Japan, or Pedro Costa, or others, are having a really, really hard time being released, or if they are released it’s of no consequence because regular viewers don’t go, the Cahiers should play a political role, what I would call a militant or activist role, and release the films itself. They should say, “Okay, we are going to become distributors for this kind of film.” Some people say that it is a conflict of interest, that you cannot be both critics and distributors. I don’t see it that way. We are talking about filmmakers who won’t become rich. If I could sum up the crisis in a word—because as they say, even here, about the financial crisis, there’s always a good side—the good thing about the crisis is that we need to understand that the separation between the critical world and the film world is not what it used to be 50 years ago when the Cahiers was founded. You had on the one hand the monthly magazine and on the other hand where the film was shown in the theaters, and to me the Internet shows us that these things really need to go together, whether we want it or not. When you are writing on a blog, you can have the article and an extract or the entire movie on the same page, so you can be a magazine and a theater at the same time. That is the most important thing to me, and that is the opportunity that is we have now, since the Cahiers is on sale.
Gavin Smith: Seung-hoon, I’ve heard a lot about the vitality of Korean film culture. You had two weekly film magazines, which I find amazing. So I imagine it must be a very different kind of scene to cinephile film-culture in Europe and the U.S.
Seung-hoon Jeung: I discussed things with the editor of Cine21 yesterday and he said that Korean film criticism does face a crisis in terms of its reception. But there it’s a little different than the Western situation and more serious because Korean cinephilic culture has only existed for a short time. It came out of the Korean cinema boom, which was around 1995. That was when Cine21 was launched, as well as another monthly magazine called Kino, which set out to be like the Korean Cahiers du cinéma but finally folded after seven years. And the Pusan Film Festival was also launched at that time. So these three embodiments of cinephilia were the basis for a new film culture in Korea. But the problem now is not in terms of established critics versus bloggers but criticism itself versus the mass audience who don’t actually need criticism to pick out a film to see on the weekend. The mass audience thinks criticism should be just a brief guide for making choices rather than a means for getting serious ideas or information. They don’t want to suffer from a headache reading serious film criticism. In other words they’re looking for entertainment, not to be enlightened. They choose films based on word of mouth. They don’t really access criticism in print culture, they just read brief comments on the websites. So the Internet seems to have contributed to this shift in film culture. There was a kind of cinephilic enthusiasm from 1995 to early 2000, but after that the Korean film industry began to fluctuate and many Korean filmmakers began to find it hard to finance their projects. And all of this is getting worse and worse because the Internet, which is very amorphous, ethereal, and decentralized, exposing the mass audience to the opinions of regular people who are not critics or experts. So the democratic aspect of the Internet in some cases provokes a fascistic effect. Last year a Korean blockbuster called D-War, a kind of Korean version of Godzilla, was a hit because its advances in special effects almost rivaled Hollywood. But the acting and directing were bad and the critics unanimously agreed that the film was trash, whereas in the country as a whole it was treated like it was a kind of national achievement. After that, a kind of witchhunt started and whenever critics criticized the film they got lots of e-mails and ended up on a kind of mass audience blacklist. This seems to indicate a kind of emotional nationalism towards Korean film history, which is combined with an endless enthusiasm for Hollywood blockbusters and an extreme antagonism towards criticism in general. But on the other side, the editor of Cine21 also told me that when Johnnie To’s new films were released in Korea this year no serious critics knew his work, whereas there were bloggers who were actively engaged with Cine21 who were very knowledgeable about his filmography. Eventually the editor gave them space in the print version to write about To. So he said that it was an example of a happy mature interdependence between print culture and online blogs, but that the blogosphere still seems generally to reflect the tendency of the mass audience’s stance towards serious criticism.
Gavin Smith: Jessica, you write for O, which I assume has a very specific but large readership in so far as Oprah is a demographic. You’re column doesn’t appear on their website, so is it safe to say that you are a print-confined publication?
Jessica Winter: We’re in the middle of a Web launch and about 80 to 90 percent of the magazine’s content will be online.
Gavin Smith: Can you describe the experience of writing serious film criticism in a magazine that has a readership probably in the millions—at the other end of the continuum from Film Comment and Cahiers du cinéma.
Jessica Winter: Sure, we actually have what I would say is an undefined demographic. Our audience is so big, so geographically diverse, so economically diverse that I can never make any safe assumptions about who I’m writing for. All I can assume is that the reader is interested in good movies. The one consideration that I have to take into account is geographic diversity. Not all of our readers live in a major city and a lot of the movies that I’m interested in writing about and that the people in this room are interested in seeing, I assume, are the kind of movies that open in a big city. They’re not the kind of movies that open in a multiplex. But luckily for me, the theatrical release is becoming less of a be-all and end-all as the gap between theatrical release and DVD closes and Netflix becomes a given, and as people see movies in different ways. It gives me a freedom to write about basically anything I want, but I do have to consider that I might be leaving some readers out of the conversation if I choose one movie over the other. The other thing that I would say is that the space that I have for writing reviews, and this comes back again to the difference between reviewing and criticism, is so small that it’s more like a cousin to film criticism, it’s more like curating. I am literally finding three movies that I think are great and making a case for them as concisely as possible. It’s very different than something I would write for Cinema Scope or Sight & Sound.
Jonathan Rosenbaum: There’s a crisis in this country, there’s a crisis, for me, in journalism. For me it’s hard to talk about film criticism without talking about journalism. In the freedom of the press rankings done annually for 169 countries by Reporters Without Borders, United States plunged from 17th place in 2002 to 53rd place in 2006, with only a minor upswing to 48th in 2007. It seems to me that we are in a situation where, in a lot of journalism, very basic things that are going on right now we can’t tell the truth about, we don’t even understand. For instance, we are currently occupying a country called Iraq, but this is not being called, in journalism, an occupation. It’s being called a war, a war that doesn’t have a clearly defined idea of what a victory is or a failure, and in which the will of the people in Iraq is considered secondary if it is considered at all. We have a person running for president who had a black father and a white mother who’s called black. This can be called a half-truth, but this is adopting a terminology which dates back to slavery in which if a person is part black he’s all black. The point is, to actually describe who Obama is racially, correctly, is politically incorrect. So, we’re in a situation where we can’t even tell the truth about very basic things like that. We’re also going through huge paradigmatic changes. To give you a basic example of this: I started out as a film critic in New York, Paris, and London, and at that time you had to live in a city like that if you were going to learn about the history of cinema. Today you can learn about the history of cinema anywhere in the world virtually. Some of the most sophisticated film venues in the world exist in places like rural Argentina, and some of the most sophisticated film viewers I know live in the middle of nowhere. Whereas once, when I really wanted to know about what was going on in film, I would read The New York Times, which I still read, but today that’s not what I read, that’s not where I would go. I would go to my man David Hudson here, who is actually able to tell me every day what’s going on in film criticism around the world. I would read writers like Pascual in Strictly Film School. If I go to the New Yorker, this is just a personal thing, instead of going to the back I would be more likely to go to the front to find out what’s going on in film. So all of these things are versions of big changes. They’re changes which even relate to whether the future of cinema is in theaters or not, because there are some arguments that maybe it’s not, and that changes whole notions of community and notions of audience. But what I do find is that even though there is more of everything on the Internet, which makes it more confusing, I find that I am constantly meeting people in their twenties who know much more about film than I possibly could have in my twenties. I can’t think that it’s either the end or the beginning of anything. We’re right in the middle of a lot of really big changes in which we’re using old definitions for new things that are going on, and so there’s a lot of confusion.
Gavin Smith: You mentioned the word community and that gives me a perfect segue into Pascual. Your blog is unusual in the sense that it’s all written by you. There is a comment section where a number of people respond, and sometimes a dialogue happens. But your blog doesn’t, for instance, point people in the direction of other blogs. Your blog isn’t designed as kind of a node in a network to other blogs. Yet, nevertheless, you are part of that community. I’m interested in what your thoughts are about the online community and to what extent it is meaningful to you as a writer of criticism.
Pascual Espiritu: To me it’s more like a cataloguing of what I watch. The outcome of this was to have a catalogue of what I watch and kind of open them up. Whether or not it had a comment section, I think, you know, you provide an e-mail address or some other way. It doesn’t have to be in that form. It could be on other websites that these discussions happen. But certainly in terms of online discussions or community, that is the appeal of it: to be able to put something out there and the audience finds you, instead of writing for an audience. That’s not what I do.
Gavin Smith: You don’t write for an audience?
Pascual Espiritu: Not really, no. Well, I do in a sense. Like I said, what I do is really just capture everything of what I see. Because what I do is come from D.C. to New York pretty much on long weekends and watch four films a day for three days and come back and make sure I capture everything before I forget it. So 10 years from now I have the memory of what I went to.
Gavin Smith: So in a sense your website is a kind of an archive.
Pascual Espiritu: It is. But it is also, you know, I leave it out there so that when people stumble into it it’s there for them. A lot of it is that there’s some information there, and if you’re interested in this person’s work, here’s some information, see if you will be inspired to see the film. It opens it up to other people writing their own stuff about the films.
Gavin Smith: It brings me back to what Jessica just said about curating. Your site seems to be highly curated. You have very specific interests, very specific tastes in serious art cinema. You don’t write about Pineapple Express on your website.
Pascual Espiritu: A lot of it is that I know people who cover those. That’s not really what interests me. What interests me is films like Nicolas Klotz’s La Blessure [The Wound], which was one of my favorite films that I’ve seen recently. But even here in New York we had only two screenings of it. I’d rather spend my time writing about something like that, since, because of distribution, you don’t see that as often. I’m here to fill the little holes, where they exist. So my interest is not to be the most popular Web writer out there. It really is, here are my thoughts on it, coming from someone with a background that is not really in the arts and not exactly layman either, but just somewhere in the middle.
David Hudson: Well, I hadn’t really planned to do this, but I’m going to end up doing what I do, which is basically collating and aggregating. It’s just the way it’s worked out. Let’s start with Pascual Espiritu. I just want to emphasize how extremely valuable that site is. You say you’re not popular, but if you Google a certain filmmaker’s name, although you may not be a household word, you’re the result that will come up immediately. Also, what you’re doing, Pascual, is very much what the word blog is, it’s a log, you know, because it’s your logging your experience and your filing impressions of films that absolutely no one else has written about, online yet. We all know that with the films you have seen, there’s been something written about it somewhere—perhaps on little mimeograph notes 20 years ago, something like that. You’re often the only online review of many of the films that you see. I wanted to talk to Jessica about the idea of geography. In a sense, that is something that the Internet can do very essentially. The blogosphere is the way that the people who do live in these outlying places and all that, the way that they do find each other. And Kent had a comment about there being a lot of reviewing going on. I would say that a lot of the activity in the blogosphere as well has to do with archiving.
Kent Jones: I meant in print venues.
David Hudson: Seung-hoon, your D-War example, what you were describing is something that is very similar to what happened here in America with The Dark Knight. It’s this community, sometimes called fanboys, that is almost like an organized army that has given a lot of film bloggers a bad name. And I think that we are coming around to a point now where we are able to distinguish between the various camps. I also want to respond to something that Emmanuel said. I agree with Emmanuel about the fact that since there is so much upheaval going on, since we don’t exactly at the moment know what a magazine is, and we don’t know what the role of the critic is, it’s very possible for critics to become advocates of a film culture by taking an active part in distribution as well. It’s something that I think has a precedent in European journalism, as well as (to tie in a little bit with what Jonathan was saying) about the evolution of journalism as a whole. Individually, the European press has always have always been aligned with certain ideologies and certain points of view. They don’t hold so tightly to this idea of objectivity that the American press does, and I think that this is something that we may all find ourselves exploring. We have examples of critics turning into distribution outlets, like Benten Films at the moment. So, to back up what Jonathan said, it’s a crisis across the board. I think we will see a rise of all sorts of new models and, yeah, we’re in the middle, we’re not in the beginning.
Jonathan Rosenbaum: It seems to me that one thing that’s very different is the whole notion of audience and even geography that’s going on. Because if you look at, for example, the number of people who might go to see a Kiarostami film in the United States, probably that doesn’t seem like very much. Then you look at all the people in the world who might be interested, it’s quite a lot, and the whole notion of community is kind of different in terms of who you’re writing for. I feel that I’m a beneficiary of this because I feel that a large portion of my readership, even when I was at the Chicago Reader, was not in Chicago but people who read me on the Internet. There’s a kind of international film culture that’s quite different from the culture of individual countries that’s growing and quite potent. In fact, figures who would have been totally unknown back in the Sixties are much better known now. Someone like Pedro Costa. I mean I’ve argued that when Danièle Huillet died, there was even an obituary in The New York Times, which would not have happened 10 years ago. It’s because of the Internet that it became news in New York even. And so I think that it’s characteristic of the way that information flow goes generally. It’s very confusing because all of our models tend to be national and local, but they’re based on paradigms that no longer seem relevant. Except for business. I mean, you know, it seems like countries exist for the purposes of businesses rather than individuals.
Kent Jones: Up to a few days ago. I just wanted to add to that, in relation to what you’re saying, Jonathan, about this question of the audience that you were writing for or not writing for, who you’re sharing space with and who you’re not. I want to say a few words about Pauline Kael. I think that Pauline Kael did something that Louis Menand referred to in an essay he wrote about her, which is that she led a national conversation about film. And, to a certain extent I think that he’s absolutely right. She did it quite brilliantly. And when I read his essay about her, it brought me back to being young and my parents and their friends arguing about films like A Clockwork Orange and about Ingmar Bergman’s films, and about Last Tango in Paris and whether they would go to see it or not. And at a certain point that all disappeared. One has different markers for that. Maybe Rocky, Star Wars, for me Ghostbusters is a film that really spelled the beginning of the end of a certain moment when…
Gavin Smith: The beginning of the death of cinema?
Kent Jones: Yeah, the beginning of the death, but . . . I think that there are many people who write as if that particular conversation is still in progress and I think that it’s changing. And also I want to say that I don’t agree, that there is no beginning or end but there never is—we all work with the illusion that there is an end point but there never really is.
Jonathan Rosenbaum: I think that what you’re saying, though, is reflected in the fact that at a certain point in the United States it was no longer possible to say “we” in reference to everyone. We can’t do that anymore. We’re in a civil war essentially now and this is a new situation and it affects everything. Of course it would affect film criticism too. So the idea of a figure like Pauline Kael is no longer possible. Even then, she never spoke for everybody, it was just the sense that there was an intelligent community that read her. A lot of paradigms like “the New York intellectual” that we had before are no longer relevant because we can’t say “we” anymore.
Gavin Smith: I don’t think that you could say “we” back in 1970, because you had Nixon’s “silent majority.” I don’t think Kael was really speaking to them. I think that what happened was that somewhere around the beginning of the Reagan era, the idea of an intellectual life and an intellectual culture became unfashionable. It became more than unfashionable, it became an anathema. I think that the Reagan era inaugurated a backlash against the life of the mind, and I think that had an impact across the culture, not just in film criticism. We’re living with the aftermath of that—the fact that arts editors in newspapers and magazines don’t think that having a serious film critic, a critic that really knows film history and who’s really approaching things in an intellectual way, is necessary. That, I think, is a side effect of a general backing off of that serious national conversation about culture and about film that when on.
Emmanuel Burdeau: I just wanted to add a French point of view on that. You could say that the same thing happened in France during the Eighties. We actually call it a backlash in French too—against whatever happened in the Seventies and the whole intellectual world, philosophy and everything. But what I wouldn’t agree with is the identification that has just been made between a sense of community, the possibility of saying “we,” and the livelihood of serious film criticism. For instance, I’m almost 35, so I was born a long time after the golden era of film criticism, cinephilia, Cahiers du cinema, a long time after the Fifties and the Sixties, where there was such a strong sense of community. People going to the Cinémathèque three times a day, going together to Brussels and Belgium to see small American films that you couldn’t see in France, stuff like that, always talking about movies, and having this kind of life that revolves only around film. I don’t see the interest that I have to go to the cinema like that, and that’s not to say that it doesn’t interest me that much, that is also not to say that ’68 and the Seventies put an end to that, that theory that cinema was everything. But of course there isn’t a sense of the “we.” For instance, when I write an article, I don’t think about the readers, not because I write for myself but because I don’t see a common interest toward cinema that everyone has, that could be the same if you are an engineer or a journalist or a teacher. I don’t see it as the end of an intellectual approach, because what I see as the challenge today for a film critic like myself is that I don’t believe that someone that you could call the average reader or viewer still exists. I have the impression that if you are, like myself, a fan of movies like Pineapple Express and stuff like that—I’m going to see it after the panel—let’s say you go to see Pineapple Express and you find it funny, you go on the Internet and in a couple of hours you can become a specialist in Judd Apatow’s productions, you can have much more knowledge about that than a film critic would have. In the same respect, what I find most interesting now in American cinema is, films like that, that are midway between something that’s supposed to be real popular and something that’s supposed to be real special. These comedies don’t work in France. Another movie which I really love, Cloverfield, is like a blockbuster but it’s not a blockbuster, and when it went out in France it didn’t work. It worked better than a Pedro Costa movie but not that well. So that is to me the question: you don’t have someone who goes to movies maybe twice a month, but that viewer knows Julia Roberts, knows Woody Allen, but when you go below he doesn’t know anything—I think everyone is crossing the lines. It’s not a scoop, the discussion right now in France, as I believe it is in the United States, is not as much about movies as it is about TV shows: “Did you see The Wire? Can you give me the DVDs?” That is what people talk about and contrary to a very conservative point of view, it’s not that TV has gone against movies, but that it’s another way of saying “we.” I can take the DVDs to my house and see it with a friend, and it’s a fragmentary community, which, in a very paradoxical way, is more suited for television than movies. I’ve never seen The Wire on television per se, I’ve only seen it on DVD. So I buy the DVD, give it to a friend. That’s why the Internet is so suited to that, because you write for everyone but you can write also for no one.
Jonathan Rosenbaum: If I can both agree and disagree... I think the “we” exists definitely, it’s just that it means something totally different. I still would argue that the “we” that matters to me is not geographically based, and that’s what’s different. I feel that one of the greatest, glorious things about it for me, being retired from being a regular journalist, is that I don’t have to see new movies, I don’t have the faintest idea what Pineapple Express is, I don’t care, but I see movies all the time and I converse with friends about them all the time, and I’m learning about them all the time, including some new films.
Emmanuel Burdeau: No, you can’t say you are happy not to see new movies.
Jonathan Rosenbaum: Well, yes I can say that. I had to spend 20 years going to see movies in the theater, whether I wanted to see them or not. And now there is no longer a compulsion. I can catch up with things later, I don’t have to be at Cannes to see it, I can wait for two years or I can wait till it comes out on DVD, or a friend might send it to me on DVD, and it might not even be legal. But the point is that the whole way that these things circulate or the way that one hears about it are different. And I don’t want to have when and how I see something be dictated just by business and according to how somebody else is going to be making money from it. That’s why I would rather read GreenCine Daily. Even though I do read The New York Times daily, if I want to learn what it meant when Manny Farber died I find out from GreenCineDaily, and I wouldn’t find out from The New York Times. Manny Farber’s death was important internationally, it wasn’t just important in the United States, but in order to find out what it meant you sometimes had to go outside of the United States and I think that’s true of a lot of things now. It’s a very peculiar paradox we’re living through, because the United States is more isolationist than it was during the Cold War, and yet we have access to everywhere else in the world through the Internet. So it’s actually an ideological phenomenon that we’re more constrained. We have the opportunity to be much more broad-minded.
Emmanuel Burdeau: I just wanted to add something to all this. This paradox: whether there is or there is not a community, whether it’s international or national, this strange attitude we all have about TV shows and the way we don’t sit together in theaters, everyone sits in their own apartment—what interests me is that all these TV shows are about community, they talk about communities. If you want to have a sense of what a community can be today, whether it’s a mob family or the proletarian people in Baltimore in The Wire, you have to see a TV show. I’m thinking about that because Serge Daney wrote an incredible piece which was called in French “Pour une ciné-démographie” (“For a Ciné-Demographic”) which says that you can tell the story of cinema by comparing the people on the screen and the people in the theaters. And he said, in the beginning, lots of people went to see lots of movies in which there were lots of people. And then, he says, when you arrive at the end of the modern age, you have the viewer who is alone in the theater watching a lonely guy walking alone, and to him that’s the end.
Gavin Smith: Sounds like my life. [laughs]
Emmanuel Burdeau: So, Jonathan said that the paradigms are changing, I think that there is a kind of symmetry with what happens on the screen, and what happens in the theater and perhaps what happens also on the page. I just wanted to say that I don’t feel sad that there is not a “we” anymore.
Kent Jones: To just enlarge a little bit on what you’re saying about The Wire, I think you’re absolutely right. Nothing has shocked me more than The Wire in the last 10 years or so. I resisted television for a long time for a lot of reasons, and I still don’t watch it as much as I watch stuff on DVD. It’s true—at a certain period, and I wouldn’t want to get into when it began, you did start to see a sense of community disappearing in American cinema. The rest of the world we can discuss, but in American cinema it disappeared, probably for reasons of anxiety and the enormous amounts of money—the idea that you have to appeal to absolutely everyone and please everyone so that you end up pleasing no one. On the other hand there’s a lot of artistic anxiety on the lower end of the economic spectrum of filmmaking. So with The Wire I was really shocked to see a genuinely social drama unfolding, in really, what, 60 hours? Because it’s not like a TV show, where you have recurring situations and characters. It’s an actual unfolding narrative, with a real attention to the feel of the neighborhood visually. And the psychological rightness of the distance between the camera and the people in the space. That’s something, and it’s very, very different and welcome.
Gavin Smith: It seems to me that there’s been a kind of a breaking down of the historically artificial barriers between television and cinema in just the last few years because of shows like The Wire. Cahiers back in the early part of the millennium suddenly started talking about the Internet and TV and video games, and that was kind of a little bit of a forerunner for what’s happened almost universally now, where we’re sitting here having a panel discussion about cinema and the thing we’ve most discussed in terms of a specific moving image thing is a TV series, The Wire. That’s another symptom of this transitional moment we’re in. Okay, let’s to open this up to questions from the audience.
Audience member #1: One of the things that I haven’t heard addressed too much is that the blogosphere seems not to have a certain level of writing that you find in print film criticism. I mean, film criticism should be an intelligent discussion of film, but I think for a lot of readers it’s also an appreciation of good writing.
Gavin Smith: I’d like to respond to that right away, which is that I think that there’s proportionally there’s probably no more bad writing on the Web than there is in print.
Jonathan Rosenbaum: One thing that I’d like to suggest is that if you go to www.rouge.com.au, you will find a magazine in English better than anything that ever appeared in print in the Sixties. Rouge it’s called, it’s an international film magazine, lots of translations in the issue. It happens to come out of Australia, but as I say, you can read Japanese film critics, French film critics, German film critics—I mean, people from all over the world write for it, but it’s translated into English. It’s named after a little-known film by Godard.
David Hudson: You also mentioned that you evidently have found blogs that you do enjoy reading, so this decentralized nature of the Web that Jonathan was talking about, they’re linking to someone they also like, and they’re linking to someone they also like, and it’s a sort of a self-organizing community.
Kent Jones: Yeah, I think that’s true. There are a lot of different activities that go on. For instance, David Bordwell—he writes. There’s a lot of connoisseurship, there’s a lot of advocacy, there’s a lot of just kind of spontaneous riffing, there’s a lot of conversational back and forth, there’s a lot of defensiveness and explaining—“Well, what I meant to say was…” There’s a lot of confusion between whether you’re reading writing, whether you’re reading a kind of facsimile of a conversation, whether you’re reading a chat forum. There’s just a lot everywhere, and you have to sort of sift through it, but I think that there is a lot of really good writing.
David Hudson: I know a lot of the good writers spend a good deal of the time pointing to other good writers as well, and they add to these great communities. To begin with, there would be Dave Kehr’s site, and Girish Shambu, and don’t just look for other essays, there are other ways of engaging in film criticism right now. Take a look at Kevin Lee’s site where he’s experimenting with short videos. It’s not like a DVD extra at all, it’s basically a critical analysis spoken over clips that are chosen and edited.
Audience member #2: Thank you for this panel. The question is directed to Emmanuel Burdeau. It is my feeling that the crisis is not in film criticism per se but in film culture. The premise being that cinema has been removed from our lives, that in the Sixties, schools, high schools, et cetera, showed films to students, there were cineclubs, unions, all kinds of community organizations, even schools had cineclubs. This network promoting cinema throughout our lives has been completely dismantled. My question is, with Cahiers du cinéma, did you think about reviving cineclubs as an alternative network for distribution and for engagement with film? And my question to the panel is: are you involved with showing films to kids in schools? I was 13 years old, I grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, and I remember the Ministry of French Services sent a bunch of films to all the French schools in the region. I think it is possible to show difficult films to people who are 13 years old, who are 14 years old. In other words, if we bring cinema back into our lives, the complicated cinema, the cinema that supposedly doesn’t sell and has no box office, I think that the real democratization of an artistic cinema will be back, no?
Emmanuel Burdeau: First of all, what you say, is not absolutely right, because for 10 or maybe 15 years there have been a lot of efforts in France from the successive governments to bring cinema back to school with educational programs called Collage du Cinéma, things like that, where the kids, whether they are 12 or 18, go to see movies and actually study them with their teacher. But then it’s not that simple. Would Cahiers du cinéma involve itself in renewing the old cineclub network? I don’t know if it’s the same in the United States but when I started writing in ’95 there was not as many debates, discussions, meetings with the directors as there are now. When you open the film program called Pariscope [the Parisian equivalent of Time Out] you will find a critic presenting a movie or a director almost every day. I have friends who virtually every night go to a different city to lecture about a film and they also meet theater owners to advise them how to present a film to their audience. That’s interesting because, on the one hand you can say, as you said, cinema went out of our lives, and on the other hand there has never been this much discussion about cinema at school, with the movie theater owners, or the teachers, cinema taught at school and in the university and so on. So you asked me a question about whether Cahiers wants to get into it. I believe I had a wonderful plan for Cahiers du cinéma, so if there’s someone who’s not bankrupt in the room… I believe there is a very, very strong resistance now, and to me it is also a generational problem. There’s also a stronger will, as Jonathan said, to make the old paradigms last longer, last a few years more, a few decades more, even if we know they are virtually dead. So the solution that is going to be chosen for Cahiers du cinéma is probably a solution that is going to change virtually nothing, so you will have a magazine that goes out each month, if you read each article you will probably find them quite good. As an editor I’m really happy with virtually every article, but if you see it as a whole, you look at it, as Gavin said, like a dinosaur. You don’t know what its role is; you don’t know how it responds to, for instance, young viewers. Do they want to see “difficult movies” or not? Do they want to study cinema as they do math, or not? As you know, you take Francois Truffaut’s Les Quatre cents coups, cinema was also outside of school. I have no ideological point of view about that, but we have to choose: is cinema now something like literature or math, or is it different? Now I think I would have to be rather extreme or negative about that. There was a generation of pioneers, the guys in the Fifties, the New Wave—they invented everything. And then you have a generation of guys 20 years younger, they inherited what the pioneers founded, and now they want to keep everything for themselves. So they have the whole “critic” and “cinema” thing as a treasure, and they don’t want anything to change. But it will change eventually, because even the old guys [laughter] will have a foot in the grave. But to me it’s tragic because that is something Cahiers should do. There are discussions everywhere, so let’s say you’re a subscriber to Cahiers du cinéma, you don’t only subscribe to a monthly magazine, you subscribe to a community. There is no real cinephile community website in France. There is none. We have what we call a forum on the Cahiers du cinema website, where the forum is only for one reason: for a couple of excited readers to write and say, “Why is this guy editor of Cahiers du cinéma? Why not me? I’m better than he is!” [laughter] So it’s strange, because when you write about a movie, you don’t write to be in competition with somebody else, you write it because it is your job. And people have other jobs, people make bread, it’s not like everybody is always in competition with everybody. So it’s tragic. [laughter] No, I mean it actually.
Pascual Espiritu: About the comment, do we go to schools and add it as a part of the curriculum. I think that’s exactly where the advantage of the Internet is. You don’t have to make it institutionalized, where they have to learn it here. It’s basically for them to stumble onto film when they’re ready for it. I think that’s one of the advantages of being on the Internet versus being in print, especially something like a daily where the next day it’s going to get pushed to the back or recycled. Fortunately, if it’s on the Web, it’s going to be there practically forever. So it’s at your leisure, it’s at the people’s convenience when they’re ready for it, or when they’re looking to go in that direction it’s available for them.
Audience member #3: I’m in my twenties and I get a lot of my film criticism from blogs and Netflix viewer reviews. Whereas my parents are obviously much older, and they get their reviews from formal, printed film criticism. And I wanted to ask if you think this movement or change in film criticism can be related to generation.
David Hudson: My short answer’s no. The experienced voices are joining us on the Web. But I don’t think it’s a generational thing.
Seung-hoon Jeong: For me I kind of shifted from general criticism to academia, and now I’m trying to recover my sense of contemporary cinema. And the way to do it is to find a clip from a film on YouTube and make a link to it on my Facebook, and then I give a very brief comment, just one paragraph or two, only in terms of my personal experience of the film. For example, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: I don’t talk about the whole film, I only take one single aspect, the character’s eye as a visual machine, which to me is a double interface. It’s hardly about the film itself, but for me it’s important, because I just want to write one critique, one scene from a film, and my own personal engagement with it. Which is also in some sense quite intellectual. But I don’t write it with any reader in mind, because it’s like my diary, it’s not even a blog, it’s a sub-blog, which is open to everybody but at the same time it is open to nobody, as Emmanuel said.
Gavin Smith: So you make observations about specific films insofar as they pertain to your academic area of specialization, which is the continuities between new technologies and new forms of vision, and their precursors.
Seung-hoon Jeong: Yeah. Everybody becomes a cultural expert in terms of their own experience of films. It’s a little bit different from Strictly Film School or your film blog, which is still very “objective.” I don’t want to be objective. I don’t think this is related to the general shift in film criticism, but there would be various formats for being critical about films on the Web. It’s hardly important in terms of the history of film criticism, but it’s important in terms of its engagement with the media shift, and still a kind of personal and communal experience of films.
Gavin Smith: Kent and Seung-hoon have to leave. If you have any parting shots that you want to make, Kent…
Kent Jones: No parting shots, but since we’re all here to talk about film criticism, I was wondering if we could just have a hand for Manny Farber. [applause]
Audience member #4: I’m a film student over at NYU, I’m a cinema-studies major. I was just wondering, given the crisis, what are you guys’ hopes, concerns, and advice for
Jonathan Rosenbaum: See lots of movies.
Gavin Smith: Yeah. I was recently talking with someone about the fact that I was just realizing how little film criticism I’ve read, and I’m the editor of a film magazine. Shouldn’t I know everything about film criticism, shouldn’t I have read all the great film critics? I really haven’t. And when I tried to get to the bottom of why that was, I realized it was because I was more interested in going to see movies than I was reading about them. The time in my life where I read the most read about film was when I was a teenager and I didn’t have access to the movies themselves. A substitute was to read film criticism. Once I was out of that cage and could go to the movies, I would spend my time watching movies rather than reading other film critics. There’s no substitute for watching as many films as you can, and watching some of them over and over again. When it comes to writing, I think the fact that we have this incredible landscape online where anyone can basically write, my advice would be that’s where you should start, because you can hone your voice. You can develop. I think one of the things that troubles me about the Internet, and I’m sure that as it evolves that will change, is that a lot of writers are writing in a vacuum. They’re not necessarily getting feedback from fellow writers, and that’s something I hope the community aspect of film criticism on the Web could help with. So far the kind of dialogue I see when I look at websites isn’t necessarily very constructive about writing. They tend to be more about dismantling somebody’s argument, or disagreeing or agreeing with them. What you’re basically saying is, how do I become a writer. I think how you become a writer is by getting behind the keyboard and just write, write from yourself. Don’t write what fits a certain formula, but write personally, from yourself and from your impressions. I also think the important thing of film criticism is to describe things, to describe the experience of a movie. How does that movie feel? What does that movie look like? That’s a good way to build up those muscles that you need to become a real writer, I think.
Jonathan Rosenbaum: If I can add something unfashionable, it’s very important to connect film to things outside of film.
Gavin Smith: Absolutely.
Jonathan Rosenbaum: There’s such a tendency to compartmentalize. I think it’s important, when you’re writing about a film, to think about how it connects to the rest of your life, to other arts, things that are happening to you. I think that film criticism tends to be way too much cut off, when it seems to me if it’s an important art form, it’s important because it addresses the way we live.
David Hudson: I’d also add that some historical context of film criticism isn’t a bad thing either; it certainly can’t hurt. Phillip Lopate’s collection is certainly a fine place to start.
Jessica Winter: My hope, dream, and concern for you is that you have health insurance and a weekly paycheck, which is increasingly hard to come by. So make sure you have a back-up plan. I think what Gavin was pointing to is really good, which is that if you are honing your craft and learning how to be a film critic with a site or a blog, maybe have willing friends who will act as an editor. Being edited is great. Being edited, for me, can be more satisfying than writing, because I have someone who’s keeping me safe from my own blind spots and miscues. And it also adds to that sense of community that we’re all hoping will get stronger and stronger.
Gavin Smith: Yeah, I think the writer-editor relationship is a primary example of a kind of community. In a publication like Film Comment, the dialogue I have with writers when it’s necessary is always very mutually rewarding. I learned a lot about editing from working with writers, and I hope writers sometimes learn a little something about writing from working with me.
Audience member #5: It’s a comment and a question. I became a student and writer of images, so to a certain extent I began to write about film when I studied under a German man who compared Eisenstein’s work on composition to the work he saw on the prehistoric caves, because the painters may have taken a torch and told a story and moved through the cave, and therefore made a movie. And later many of the debates were taken up by Rossellini, when he turned from film to video. Here we are in 2008, and I find people still inside the box. Even at the Film Society, and even at the New York Film Festival, you have films categorized as French films, as Italian films. There’s a French film festival, Italian film festival, Human Rights Film Festival, when what we need are good films, period. And good video, period. And good work for children that is not so violent. So a few years ago I started to be an activist, and I showed films to heads of state and people coming to the U.N. when the General Assembly met, because some of them had not been educated very well to make decisions for the rest of the world. And this week we launched a program under their program called Culture of Peace to go after the producers, the media, who are turning out all the violent stuff, so even the kids in the refugee camps and the child soldiers see violent, terrible stuff. Images that stick with them, that terrorize them, that trouble their dreams. You critics could do a lot more by internationalizing your perspective, pushing the institutions that are cineclubs to stop being so nationalistic, and writing more about how violence is chic. You don’t realize, even though it’s well-made, how bad it is for all the parents and children all over the world. So what I’m asking is, since you all seem like very good chaps and ladies, are you going to make films or do production like the New Wave did in France? What we need are intellectuals and our brightest critics to start mixing with the dumbheads who are producing most of this stuff.
Jonathan Rosenbaum: Can I address the national aspect? I agree with you that there is a problem about clustering films by nationality too much. I think the problem has to do with money, largely, and that the funding source for many films getting made, shown, seen, etc., are national groups. You can actually get films funded by France in government. There are so many national groups that have a vested interest in showing films of their nationality, it emerges like that, that we end up seeing films in these categories. And I think that’s part of the problem, because the people who foot the bills are those doing the packaging and the labeling.
Audience member #6: I think we got three-quarters of the way into this discussion before YouTube was mentioned by anybody. Jonathan has spoken about a “we” sense of community. How many of you have used BitTorrent to download movies? There’s a comment in the back about a generational difference, which I do think definitely exists. I’m in a community of people, we pass around clips—Alexander Nevsky, Tarkovsky, you name it. There are clips from all of these films on YouTube or elsewhere all over the Internet now, my point being that there’s more of a hunger for your writing and your criticism than ever before, because there’s more access to what was previously obscure or hard to see in cinemas. It is blossoming, it’s exploding now, and if you’re not downloading films legally or illegally, if you’re not a part of that culture, you’re missing out on this. And I think, Jonathan, you’re missing out on this, if you’re not embracing…
Gavin Smith: Criminal activity, yeah. [laughter] You’re advocating that we break the law immediately.
Audience member #6: No, I’m simply suggesting that there’s much bigger access to films that were previously obscure, that you had to go to Belgium or New York to see. You can find clips of almost everything now.
David Hudson: You can also find more than clips now. There are many legal, on-demand sites that are blossoming now. I find whole films more valuable than clips.
