Jonathan Rosenbaum Super Critic strikes again!

Not really.

I also realize that, yes, JR's rebuking of the Sideways phenomenon is informative and incisive. But it's also the main focal point of his entire article (which is titled "Besides Sideways"; a subtitle reads, "This critics' darling has its virtues, but there were at least 50 better films released in 2004"). The point is, the biggest thing on JR's mind at the end of 2004 is that everyone's favorite film needs to be cut down to size. Why not reduce that to a single paragraph in the article and focus on telling us which films really did deserve the high praise?

that's how i felt reading it.

>if people want to judge for themselves whether his failure to get
>behind the wine juggernaut is as intellectually bankrupt as all
>that.

"sideways" is an odd "juggernaut" - as j.r. jones pointed out in his astute year-end commentary for the same publication, it was a consensus winner in polls but few critics put it in their personal top five ("a movie with many friends but no lovers" said hoberman).

rosenbaum's "[is sideways] the proudest achievement of world cinema in 2004?" comment comes off as shrill. most of the critics responsible for putting it on so many year-end lists appear to agree with him that there were one, two, three, four, five, or more better films. if anything it proves the uselessness of "best of" lists.

The issue of hyped movies shutting out more idiosyncratic, personal ones is a legit major topic when discussing contemporary film culture, given the ever narrowing stream of what gets seen on US screens.

Well, perhaps not soulless as much as trivial and onanistic.

Have you seen "Phoenix"? I haven't. I also suspect he didn't write it was *the* REAL movie to see, maybe just that unlike Ethan Hawke, Dennis Quaid can be something besides self-absorbed twits.

If
(A) = every hipster cinephile adores Before Sunset
and
(B) = no self-respecting cinephile hipster would dare see Flight of the Phoenix
and
(C) = hipster cinephiles (i.e. the only people actually reading my writing) are always wrong
and
(D) = the only people who really have any taste in filmgoing are actually the accused "dolts" who'd rather see Mr. 3000 and Flight of the Phoenix than Before Sunset or Dogville
then
(E) = Film culture is on life support and I am the only competent doctor in the house.

I don't know if it says more about them or more about me and how often I read both of them, but J-Ro and Armond's biggest collective weakness at this point is the absolute rote predictibility of their arguments. I should've put down a juicy bet on J-Ro attacking Sideways in his year end piece.

Sorry it took a while.

Film Writing on the Web: Some Personal Reflections
Jonathan R0senbaum. Film quarter1y. Berkel3y: Spring 2007. Vol. 60, Iss. 3; pg. 76, 5 pgs
Abstract (Summary)

REVIEW ESSAY

Film Writing on the Web: Some Personal Reflections

There's a part of me that understands perfectly why a minimalist like Jim Jarmusch and a nineteenth-century figure like Raul Ruiz won't have anything to do with email. "You can't smell email," Ruiz once said to me, to explain part of the reason for his distaste. But I find it tougher to feel nostalgic about film criticism before the Internet, because even though you could smell it, the choices of what you could lay your hands on outside a few well-stocked univers1ty libraries were fairly limited. Similarly, the choice of what films you could see outside a few cities like New York and Paris before DVDs was pretty narrow and possibly even more haphazard than what you could read about them.

These two developments shouldn't be considered in isolation from one another. The growth of film writing on the web-by which I mean stand-alone sites, print-magazine sites, chatgroups, and blogs-has proceeded in tandem with other communal links involving film culture that to my mind are far more important than the decline in the theatrical distribution of art films and independent films, so I'll be periodically discussing those links here.

When I started out as a cinephile in New York in the early 1960s, the English-language magazines that counted the most were the ones that went furthest in gathering together diverse constituencies: Sight and Sound, Film Culture, and Film quarter1y. Even the more local and partisan New York Film Bulletin was translating texts from Cahiers du Cinéma. Of course the film world was much smaller then and some of the nostalgia for that era undoubtedly focuses on the coziness. By the time film writing on the web started, film culture had spread and splintered into academia and journalism, which often lamentably functioned as mutually indifferent or sometimes even mutually hostile institutions. So the theoretical golden age, I assume, took place before all the institutionalizing.

Significantly, the most enterprising early efforts to disseminate film writing on the web were neither American nor English nor French, but Australian-most notably the academic and peer-reviewed Screening the Past, founded by classical and fine-arts scholar Ina Bernard in Melbourne in 1997, and the more journalistic Senses of Cinema, founded by filmmaker Bill Mousoulis in the same city in 1999. Both publications are still going strong-having published nineteen and forty issues respectively by late 2006, while continuing to keep all their previous issues online. (Senses of Cinema underwent several changes after the departure circa 2002 of Mousoulis and another editor, critic Adrian Martin, the latter of whom went on to co-found the no-less-ambitious Rouge in 2003.) It's easy to hypothesize that this Australian concentration came from both a highly developed and interactive local film community, and a desire to be recognized by and also to communicate with the wider world of cinephilia.

Three other extremely useful film sites that have by now become regarded as staples are the English and academic www.film-philosophy.com, the American and basically journalistic daily.greencine.com, and the international www.mastersofcinema.org (which functions mainly though not exclusively as a guide to what's coming out on DVD)-all especially valuable, as is Senses of Cinema, as conduits to other sites. Then there are the sites maintained by film magazines (e.g., Sight and Sound, Film Comment, Cineaste, Cinema Scope), which offer samples rather than exhaustive duplications of their latest issues, and those sites that have replaced former magazines on paper, such as Bright Lights.

My acquaintance with blogs and chatgroups has been more limited,1 but a few of each might be mentioned here. Among the more notable critics' blogs are ones devoted to Serge Daney in English (sergedaney.blogspot.com) and to Raymond Durgnat (currently in hiatus, though expected to return), ones maintained by Fred Camper, Steve Erickson, Chris Fujiwara, and Dave Kehr, and Saul Symonds's www.lightsleepcinemamag.com, which also originated in Australia and prints or reprints a few texts by other critics not readily available elsewhere. The main chatgroups I'm familiar with are the auteurist "a film by," "film and politics" (which started out as a splinter group deriving from the former and is also on Yahoo), and a few separate groups located on the elaborate site www.wellesnet.com ("the Orson Welles web resource"). The latter calls to mind a slew of other director-based sites, including especially impressive ones devoted to Robert Bresson, Jonas Mekas, and Jacques Tati.

How wide are the readerships of such resources? Klaus Eder, who for many years has been the general secretary of FIPRESCI, the international film critics' organization, recently told me that Undercurrent-an online, English-language magazine established on their website in 2006, edited by Chris Fujiwara, that has so far published only three issues-had about 100,000 readers per month. Considering how specialized the magazine's turf is-encompassing such topics as the late film critic Barthélemy Amengual, Alexander Dovzhenko, the acting in Don Siegel's Madigan (1968), Austrian cinema, sound designer Leslie Schatz, assorted short films, and recent features about Cameron Crowe, Philippe Garrel, Danièle Huillet, Terrence Malick, Park Chan-wook, and Tsai Ming-liang-and considering that 100,000 readers seems to comprise more than those of all film magazines on paper combined, this was a startling piece of information and one that initially beggared belief. It was also hard to square this figure with one given to me by Gary Tooze regarding a recent piece of mine called "Ten Overlooked Fantasy Films on DVD (and Two That Should Be!)" on his much more commercial and consumer-oriented web site, www.dvdbeaver.com. (In that case, he estimated about 10,000 hits during the first week the article was posted.)

But once Klaus added that the average length of time spent by each reader of Undercurrent was roughly two minutes, I started to realize that my shock was premature and that my superimposition of two incompatible grids-one devoted to subscribers and readers of paper magazines such as Cahiers du Cinéma, Film quarter1y, and Sight and Sound, the other devoted to web surfers-could only lead to muddled conclusions. And I'm not sure that the comparison with DVD Beaver is very meaningful without the average length of time of each hit in that case, which I don't know.

I also recently learned from David Bordwell that his web site at www.davidbordwell.net "receives between 250-450 unique visitors each day, with an average of 2-3 pageloads per visitor. Most visitors on any day are first-time visitors, with about 60-100 coming back from a previous day. Heaviest usage is from the U.S. and Europe, which you'd expect." I don't think we can meaningfully compare these figures with the sales of Bordwell's books (which I didn't ask him about), and I'm not even sure how meaningfully we can compare Bordwell's site with Undercurrent, given the range of things that web-surfers are looking for. Bordwell largely uses his site to update and expand many of his writings on paper, and this already points to functions that are qualitatively different from those of published works.2

Extrapolating from all this, I started to realize that current claims that film criticism is becoming extinct, and counter-claims that it's entering a new golden age, are equally misguided if they assume that film criticism as an institution functions the same way on paper and in cyberspace, as two versions of the same thing rather than as separate enterprises. Related debates about the distribution of foreign films in the English-speaking world (drastically shrinking in theaters, drastically expanding in the production and distribution of DVDs), or the sophistication of young filmgoers regarding film history (growing if you follow some chatgroups, declining if you follow certain others), or the number of films that get made (even more difficult to determine if videos and films are treated interchangeably) seem equally incoherent due to the disparity of reference points, creating a Tower of Babel in a good many discussions. It's a central aspect of our alienated relation to language that when someone says, "I just saw a film," we don't know whether this person saw something on a large screen with hundreds of other people or alone on a laptop-or whether what he or she saw was on film, video, or DVD, regardless of where and how it was seen.

In short, we're living in a transitional period where enormous paradigmatic shifts should be engendering new concepts, new terms, and new kinds of analysis, evaluation, and measurement, not to mention new kinds of political and social formations, as well as new forms of etiquette. But in most cases they aren't doing any of those things. We're stuck with vocabularies and patterns of thinking that are still tied to the ways we were watching movies half a century ago.

If we consider briefly just the question of email and chatgroup etiquette, we already encounter a daunting array of new kinds of behavior. If sending an email to someone can sometimes partake of the kind of intimacy associated with whispering, there are also arguably new forms of interpersonal brutality that crop up periodically in chatgroups, obliging some leaders of such groups to impose certain standards of civility between members. Even definitions of what constitutes a stranger or evaluations of the importance of typos have undergone a certain amount of transformation within the new context of chatgroups, and there are few of us who aren't still finding our bearings within such contexts.

In order to grasp some of the new tricks that some of the old dogs are failing to learn, it helps if we start redefining what we mean by community in relation to geography, which is central to all these paradigmatic shifts. It becomes relevant, for example, that Fujiwara edits Undercurrent from Tokyo as well as from Boston, and that the editor of Film quarter1y, published by the Univers1ty of California Press, works out of London-and perhaps even that this sentence is initially being written on a plane between Ch1cago and Vancouver-especially if we persist in regarding the discourse of both magazines as a discourse being aimed at a specific geographically-based constituency seen in relation to a particular nation state, town or city, univers1ty or other institution. Speaking as someone who currently feels that he lives on the Internet more than he lives in Ch1cago, I consider this distinction vital to the ways that I function as a writer. Maybe it's also relevant that Rouge, the most impressive of the international online film magazines (translating some of its texts into English from Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish sources), originates from Australia-or at least from three Australian editors, who may at any given time be in France, Greece, or elsewhere while doing part of their editorial work. But if it is relevant, this is largely because Australia is itself multicultural, also yielding a multicultural, state-run TV channel, SBS, that similarly has few counterparts.

It's my own conviction that the nation state itself is fast becoming an outdated and dysfunctional concept, apart from the special interests of politicians and corporations and their own highly functional designation of countries as markets. It seems bewildering that while most of the world appears to detest George W. Bush as much as I do, this fact has been deemed totally irrelevant to political strategy and activity within the Democratic Party, so that the U.S. currently appears to be more isolated from the rest of the world than it was during the cold war-in spite of the unprecedented possibilities of communication and interactivity made possible by the Internet. And if we scale down this striking paradox to the more modest dimensions of film culture, the same anomalies are apparent. The choices of ordinary filmgoers are said to be steadily shrinking at the same time that most of the riches of world cinema are becoming internationally available for the first time on DVD.

Part of our problem in assessing our new conditions is a bad habit of often assuming by reflex that they're either bad or good-which is about as futile as arriving at such a simplistic conclusion about globalization. Let me try to illustrate this with a couple of extended personal anecdotes. Shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, I was invited by the Ch1cago Reader's editor to write something reflecting on its aftermath. After she decided not to run my article, I received a similar invitation from Senses of Cinema and emailed them the same piece, somewhat rewritten.

I wrote about my fear of what I described as American as well as Middle Eastern terrorists-by which I meant Americans who suddenly started thinking about the vanished World Trade Center as if it were their own private property and the attacks of September 11 as if they were simply and unambiguously an "attack on America," thereby allowing the Middle Eastern terrorists and their assumed positions to set all the terms of the discussion and automatically dismissing the nonAmericans from over eighty countries who were destroyed in the attacks as irrelevant. I was especially upset by a poster with an American flag over the words "September 11, 2001 / We Will Not Forget," placed on the front door of the building where I live in Ch1cago by an upstairs neighbor, who didn't bother to consult anyone else in the nine-unit building about it. Feeling that flags were already being used to intimidate, to stop conversations rather than start them, I objected at our next condo meeting that "we will not forget" in this context meant that we will forget all the non-Americans killed -at which point my neighbor left the room and refused to discuss the matter further, with the result that his poster remained up for many weeks afterwards. I concluded that I was tempted to attribute part of this terrible climate to a certain "narcissism about mourning" that a visiting German filmmaker had recently mentioned to me with regard to some of her New York friends and acquaintances.

Less than an hour after the issue of Senses of Cinema containing my article appeared online, I received an abusive email from a New York film critic whom I knew only slightly and who wrote me, in a fit of rage, that I had no moral right to accuse people like him of being narcissistic about mourning when he could still smell the ashes of burnt flesh from his apartment. So three extremely disparate and irreconcilable definitions of community were affecting me all at once: a feeling of repression, censorship, and bullying in the building where I live; an ability to express this feeling freely and openly to like-minded individuals on a web site located on the other side of the planet; and an almost traumatic sensation of being assaulted by an acquaintance 800 miles away for expressing the same feeling. The first and last of these experiences were nightmarish and dystopian, the second was Utopian, and the second two were possible only because of the Internet-because I can't imagine that the New York acquaintance would ever have phoned me with the same message. And only the first was geographically matched with where I happened to be.

My second anecdote relates to the recent death of Danièle Huillet, the filmmaking partner of Jean-Marie Straub, and how this was both discovered and dealt with by many people via "a film by." Shortly after I learned about this shocking and upsetting occurrence, when a friend in New York, critic Kent Jones, phoned me, I posted what little information I had in this chatgroup, and for roughly the first twenty-four hours there was little if any response. But when responses then started to come, they were detailed and far-ranging, and came from such diverse quarters as Los Angeles, Paris, the American Midwest, and Melbourne. They included photographs of Huillet as a little girl growing up on a farm (posted at kinoslang.blogspot.com) which I had never even known existed, information about the first digital video of Straub-Huillet (which later proved to be obtainable online), links to an article in Libération and many older English-language texts-and a detailed (and somewhat contentious) discussion about an obituary written by Dave Kehr for the New York Times, an obituary that conceivably might not have been written if the news about Huillet's death hadn't been posted in "a film by."

More generally, the kind of discourse and behavior one encounters in "a film by" seems to run the gamut from news and critical analysis to childish and protracted exchanges of insults-a mix that is by no means restricted to chatgroups dealing with film, and which also can be characterized as split between occasional and habitual (or even compulsive) contributors-those who periodically visit and those who appear to do very little apart from exchange comments. Significantly, this particular group was initially formed by critics Fred Camper and Peter Tonguette to counter the impolite behavior in other film chatgroups, and it continues to be monitored for that reason, but this hasn't prevented the discussions from periodically descending into invective that overwhelms other forms of communication. It would be interesting to hear from psychologists and/or psychoanalysts about the psychic reservoirs and "family plots" that appear to be tapped into by these exchanges, leading to forms of behavior that seem to be specific to the Internet and periodically undermine some of the more progressive and utopian possibilities.

Thanks to the site of www.cinema-scope.com, where I write a regular column called "Global Discoveries on DVD" that usually appears online, I received one of the most exciting glimpses of the utopian possibilities inherent in film writing on the web. For some time, I have been fantasizing that ciné-clubs, a major spur to French cinephilia over most of the past century, could be making a comeback, this time in global terms, thanks to DVDs. These ciné-clubs could be situated almost anywhere, in houses and apartments as well as in storefronts, and a model configuration might be touring "retrospectives" on DVD in which the DVDs could be sold at the screenings (perhaps along with relevant books and/or pamphlets), in much the same way that CDs are now often sold by music groups in clubs between their sets. And if enough circuits for these retrospectives could become established in this fashion, this could ultimately finance the production of these packages. In some ways this dream has already been realized in the U.S. by www.moveon.org and the way it has arranged private showings of such Robert Greenwald documentaries as Uncovered: The War in Iraq and Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (both 2004), Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005), and Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers (2006), but it doesn't appear to have caught on with other kinds of films.

While attending the Mar del Plata film festival last spring, I met a schoolteacher based in Cordoba who had established a few ciné-clubs in separate small towns that he visited on a regular basis, and the films he showed included some of the more specialized and esoteric films I had written about, including Forough Farrokzhad's The House is Black (1962) and Kira Muratova's Chekhov's Motifs (2002). He told me the combined audiences of such screenings for each film was somewhere between 700 and 800 people. Considering how unlikely it would be to fill single auditoriums of that size in most major cities of the world for such films, I realized that the shifting paradigms of today might also transform what we normally regard as a minority taste. Once the paradigm of a single geographical base changes, all sorts of things can be transformed. Maybe Muratova's craziest feature is too difficult for most New Yorkers and Parisians, but once it can be acquired globally on DVD with the right subtitles, anything becomes possible-including a sizable group of viewers in Cordoba.
Sidebar
If sending an email to someone can sometimes partake of the kind of intimacy associated with whispering, there are also arguably new forms of interpersonal brutality that crop up periodically in chatgroups.

Sidebar
WEBSITES DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound
www.brightlightsfilm.com
www.ch1cagoreader.com/movies
www.cineaste.com
www.cinema-scope.com
daily.greencine.com
davekehr.com
www.davidbordwell.net
www.dvdbeaver.com
www.filmlinc.com/fcm/fcm.htm [Film Comment]
www.fipresci.org/undercurrent
www.film-philosophy.com
www.fredcamper.com
home.earthlink.net/~steevee [Steve Erickson]
www.insanemute.com [Chris Fujiwara]
www.jonasmekas.com
kinoslang.blogspot.com
www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast
www.lightsleepcinemamag.com
www.mastersofcinema.org
www.mastersofcinema.org/bresson
movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/a_film_by
movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/film_and_politics
www.rouge.com.au
www.sensesofcinema.com
sergedaney.blogspot.com
www.tativille.com

Footnote
NOTES
1. Since writing this essay, I have started blogging at blogs. ch1cagoreader.com/film
2. I was chagrined to discover that an essay of mine on Eyes Wide Shut reprinted in American Movie Critics by the Library of America, a publisher celebrated for its "definitive" editions, introduced a typo in the opening paragraph that reversed the meaning of the sentence, changing "argue" to "agree"-a typo that hadn't occurred in any of the article's three other appearances on paper. Ironically, if such a typo had occurred in the Ch1cago Reader, where the article first appeared, it could have been corrected a day later in the Reader's online edition, whereas the Library of America's typo, barring a second edition, is permanent.
But this doesn't necessarily make the Reader's online system superior in all respects. For the past several years, due to space restrictions regarding the Reader's paper edition, all its capsule film reviews that run past a particular length now have to be permanently shortened for both the paper and its online editions. Thus the older issues on paper preserve longer capsules that are no longer available anywhere else, while the capsules available online can theoretically be altered on a week to week basis and thus have none of the same archival status and value.

Louis Malle's polished, sentimental memory piece (1987)—about his glancing brush with the Nazi holocaust while attending a French Catholic boarding school in 1944—works mightily to flatter the audience's sense of compassion and virtue. The plot involves the hero's growing friendship with a brilliant Jewish boy hiding incognito at the school (along with a few other Jews and members of the French resistance), whose identity is uncovered by the gestapo. In keeping with the more “enlightened,” liberal brand of French anti-Semitism, which depicts Jews as cute, lovable, and exotic rather than venal and sinister, the featured victim is treated as a rare objet d'art rather than an ordinary kid. Malle is certainly sincere in his efforts to describe the overall milieu accurately, and the film is less obnoxious than his pious Lacombe, Lucien (1973), which dealt with a related theme. With Raphael Fejto and Gaspard Manesse, especially good as Malle's alter ego. In French with subtitles. 103 min.

I would have swapped ATLE for Lacombe, Lucien.

having realized that i don't really know anything about louis malle and wondered whether i ought to see a film or two, rosenbaum does the rest

Reading old collections, man, Rosenbaum went from astute to shrill and unreadable somewhere around the mid-nineties, I think? I mean their always seems to have have been some self-righteous tut-tutting, but it's sad to see someone who wrote a pretty good essay about Manny Farber so eager to throw around such incisive descriptive terms as "cynical" and "sentimental". Bleh.

Best thing I learned about him in recent times was that as a teenager in Alabama he spent most of his time hanging around the family movie theater with the musicians who were starting the Muscle Shoals Sound

Lacombe, Lucien is tremendous, fuck this dude.

https://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/emd/d/chicago-jonathan-rosenbaums-film/7783586954.html

Geez, I wonder if he's sick? (Not to be a doom-mongerer.) I ask because selling off albums/DVDs/books/etc. in bulk is exactly what I plan to do if I have any kind of window in which to do so.

Nah, he's fine. He was planning to sell it all to U of C and recently had his collection inventoried for that reason, but turns out U of C didn't want to spend that much money expanding a physical movie library.