Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
View image Lost treasures of Xanadu -- in a Pennsylvania warehouse?
For five years now, one of the great film resources in America has been unjustly imprisoned, boxed up and sitting in a storage facility in Hamlin, Pennsylvania. It's a scandal, a tragedy, and an enormous disservice to film scholarship. In a recent e-mail, Mary Corliss, creator and curator of the Film Stills Archive at the Museum of Modern Art, the source of images for countless film-related books and publications (Corliss is also the stills editor for both Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" books), brings us up to date on the struggle to make this invaluable treasure accessible again:
I have been remiss in sharing the final chapter of the [National Labor Relations Board] vs. MoMA saga with all of you who supported me and Terry Geesken after our abrupt lay-offs and the closing of the Film Stills Archive in January 2002. This September, I received a document signed by the three Republicans appointed to the Washington office of the NLRB. (The Democratic minority on the panel was not represented). In their ruling, they not only fully agreed with MoMA's arguments; they reversed those points that the judge in the NLRB trial had decided in our favor.
Essentially, they found MoMA's decision to close the Film Stills Archive to be solely the result of the Museum’s need to reduce services and spaces during its $850 million expansion, and not a personal retaliation for our union activities. That verdict represents the end of the legal battle.
But the struggle to keep the Stills Archive alive does not, cannot end there. Since MoMA argued that the Archive was closed for temporary lack of space, it follows that, when even more space was made available, the Archive would reopen. That was Terry’s and my understanding when we took a low severence in order to have recall rights to our jobs of 34 and 18 years, respectively, returning when the Archive reopened. In other words, the future of the Archive bore no relevance to the disposition of the NLRB case.
Andy Horbal's Film Criticism Blog-a-Thon -- the center of the movie criticism universe this weekend.
This is another contribution to Andy Horbal's Film Criticism Blog-a-Thon at No More Marriages!, a blog which is itself devoted to the subject of film criticism. As Andy introduces the Blog-a-Thon: "I regard film criticism as simply the larger conversation about film, and this is a conversation about that conversation. Many of us read and write a great deal of film criticism, and this is a chance to think about what exactly we're doing." Here's to the occasion!
The few of us who are fortunate enough to get paid to write and think about movies are constantly asked for advice about how to do it -- or, even more often, how to get a job doing it.
My answer to the second question is simple: There is no "career track" for a movie critic. See a lot of movies. Read a lot of film history and criticism. Practice writing. If you're in school, submit reviews to your school paper. If they like your writing, they'll probably ask you to write more. Or publish your own blog or web site. The best way to get the attention of people who may give you writing assignments is to get your writing somewhere it can be read.
The first question (which boils down to: How do you write film criticism?) is far more difficult, because everybody does it differently. The worst thing that could happen would be for a critical Bob McKee to come along and turn film criticism into a formula, the way most Hollywood movies have become illustrated formulas. (Actually, most print reviewing has been an inverted-pyramid-type formula for a long time: Intro that sets up the verdict; plot description; something about the acting; something about the cinematography or costumes or sets or whatever; summary.)
... I see films and film criticism as two sides of the same coin ("The unexamined film is not worth watching").... Imagine what it would be like if the conversation about movies (whether academic study, criticism, or casual after-movie talk) ended with the final credits. What if the movie was just over and you never thought about it or discussed it with anyone again? It's unthinkable, about as likely as the prospect that movies themselves -- storytelling with moving images -- would cease to exist.
But writing is only the first stage of critical engagement with film (or any art) -- or maybe the second, after initial verbal discussions (see David Bordwell's essay, "Studying Cinema," here). Next, come responses to the original written criticism, for which a blog Comments section is ideally suited. It gives readers a chance to critique and enlarge upon the initial post, the original writer the opportunity to clarify and refine his/her thoughts, and everybody a chance to discuss amongst themselves. This, to me, is where criticism really starts to get exciting. The primary piece stands, but can be read and re-read in light of the ensuing discussion. In ideal situations (as with my piece on two reviews of "Nashville" in light of "Bobby"), it's possible to quote not only from what the critics have written, but to "quote" (with frame grabs, or even clips) directly from the movie(s) under scrutiny.
View image Inside Pearl's Parlor: Red, white and bluegrass. Kenny Fraiser (David Hayward) enters from behind the flag at center.
How can two critics see (or remember) the same movie, and have such contradictory interpretations of how it works and what it means? And what better case-in-point than Robert Altman's 1975 "Nashville" -- now being remembered in the wake of Altman's death last week, and seen through the prism of Emilio Estevez's recent release about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, "Bobby"?
View image Lady Pearl: "The only time I ever went hog wild, 'round the bend, was for the Kennedy boys. But they were different."
View image "... and the asshole got 556,577 votes."
Watching the movie, I kept thinking of "Nashville." And not just because Robert Altman's 1975 masterpiece remains the most politically and psychologically astute big-ensemble/where-America's-at movie ever made (it's got a presidential campaign and ends with a beloved public figure gunned down, too). There's a minor character in it, played by Barbara Baxley, who's a Kennedy-loving Yankee married to a country music star. In one boozy monologue, she expresses all that was both hopeful and delusional about what the dead Kennedys represented for progressive citizens. I've never forgotten that speech, while the more simplistic and diffuse "Bobby" is already starting to fade from memory.
Despite its reputation as an exuberant classic, "Nashville" knows zip and cares even less about country music or the city of Nashville (where it was shot) -- which doesn't prevent it from heaping scorn on both. It even ridicules a dowager who tearfully reminisces about John and Bobby Kennedy, and it shamelessly encourages viewers to share its contempt for the rubes. The relentless cynicism that Nashville brandishes as proof of its hipness ultimately gives way to glib, high-flown rhetoric in the climactic repeated shots of an American flag filling the screen while a nihilistic pseudocountry anthem, "It Don't Worry Me," builds to a crescendo, asserting the concert audience's unembarrassed cluelessness.
First, I want to point out the obvious: Bob Strauss is right even when he's wrong (I don't think Baxley's character is minor or a Yankee) and Jonathan Rosenbaum is wrong even when he's right (Altman admitted he wasn't interested in making a movie about the real Nashville or country music; after all, he let the actors write their own songs). Rosenbaum's preoccupation with his own perception of "hipness" (which he deems extremely uncool) appears to have obscured his view (or his memory) of what's happening on the screen in Altman's movie. As I said in a comment over at The House Next Door, using "Bobby" to bash "Nashville" makes as much sense as using "Neil Simon's California Suite" to bash "Short Cuts" -- or "The Towering Inferno" to belittle "Playtime." Yes, there are superficial similarities (as Bob points out), but in terms of ambition, complexity, vitality and sheer movieness, there's no comparison.
View image Establishing shot: The first image of Yasujiro Ozu's masterpiece, "Tokyo Story." Ozu tends to begin with a series of static shots (say, three to five) that set the location and mood.
David Bordwell (recently returned from Easter Island!), has a swell historical overview of first shots (and the Opening Shots Project) here. David notes that many classic films begin with fairly routine establishing shots and wonders:
Was there a moment when directors started to feel that they had to weight the first shot heavily, to treat it as a dense moment that the viewer should savor? The first shot of a film could be as vivid and bristling with implication as the first sentence of a novel. When might directors have begun to think along these lines?
He then surveys several of your (and my) Scanners favorites, and mentions a number of his own (from films by Harold Lloyd, Yasojiro Ozu, D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein and others):
Fairly far back in film history, directors seem to have realized that first shots should be freighted with implication. There probably isn’t only one moment when this strategy arises, but I’d suggest looking first at the period when synchronized sound comes in. Most films at the time were pretty static and theatrical in their reliance on dialogue, so a flashy opening shot or sequence could reassert “This is cinema.” The bravura tracking shot was a common way directors chose to draw the viewer into the film’s world, as at the start of "Threepenny Opera" or of "Scarface." Maybe this is a key moment in which filmmakers began to realize that the opening shot of a film should grab or puzzle the viewer and let us reflect a little on the fact that it’s doing so.
I haven't seen all the nominees ("The Dead Girl," "American Gun," "Wristcutters: A Love Story," etc.), but, as always, there are some most welcome nominations. (Links below go to my reviews, festival coverage -- or even Opening Shots.)
Paul Dano for "best supporting male" (that's the IFP's category) in "Little Miss Sunshine," which is also nominated for best feature, screenplay, directors -- and Alan Arkin, also nominated for supporting male. I love Arkin (it's all about "Little Murders," people!), but I thought Steve Carell and Dano stole the movie, with Toni Collette and Greg Kinnear close behind.
Robert Altman, best director for "A Prairie Home Companion."
Biggest disappointments: No documentary nominations for "51 Birch Street" or "The Bridge." The former may have been too deceptively simple and artless (in truth, it's a complex work of art) and the latter too cold and disturbing for many in the Indie tent-party crowd.
I'm still technically on break, but I'll be back to blogging (and editing) Wednesday.
Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld
so I can sigh eternally
-- Kurt Cobain, "Pennyroyal Tea"
It's true that all the men you knew were dealers
who said that they were through with dealing
every time you gave them shelter
-- Leonard Cohen, opening lyrics for "McCabe & Mrs. Miller"
View image "Nashville" 25th reunion. Note gigantic Oscar at right; Altman got his own, regular-sized one six years later. (photo by Jim Emerson)
"However, the cortex, which is dwarfed in most species by other brain areas, makes up a whopping 80 percent of the human brain. Compared with other animals, our huge cortex also has many more regions specialized for particular functions, such as associating words with objects or forming relationships and reflecting on them. The cortex is what makes us human."
-- John J. Ratley, M.D., "A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain"
I'm not sure what, if anything, meaningfully connects these fragments to the passing of Robert Altman -- or his films, as alive now as they ever were -- but they were all things I encountered during a day spent thinking about Altman and, to my surprise, not wanting to speak out loud about him to anyone. I talked to my mother on the phone. She asked hesitantly, "Have you heard any news today?" "Yeah," I said, and changed the subject. What can I say that isn't trivial? (Rhetorical question, please.)
In this state of grief, nothing I'm writing or thinking about Altman is adequate, or even makes much sense, in large part because a whole moviegoing lifetime of engagement with his movies (beginning at age 15) has so profoundly shaped who I am and how I experience the world. Like hundreds, thousands (millions?) of cinephiles and cinephiliacs, I found life (and, paradoxically, shelter) in Robert Altman's movies. "Nashville" is my church, to which I return again and again for joy, insight, inspiration and sustenance. (I haven't written about it for years, but I also know that I'm almost never not writing about "Nashville.")
To this day, I am in some deep but irrational sense convinced that the characters in "Nashville" (even though I know they're played by 24 of my very favorite stars!) continue to exist outside the parameters of the movie itself. I've met and interviewed, for example, Ned Beatty, but there's Ned Beatty the actor and then there's Delbert Reese, who is someone else entirely. Delbert exists, imaginatively independent of the great actor (one of my all-time favorites) who inhabited him in "Nashville." (This is most unlike the other most-influential movie in my life, Roman Polanski's "Chinatown," made just the year before "Nashville," which is as "closed" a film as "Nashville" is "open." "Chinatown" ends so definitively that, "Two Jakes" aside, any life beyond the final frame is unthinkable.)
Right now I just want to share another fantastic memory: In 2000, I heard there was going to be a 25th anniversary reunion screening of "Nashville" at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. I'd moved back to Seattle by this time, but I bought tickets the moment they became available (for five bucks apiece) and went to LA for the event: My favorite movie, in a pristine print, in one of the finest movie theaters in the world, with most of those 24 favorite stars in attendance. It was... transplendent (as a Shelley Duvall character once said). I'll post an update with IDs later, but for now, see if you can identify the people onstage (taken with a now-primitive, but still beloved, Canon Digital Elph)
View image The Dangerous Woman pays a final visit -- with a smile. From the ending of "A Prairie Home Companion" (2006).
I'm off this week, but I needed to personally acknowledge the death of Robert Altman, the first great director I ever met, and the filmmaker whose work (particularly "Nashville," "3 Women," "The Long Goodbye" "California Split" and "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" -- all of which were originally released, and encountered by me, when I was in my ultra-impressionable teens), most inspired my love of movies and my determination to devote my life to them. I first met Altman in person when I was 18 or 19, in the living-room-like lobby of the Harvard Exit Theatre in Seattle at the world premiere of "3 Women" (or, possibly, Alan Rudolph's "Welcome to L.A."). He was standing by the grand piano, by himself, and I, shaking and sweating, forced myself to go over and talk to him. He spoke back. I couldn't believe it: To me, it a "Sherlock, Jr." moment, as if I'd somehow passed through the screen and was interacting with someone on the other side. Over the next 20 years or so, I would interview him a number of times in a professional capacity, and I relished these sharp, thoughtful, intelligent, funny conversations. I don't remember much of anything about that first chat, though, except that my end of the exchange would not be described by any of the adjectives in the previous sentence. But it had a huge impact on me.
Two anecdotes: 1) Shortly before the release of "The Player," when I was working in Los Angeles, I went to interview Altman -- I think it was at the Beverly Hills Hotel, or maybe the Chateau Marmont, I'm not sure. When I arrived, Altman was on the phone with Fine Line, cussing them out about the advertising budget. I was talking to the publicist about my trip to Europe, from which I'd just returned, and saying how I found it exhilarating and liberating to be in a strange city, and to be out in public, and not understand the conversations that are taking place all around you.
The instant Altman got off the phone he practically leapt to the other side of the room: "I heard what you were saying about being in Europe and that's exactly the way I've felt! I lived in Paris for years and never learned French. You realize there's just so much extraneous bullshit you don't have to listen to if you don't know the language!"
This from the man who pioneered the multi-track Lions Gate Sound System, and whose movies are known for their almost contrapuntal background dialog (wrangled, in some of the '70s films, by assistant director Rudolph), finely tuned babble that picks up on little bits of character from the edges of the frame (or even beyond it) and makes a scene come to life as an immersive experience.
2) Years later, at a then-rare screening of "Nashville" I attended at the Walter Reade Theater in New York (yes, by the mid-to-late-1990s it was virtually impossible to find a showable 35mm print of "Nashville," one of the greatest films of all time), actor Scott Glenn (who played Pfc. Glenn Kelly) told a story about how the actors were individually miked and, in crowd scenes, often didn't even know if they were within the scope of Paul Lohman's wide-screen Panavision frame.
"How will I know if I'm on camera?" Glenn recalled someone asking.
"You won't," Altman said. "Just do something interesting and you might end up in the picture."
UPDATE: 11/22/06:A.O. Scott has the finest Altman obit I've seen in the MSM, using the ending of "California Split" as a way of discussing Altman's career:
Mr. Altman thrived on the shapelessness and confusion of experience, and he came closer than any other American filmmaker to replicating it without allowing his films to succumb to chaos. His movies buzz with the dangerous thrill of collaboration — the circling cameras, the improvising actors, the jumping, swirling sound design — even as they seem to arise from a great loneliness, a natural state that reasserts itself once the picture is over. A makeshift tribe gathers to produce a film, or to watch one, and then disperses when the shared experience has run its course. Everyone is gone, and the only antidote to this letdown is another film....
But if ["A Prairie Home Companion"] was a last gathering of the troupe, after which the lights dim forever, and the audience disperses, it was also just another movie in a career like no other, and when it was over — in the ending I like to imagine — American cinema’s greatest gambler shrugged his shoulders and walked away.
