Comments on: From the NYU Film Criticism Workshop

By: Like Anna Karina's Sweater

Like Anna Karina's Sweater — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 03:19:58 +0000

The Said Comes From the Seen…

I’ve been reading (and re-reading) Kevin Lee’s coverage of the workshop on the responsibility of film criticism (featuring Adrian Martin, Jonathan Rosenbaum and (in absentia) Nicole Brenez) that was held at NYU last week, and I can’t help but wal…

By: Maya

Maya — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 07:54:44 +0000

Tomorrow’s a bitch. The past, now she was faithful. Heh.

By: ryan tracy

ryan tracy — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 22:52:22 +0000

Let’s not work ourselves into a swivet over the possible obsolescence of DVD. Unlike the evolution from VHS to DVD, or Laserdisc to DVD, the evolution from DVD to Blu-ray will be (and has been) far less backwards exclusive. Indeed, most Blu-ray devices, save for a few cheapies, are backwards compatible, meaning that they play both Blu-ray Discs and DVDs. Having recently yielded myself up to the lord paramount of futurity, that two-headed monster, constituted of Blu-ray and HDTV, I’m ready for whatever tomorrow brings… at least for now.

By: Maya

Maya — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:22:07 +0000

This tickles the Cassandra within to prognosticate that I’ve been feeling for some time now that seeing cinema on celluloid is going to shift into the elite prestige arts like opera and the symphony, where you pay good money for your seat for the privilege of seeing a movie how it’s supposed to be seen. And as Dave is suggesting, truly fine opera companies and symphonic orchestras aren’t readily available outside urban centers.

Then again, why anyone would choose to not be an urbanite still baffles me. (Joking of course.) Though I did receive a comment one time by a rather petulant fellow who said it wasn’t fair that I could write about films I see in the city which were not available to him in the country. I reminded him that living in the city was not an accident; it was a choice. We all have choice. You have to decide what’s important for you. If a love of cinema is so entrenched as to biography and lifestyle, then I think you decide accordingly.

By: davis

davis — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:53:30 +0000

While I can see your point, Dave, it really does depend on where you are. It’s a very urban-centric view. Growing up in Missouri, as I did, the existence — somewhere — of a film on 16mm was virtually useless compared to the availability of DVD today.

Now I’m lucky enough to live in San Francisco where the large number of screenings tend to crowd out any available time for DVDs. They just stack up. But elsewhere this isn’t the case.

By: HarryTuttle

HarryTuttle — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:57:18 +0000

Let’s compare to literature, the industrial model cinema should match eventually. A published book is available anywhere until out of stock, then we may find it on the second-hand market, and ultimately readily accessible at the library.
The story is different for a film, because in celluloid form it stays in an industrial circuit. The film is available if the distributors are willing to show it, there is no alternative market for customers who are ok to view it “second-hand” outside the certified circuit. It always depends on the choice of a big investor because a screening is too expensive for individual viewing. And it’s even difficult for private ciné-clubs or university screenings (cinematheques being rare exception only few people can access to anyway).
And the DVD market is also owned by the industry, the titles made available are subject to profitability. So the small niche titles have no chance to get a costly digital release.
Unlike books, the entire catalog of films made is NOT available to the individual viewer as long as it is signed by the studio. The costly apparatus to print and screen a reel separates the auteur from the audience by a technological gap only industrials can afford to overcome, if they see benefit.
There is a first natural selection before production, because the auteur needs to convince a studio to fund the budget (just like for book publishers). But there is another one at the DVD level, the film is once again filtered through DVD-compliance, even though it has already been approved once.
We can see a film in theatres if a studio executive sees fit, but we can only see a film on DVD (to make up for the shortage of theatrical screenings) if it is “approved” first by a studio executive, then by a DVD distributor, two different people, the latter one who the auteur might not have been in contact with at all.
So there is a private circle of high executives who decide what titles are available on the culture market, and we could worry about what motivates their choices and what kind of censorship is at work. Not to mention the studios intentionaly withholding certain titles for speculating purposes, either to raise the prices or to prevent direct competition between other titltes of their catalg they prefer to support…
This point is aggravated by what Kehr just said about the technological generation upgrades (nitrate, celluloid, 16mm, 35mm, 70mm, VHS, laserdisc, DVD, HD-DVD, blu-ray, netflick, greencine…) Each new format requires to rebuild an new catalog of available titles, and new choices are made, by other people with their own agenda.

This is a serious issue for historians. Because once the technology becomes obsolete, the old catalog is lost for the public, and we have to fall back on the latest catalog that is playable with our equipment. which means we have to be very careful of how the newest catalogs are duplicated from the older ones, why certains titles are disposed… and might be lost for future generations due to successive technological upgrades…

I would be nice to think that if a film is paid by a studio we can be sure that the title lives for ever and can be available, one way or the other, like books!

By: Dave Kehr

Dave Kehr — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:01:34 +0000

“A film critic” has made my point exactly — that there are practicing film critics out there who have not seen the films of Joseph H. Lewis, and will not be able to in the brave new world of DVD and digital distribution. No one is worried about “2001″ disappearing, but the loss of “My Name Is Julia Ross,” “The Undercover Man,” “So Dark the Night,” and many other Lewis films is not to be shrugged off as “nostalgic regret.” I suspect that many of the contemporary admirers of Michael Mann would have to reconsider their assessments of MM’s blazing originality in the light of the deep focus work in in even the lowliest of Lewis’s B pictures. The paradox of this situation is that the archives are bursting with excellent, and expensively produced, restorations of many rare films, but that they can’t be seen unless you live within striking distance of a major institution. Sneer if you like at television showings, but by the time I was 18, I had seen every extant Josef von Sternberg film thanks to late night television (all right, not “The Salvation Hunters”), while from what I gather on websites like “The House Next Door,” there are plenty of current writers who have not even seen “Dishonored” or “Morocco,” much less “An American Tragedy” or “Anatahan.”

As the owner of a cathode ray tube myself, Kevin, I’m continually frustrated by how much of the image is lost to overscan — you are, in fact, seeing significantly less of the frame than you would on one of those $5,000 flat screen specials, which I suspect neither you nor I are in a position to purchase right now. The electronics companies are continually pushing us toward more and more expensive equipment; having lived through three technological upgrades — 16mm to VHS, VHS to Laserdisc, and Laserdisc to DVD — it’s clear that, while the sound and image improve (in some limited way) with each new media, the number of films available drops off drastically. When we are dragged kicking and screaming into the Blu-ray era, even more currently avialable titles will disappear. Does anyone see NBC Universal or Sony rescanning the handful of library titles they have put out for Blu-ray distribution? Only the most famous and most commercial will make the cut — the “Casablanca”s and the “2001″s.

As Serge Daney once said — and this was back in the 80s, when VHS was just getting under way — we have the choice today between nostalgia and amnesia. To simply dismiss the 98 percent of American movies that are not available on DVD as irrelevant is, I suppose, one way for younger critics to rationalize their lack of viewing experience, but I am sure that the more curious and intellectually honest among them have long since realized that they are being cheated of a huge part of our cinematic heritage.

And of course, Charles Burnett’s films were available in the 70s — that’s when they were made! I’m very, very happy to see them back in circulation, particularly in the beautiful prints restored by UCLA, but on the other hand, one of Burnett’s finest accomplishments, the 1990 “To Sleep with Anger,” is no longer available in any shape or form in the US (although an edition is available from the BFI). Where’s the progress in that?

By: alsolikelife

alsolikelife — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:43:53 +0000

further:

“The level of celluloid fetishism there is getting ridiculous. I could go along with it if filmgoing always meant a new 35mm print projected without anyone’s cell phone ringing. kids throwing candy at the screen or other distractions (and I find the MOMA audience generally more obnoxious than NYC multiplex ones, so arthouse/rep screenings aren’t necessarily on a higher plain in this regard) , but some people there seem to find even a dirty 16mm print a communal experience akin to attending Christmas Eve Mass on Ecstasy, while video – in any form – is simply abject. It’s funny: on the Mobius board, people have a tendency to boast about their home theater set-up and talk about how awful it is to have to see new movies in the theater.”

By: alsolikelife

alsolikelife — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:42:57 +0000

A film critic emailed this to me:

“Like a lot of people, Kehr seems to think that the cinephilia of his youth is the ideal. I’m too young to know the days of 16mm film societies offering endless Joseph H. Lewis retros, but my experiences of 16mm prints in college suggested that they’re hardly an ideal medium. The 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY print NYU owns was ready for the scrap heap when I saw it, and it wasn’t the only one. And THE HOUSE OF BLACK and Charles Burnett’s films weren’t exactly readily accessible in the glory days of the ’70s. In other posts, Kehr has seemed nostalgic even for commercial TV broadcasts of old films, where they were edited for content, panned and scanned (where applicable) and interrupted by commercials. If I was playing devil’s advocate, I might suggest that we have access to fewer films on the rep circuit now but that both the audience and theaters care more about their presentation (something that the rise of the big screen TV and DVD technology may actually have contributed to.)”

By: alsolikelife

alsolikelife — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:35:36 +0000

I’m inclined to feel the way you do, Matthew (and I too have a cathode-ray TV at home). I agree that the cinematheque experience can be just as overrated as it is idealized, though I suppose I am not old enough to make an informed comparison.

So far for my project I’ve been burning through all the titles that are readily available on DVD or video. As my project works its way towards the less available titles, it will prove to be a kind of test to see how readily accessible a given film can be for the cinephile on the lookout.