Prelims.qxd 1/12/07 12:22 PM Page iv Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data City that... more Prelims.qxd 1/12/07 12:22 PM Page iv Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data City that never sleeps : New York and the filmic imagination/edited by Murray Pomerance. p. cm. Includes bibliographical ...
New Review of Film and Television Studies, Mar 1, 2010
... and MacCormack, 2008, 10); and as anyone can tell from his auteur-oriented writing ... a perc... more ... and MacCormack, 2008, 10); and as anyone can tell from his auteur-oriented writing ... a perceptive critic who perceives the rumble of the great dualism machines but doesn ... question of dualisms, the limitations of Deleuze's auteurism, his Frankfurt School-like pessimism about the ...
Long-form film criticism is not as hopelessly moribund as some observers contend. Serious general... more Long-form film criticism is not as hopelessly moribund as some observers contend. Serious general-interest publications still contain serious articles by serious reviewers and essayists; home-video distributors such as Flicker Alley and the Criterion Collection still supplement their releases with thoughtful booklets, leaflets, and audio commentaries; and a small but significant number of specialized print and internet outlets help to keep cinephilia alive and reasonably healthy. This said, however, the once-thriving genre is definitely endangered by competition from near-ubiquitous soundbite and social-media discourse that makes up in haste and carelessness what it lacks in depth and breadth. Anything that counters this culturally insalubrious trend is therefore welcome, and I am doing what I can to spread the word about The Press Gang: Writings on Cinema from the New York Press, 1991-2011, a recently published compendium of articles (edited by Jim Colvill, published by Seven Stories Press) by film critics Godfrey Cheshire, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Armond White, all of whom were on the staff of the New York Press, a Manhattan-based alternative weekly that commenced operations in 1988 and closed its doors in 2011. Even in this age of infinitely reproducible internet prose, many of the essays, interviews, rants, and reviews collected here have been out of circulation since the periodical went defunct, and their reappearance is cause for celebration. The paper's chief rival was the Village Voice, where several estimable film critics found a home over the years, the pioneering auteur theorist Andrew Sarris and the remarkably versatile J. Hoberman among them. None of the New York Press reviewers had the fame or influence of those Voice critics, but all are excellent writers, and their characteristic pieces are eminently worthy of preservation in book form. Cheshire was the first to join the Press, arriving in 1991 and continuing until 2000, when he was abruptly fired for reasons that were mysterious then and have remained so ever since. Seitz began his tenure in 1995 and left in 2006, while White came onto the team in 1997 and remained until the paper ceased operations. Of the three, White has been the most provocative, becoming the most prominent Black voice in the white-dominated field of American film criticism via opinions and arguments capable of stirring as much discussion as the movies under examination. He is known for having brashly contrarian views, but his pieces in The Press Gang constitute a varied and sophisticated body of work, exploring key films by everyone from Jean-Luc Godard and Andr e T echin e to Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg, and demonstrating a voluminous knowledge of pop culture along the way. Less clearly admirable is his zest for belittling those who disagree with him, including his own readers, who are "dishonest or hopelessly ignorant" (204) if they enjoy The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, USA, 1999) and reveal themselves David Sterritt, editor in chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, was film critic of The Christian Science Monitor for almost forty years, He chaired the National Society of Film Critics for a decade and served two terms as chair of the New York Film Critics Circle.
Lois Weber made almost 150 films over the course of a career that began in 1911, when she codirec... more Lois Weber made almost 150 films over the course of a career that began in 1911, when she codirected her debut picture with her husband Phillips Smalley and the legendary Edwin S. Porter, and ended in 1934, when she directed her first and only talkie. Today most of her films are understandably obscure, given the movie industry's long history of forgetting, losing, carelessly storing, and outright destroying pictures (especially silent pictures) not immediately useful for profit-making purposes. But a few gems have become readily available in recent years, including The Blot, a sensitively crafted 1921 melodrama conveying the sort of forthright social message-here, the damages modern society inflicts on itself by failing to value intellectuals and others who serve important cultural needs for little monetary reward-that is a distinguishing feature of Weber's filmography. The Blot is a highlight of Flicker Alley's recently released collection Early Women Filmmakers: An International Anthology, which I discussed in an earlier article. 1 Now the enterprising archivists, preservationists, and distributors at Milestone Film and Video have released two more of the ever-intriguing pictures made by Weber and Smalley, both produced in 1916 but strikingly dissimilar in style and story, offering additional evidence of the versatility and flexibility that are among the team's many artistic virtues. The very different dramas are worthy of close scrutiny by anyone who cares about Weber-Smalley cinema in particular or the great history of silent cinema writ large. The longer of the two films, The Dumb Girl of Portici, is adapted from Daniel F.E. Auber's opera La Muette de Portici, a five-act extravaganza (also known as Masaniello, after the title character's brother) that premiered in 1829 and is sometimes called the first French grand opera, thanks to its expansive scale, historical setting, and innovative use of mime and dance. The opera has a strong political pedigree: its story deals with a 1647 rebellion against Spanish overlords in Naples, and the opera itself helped to spark the Belgian Revolution of 1830-1831 when an audience David Sterritt is Editor-in-Chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video and film professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art. His most recent books are Rock 'n Roll Movies (Rutgers University Press) and Simply Hitchcock (Simply Charly).
is a collection edited and partly written by Bruce Babington and Charles Barr, both authorities o... more is a collection edited and partly written by Bruce Babington and Charles Barr, both authorities on American and British cinema. The Films of Douglas Sirk: Exquisite Ironies and Magnificent Obsessions is a monograph by Tom Ryan, a veteran Australian film critic. Each volume traces the history of a career from its origins through maturity and onward to its final stages, which in Sirk's case was a contented European retirement and in Stahl's case was death at age 63, one year after directing his last picture in 1949. The books are connected by two qualities that these directors have in common. One is a longtime commitment to melodrama and the so-called women's film, although it is a mistake to think of either filmmaker entirely in terms of those closely related categories. The other link is a trio of remakes: Sirk remade Stahl's Imitation of Life (1934) and Magnificent Obsession (1935) under the same titles in 1959 and 1954, respectively, and remade Stahl's When Tomorrow Comes (1939) under the title Interlude in 1957. (One more link: addition to writing the Sirk volume, Ryan wrote three essays in the Babington and Barr collection, two of them on Stahl films remade by Sirk.) Sirk's critical stock has risen so high in recent decades that Stahl-when remembered at all-tends to be regarded as a mildly interesting precursor of a far important figure. Early in The Call of the Heart coeditor Barr signals some major reasons for Stahl's neglect, none perhaps more pivotal than his early death, which precluded the kind of elder-statesman recognition that has kept the names of Sirk and other longlived filmmakers alive in the minds of critics and the eyes of the public.
Beginning with a failed gesturea missed attempt to land an apple core in a trashcanthe poet re-... more Beginning with a failed gesturea missed attempt to land an apple core in a trashcanthe poet re-alizes this was no unlucky shot. He traces his failure back from the gesture, back up the arm itself, earlier and earlierto when? To the moment the thought was formulated, or ...
Years ago I knew a theater director who did not just accept but actually liked the way his produc... more Years ago I knew a theater director who did not just accept but actually liked the way his productions vanished into thin air once their final performances were over. In his view, theater must exist entirely in the moment, imbued with the physicality and ephemerality that separate stagecraft from more readily reproducible arts. Each new project calls for inventing a new world, he believed, and old worlds have no business hanging around when their natural life spans are over. I once ran this notion past Elizabeth LeCompte, founding director and honcho of the Wooster Group, the hugely experimental, hugely influential New York theater company. How did she feel about the inescapable impermanency of live theater? Her reply: “It drives me crazy.” That was more than thirty years ago. Times and technologies have changed since then, and making records of theatrical creations is now as easy as it is commonsensical, even if the crucial qualities of materiality and immediacy make live productio...
He became a movie star playing The Man With No Name, and today his name is known around the world... more He became a movie star playing The Man With No Name, and today his name is known around the world. Measured by longevity, productivity, and profits, Clint Eastwood is the most successful actor-director-producer in American film history. This book examines the major elements of his career, focusing primarily on his work as a director but also exploring the evolution of his acting style, his long association with screen violence, his interest in jazz, and the political views -- sometimes hotly controversial -- reflected in his films and public statements. Especially fascinating is the pivotal question that divides critics and moviegoers to this day: is Eastwood a capable director with a photogenic face, a modest acting talent, and a flair for marketing his image? Or is he a true cinematic auteur with a distinctive vision of America's history, traditions, and values? From A Fistful of Dollars and Dirty Harry to Million Dollar Baby and beyond, The Cinema of Clint Eastwood takes a close-up look at one of the screen's most influential and charismatic stars.
The cinematic exploits of Martin Scorsese are as varied as they are numerous, comprising worthwhi... more The cinematic exploits of Martin Scorsese are as varied as they are numerous, comprising worthwhile enterprises as a director, producer, screenwriter, editor, actor, and energetic advocate for the ...
Auteurism has followed a long and winding path since its birth in the 1940s and ascendency in the... more Auteurism has followed a long and winding path since its birth in the 1940s and ascendency in the 1960s, moving from the illustrious pages of Cahiers du cin ema to sundry high-toned publications, scholarly conferences, and university classrooms, and thence to movie reviews and fan discourses of all sorts. Along the way, it has been debated by such spirited thinkers as the zealously supportive Andrew Sarris and the belligerently unsupportive Pauline Kael, and eventually some of its French originators started cooling on their own invention, as when no less a polemicist than Jean-Luc Godard acknowledged that he and his colleagues had exaggerated the primacy of directors in the enormously collaborative enterprise of feature filmmaking. Its many ups and downs notwithstanding, however, the politique des auteurs still thrives as it approaches its eightieth anniversary, and one sign of its ongoing vigor is the prevalence of book series with auteurist foundations, from Wallflower Press's Directors' Cuts and University Press of Mississippi's Conversations with Filmmakers to the British Film Institute's World Directors and University of Illinois Press's Contemporary Film Directors, a highly prolific line with more than fifty books published to date. I have reviewed several volumes in the Illinois series elsewhere, and its most recent additions are excellent enough to warrant special attention. 1 The new entries are Werner Herzog, by Joshua Lund, a professor of Spanish at the University of Notre Dame, and Lucrecia Martel, by Gerd Gem€ unden, a professor of German, comparative literature, and film and media studies at Dartmouth College. Herzog and Martel are very different figures. The former is a Western European man who has directed scores of features and shorts in a long list of countries during a career spanning almost sixty years, gliding easily between fiction and documentary. The latter is a South American woman whose two dozen directorial credits include only four features, each brilliant enough to confirm her status as a world-class auteur. But both have distinctive and resolutely personal styles that weave their major works into the kind of esthetic whole that auteurism can effectively analyze and explicate. The new Illinois volumes are therefore more than welcome.
Prelims.qxd 1/12/07 12:22 PM Page iv Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data City that... more Prelims.qxd 1/12/07 12:22 PM Page iv Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data City that never sleeps : New York and the filmic imagination/edited by Murray Pomerance. p. cm. Includes bibliographical ...
New Review of Film and Television Studies, Mar 1, 2010
... and MacCormack, 2008, 10); and as anyone can tell from his auteur-oriented writing ... a perc... more ... and MacCormack, 2008, 10); and as anyone can tell from his auteur-oriented writing ... a perceptive critic who perceives the rumble of the great dualism machines but doesn ... question of dualisms, the limitations of Deleuze's auteurism, his Frankfurt School-like pessimism about the ...
Long-form film criticism is not as hopelessly moribund as some observers contend. Serious general... more Long-form film criticism is not as hopelessly moribund as some observers contend. Serious general-interest publications still contain serious articles by serious reviewers and essayists; home-video distributors such as Flicker Alley and the Criterion Collection still supplement their releases with thoughtful booklets, leaflets, and audio commentaries; and a small but significant number of specialized print and internet outlets help to keep cinephilia alive and reasonably healthy. This said, however, the once-thriving genre is definitely endangered by competition from near-ubiquitous soundbite and social-media discourse that makes up in haste and carelessness what it lacks in depth and breadth. Anything that counters this culturally insalubrious trend is therefore welcome, and I am doing what I can to spread the word about The Press Gang: Writings on Cinema from the New York Press, 1991-2011, a recently published compendium of articles (edited by Jim Colvill, published by Seven Stories Press) by film critics Godfrey Cheshire, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Armond White, all of whom were on the staff of the New York Press, a Manhattan-based alternative weekly that commenced operations in 1988 and closed its doors in 2011. Even in this age of infinitely reproducible internet prose, many of the essays, interviews, rants, and reviews collected here have been out of circulation since the periodical went defunct, and their reappearance is cause for celebration. The paper's chief rival was the Village Voice, where several estimable film critics found a home over the years, the pioneering auteur theorist Andrew Sarris and the remarkably versatile J. Hoberman among them. None of the New York Press reviewers had the fame or influence of those Voice critics, but all are excellent writers, and their characteristic pieces are eminently worthy of preservation in book form. Cheshire was the first to join the Press, arriving in 1991 and continuing until 2000, when he was abruptly fired for reasons that were mysterious then and have remained so ever since. Seitz began his tenure in 1995 and left in 2006, while White came onto the team in 1997 and remained until the paper ceased operations. Of the three, White has been the most provocative, becoming the most prominent Black voice in the white-dominated field of American film criticism via opinions and arguments capable of stirring as much discussion as the movies under examination. He is known for having brashly contrarian views, but his pieces in The Press Gang constitute a varied and sophisticated body of work, exploring key films by everyone from Jean-Luc Godard and Andr e T echin e to Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg, and demonstrating a voluminous knowledge of pop culture along the way. Less clearly admirable is his zest for belittling those who disagree with him, including his own readers, who are "dishonest or hopelessly ignorant" (204) if they enjoy The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, USA, 1999) and reveal themselves David Sterritt, editor in chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, was film critic of The Christian Science Monitor for almost forty years, He chaired the National Society of Film Critics for a decade and served two terms as chair of the New York Film Critics Circle.
Lois Weber made almost 150 films over the course of a career that began in 1911, when she codirec... more Lois Weber made almost 150 films over the course of a career that began in 1911, when she codirected her debut picture with her husband Phillips Smalley and the legendary Edwin S. Porter, and ended in 1934, when she directed her first and only talkie. Today most of her films are understandably obscure, given the movie industry's long history of forgetting, losing, carelessly storing, and outright destroying pictures (especially silent pictures) not immediately useful for profit-making purposes. But a few gems have become readily available in recent years, including The Blot, a sensitively crafted 1921 melodrama conveying the sort of forthright social message-here, the damages modern society inflicts on itself by failing to value intellectuals and others who serve important cultural needs for little monetary reward-that is a distinguishing feature of Weber's filmography. The Blot is a highlight of Flicker Alley's recently released collection Early Women Filmmakers: An International Anthology, which I discussed in an earlier article. 1 Now the enterprising archivists, preservationists, and distributors at Milestone Film and Video have released two more of the ever-intriguing pictures made by Weber and Smalley, both produced in 1916 but strikingly dissimilar in style and story, offering additional evidence of the versatility and flexibility that are among the team's many artistic virtues. The very different dramas are worthy of close scrutiny by anyone who cares about Weber-Smalley cinema in particular or the great history of silent cinema writ large. The longer of the two films, The Dumb Girl of Portici, is adapted from Daniel F.E. Auber's opera La Muette de Portici, a five-act extravaganza (also known as Masaniello, after the title character's brother) that premiered in 1829 and is sometimes called the first French grand opera, thanks to its expansive scale, historical setting, and innovative use of mime and dance. The opera has a strong political pedigree: its story deals with a 1647 rebellion against Spanish overlords in Naples, and the opera itself helped to spark the Belgian Revolution of 1830-1831 when an audience David Sterritt is Editor-in-Chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video and film professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art. His most recent books are Rock 'n Roll Movies (Rutgers University Press) and Simply Hitchcock (Simply Charly).
is a collection edited and partly written by Bruce Babington and Charles Barr, both authorities o... more is a collection edited and partly written by Bruce Babington and Charles Barr, both authorities on American and British cinema. The Films of Douglas Sirk: Exquisite Ironies and Magnificent Obsessions is a monograph by Tom Ryan, a veteran Australian film critic. Each volume traces the history of a career from its origins through maturity and onward to its final stages, which in Sirk's case was a contented European retirement and in Stahl's case was death at age 63, one year after directing his last picture in 1949. The books are connected by two qualities that these directors have in common. One is a longtime commitment to melodrama and the so-called women's film, although it is a mistake to think of either filmmaker entirely in terms of those closely related categories. The other link is a trio of remakes: Sirk remade Stahl's Imitation of Life (1934) and Magnificent Obsession (1935) under the same titles in 1959 and 1954, respectively, and remade Stahl's When Tomorrow Comes (1939) under the title Interlude in 1957. (One more link: addition to writing the Sirk volume, Ryan wrote three essays in the Babington and Barr collection, two of them on Stahl films remade by Sirk.) Sirk's critical stock has risen so high in recent decades that Stahl-when remembered at all-tends to be regarded as a mildly interesting precursor of a far important figure. Early in The Call of the Heart coeditor Barr signals some major reasons for Stahl's neglect, none perhaps more pivotal than his early death, which precluded the kind of elder-statesman recognition that has kept the names of Sirk and other longlived filmmakers alive in the minds of critics and the eyes of the public.
Beginning with a failed gesturea missed attempt to land an apple core in a trashcanthe poet re-... more Beginning with a failed gesturea missed attempt to land an apple core in a trashcanthe poet re-alizes this was no unlucky shot. He traces his failure back from the gesture, back up the arm itself, earlier and earlierto when? To the moment the thought was formulated, or ...
Years ago I knew a theater director who did not just accept but actually liked the way his produc... more Years ago I knew a theater director who did not just accept but actually liked the way his productions vanished into thin air once their final performances were over. In his view, theater must exist entirely in the moment, imbued with the physicality and ephemerality that separate stagecraft from more readily reproducible arts. Each new project calls for inventing a new world, he believed, and old worlds have no business hanging around when their natural life spans are over. I once ran this notion past Elizabeth LeCompte, founding director and honcho of the Wooster Group, the hugely experimental, hugely influential New York theater company. How did she feel about the inescapable impermanency of live theater? Her reply: “It drives me crazy.” That was more than thirty years ago. Times and technologies have changed since then, and making records of theatrical creations is now as easy as it is commonsensical, even if the crucial qualities of materiality and immediacy make live productio...
He became a movie star playing The Man With No Name, and today his name is known around the world... more He became a movie star playing The Man With No Name, and today his name is known around the world. Measured by longevity, productivity, and profits, Clint Eastwood is the most successful actor-director-producer in American film history. This book examines the major elements of his career, focusing primarily on his work as a director but also exploring the evolution of his acting style, his long association with screen violence, his interest in jazz, and the political views -- sometimes hotly controversial -- reflected in his films and public statements. Especially fascinating is the pivotal question that divides critics and moviegoers to this day: is Eastwood a capable director with a photogenic face, a modest acting talent, and a flair for marketing his image? Or is he a true cinematic auteur with a distinctive vision of America's history, traditions, and values? From A Fistful of Dollars and Dirty Harry to Million Dollar Baby and beyond, The Cinema of Clint Eastwood takes a close-up look at one of the screen's most influential and charismatic stars.
The cinematic exploits of Martin Scorsese are as varied as they are numerous, comprising worthwhi... more The cinematic exploits of Martin Scorsese are as varied as they are numerous, comprising worthwhile enterprises as a director, producer, screenwriter, editor, actor, and energetic advocate for the ...
Auteurism has followed a long and winding path since its birth in the 1940s and ascendency in the... more Auteurism has followed a long and winding path since its birth in the 1940s and ascendency in the 1960s, moving from the illustrious pages of Cahiers du cin ema to sundry high-toned publications, scholarly conferences, and university classrooms, and thence to movie reviews and fan discourses of all sorts. Along the way, it has been debated by such spirited thinkers as the zealously supportive Andrew Sarris and the belligerently unsupportive Pauline Kael, and eventually some of its French originators started cooling on their own invention, as when no less a polemicist than Jean-Luc Godard acknowledged that he and his colleagues had exaggerated the primacy of directors in the enormously collaborative enterprise of feature filmmaking. Its many ups and downs notwithstanding, however, the politique des auteurs still thrives as it approaches its eightieth anniversary, and one sign of its ongoing vigor is the prevalence of book series with auteurist foundations, from Wallflower Press's Directors' Cuts and University Press of Mississippi's Conversations with Filmmakers to the British Film Institute's World Directors and University of Illinois Press's Contemporary Film Directors, a highly prolific line with more than fifty books published to date. I have reviewed several volumes in the Illinois series elsewhere, and its most recent additions are excellent enough to warrant special attention. 1 The new entries are Werner Herzog, by Joshua Lund, a professor of Spanish at the University of Notre Dame, and Lucrecia Martel, by Gerd Gem€ unden, a professor of German, comparative literature, and film and media studies at Dartmouth College. Herzog and Martel are very different figures. The former is a Western European man who has directed scores of features and shorts in a long list of countries during a career spanning almost sixty years, gliding easily between fiction and documentary. The latter is a South American woman whose two dozen directorial credits include only four features, each brilliant enough to confirm her status as a world-class auteur. But both have distinctive and resolutely personal styles that weave their major works into the kind of esthetic whole that auteurism can effectively analyze and explicate. The new Illinois volumes are therefore more than welcome.
In recent weeks I have spent many pleasurable hours with DVDs and Blu-rays released by Flicker Al... more In recent weeks I have spent many pleasurable hours with DVDs and Blu-rays released by Flicker Alley, which has established itself over the past dozen years as a terrific resource for revivals, restorations, and rarities that are hard or impossible to see elsewhere.
This review deems Patricia Pisters’s monograph The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Di... more This review deems Patricia Pisters’s monograph The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture to be a timely intervention in contemporary media theory, well grounded in the particularities of twenty-first-century screen practice. The reviewer also points out certain assumptions and presumptions that lead the author to a few injudicious assertions about relationships among the mind, the brain, and the screen.
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Papers by David Sterritt