Film Quarterly, CineACTION!.

"Yes, but I was a bad one," admits Aki Kaurismäki in a lead-off interview in the new Film Quarterly when interviewer Bert Cardullo asks the Finnish director if it is true that he started out as a film critic. "For me it was only masterpieces or shit, and that's not the right way to be a critic. The correct way is to be honest and not pretend anything - the same stuff as it takes to be a good filmmaker." Kaurismäki, in an interview recorded in November, 2003 (they have quite a lead time over there at FQ), goes on to note that "the basis for all art is reduction, simplicity. You go from an initial idea or narrative that you progressively reduce until it is sufficiently bare enough to be true. Then, and only then, are you finished."

This new Film Quarterly will be of interest to students of contemporary film journalism because it is the first issue under the stewardship of Rob White, who once worked at the British Film Institute, where from 1995 to 2005 he'd been Commissioning Editor, heading the BFI Film Classics series, while also writing a column at Sight and Sound (not that it proved to be much of a journey to FQ; White remains in London, and the BFI's books were already distributed in America by the University of California Press, which publishes FQ). White becomes only the third editor of the journal in almost 50 years, following Ernest Callenbach, helmer from 1958 through 133 subsequent issues, and Ann Martin, who came out of American Film and the New Yorker and who took over in 1991. Under Callenbach, the magazine was much more Hollywood oriented, though from a scholarly bent, with frequent essays on Ford, Wilder, Peckinpah, et cetera. Martin established the journal as much more exclusively academic. In her pages, you were more likely to find essays on early film history, the digital revolution, melodrama (or, the "kinetics of suffering"), and a focus on films from Cuba, Korea and Cyprus, for example. Film sound was a particular interest of Martin's. The movie review section played host to longer, if plodding, pieces, but occasionally Martin could throw off the shackles of academic sobriety and publish something fun, such as the Showgirls roundtable discussion of spring 2003.

The White Era maintains that policy, at least for now. Also at hand in this issue is an essay on screen violence by Stephen Prince, focusing on The Passion of the Christ, and Kristen Whissel on "verticality" in modern digital special effects, plus film reviews of Caché, Wedding in Galilee and The Cyclist. These are preceded by a charming "Close Up" column by Richard Armstrong on seeing Chungking Express for the first time ("Kinetic, chaotic, lyrical, serious, whimsical, earnest, wry, disciplined, anarchic, and free - this movie baffled, frustrated, appalled, excited, and upset me").

Book reviews have always been Film Quarterly's strong suit, and White's debut collection (assuming they aren't holdovers from the last regime) is satisfying and informative, kicking off with Scott Simmon on Robert S Birchard's Cecil B DeMille's Hollywood: "DeMille's first features are distinctive, for instance, partly because of their innovations in mood lighting. But in the sound films it's exactly the lighting, so flat and overbright (and later so oversaturated with color), that tends to simplify the dramas."

It's followed by, among other reviews, Bernard F Dick on Marilyn Ann Moss's Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film, Vincent LoBrutto on Gene D Phillips's Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola ("While other biographers follow Coppola on an emotional roller-coaster with uneven outcomes and illogical decisions, Gene Phillips keeps his wits throughout the hype and melodrama of Coppola's exploits to reveal an ambitious artist who is more likely 'crazy as a fox' than just plain crazy"), Elizabeth A Lathrop's consideration of Hugo Frey's Louis Malle, Alan Nadel on Mark Feeney's Nixon at the Movies - providing what passes in academia for a rave - Sharon Sharp on Derek Kompare's book on reruns in network television ("Rerun Nation demonstrates how, beginning in the 1970s, reruns satisfied a cultural desire to gaze backwards at the past, and how the television industry symbiotically exploited that backward glance in order to validate and profit from its business strategies of repetition"), Jacqueline Stewart on J Ronald Green's two companion volumes on Oscar Micheaux, and Lloyd Michaels on Peter Brunette's monograph, Wong Kar-Wai, part of the University of Illinois Press's Contemporary Film Directors series.

Minimal though it is, Film Quarterly does have an online presence, if only generally one sample article per issue, but as with most websites based in academia, the site lags behind the hard copy. In any case, shortly one of the above essays will be found on the mag's site.

At least Film Quarterly has an online presence of however much paucity. The new CineACTION!, issue 69, is exiled from cyberspace, like all the previous issues in the journal's 21-year run. With the theme of "Films From Around the Globe," this issue includes: Peter Harcourt's "Images of the Rural: The Cinema of Quebec," which makes a fine companion piece to Steve Gravestock's essay on "the year in Canadian film" in the previous issue of Cinema Scope (not available online); Malek Khouri's essay on Youssef Chahine's Al Maseer (The Destiny), which, after a lot of throat-clearing ("This article...," "This essay...," "This essay first...") provides some pretty good information on the film and its contexts; Alive Shih's interview with Wang Xiaoshuai (Cannes winner for Shanghai Dreams); Nicola Galombik and Michael Zryd's consideration of Jonas Mekas's The Brig; an analysis of Bolivian director Rodrigo Bellot's Sexual Dependency; and reviews of Bruce McDonald's The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess, Jean-Marc Vallée's C.R.A.Z.Y, three documentaries from Nova Scotia, and reports from the AFI Fest 2005, 54th International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg, and the 7th Scandinavian Film Festival LA festivals.

Robin Wood (and come on, isn't Wood's work the first reason we pick up the publication?) is represented by "On William D MacGillivray" and a review of two films by Amnon Buchbinder, Whole New Thing and The Fishing Trip. The MacGillivray essay represents disjecta commissioned for a book about Canadian filmmakers, in which he rate's MacGillivray's Life Classes above Citizen Kane:

I included Life Classes in my list of the "ten best films ever made" in the last Sight and Sound critics' poll but one. My friends thought I was being quixotic but the choice was absolutely genuine. The very concept of "the ten best" is of course absurd: everyone will be able, with brief thought, to come up with a hundred films that will vie for inclusion. Let me say, however, that I easily prefer MacGillivray's film to Citizen Kane, which in those days always emerged in first place. This will doubtless be greeted with incredulity, perhaps laughter, by many readers, but it seems to me readily defensible. Is Kane (for all its undoubted brilliance) "intelligent about life" [in Leavis's phrase]? Or is it, first and last, a self-applauding celebration of its maker's genius? I think I have watched Kane and Life Classes about the same number of times (whether for class discussion or for pleasure), and Welles's film long since went dead on me emotionally (I can still admire its skills, but coldly, as from a distance) and MacGillivray's remains as fresh, as moving, as surprising, as intelligent as ever.

And that, in a nutshell, is the Robin Wood we know and love.

Posted by dwhudson at June 27, 2006 9:40 AM