Film Quarterly. Spring 08.

Once again via Girish comes word of a new issue of Film Quarterly, and once again, there are four pieces online. Editor Rob White tantalizes browsers by noting that the bulk of the issue, including a batch of pieces on "unusually lengthy works now available on DVD," may be read exclusively in print; he then considers the recent spate of onscreen "serial killers who try to talk like philosophers. What may be most disturbing about their viciousness is its credible pretense of lucid rationality."

Joshua Clover on I'm Not There: "[W]e all feel so cool about being down with the gender play, so open-minded and progressive (indeed, there is another column to be written about the extent to which, in casting Dylan as a woman, a young black male, and a bunch of white guys who are still fundamentally identical, [Todd] Haynes has made a film of this year's Democratic presidential primaries). This sensibility is finally annoying, both because it reminds us that the anxiety endures after all, but also because there are few spectacles as unwholesome as liberals flattering themselves. This critical reception doesn't make I'm Not There a lesser film, just a less-pleasant social fact."

Adrian Martin contrasts the way in which I'm Not There dances around the hole, the absence at its center - Bob Dylan - with the approach taken by Ken Jacobs's Star Spangled to Death to Jack Smith - and to the viewer - adding, "To watch Star Spangled is to be plunged back to the very origin of a 'funk art' that created its magic from, literally, whatever junk was to hand, from what [Félix] Guattari called 'this American mess' - a true no-budget endeavor."

In a piece written before the writers' strike ended, Ben Walters looks back at all the little movies that got made anyway: the pro- and anti-WGA online videos.

Posted by dwhudson at April 7, 2008 7:20 AM