Critics, 4/24.

The New York Press turns 20, giving Armond White an opportunity to lash out at all those snake-hipped word-slingers once again. Only this time, at length: "There's more writing about movies these days than ever before. In print and online, it's never been worse - especially on the Internet where film buffs emulating the Vachel Lindsay-Manny Farber tradition are no longer isolated nerds but an opinionated throng, united in their sarcasm and intense pretense at intellectualizing what is basically a hobby." Movies that "should have rocked film culture" are ignored; instead, "critics' imprimatur" lands on "movies that are mendacious, pseudo-serious, sometimes immoral or socially retrograde and irresponsible." And there's a list, too, of "Ten Current Film Culture Fallacies."

Updated.

Kevin Lee not only wraps his coverage of the recent Moving Image Institute symposium on film criticism, he also comments on much of what's been blogged about it in the past couple of weeks. "Much has been made of the perceived antagonism between print institutions like the Times and the blog-barians storming their gates. As rousing as these posts and discussions have been, let's cut to the chase: in three years this isn't even going to be an issue. While I won't divulge any details of what was discussed at the Times meeting I think it's fair to say that they are as anxious as any blogger about securing their audience in a sea of competing critical voices."

Doug Cummings has been reading the Winter 2007 issue of Film International dedicated to André Bazin. Guest editor Jeffrey Crouse writes, "I look forward to the day when film analysis is conducted from an emphasis on love arrangements as Bazin conceived, rather than largely power ones [favored in academia], with the latter being a subset of the former. Imagine the expanded vocabulary and range of concepts one might draw upon so as to delve more precisely into the significance of so many film masterworks." Doug: "I submit that the French film, The Secret of the Grain, which deservedly swept the Césars a couple months ago and screened at the Los Angeles COLCOA festival last weekend, is a prime candidate for this kind of analysis."

The film screens, by the way, at Tribeca on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and May 4; and at the San Francisco International Film Festival on May 3, 5 and 8.

"Call it an aesthetic existential crisis, film-critic style," writes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "The key symptom: I came out of Flawless pondering the unanticipated but undeniable fact that I found it more enjoyable, absorbing, companionable and, in certain ways, cinematic, than I find about 99 percent of fictional films these days, including pretty much everything nominated for Academy Awards, all the big Hollywood summer and year-end spectaculars, plus most Amerindie and foreign auteur films of current renown."

Harry Tuttle revives his series on critical fallacies.

Updates: Glenn Kenny to Armond White: "You think you're applying some form of moral rigor to your work, but the fact is that you're a bully and a hypocrite, and I don't want to know you." Comments ensue.

"Armond's deeply confused screed makes me glad I quit the Press so that I don't have to attempt to explain to people out of professional courtesy what point he thought he was trying to make," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in a comment at the House Next Door. "My admiration for Armond's originality and the impact of his 1980s and 90s writing on my own have been detailed at length here many times, so I won't rehash it again. Cutting to the chase: It has become increasingly and sadly clear in recent years that Armond's as much the establishment as AO Scott, in that he derives much of his impact from the institutional weight of a print publication and from the insulated status that this one-way model of communication affords." There's more.

Jeffrey Wells and Karina Longworth also comment on the White piece; best of all is Karina's entry title, "How to Write Film Criticism? Stop Reading It." Which is inspired by a quote from Nathan Lee, which certainly strikes a chord with me and bears repeating all over again right here:

I find most film writing almost... unreadable. And the longer I write, the less of it I try to read. I think that keeps me a better writer. I'm reading all the time, but I can learn more about the movies I'm seeing this week from reading a great 19th century novel than I can from whatever XYZ critic has to say this week about whatever. I think another problem with movie writing is that it's insular, especially Internet writing. It's so narrow and insular and just about movies, and I think to be a really good writer and film critic you need a range. You need to know what's going on in painting, you need to know what's going on in music, you need to read books, and get laid, and go to restaurants, you know what I mean?

Since I spend the better part of most days feeding what Matt aptly calls "film writing's equivalent of a news ticker," or at least one among many, I do find that once I tear myself away from it, I'm starved for anything but more film news, film criticism - and on some days, even films themselves. A quick list of my own sanity-saving diversions of the moment: the US presidential campaign (no, really; someone said the other day that this would make for a great opera), Berlin's thriving art scene and Zadie Smith's White Teeth.

Posted by dwhudson at April 24, 2008 1:00 AM