Making The Wire.

On Wednesday, a symposium entitled Making The Wire will take place at the Museum of the Moving Image and Moving Image Source is gathering materials that even those far and away from Astoria, New York are going to want to read and watch.

For some time now, Kevin B Lee's video essays have been among the most exciting developments in film blogging, suggesting not an alternative but supplemental form of film criticism accessible to anyone online. Here, he and Matt Zoller Seitz have edited Andrew Dignan's analyses of The Wire's credit sequences (Season 1 and Season 2).

"The Wire is strikingly bereft of a central figure from whose perspective the story is told and whose voyage of self-awareness provides its raison d'etre," writes Dana Polen. Instead it suggests that in the complexly knit fabric that is the urban environment, any one figure is little more than a place-holder, a token that can always be replaced by someone else." Hence, the series is "like Balzac's fictional project, which aimed to offer a total physiognomy of the urban experience in which individual stories mattered only for their place in a larger context."

Related: Jürgen Fauth's Wire roundup.

Updates, 7/29: Nelson George explains why The Wire " is the best black TV show written mostly by white men."

And the video analyses of the credits for Seasons 3 and 4 are up.

Updates, 7/30: "The Wire is a show (like Twin Peaks or The Sopranos, Deadwood or Dexter) in whichthe music and montage are essential to bringing the viewer into the world of the show. Like a clearing of the mind as you go into meditation, these familiar (mantra-like) rituals help us leave our conscious surroundings behind and enter a different (but eventually quite familiar) imaginative terrain." Jim Emerson, too, on the credits sequences.

And the video for Season 5 is up.

Updates, 8/1: Vulture reports on the panel.

David Schwartz at the Source on a terrific scene (and the clip's there, too): "As engrossing as the chess scene is on first viewing, it gains in power on re-viewing, not only because we know the tragic fates of the three characters but also because we see how the chess lesson can be applied to much of the other action in the series. After all, in chess, the pieces don't control their own moves. And series creator David Simon's worldview is much closer to that of Greek tragedy - with its ambitious protagonists unaware that their fate is not entirely in their own hands - than to the more conventional view of most American literature, and television, where personality triumphs and good defeats evil."

Update, 8/14: Online listening tip. The full panel.

Posted by dwhudson at July 28, 2008 2:50 PM