A recent n+1 panel discussion at the Kitchen addressed the anxieties of online culture, including the effects of instantaneous access to information on how we engage with and think about literature, criticism, and so on. It seems that now, more than ever, an alarm has been sounded within literary communities concerning the Internet’s potential to slight or undermine patience, attention, and contemplation (I am thinking of Nick Carr’s article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? as well as Lee Siegel’s book, Against the Machine, both troubled by the Internet’s ability to hyper-kinetically modify our experiences). Jonathan Rosenbaum addressed somewhat similar ideas about the future of film criticism at a time when more and more film viewers seem to be referring to blogs and websites like RottenTomatoes and MetaCritic rather than, say, Film Comment or Film Quarterly. My question is: has the Internet contributed to a growing disinterest in (or dismissal of) a film criticism that moves beyond mere binary, simplified opinions and analyses of films? Is there a risk that complexity is being undermined?


The consumer-guide approach to film reviewing is pointless. This is in an age in which the amount of publicity attending the release of any film has become inescapable. Even the most casual filmgoer is inundated. By the time a film comes out today, pre-release publicity has already obviated the need for plot description and information about a film’s cast and director, which is usually what every short review is about. Still, the editors of daily papers, weeklies, and monthly magazines continue to publish these kinds of reviews as though someone, somewhere, actually cares. This is not the fault of websites. It is the fault of the editors and publishers who failed to respond to the challenges posed by the Internet, and who can’t change the way they work. They failed, and they unaccountably continue to employ full-time film reviewers and an army of underpaid freelancers (including me) to write what amounts to a series of name-checks in support of advertising. There are exceptions to this, periodicals that publish longer pieces or better-considered short criticism, but these are few. To blame the Internet for editors’ and publishers’ lack of imagination isn’t fair. It’s only half the story. If magazines and newspapers were publishing writers worth reading, and who were writing original and unexpected things, and giving them enough space to do it, people would read them. Instead, they publish toadies who, along with most of the editors and publishers who hire them, feel as though they have some stake in keeping the entertainment industry afloat (which they very well may). Who reads these capsule reviews? It’s harder to read that kind of short review than it is to read a 3,000-word piece. You skim short reviews even more than you skim a long piece, looking for one sentence that catches your eye, hoping not to waste your time. Short reviews should be one sentence long. And since, on average, every movie that comes out gets 31/2 stars, why rate them at all? 

Although there are publications where this isn’t the case.  

It’s the system almost every paper and magazine uses. For most people, that’s what film criticism is. This serves the entertainment industry, not readers. If a film is mentioned enough in print, its name recognition snowballs, it becomes What’s Playing. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad - which, as far as the entertainment industry is concerned, is something the box office will determine, anyway. Meanwhile, publishers cut and cut and make their film sections smaller and smaller. That’s their solution to every problem. That and hiring ever more chipper film reviewers. I know of one glossy magazine whose film reviewer doesn’t even see the films he writes about because the magazine’s lead-time is so long it closes before that month’s films are press-screened. Instead, he relies on pre-release material, refers to the Internet, and watches trailers. Then he guesses how audiences will respond when the movie is finally released, and writes his two paragraphs based on this pseudo-informed precognition. How is that better than the Internet? 

Many of the so-called “arts and entertainment” websites seem to follow the “infotainment” model, whereby criticism that wants to do more than simply hand out grades is dismissed. 

That model existed before Rotten Tomatoes, before Ain’t It Cool News, and before users could go onto IMDb or Netflix to write that no movie ever made will be better than Braveheart. Writers willing to do that have existed since De Mille made The Squaw Man. They don’t owe their existence to the Internet. They owe their existence to bad hiring practices and to lame ideas about what film criticism is, should be, or could be. As an example, I know one alt-weekly that refuses to publish a long review of any movie unless the review is positive. Obviously, since writers are paid by the word, they want to write longer pieces, and in this case that encourages them to inflate the reputations of mediocre films. That’s an editorial decision that turns writers into publicists. Anyway, who wants to buy a paper or magazine, or even pick up a free one, when he can get the same information he’ll find in it without even getting out of bed? Print can’t compete with the IMDb for basic information, or with websites that publish babble written in clichés. It shouldn’t try to. And the pusillanimity of film critics themselves undermines film criticism as much as anything. Whenever a big-budget movie is released that breaks box office records and also receives bad reviews, film critics respond to the petty howling of the industry by writing hand-wringing articles with titles like, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest: How Did We Miss the Boat?” This kind of behavior endears film critics to no one. It reinforces their image as milquetoasts incapable of standing up for what they believe. Who will miss them when they’re gone? In a way, it’s good that the Internet is encouraging the perception of a voracious need for consumer-guide film reviewing. People who want that kind of information don’t want to read real film criticism. Let them have their capsule reviews and regurgitated publicity, and let magazines stop giving films a B+ or a B-, which is purely comic anyway. Today, on the web anybody can hand out grades So, yes, the web has displaced film criticism in that sense.  

What encouraged this shift in the way film criticism is thought about? 

Post-Star Wars, film criticism really started to cave in to the film industry, especially as Kael-era film critics began to age and miss their salad days, when Fellini and Bergman, and then Antonioni and the Nouvelle Vague and, lastly, the New Hollywood of the early 1970s were new to American screens. Many critics essentially abandoned the cinema in favor of blockbuster entertainment. They decided to go along to get along, and all of a sudden they had no patience for anything - but they couldn’t get enough of Jaws. I think they began to identify, even over-identify, with the industry in general, more than they identified with any of the filmmakers they once professed to love. They just didn’t seem to care about anything important anymore, and they did nothing to bring new critics along. The result is that younger critics cling in desperation to the one model they can respect, and they all become the same, interchangeable, post-Hoberman critic, writing like cultural studies grad students auditioning for jobs at Variety.   

What are your thoughts on academic film writing? 

Being an academic and being a writer are two different things. I know academics I wouldn’t read a postcard from. To me, it’s apparent that, since the mid-1980s, even as young film academics had more and more access to more and more movies - and know more writing on the cinema from the past - they were becoming worse writers. I can’t think of one book or article by any American or English academic film writer of the last 25 years that I’ve read and would re-read today. If a lot of film critics write like grad students auditioning for trade papers, a lot of academics write like technical writers who love gossip columns. I’m thinking of the jovial gleefulness of a David Bordwell, which is a classroom version of Leonard Maltin’s television bonhomie. No doubt Bordwell inspires his students just as Maltin entertains his viewers, and both are prolific authors with employees or acolytes. Both know their film history, and both seem like nice guys. That doesn’t make me want to read their books or whatever they put on the web. Having said that, I’d prefer either one of them to the generic film academics of the 1980s and 1990s, practitioners of a discipline that could have been called Blade Runner Studies. I mean the post-Questions of Cinema world of American academic film studies before Slavoj Zizek trounced it. If it has produced anything of lasting interest, please send me a copy.  

What led you to n+1? 

In the 1990s, I worked as the co-editor of a zine called Hermenaut, which I also wrote various columns and features for. Hermenaut was a digest of pop culture and philosophy based in Boston, where I lived at the time, and where I also worked as a movie theater projectionist at a Harvard Square revival house called the Brattle Theatre. Unbeknownst to those of us writing for Hermenaut, a few Harvard undergraduates were reading our zine, including Keith Gessen, one of the editors of n+1. Gessen wrote us an interesting letter and we invited him to a party. We had a lot of cocktail parties back then because there was nothing else to do in Boston at night if you didn’t want to go to a rock show. So Gessen came to one and told me his favorite movie was Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I said, “What? That’s the kind of thing I hear from English people!” He explained he was born in the Soviet Union. We’ve been friends ever since. He wrote for Hermenaut when he wasn’t writing for more prestigious publications, and after I moved to New York he asked me to write for n+1. It took me a while to start to write for it, but I’m glad I did. The n+1 editors are very good at what they do and they encourage me to write what I want. That’s a rare quality. 

What films in the past few years have been important experiences for you?  

The biggest revelations I’ve had in the last five years were Mikio Naruse at Film Forum, Ophüls’s Le Plaisir at BAM, and Nicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again, which showed at the MoMA Gramercy in 2003 and was as emotionally devastating as any film I’ve ever seen. Two films from 2001 haunt me in strange ways: one is Vanilla Sky, that deranged, terrible monument to baby boomer hubris Cameron Crowe made for Tom Cruise. The other is John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars, a seemingly normal, even banal science-fiction film that really isn’t normal at all. It’s cheap, it was a troubled production, no one liked it, but to me it’s fascinating. Some great films, some just really interesting, that didn’t get enough attention or were reviled: Brisseau’s Secret Things, Romero’s Land of the Dead, Chantal Akerman’s From the Other Side, a Belgian horror film called Calvaire, Owning Mahowny with Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Ice Harvest, Idiocracy, The Oh in Ohio and Broken English, the disturbing French films Lemming and They Came Back, Marie Antoinette, De Palma’s Black Dahlia. Some other recent films were underrated and/or among their directors’ best work: Johnnie To’s Election and Triad Election, Kings and Queen, Grizzly Man, A Prairie Home Companion, Caché, Inland Empire, Syndromes and a Century, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, The Assassination of Jesse James, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution. A number of established figures have been producing great work that’s been unjustly ignored or treated too lightly: Aki Kaurismaki, Jafar Panahi, Takeshi Kitano, Tsai Ming-Liang, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Hou Hsiao-hsien. The best things get lost because they’re not fed into the publicity mill and sometimes it seems like only things no one cares about are any good.  

What are your hopes for the future of film criticism (or criticism in general)?   

Like everything else produced in the US in the 20th century, American film criticism was anthologized recently, in Philip Lopate’s collection for the Library of America. What a sad trajectory that grouping presented. You can trace the curve that rises through the middle of the last century, peaking 35 or 40 years ago. After Ferguson, Agee, Farber, Sarris, Kael, and a few others, the book fizzled, ending with pieces by the New York Times critics who currently write the paper’s reviews of first-run films. Was that the best Lopate could dig up to represent the contemporary scene? I guess it’s like Marlene Dietrich says to Orson Welles in Touch of Evil: “Your future’s all used up.” I guess that means film criticism will have to thrive on the web instead of in magazines, because even most serious magazines show a continued resistance to good film criticism, or even regular film criticism. Newspapers, which have never really been interested in serious film criticism, just aren’t going to survive as outlets for it. It’s already the case that interesting film criticism is mostly on the web. I’d rather read Senses of Cinema or a film blog than a film magazine. The main problem with the serious new film blogs is their naiveté. I don’t know why I expect people who write about Straub-Huillet and Pedro Costa to be a little more hardboiled, but I do. I don’t look forward to a future reading film criticism on a computer screen, though. Watching movies on a screen and then reading about them on the same screen is a depressing system to live under. Reading should be a respite from watching; it’s different from watching movies on a screen, even if movies are a form of writing, too. Movies should complement reading, and vice versa. Now they’re being collapsed into the same thing, into television, which makes them into work and not fun. Computers are what we stare into at work. I don’t want to be chained to a device like a heart patient or a rechargeable handyvac. One form should remain different from the other in order to comment on it productively, and that can’t happen if they’re both continuously dripped into us in the form of publicity. Information swirls round and round, and few people have anything to say about what’s actually on the screen. Maybe the only hope for film criticism is that Harry Knowles goes face down into his third helping of pancakes tomorrow morning. The rest is user comments.

Interview by Ricky D’Ambrose