Hmm. the question of how much information should be required to understand a movie is an interesting one as it goes towards the idea of movies as a universal language, which is often assumed but needn’t be accepted. Given most films are best understood from the perspective of the culture from which the film comes from, the suggestion that there is some amount of research which can provide an adequate basis for “getting” the movie to anywhere near the same degree as a native of the culture is problematic. Such an attitude, I think, tends to better favor those informed by a certain set of “liberal” or artistic values which are uncommon everywhere in the world. I strongly suspect that many of the best loved “foreign” films do not speak to residents of the culture from which they came in the same way that they will to those who have invested energy in artistic appreciation in general. In fact, I believe it is often easier to appreciate movies from outside ones own culture, or to accept things said in subtitles that might fall hard on the ear if spoken in one’s own language.
At the same time, there is no question that someone who lives in a culture will have a different understanding of the references made by a movie created by someone from the same or similar culture, and this is even more true when the film is set within the society which one is most familiar. In this sense, the more one can inform themselves about the situation, history, or society being shown, the better of a grasp one will have on the references. Still though, it is a very different thing to have read up on say the history of Thailand and to have grown up or even simply lived there for any length of time. Looking at Thailand from the privileged perspective of someone who grew up in the US, for example, is to apply a very different set of expectations, values, and historical expectation than would possibly be the case for a native of Thailand.
This all raises a number of questions which cannot be easily answered, if answered at all. One of the most significant being that an assumption about who the film is for is implicitly being made. One might either see a movie as addressing a specific audience or a universal one. If the former, then wondering who might make up that audience becomes an issue which has larger implications and can’t easily be declared moot. If, instead, it is the latter, then the question would be how the film addresses the issues at hand for audiences who aren’t going to be as informed about specifics and who will not necessarily share underlying values regarding the ideas in play.
There is, of course, another option which might possibly seem more attractive, one which comes from aesthetic theory rather than political or social theory, and that is that the artwork, if successful, will speak to us regardless of background based on its aesthetic values, not its political ones. From this perspective, the notion that an artwork need say something absolute and clearly distinct becomes, at best, a secondary value, and, to some, an almost or complete negation of the qualities necessary for great art as art, by its very nature in this view, does not provide answers, it creates unresolvable tensions. This latter idea is a difficult one as I think most of us have some deeply held beliefs which act as a sort of circuit breaker when viewing an artwork. That is to say that when some ethical or moral perspective is seen to be embraced, the circuit breaker trips and we can no longer appreciate the work from a disinterested perspective. This will also work against the idea of a universal language for movies to some degree, and goes quite a ways towards explaining why there can be no agreement on a set of great films by even the most devoted viewers who would seem to come from the same background and who seem to otherwise share similar beliefs.
We will always bring our singular experiences to bear when viewing, and no research can erase that, in fact the act of researching itself helps to further exemplify the divide as it in itself suggests a set of beliefs which can’t be entirely disregarded, just as believing that one can adopt a wholly disinterested stance and judge a movie purely on aesthetic values has a set of demands of its own. One can say that a a great film will overcome these difficulties and speak in one way to the outsider or the ignorant and in another way to the native or the informed, and in some sense this can be seen as true, but in another, it is simply a different value one might use or claim when judging or valuing a film, as one would have to assume the truth of one or the other half of the equation without being able to experience it yourself. The best one can hope for then is for the movie to simply find its audience and for each person to appreciate it as they feel they must. If enough people do, then the movie will find some larger spot in whatever culture those that appreciate it best belong to, and if it has a diverse appeal, then it will be considered “of value” in a larger variety of sub-cultures or groups and its importance will be magnified.
The TL:DR version is simply there is no right way to watch a movie, there is only the way that fits the viewer’s interests and beliefs.
The Runner is such a strange movie to be arguing about, since, as near as I can tell, there is very little disagreement over what it’s about or how it works other than perhaps some question over the ending and what the shouting is all about, nor should there be since the movie is both exceedingly simple and pretty familiar, at least in its general construction. The only differences basically are between those who were drawn into the story and those who weren’t or were less enthused by it.
Personally, you can count me with the second group as the elements which I found diverting didn’t make up for the feeling I had seen this film, or even more heard this story, before in various guises hundreds of times. That isn’t to say there is any other story I’ve seen that is absolutely identical, so for those who enjoyed the film, I’m sure they found something more compelling about the specific details of this particular film than I did. This isn’t surprising given how continually popular the the story of a plucky young lad, stout of heart and innocent in the ways of the world, one who is often an orphan or otherwise disadvantaged, is first disillusioned, corrupted, abused, or otherwise made to face the harsh realities of his time and place, but eventually overcomes them through grit, determination, and by becoming wise beyond his years, thus learning to outwit or outperform those who tried to keep him down. In some versions there may be a sad twist at the end as the world proves to much for anyone to handle, as the message of the destruction of innocence becomes the main focus. There is also the “coming of age” version where the naive boy is ushered into manhood by an impossibly beautiful, sensitive, and mysterious older woman who recognizes his worth where others don’t, but who is somehow just flawed enough to not remain near after the boy has become a man allowing him to look back wistfully on the relationship and what it taught him.
The story of this movie is another version of the tale, which typically occurs prior to the awakening of manhood, but is still the same sort of mythic retelling of adolescence. As is often the case, there is an autobiographical element to the story, one which turns the teller of the story into a sort of heroic figure, aggrandizing him by showing the troubles he overcame in order to tell the tale. In this sense, the story becomes a little less like Dickens and more like a Greek myth as the hero grows into a powerful figure rather than merely delineating the flaws of the larger social order. This difference is something I think Ari was getting at as when the tale is based more in a social construct the central figure becomes a sort of an unblemished lens through which we can see the society without the prejudice which might come from an inherited place in the world. Injustice can be more purely felt in this manner.
When the story has an autobiographical bent to it, the world is viewed through the eyes of the protagonist, so events are understandably more limited in scope to how it effected him. In this way, the story of The Runner makes perfect sense in the way it does eliminate most other perspectives of the world as it is told through something like Amiro’s POV. His interests are in simply surviving and thriving, so what other’s may think or feel would generally be somewhat alien to that perspective as isn’t his primary concern. This is why someone like Kiarostami’s films dealing with boys and their struggles tend to feel different as his viewpoint is to show the larger world which is creating the situation the boy is facing, so he will generally have some scenes which at least allude to the perspective of characters other than the boy rather than film the whole thing as if it were more purely from the internal point of view of the boy. The difference between these approaches can seem subtle at times as each may limit what is shown to things the boy is present for, but I would suggest that it is in the scenes and dialogue which is seemingly unnecessary for the boy’s story where the wider social order is explored, and The Runner mostly avoids this, essentializing the story to Amiro’s singular drive to escape his circumstance.
The narrative of The Runner is pretty basic, Amiro starts with nothing, and slowly tries to gain his way in the world, taking on an activity, having someone or something infer with it, usually unfairly, which seem to cause Amiro to abandon that activity for another slightly more profitable one during which someone will infer and he will move on again, and so on. Amiro’s trajectory is always upwards though, as he won’t let the interference or abuse hold him back. He sets his mind on a goal and accomplishes it suggesting that the story will continue in that vein after the filmed part of the story is over. The important thing about the ice race, isn’t the ice, it’s the race. The ice itself isn’t significant as such. We should know this by there being no real stake to the race other than what Amiro decides there will be. If he didn’t win it wouldn’t have mattered in any real sense other than he wanted so desperately to do so. This is why it is fairly evident that he would win since the stakes simply aren’t there for anyone else, so no matter how drawn out the race is, the end is fairly well determined. The “meaning” of the race then is one of mastery or self realization, this is why he treats the ice as he does and reacts so jubilantly. His perspective is the perspective of the film, this is why I find it hard to think of the movie as having anything like an ambivalent ending, it is a pretty certain one to me, but, of course, anyone can read into the film what they want. so if someone wants to focus on the ice melting as a symbol of the futility of the race, that is fine, I would suggest that it is more related to temporal concerns and trying to achieve something before the chance disappears, and how the other boys misunderstand the goal.
As to the What’s Eating Amiro Grape? yelling thing, I would shave to say that it doesn’t precisely make sense in thinking of it as Amiro wanting to be heard as the situations aren’t one’s in which he would be heard as opposed to those where he might be, that is when there are actually other people around, but that isn’t to say the general idea isn’t somewhat valid as Amiro is, in a sense, emulating the planes and is asserting his significance or desire to become someone of import who can escape like they do. He is yelling for himself then as much as anything I would think, not to gain the attention of someone else directly. With that I would also say that the sound and some of the cinematography was quite fine. I thought the use of long lens was often strong, and would have been even better had the print either not been faded or if a more vibrant film stock had been used. The lens choice, I felt, tied in nicely to the central themes of the movie, in that distance is so key to Amiro’s dreams and it can also reflect that other type of distance, the kind which exists between him and the other characters.
As to some of the other specifics of the movie, I found the basic repetition of the scenario to be heavy handed, as it became fairly obvious what was more or less going to occur at the start of each separate scenario. If I were a snarkier fellow, I would also wonder how the hell that kid is going to go anywhere with his poor money sense as he takes on a job which requires an investment in equipment only to abandon it shortly thereafter wasting the investment, his idea to chase down the guy who stole a glass of water by leaving behind his bucket of water and glass is a pretty good example of rial wise, toman foolish, and all the money he was spending on magazines and broken lightbulbs suggests more money to burn than any sort of plan, but I’ll chalk that up to poetic license I guess, just as I will his boat apartment, which seems a little precious to me otherwise.
It’s seems like every cup we’ve had so far there has been at lest a few films like this one, so they obviously are speaking to someone. Even with my general dislike of the little boy films, I can say that there are a few similar films which move me as well. In the first world cup, for example, I felt the The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun was an exceptional film, and it doesn’t differ too much from The Runner in it’s basic outline. Two of the most important or telling distinctions are that is about a little girl instead of a boy and, more importantly to me, that the story is treated more as a fable rather than the kind of inbetween feeling which seems to trouble people here about The Runner. This is the most interesting part of the argument here as the film does have something of a look of a film which is trying for a sense of “real” in a way which is somewhat incongruous given its method of essentialization and the lens choices. I suspect that this feeling comes in part from the sparsity of detail or objects in the film, as poor tends to more readily lend itself to thoughts of “real” than abundance, and in part due to the desaturated color of the film as vividity of color or higher contrast black and white is often used to give a feeling of heightened reality. The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, for example, is a much more vivid film in that sense.
I’m sure there is something somewhat automatic about the assumption though as well, as there is an understandable assumption that one wouldn’t exaggerate poverty like one would riches, so any film which shows the downside of life is therefore more likely to be “real” than one showing something more generally unobtainable. This too ties in with the history of films on similar subjects, a history which goes back much farther than the neo-realists, (of which The Runner seems more like DeSica than Rossellini to me even with the consonance with Germany Year Zero.) One can look back to the silent era for films with related subject matter, even if they didn’t often have the same sort of autobiographical feel, and later, one can look towards not only someone like Truffaut, but to films like Douglas’ My Childhood, which is also claimed as feeling “real” even with its obvious symbolic and otherwise mannered moments. (That, by the way, is another good example of a film with passionate admirers with which I disagreed, but can’t rightly gainsay, and one of many on the subject where trains play an outsized role. One begins to see why trains need so many damn engines, not only do they have to pull all those rail cars, but all that symbolic freighting they are encumbered with has to weigh a ton.)
Anyway, that’s my initial thoughts on the movie, I haven’t yet finished Lust for Gold, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to vote or not before the deadline, but it seems pretty clear from what I’ve seen so far I prefer Lust. Again though, none of that isn’t to say that I don’t recognize why other people may deeply appreciate a movie like The Runner in ways that I don’t. I can see where they’re coming from, but it simply isn’t the kind of movie which I generally enjoy. Simply put, I don’t tend to like movies about plucky young lads, hell, I haven’t even got around to watching 400 Blows yet for pretty much that same reason, so take from that what you will
Yeah, I could have put it more succinctly, big surprise there I’m sure, by simply saying The Runner is a movie where pretty much all the reactions to it seem to me to be pretty easily defensible as the movie simply comes down to how well you relate to the central character as that is pretty much all there is. SO those who dislike the film and those that like it aren’t really seeing anything radically different from each other, they are just having different emotional responses to what they’ve seen for various reasons.
Oh, and I started to make a list of films, but I wasn’t fully satisfied with it and ran out of time to submit as well as having some doubts about some of the peculiarities of the system as it would have handled my submissions. I neither wanted to have my choices over represented, especially given that I assumed many of the ones I would have most wished to see used would be the ones with the most competition, and that would have left a lot of films which I felt wouldn’t have been as widely appreciated by those participating as they were by me. I also didn’t want to knock off films which those who knew a country’s film history better might have selected, for example, I was going to select an early “Bollywood” movie for India, but I was more than pleased to see the one Apursansar chose instead and I would have felt bad if my selection had bumped one which is both more likely to be eye-opening and appreciated. Or one could say I’m just weird, which might be more to the point.
Nah, I just know people here have a limit on the amount of melodramas and other odd and old stuff they’d want to see. if we have a pre-1960 cup sometime, I’ll be all over it.
I dig all of those, and Khuda Gawah is particularly awesome,although I have little doubt but that its wonders would be lost on most here given the fear of the sheer power of Bollywood excess, but the one I was going to really submit was Mahal, a sort of an Indian precursor to Vertigo if you will.
Jazz, it seems to me that you are coming to this question from the wrong way around, and that is what is having an impact on your “answer”. If there are values to which we can all agree on without question or internal opposition, than in society those things should be able to be realized. That society isn’t able to find or maintain these alleged values should suggest that there is more to the question than saying we all can agree peace love and harmony are good. If there is something in a movie which truly bothers us, say overt racism, we will be truly bothered, and we won’t take to the film. If we aren’t bothered by the film, than it isn’t having that sort of effect on us which means we aren’t noticing any instances of racism or whatever that may or may not exist in the film. Your suggestion then is to say films need to be more forthright about promoting certain values, that is to say the films need to better highlight race and positive reactions to it to basically force people to notice what they wouldn’t have otherwise, that or films should otherwise only show positive interactions among people and avoid negative representations and objectionable actions. This would pretty much drive everyone away from the theater as those who already “know” these things would find the films tedious and heavy handed, and those who don’t would find little to interest them or would feel preached to as the necessary stooping to the lowest level would render the stories virtually inert and uninteresting.
The problem is that we actually like violence and some forms of feeling separate or different than others. Individually those boundaries may vary, but the complexity of human beings isn’t something that can be smoothed out in any reasonable manner. Art doesn’t exist to give answers, if there is an obvious answer which we already know, then a movie dealing with it isn’t of interest as it would simply be didactic and aimed at some “lesser” folk who needed the lesson. Art isn’t science, it doesn’t provide answers, it thrives on dissonance, the contradictory impulses which exist in each of us. A work of art basically deals with the boundaries between two worlds, the real one which we exist and live or day to day lives, and an essentialized or exaggerated one which is then contrasted to the real internally which is where our response comes from.
If you remember, you started a thread for me once on “needing” violence in films. This is what I’m referring to. Even in the most liberal and artiest of art films which seem to directly condemn violence, we often find our “pleasure” or gain our strong emotional response by seeing some character we empathize with suffer or die. This is where the catharsis comes from. We are both enjoying the violence as that is would provides the artistic experience while we are also repulsed by that very violence we need to fully appreciate the film. We need Hamlet to die and take out the entire court of Denmark, or Lear and his daughter to be led off to their ends. Even if a film manages to end ahppily, we still need the protagonist to suffer to make the gained end worth attaining.
This isn’t just true of high art films, or violence, it is generally true of all “art” or entertainment, even if we ourselves don’t enjoy it or find it simplistic or something, someone else might be for reasons similar to those above. Why, for example, are The Dark Knight and Star Wars so damn popular? I would suggest that a key component of their success has to do with how much people “like” the villians and wish them to succeed, or not fully fail. People “know” the so-called good guys are going to win in the end when they start watching the movies, so it isn’t a matter of suspense, but a sense of being torn between what one knows should happen and what one is also enthralled by, the allure of the “bad”. It’s easy to say something like war is bad or violence is unacceptable, but that is a facile attitude which doesn’t begin to explain why war and violence exists. We are more complex than such easy answers can account for, and that underlying complexity is what is measured out in art. Art addresses social goods by showing the contradictions inherent in the social order and in each of us. Art doesn’t exist to give answers, it exists to raise the questions.
Even more than no obligation, I would suggest that art is basically built around feelings of tension and release, even music, so a narrative form is almost, by definition, going to be dealing with areas of our being which don’t allow for easy moralities. Even the Christian mystery itself is based on the notion of suffering and violent death leading to redemption of the world, one doesn’t get the reward without the pain, that’s a large part of the power of the story.
I wasn’t suggesting that there was no symbolic meaning to the ice, just that I don’t think it is quite as House would have it. My reference to temporality and the race was suggesting that while Amiro was looking at life as something which could slip away from him if he didn’t run to catch it, which is why the reward of the ice itself wasn’t of greatest significance to him it was in winning the race and being able to grasp it before it melted away, while the other kids were focused more on the transitory pleasure the ice provided. The symbolism of the film, such as it is, is somewhat interesting in that it is all, for lack of a better term, first order symbolism, which is to say that the planes, trains and the like hold symbolic meaning for Amiro himself, and not just the audience, so we are sort of seeing his understanding of their “meaning” in large part, which suits their simplicity.
Jazz, personally I would love to see more color blind casting for roles as most Hollywood characters don’t have any specific traits which should limit their casting to a specific race. I also would like to see more diveristy in the ranks of those who make films at every level, from studio heads to writers, and happily support any efforts to call out the industry for its failings along these lines. This, however, is a different thing than suggesting films should have some standards imposed on them in terms of the stories they tell. Trying to force art to fit a mold of some sense of how the world should be isn’t going to do the art or the audience any favors, particularly since an audience isn’t a monolithic entity but a group of people who will react in very different ways to what is being shown. Many Hollywood films seemingly aimed at providing more “positive” minority representation are those which become more widely mocked or scorned than films which don’t tackle the subject. I’m not even sure of your claim about the current racial climate in Hollywood being one where minorities are represented most as gang bangers, there is some of that, sure, but after all the grief the industry ahs received they’ve also tended to go the “magic negro” route a lot where someone like Morgan Freeman will be there just to do what you suggest, present a positive image, or where some “friend” of the main character will be a minority, but not get much to do beyond providing the protagonist with some cred for being so open minded. I’m not sure that positive portrayal for the sake of positive is any better than a more important “bad” character. Of course it would be ideal if there were simply more minority characters of all types, but Hollywood in general isn’t very adept at nuanced or subtle characterization since they generally aim their product at the broadest audience possible, thus they tend to dumb down the films or eliminate complexity which leaves little range for most portrayals of any sort.
This is sort of process is why I am even more against the whole “think of the children” attitude as that is exactly the sort of lowest common denominator attitude which will further rob the form of any interest whatsoever. A lot of the worst art I can think of is just that, aimed to be inoffensive and not threatening to anyone, it’s a hollow shell of what art could be and it does those precious children no favors by portraying some sugar sweet fantasyland which has little to do with the real world. I’m not sure that overly sheltered children are at all better off than those who aren’t so sheltered in terms of how they will later view the world or what
I would also suggest that you might be giving movies much to much credit in terms of influence nowadays as they are an increasingly limited form, one which, at its largest popular appeal is aimed so broadly as to be almost empty of merit, and one which at its other end is much more able to deal with diversity and nuance, but which few will seek out. Television, the internet and video games are much more influential I’d think. This brings up another point, and that is that it seems a little odd how so many people are worried more about the possible harm of representation when they often ignore the real harm done in so many other areas. Typing all of this out on a computer should give one pause when considering the conditions those that made the computer are laboring under, for example. Or if “thinking of the children” one might do better to look to sports like football and hockey where studies are consistently showing there is actual long term physical harm being done to children rather than any more abstract possibility of it. This, again, isn’t to say that I don’t agree with some of your diagnosis regarding representation but your prescription for a cure seems misguided to me.
hardly anybody knows Mexican studio system Bunuel, which I think is his greatest period.
You think it’s his greatest period? Let’s just say it without the pussyfootin’, it is his greatest period, notwithstanding the excellence of some of his later work. And I say that without yet having had a chance to see Illusion Travels by Streetcar, which is very well thought of by those who have delved into this period more deeply.
I’m really looking forward to this round due not only to finally having the chance to see Illusion, but also because Apursansar never seems to bring out anything but great lesser known movies to these events. I fully expect to love both films and have a devil of a time deciding between them.
Yes, I think government support of the arts is often really misunderstood in how it works and what advantages it provides artists and therefore those who appreciate the arts.
There are a number of ways in which government assistance is used to help the arts. In liberal western states, like many of those in Europe or in Canada, there is or was a mandate to protect and develop the cultural heritage of the state as they viewed the arts as a important public good. To this end, fairly generous funding was often set aside in order to further this aim. There was usually a department of the government which had as part of its mission protecting and supporting the arts.
Under the mandates which these departments tended to operate under, it was often the case that support for the arts meant providing assistance to artists which could come through some direct funding or through other material aid. This doesn’t mean the government was either fully funding the projects nor influencing them in any direct way, as the methods of support would often be more indirect than that or come during the planning stages or be commissions for noted artists who would then have more freedom to create their works without concern for the same level of commercial concerns. The funding would often be even more indirect with money being given to ;larger arts institutions which would then develop commissions or help fund projects deemed of import by smaller panels of artists and curators who would offer grants to artists who came up with interesting proposals. This could take the form of competitions between artists where the money would then be divided by need and potential merit, or it could come in the form of an application for some assistance which the organization would look at.
Often what would happen in the latter cases is that the government, or some smaller local branch, might simply give a portion of the necessary funding in order to allow other public and private partners to be able to pick up the rest of the cost without having to worry as much about recouping their investment. State television stations would be another route which government funding would find its way to filmmakers as the movie would be commissioned for state tv. The advantage of this system would be even more obvious if one could simply find a list of the works made with some government assistance. A large number of what we now consider to be some of the greatest artists had the chance to work due to this assistance, and a large number of important artistic achievements in the arts came via this route as well.
This isn’t to say that such a system produces nothing but gold or is without flaws, there can be favoritism and other biases on grant panels just as anywhere else, but the mandate itself creates a very different art environment than one which commercial concerns trump all. In a way, one can think of it as being something like the government support for libraries. Just because the government provides funding for libraries doesn’t lead people to think that the books in the library or the librarians are all working to some nefarious end. Librarians, like teachers, often oppose the government which funds them as they see their institution as having a higher purpose than short term concerns about saving or making a buck.
In the US, of course, this mandate only barely exists and is often perverted by those who see no value in the cultural heritage or see it as belonging more rightly to private corporations or individuals. Government funding here has suffered repeated attacks over the years for these reasons. An agency like the NEA will get some meager funding, which they will them give out to notable arts organizations like museums or preservation groups, but sooner or later one of the institutions which received money will show something vaguely controversial, this work may not have been directly funded by the NEA, but the institution itself was so someone will claim they are deeply insulted by the work and thus funding for the arts is obviously morally repugnant. There will be cries of socialism; the work doesn’t appeal to anybody but elites, art should support itself like in Hollywood so funding for this pretentious crap is wrong, and, of course, think of the children, they will be harmed by this minority point of view, all right thinking people know the world isn’t like this.
I am fully behind government support of the arts, and this support is also attached to the copyright debate in that I believe we, as a public, own our cultural heritage, we, understandably, want to aid artists by protecting their interests for a time, but they are only caretakers for works which belong to us all. I have a hard time understanding people who love the arts but can’t seem to support funding them as a society. If the arts are important to us, and everything I can see suggests they are, even if we don’t agree on which works, then demanding support and preservation would seem to be a no brainer. But, then again, this is America and here the dollar is god and individuality built off the fear of others unlike you is the mindset, so art, which so often works against those concepts is going to have a hard time.
Indeed, Mexico does have much to be proud of in its film history, and while I might shy away from saying there are plenty of much better films than Bunuel’s from that period, there are, at least plenty of films which should be regarded as highly. Unfortunately, there is only so much you can do with a three film limit to capture a nation’s film history. Personally. I was planning on choosing a Fernandez film if I had submitted a list as he is indeed worthy of the attention, but I can’t argue with Bunuel’s films from this period also deserving more attention on their own merits and also as providing a better understanding of one of the most well regarded directors in film history who has been all too often looked at only through the lens of some later work. It’s a similar feeling to that I had about Wiseman being the first selection from the US. Wiseman’s films haven’t been viewed by wide numbers of viewers, so any of his films could use the support, but he was selected in one of the previous cups and he is also a “known” quantity in terms of name at least for those who have spent much time looking at film history, so one could also argue that picking a movie by a less well known, on mubi, director or a film which may stand outside pantheons of great artists could have been more rewarding. It is an argument that has no good way to be answered as each path has advantages as long as both paths would end up with a worthwhile movie in the end.
I don’t even know where to begin with those claims…
I don’t know what you mean by more democratic, that isn’t something I would have claimed as an issue one way or the other as I’m not sure what you are even suggesting is being measured there. One could assume more democratic would be more popular as in people are “voted” with their wallets when they went to see Avatar in record numbers as opposed to something like Summer Hours, thus making Avatar the more “democratic” choice for artistic success. This is pretty much the opposite of my point which is based more around long term artistic/cultural values rather than short term financial success. Popularity of the moment is great, for those who enjoy it and commercial cinema is fairly adept at making bucks by creating films people will go see, those films don’t need much in the way of government subsidies, although they often still receive some in the way of tax benefits, write offs, and local government assistance in some form as an exchange for filming in a given location. A movie like Summer Hours isn’t going to be popular in the same way. It received government subsidies, like most French films have for decades, so I guess France’s cinematic output, like that of a number of other European nations, must be pretty much made up of unentertaining and unrisky films, as well as funding from state television, which hacks like Bergman also received, and some local government funding and material assistance from the Musee d’Orsay, which receives funds from the government as well. This assistance didn’t fund the movie on its own, there was private investment into the production as well, but the government assistance helps the private investors make some money out of what isn’t as likely to be popular in the broad sense.
If you hadn’t noticed, much of the most highly regarded art, highly regarded by those who are most involved with art as something of longer lasting significance and deeper value than that of momentary whim, often tend not to be immediately popular and as their value isn’t even judged in those same terms. Now, one can reject that view of aesthetic value or artistic importance, a great many do which is why art funding is so difficult to put together for many artists. If that’s the case, then I can see why trying to preserve our cultural heritage would seem so ridiculous as the moment is now and the past is gone, so letting those old movies deteriorate on the shelves is fine, and supporting art that only might appeal to a small segment of the population simply isn’t worth anything as if it were there would be money to be made in doing so. I disagree with that notion and believe that art provides much more to our culture than can be measured in dollars, but I’m not even going to try to get into that argument right now.
It’s great that there is are places like the Museum of Fine Arts which need so little government assistance to survive. Yes, some artists and institutions can manage to get by on purely private funds, nothing too surprising about that. Those institutions are lucky as a great many museums and other arts organizations do require some assistance to get by. If you’re lucky enough to live in a big city with lots of deep pocketed donor types, than you have the advantage, but not everyone does and not all arts are so easily housed in an institution in any case, so some people are just going to be out of luck if they aren’t in the right place, and some arts will largely wither away, which is fine I guess since they are only marginal and not popular so they don’t deserve government aid like sports stadiums or oil companies which deserve their support since they are so needed by the masses. “Capitalism” plays favorites to you know, we just like to pretend it is neutral when it serves our purposes, like in debates about cutting off the minimal funding to the arts as a way to throw meat to the crowd to keep them from paying attention to where the money actually goes. Yeah, paying 20$ to see a show is nice for those that have the dough, of course not everyone has that kind of money to spend on such things, but those that don’t probably don’t deserve arts anyway being losers. We should probably finish killing off the libraries for that reason as well since anyone who can’t afford a book likely wouldn’t know what to do with one besides color in it anyway. Heck, screw books all together, Kindles are where it’s going to be at anyway as that’s the trendy popular thing, consequences be damned.
It seems like you sorta skimmed part of my last post, which I understand since they are fucking wordy and probably not all the fun to read, but your second paragraph seems to either miss my point, which could be my fault, or to actively accept what I was suggesting as a misguided view as true. I might be misunderstanding what you are saying by “what does government intervention in the arts accomplish” though. If you mean funding, then your allusion to the painting The Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili kinda makes my point as it wsn’t covered in feces, and it didn’t receive any direct government funding. The city of New York provided general funding to the museum which exhibited the painting and then sought to have that funding pulled when Giuliani decided to score some political points by making a todo about the painting and the decline of moral values in the world. Giuliani lost that battle in court and it all came to nothing in the end other than some outrage porn.
Now if you meant that the act of having any funding for an institution like the Brooklyn Museum allows for schmucks to make those arguments and therefore it would simply be better if there was no funding in the first place so the arguments couldn’t happen, then, sure, you would be right in the sense that government officials couldn’t threaten to pull funding which wasn’t there, though that wouldn’t stop them from being outraged by the art anyway. No, on second thought maybe it would stop them as losing enough funding could get them to close their doors. Oh, sure, maybe they could come up with the extra 7 million from private donors, after all New York is a big city so they have plenty of people with cash around, the nice thing about private donors is that there disputes happen behind closed doors so the public isn’t even aware of what they will lose when the donor threatens to pull their money if things don’t go their way or sets conditions for the funds to be used. That keeps everything so much neater. Even better, the institution might be able to snag some corporate sponsors who will not only pressure the institution to avoid controversy which might effect their image, but they might be able to score some choice corporate tie ins as well, and who really minds having art choices managed by corporations with their eye primarily on their bottom line? I mean we all vote with our wallets and use their products, so it’s a perfect marriage of both capitalism and democracy, which is definitely what art should be about, the bottom line. (This is setting aside all the studies which show that government support for the arts tends to be a net positive economically as well as making locations which make the investment more desirable for living and therefore for future growth.)
Oh, and I’m not sure the forum, with it’s few hundred users worldwide, proves much about the survival chances for anything, including the forum itself.
Jazz, one of the things I was trying to get at in that other thread goes back to the discussion we were having about Langer and aesthetics where the idea of an emotional logic was brought up. The difference between rational logic and emotional logic, I think, is partly what is causing some of the disagreements here as it sounds like, though I may be misunderstanding you, that you are thinking of this film and films in general as needing a rational logic in order to be important or meaningful and that you are speaking of morality in terms which would be better thought of as being associated with the same kind of rational process as “intellectual” logic has. That is to say there is a preferred or right answer to which one can turn or a more or less linear process of thinking which can be applied to understand a movie.
I would suggest that this is not the right way to think of art and what it provides, or the best way to understand how a movie might effect someone, regardless of whether that is how they are generally talked about in many circles, critical or otherwise. An emotional logic needn’t have that sort of rational connectiveness to it, indeed, I would suggest that the power of art generally comes from not having it even if people tend to justify what they like in those terms. It is the conflict between the perception of the real and the feeling we have which often animates our deeper responses to art and better fit how we live than more rational decisions can allow. People may intellectually believe all sorts of things which they fail to enact, the conflict between the belief and living it is something fundamental to humanity.
Just as in this film intellectual and moral beliefs are both at odds and both unable to deal with the problem in the way their certainty might suggest, we are caught in a world where our beliefs and our intellectual understanding, no matter how rock solid or certain, are constantly faced with situations which deny that certainty or challenge our position as moral and/or rational creatures. Often we may find a way to place the “blame” for this on something other than ourselves and go on holding that there is certainty out there if only others would see it or if only such and such things would happen to shine a light on what we know to be true, but I would suggest that when it comes to opur interactions with the world or each other that the flaw is more often in believing in the certainty to begin with. But I can’t be entirely sure sure about that without contradiction of course, so it’s just something to think over.
Yes, I kinda felt that was what you were going for, and I do enjoy Jazz’s threads on all these topics as it gives an opportunity to flesh these things out, but I would also suggest that perhaps the very act of questioning in this sense almost demands a set of answers which can almost never be satisfactory as it leads towards the sort of more linear thinking which art isn’t best fit for.
Heh. Thanks. I just hope that I didn’t come off as too dismissive as the naive comment may have made me go a bit overboard and I wouldn’t want it to sound like I think these questions are cut and dried or that I don’t respect Jirin’s opinions on this overall. It is true that there are flaws with most methods of government funding, but when contrasted with teh alternative I know where I stand on the issue as, to me, the government should represent the sort of society in which we wish to live and act towards bettering the circumstances of people, particularly those who catch the shit end of things, often for only the fault of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time. I know my values aren’t shared by all, but to me the difference lies as much in what the downsides of adopting a given approach would be as much as in the best possible outcome, and in that sense, providing some decent funding the arts has far less of a downside than the alternative from what I can see.
He does doesn’t he? I often wish I had his ability to frame questions as I tend to find I can’t really express something until I hear alternatives which don’t fit my thinking. (Oh, and, please, your posts are always great and far less amorphous than mine.)
And while you may not oppose all depictions of such things, once you start down the path of defining those issues and somehow regulating them, someone out there surely will and make demands which you yourself may not, which is part of the problem.
Oh, it happens, as much as I try not to let it since I know the intent wasn’t to create that feeling. I always feel bad if it does come off that way as it is usually just a momentary impulse created by associations to other things and a less than generous reading of something. I have a number of friends who are artists, and have had arguments about funding and the like before with people who, unlike Jirin, were actively jerks, so I undoubtedly let that influence my reading of his post unwarrantedly. There have been other times where I’ve said things I felt bad about later, I remember the Von Trier vs Khoo match in a previous cup going that route and I also remember an unkind remark I made about Nora Ephron to someone here once which I regretted as I think it made the person who brought her up feel unwelcome. I felt so bad about that latter one that I sat down and watched all of the Nora Ephron films my local video store had to try and find a better perspective on her work. (Note to Nora, don’t remake Lubitsch films, it can’t end well.)
I think it is important to go beyond the point of how much money is being spent or should or could be added or subtracted to that total and look towards why these expenditures matter. I don’t have nor will likely have any children, and I am no longer a young man, so from a purely self-interested point of view I could say that spending on things like education or the environment is unnecessary as those expenditures will hold little benefit for me, they’re problems for people who have some greater stake in the future of the country or world than my limited time and stake. I could say that, but I don’t because I believe in government being there to represent the greatest common good for all who live under it. A world where each simply looks out for their own is inherently problematic as it is not only too attached to short term goals and simple exchange, it is also an ugly world one where people aren’t asked to see commonalities between themselves and one where we wouldn’t strive for anything beyond ourselves, where ideals of something greater than ourself and our individual wants don’t hold any value if they don’t profit someone more than they cost.
JAzz’s initial question was about whether art should be constrained or restricted to certain moral aims, underlying that question, I would say, is the idea the art is a secondhand “good”, that it benefits the culture only by sharing some moral values or readily discernible intellectual end, that it isn’t a good in and of itself regardless of some rational “meaning”. Art transcends its time and culture, it goes beyond concerns for what might be the moral issues of the day and speaks to generations of people all over the world. Art is meaningful in and of itself, it doesn’t require some secondhand justification for its existence. Our troubles and day to day battles are immensely important to us but we as individuals will largely fade from history and will be thought of as statistics, as being part of some common mass of action or lack thereof. Most history is written from the side of how we made others suffer, how we were wrong or how power was gained or lost by nations or some select powerful individuals who had some will to power. What else is there? The individual lives of anonymous plumbers, accountants or clerks simply won’t matter over time just as those anonymous figures of the past don’t matter to us outside of perhaps some relatives or remote acquaintance.
History would be a cold, sad and distant thing if that was all that we had to look at and to find significance in, but that isn’t all there is, there is also science and art, the record of mankind’s excellence of its challenge to anonymity and to bring something more to the world. We look to the history of art as some of the highest achievements of mankind. The art of the past is not only what ties us more concretely to the time, but it personalizes the connection, it shows how we are linked to those who came before and how their understanding of the world still resonates with our own. It creates an unbroken lineage of man’s struggles and aspirations, the beauty and sorrows of the individual. It keeps the world gone alive as we can “feel” that world and not only see it as a part of our own, but come to embody it as the works of the past are what we build our own understanding of the present and future on.
How does this relate to government funding of the arts? There are several primary ways why this is important. The first is simply that supporting government funding of the arts signals the importance of the arts to the culture. It establishes our values as a society and it gives context to what we believe and who we are in a way that says our interests are not simply self serving or short term, that we as a people are interested in our connection to the past and to the future as well as to expression by those who aren’t necessarily powerful or rulers. Funding the arts is a way to say there are things that are important which aren’t directly associated with profit or gain but are valuable for themselves and what they show about our interactions with the world and each other. It is a way to spread beauty, to share wonder or awe, to express fear, sadness or other passions, to criticize and to refuse to fade into the shadows of time. Funding the arts is to say, yes, these things are important to us as a people. We need not like any particular work of art to say art itself is worth protecting, preserving and creating, we just have to recognize the place it holds in our lives and our histories and to celebrate that.
Because of this we also need to ensure that art is available for all to see and that we are educating people in its history. There is little immediate profit in funding education in the arts or in giving people access to art which isn’t under the commercial control of some organization or figure, but these things are necessary, just as education in science or history would be. This is threatened not only by a failure to fund the arts, but by the way we accord rights to them. We are allowing what should be the common good to be controlled by those whose primary interest is financial and this is disastrous. There is no question but that we should protect the ability of artists to make a living with their art , but carrying that to extremes is not only wrong but inherently contradictory to the purported purpose of such protection. In capitalism it is claimed that competition will provide a sort of balance of interests, but the goal of any entity within that system is to maximize their own profits at the expense of others, so they seek anti-competitive ends as that will prevent others from threatening their gains. This failure threatens our understanding of human history and renders the past ever more obscure, or something to be played with only by those who can afford to get in the door. Art is understood through the experience of it. It needs to be accessed to be understood. You can’t share an artwork through secondhand means as it is an irreducible object. Denying or limiting access to the arts directly or by allowing that control to be held by for profit entities is equivalent to allowing a corporation to control access to certain thoughts or ideals. It is to put the human psyche up for sale.
Our public history is inextricably linked to art which was brought out before us, but we are prevented for ever accessing any of that shared history on equal terms. Allowing art to remain in private or corporate hands is to give up the very basis of our civilization to entities whose interests are purely their own. (In this I am speaking of “art” in the broadest terms including all forms of of shared thought which fall under copyright laws, not just the so-called “high arts”. By giving up this control and by not funding education and access we are favoring the ephemeral and the parochial over the broader interests of all. By not asserting a greater value for the arts, a value which those who currently control them are well aware of which is why they fight so vehemently to keep their control, we are, at the least, tacitly saying that our interests, the interests of society, is best served by being entirely in the hands of the private whim or corporate control. This is a horrible wrong which robs us of our heritage and our very own histories as we are prevented from having any claim on that which has shaped the our world.
None of this is to suggest that private investment in the arts isn’t important, indeed it is. The government neither can nor should seek to take over that role, and should work to ensure that there is a fair opportunity to profit or to share privately funded works without interference and to allow artists and those who fund them to live well off of whatever returns they can get, as long as that is done within reasonable bounds where the “rights” of the individual don’t curtail the greater needs to the society. I’m not suggesting there are clear or easily determined boundaries for these things or suggesting some definitive limits to control. What I am saying is that we are out of balance now and heading further in the wrong direction and we need to stop this trend before we lose all. Government funding for the arts is a help, not an answer, it should be meant to assist those who may not fit current profit models and to help set a tone and protect the interests of the greater society at least as fiercely as it does those who seek to profit. What I’m suggesting isn’t anything radical, no, what is radical is the direction we are going in, not only in terms of laws and funding, but in terms of how the arts are viewed overall. This last point isn’t something which funding would necessarily directly improve, although having a broader selection of arts available and better emphasizing their importance would certainly help in this regard, it is something which needs to be fought every time someone speaks of cultural vegetables, or “trash”, or white elephants. Art needs to be celebrated at least as much and as fully as the kitschy pleasures of the ephemeral or the solipsistic pleasures of the nostalgic. I have nothing against any form of art, there is no type of movie or writing or painting or music which is inherently less worthy of attention than another, but the way which we view these things strikes me as being almost completely out of whack as that which pleasures without reflection or effort is given pride of place over that which might go beyond simply reinforcing what we already know.
I could go on, but I suspect I’ve already reached a point of diminishing returns with that block of text, so I’ll leave it there.
While I’ve said some harsh things about Ebert before, I think one can profit by trying to see his good points as well as his weaknesses. He is genuine, reliable, generally open-minded, generous, and largely unjaded. He writes clearly and simply with a seemingly undiminishing passion for his work. He is also a relatively unadventurous thinker and a linear answer and connection driven one who tends towards generalities and surface interpretation. He is a fine reviewer who has done much for making movies more accessible to the average viewer, but who doesn’t provide much meat for the more informed. As a more serious critic his work leaves much to be desired, but I’m not sure that is even something he is concerned about given how he presents himself and where. His position among film writers is certainly out of proportion with his contributions in terms of lasting impact, but this is more of a by-product of his success with his primary audience than something more nefarious. Personally I don’t have much use for his writing anymore, though I did watch his show with Siskel religiously when I was young, and I to am often displeased by his outsized reputation and “say” on movies and other topics, but I really can’t begrudge him for it and I certainly can’t hold it against him as a person since he is, by most accounts, a man who seems to live,and not just perform those better attributes I associate with him.
Santino, isn’t that more of an issue which the industry should be addressing rather than a critic? I mean one of the entertainment industries biggest perceived problems is piracy, and studies show that piracy dramatically increases when there are staggered release dates for movies and television shows. For releases that already have a distributor, its like trying to hold the world to a standard which has passed.
Regarding Ebert or pretty much any published reviewer or critic, one has to think about what how they view their assumed responsibilities. I would suggest that one of the things that makes Ebert such a force is that he seems to be the reviewer he is most adamant seeing his job as being for his readers first and foremost. Contrast this to someone like Armond White or Dan Kois who seem to believe their primary responsibility is to their publications, or less generously to their careers, hence their constant need to linkbait or be contrarian, or to someone like Rosenbaum who seem to be primarily be concerned with being true to the movies themselves and letting the audience follow as they may.
This, as Matt suggests, certainly has something to do with who they write for, but I think it is also something more personal as well. I can’t even begin to believe Ebert couldn’t largely write about whatever films he wants at this point as I would bet that he is the most read writer on his paper’s staff, and therefore could follow whatever path he wanted as long as he maintained that readership. He chooses to, I think, focus on what he perceives as the interests of his readers and his responsibility to them. I don’t know whether Ebert could write more “serious” critiques well, the kind of stuff which might better fit in at film journals with dedicated afficiandos as the main audience. I’m sure he could become more David Kehrlike, and go further down that path if he chose, but he simply doesn’t view films the way someone like Rosenbaum does. This is both why he is so widely read and why his influence can be less than ideal for those who take a somewhat opposing view of art.
I’ve said before that Ebert and Kael are both the best and worst things to ever happen to film criticism, and by that I mean no two critics have done more to popularize criticism with the wider public and get them to appreciate a personal response, but both have also had an enormous influence on how movies are discussed, and in that way their influence isn’t entirely benign if one wants more than thumbs up or thumbs down and talk of trash. By being so reader friendly, they have allowed their audiences to feel that movies are there for them to judge without needing to bring anything to the movies. There is a reductive quality to their way of thinking of movies which makes the audience member, as represented by themselves, the focal point of the art. How the movie responds to the audiences wants or needs then becomes more of the issue than trying to apply oneself to the movie or to expand one’s way of viewing. This is a generalization of course, but it is largely the feel I get from their writing and why I so often oppose them even as I can also see things to admire as well.
Edit: I should also add that it is helpful to remember that most published critics are writers first and critics second, by which I mean that their job is more dependent on their ability to write well and to be get copy in on time whether or not they have anything significant to say. Most critics seem to come from fields which, at best, are only glancingly connected to film, so they aren’t necessarily going to be particularly well suited or informed about much of it necessarily. This isn’t an entirely bad thing as it isn’t like there is some better competing model out there from which “real” critics can be found.
Whether one can write that way or not and find a large general audience while still appealing to those who are more involved with an art form, any art form, is something of an open question, but it isn’t something I would normally attribute to Ebert and Kael, other than on rare occasions. That ins’t to say there that there is anything necessarily wrong with writing for a larger and more general audience, emphasis on the necessarily, but both of them have some specific attitudes which I believe create sets of expectations which I think run counter to being able to appreciate art in its fullest aspects. I put scare quotes around “serious” to signal a difference between styles, not to suggest that either Kael or Ebert weren’t in earnest about their reviews by the way. I am failing to find an easier way to describe the difference in approach short of launching into a long spiel which I would like to avoid at this point. I, of course, recognize that my interests, or those of people who want something more from reviews than what is generally given by Ebert are not the only ones out there, nor should they be seen as being as definitively more valuable than those who do like his writing, I’m merely suggesting there is a gap between the two which may be more difficult to bridge than often seem to be assumed, and that trying to find a way to bridge that gap would be a very valuable thing if it could be done.
It depends on what you are hoping for or want from art and critics I guess. My feeling is that Ebert, and even more so Kael, are given a sort of intellectual standing or weight in the culture which helps to create a context for viewing art which has some ramifications which I find deeply unsatisfactory. I, of course, wouldn’t suggest that the pleasure people get from reading them is somehow wrong or illegitimate, just that there are consequences to their popularity. Is this better or worse than some unknown alternative? I can’t say as those two certainly didn’t create the sort of cultural view I suggest they are perpetuating, the culture was moving that way before them and would likely have continued that direction without them. My problem is with some of that cultural shift and how those two, by dint of their popularity help cement it in place further. I’m not trying to suggest there aren’t good things to be said about their popularity as well, indeed I suggested some aspects of that, I’m just trying to explain the difference in appreciation of them by some of us and give some clue as to what reasons there are for that disagreement.
By the way, I’m also not trying to suggest that this is some sort of one way street where it’s Ebert and Kael, and those they influence, are the sole problems opposing some poor set of better writers who should be getting the attention instead. It’s just that we are talking about Ebert here so I’m focused on his role primarily. I could just as easily point out the immense failure of the “academic” writers to, you know, actually learn to write in a way that can be readily understood. If my problem with Ebert is outsized influence due to his giving his audience what they want, my problem with all too many deservedly unknown writers is that they can’t say anything clearly or interestingly to anyone not in a graduate film studies program, and even then I suspect there is a lot of sighing and headshaking going on. Writing well about cinema requires the author to, well, write first and foremost. You need to be engaging and to provide ideas which grab the reader and make them think about things in a different light. Academia doesn’t value that, just the opposite really, the value thee tends to be speaking to a select audience in a way that renders art almost entirely moot as it is more about showing command of thinking about thinking about art then anything else. Academic writing, a branch of which invades which many film journals, is talking to a couple dozen people at a time and trying to convince them you already agree.
Edit: Regarding the Turin Horse/Artist thing, I would first suggest that one needn’t have something become “popular” to be more popular, and that the question could be more profitably not thought of as that sort of comparison at all but as a way of looking at movies in general regardless if it is Super *, Tree of Life, Turin Horse or Twilight: Breaking Dawn. It is more the approach than some final judgement I am concerned about.
It depends. Being challenging is good, being pointless obscure so not so much. Being entertaining is neither good nor bad in itself, what one is being entertained by and being aware of it though is kinda important.
Because it has consequences, because self knowledge is a value in itself, because without it we end up with the sort of endlessly regressive cycle of diminishment where the same shit is shoveled our way over and over again and we can’t figure out why we aren’t more satisfied, or god help us, enriched. Sure, to most people these may not seem like important questions, but I believe they are even if people don’t think about it themselves. Art does more than simply entertain, it’s a complex form of communication that also tells us something about ourselves and the world. Understanding something of what we are being asked to respond to can help us see these things more clearly. A good critic does that, enlightens, and doesn’t just gloss the surface to provide a thumbs up or down so we don’t “waste time” seeing something we wouldn’t already know.
Yeah, I more or less agree with what you are saying about Ebert overall there Matt. I was mostly suggesting that he could have at least occasionally gone in somewhat different directions, not radically so, but that wouldn’t suit him anyway, which, as you point out, is kind the gist of the matter.
I am a little more ambivalent about the industry release schedule thing though since if they are planning on an eventual wide release, then the advertising costs are already going to be set, and might even be lessened as they perhaps wouldn’t need to be duplicated market by market. There is, of course, a question of theater availability involved and some other associated issues, but if they are so worried about pirating then they surely would do things to mitigate that factor, and cost, which this would help do. (I’m also thinking internationally here and not just a slow roll out in the US as the movies which most get pirated aren’t those that get that treatment here.) Whatever the case, I can’t help but feel the industry needs to find new models for distribution as the old ones are just that, old, and aren’t always really well suited to today’s world.
True, and that is a problem as it helps foster a divide, which may not be possible to ever fully bridge, but which could at least be lessened, or so I think anyway.
2012 MUBI World Cup - Voting Secrets over 1 year ago
Hmm. the question of how much information should be required to understand a movie is an interesting one as it goes towards the idea of movies as a universal language, which is often assumed but needn’t be accepted. Given most films are best understood from the perspective of the culture from which the film comes from, the suggestion that there is some amount of research which can provide an adequate basis for “getting” the movie to anywhere near the same degree as a native of the culture is problematic. Such an attitude, I think, tends to better favor those informed by a certain set of “liberal” or artistic values which are uncommon everywhere in the world. I strongly suspect that many of the best loved “foreign” films do not speak to residents of the culture from which they came in the same way that they will to those who have invested energy in artistic appreciation in general. In fact, I believe it is often easier to appreciate movies from outside ones own culture, or to accept things said in subtitles that might fall hard on the ear if spoken in one’s own language.
At the same time, there is no question that someone who lives in a culture will have a different understanding of the references made by a movie created by someone from the same or similar culture, and this is even more true when the film is set within the society which one is most familiar. In this sense, the more one can inform themselves about the situation, history, or society being shown, the better of a grasp one will have on the references. Still though, it is a very different thing to have read up on say the history of Thailand and to have grown up or even simply lived there for any length of time. Looking at Thailand from the privileged perspective of someone who grew up in the US, for example, is to apply a very different set of expectations, values, and historical expectation than would possibly be the case for a native of Thailand.
This all raises a number of questions which cannot be easily answered, if answered at all. One of the most significant being that an assumption about who the film is for is implicitly being made. One might either see a movie as addressing a specific audience or a universal one. If the former, then wondering who might make up that audience becomes an issue which has larger implications and can’t easily be declared moot. If, instead, it is the latter, then the question would be how the film addresses the issues at hand for audiences who aren’t going to be as informed about specifics and who will not necessarily share underlying values regarding the ideas in play.
There is, of course, another option which might possibly seem more attractive, one which comes from aesthetic theory rather than political or social theory, and that is that the artwork, if successful, will speak to us regardless of background based on its aesthetic values, not its political ones. From this perspective, the notion that an artwork need say something absolute and clearly distinct becomes, at best, a secondary value, and, to some, an almost or complete negation of the qualities necessary for great art as art, by its very nature in this view, does not provide answers, it creates unresolvable tensions. This latter idea is a difficult one as I think most of us have some deeply held beliefs which act as a sort of circuit breaker when viewing an artwork. That is to say that when some ethical or moral perspective is seen to be embraced, the circuit breaker trips and we can no longer appreciate the work from a disinterested perspective. This will also work against the idea of a universal language for movies to some degree, and goes quite a ways towards explaining why there can be no agreement on a set of great films by even the most devoted viewers who would seem to come from the same background and who seem to otherwise share similar beliefs.
We will always bring our singular experiences to bear when viewing, and no research can erase that, in fact the act of researching itself helps to further exemplify the divide as it in itself suggests a set of beliefs which can’t be entirely disregarded, just as believing that one can adopt a wholly disinterested stance and judge a movie purely on aesthetic values has a set of demands of its own. One can say that a a great film will overcome these difficulties and speak in one way to the outsider or the ignorant and in another way to the native or the informed, and in some sense this can be seen as true, but in another, it is simply a different value one might use or claim when judging or valuing a film, as one would have to assume the truth of one or the other half of the equation without being able to experience it yourself. The best one can hope for then is for the movie to simply find its audience and for each person to appreciate it as they feel they must. If enough people do, then the movie will find some larger spot in whatever culture those that appreciate it best belong to, and if it has a diverse appeal, then it will be considered “of value” in a larger variety of sub-cultures or groups and its importance will be magnified.
The TL:DR version is simply there is no right way to watch a movie, there is only the way that fits the viewer’s interests and beliefs.
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2012 MUBI World Cup Voting, Match #1: Iran (The Runner) vs. Romania (Lust for Gold) about 1 year ago
The Runner is such a strange movie to be arguing about, since, as near as I can tell, there is very little disagreement over what it’s about or how it works other than perhaps some question over the ending and what the shouting is all about, nor should there be since the movie is both exceedingly simple and pretty familiar, at least in its general construction. The only differences basically are between those who were drawn into the story and those who weren’t or were less enthused by it.
Personally, you can count me with the second group as the elements which I found diverting didn’t make up for the feeling I had seen this film, or even more heard this story, before in various guises hundreds of times. That isn’t to say there is any other story I’ve seen that is absolutely identical, so for those who enjoyed the film, I’m sure they found something more compelling about the specific details of this particular film than I did. This isn’t surprising given how continually popular the the story of a plucky young lad, stout of heart and innocent in the ways of the world, one who is often an orphan or otherwise disadvantaged, is first disillusioned, corrupted, abused, or otherwise made to face the harsh realities of his time and place, but eventually overcomes them through grit, determination, and by becoming wise beyond his years, thus learning to outwit or outperform those who tried to keep him down. In some versions there may be a sad twist at the end as the world proves to much for anyone to handle, as the message of the destruction of innocence becomes the main focus. There is also the “coming of age” version where the naive boy is ushered into manhood by an impossibly beautiful, sensitive, and mysterious older woman who recognizes his worth where others don’t, but who is somehow just flawed enough to not remain near after the boy has become a man allowing him to look back wistfully on the relationship and what it taught him.
The story of this movie is another version of the tale, which typically occurs prior to the awakening of manhood, but is still the same sort of mythic retelling of adolescence. As is often the case, there is an autobiographical element to the story, one which turns the teller of the story into a sort of heroic figure, aggrandizing him by showing the troubles he overcame in order to tell the tale. In this sense, the story becomes a little less like Dickens and more like a Greek myth as the hero grows into a powerful figure rather than merely delineating the flaws of the larger social order. This difference is something I think Ari was getting at as when the tale is based more in a social construct the central figure becomes a sort of an unblemished lens through which we can see the society without the prejudice which might come from an inherited place in the world. Injustice can be more purely felt in this manner.
When the story has an autobiographical bent to it, the world is viewed through the eyes of the protagonist, so events are understandably more limited in scope to how it effected him. In this way, the story of The Runner makes perfect sense in the way it does eliminate most other perspectives of the world as it is told through something like Amiro’s POV. His interests are in simply surviving and thriving, so what other’s may think or feel would generally be somewhat alien to that perspective as isn’t his primary concern. This is why someone like Kiarostami’s films dealing with boys and their struggles tend to feel different as his viewpoint is to show the larger world which is creating the situation the boy is facing, so he will generally have some scenes which at least allude to the perspective of characters other than the boy rather than film the whole thing as if it were more purely from the internal point of view of the boy. The difference between these approaches can seem subtle at times as each may limit what is shown to things the boy is present for, but I would suggest that it is in the scenes and dialogue which is seemingly unnecessary for the boy’s story where the wider social order is explored, and The Runner mostly avoids this, essentializing the story to Amiro’s singular drive to escape his circumstance.
The narrative of The Runner is pretty basic, Amiro starts with nothing, and slowly tries to gain his way in the world, taking on an activity, having someone or something infer with it, usually unfairly, which seem to cause Amiro to abandon that activity for another slightly more profitable one during which someone will infer and he will move on again, and so on. Amiro’s trajectory is always upwards though, as he won’t let the interference or abuse hold him back. He sets his mind on a goal and accomplishes it suggesting that the story will continue in that vein after the filmed part of the story is over. The important thing about the ice race, isn’t the ice, it’s the race. The ice itself isn’t significant as such. We should know this by there being no real stake to the race other than what Amiro decides there will be. If he didn’t win it wouldn’t have mattered in any real sense other than he wanted so desperately to do so. This is why it is fairly evident that he would win since the stakes simply aren’t there for anyone else, so no matter how drawn out the race is, the end is fairly well determined. The “meaning” of the race then is one of mastery or self realization, this is why he treats the ice as he does and reacts so jubilantly. His perspective is the perspective of the film, this is why I find it hard to think of the movie as having anything like an ambivalent ending, it is a pretty certain one to me, but, of course, anyone can read into the film what they want. so if someone wants to focus on the ice melting as a symbol of the futility of the race, that is fine, I would suggest that it is more related to temporal concerns and trying to achieve something before the chance disappears, and how the other boys misunderstand the goal.
As to the What’s Eating Amiro Grape? yelling thing, I would shave to say that it doesn’t precisely make sense in thinking of it as Amiro wanting to be heard as the situations aren’t one’s in which he would be heard as opposed to those where he might be, that is when there are actually other people around, but that isn’t to say the general idea isn’t somewhat valid as Amiro is, in a sense, emulating the planes and is asserting his significance or desire to become someone of import who can escape like they do. He is yelling for himself then as much as anything I would think, not to gain the attention of someone else directly. With that I would also say that the sound and some of the cinematography was quite fine. I thought the use of long lens was often strong, and would have been even better had the print either not been faded or if a more vibrant film stock had been used. The lens choice, I felt, tied in nicely to the central themes of the movie, in that distance is so key to Amiro’s dreams and it can also reflect that other type of distance, the kind which exists between him and the other characters.
As to some of the other specifics of the movie, I found the basic repetition of the scenario to be heavy handed, as it became fairly obvious what was more or less going to occur at the start of each separate scenario. If I were a snarkier fellow, I would also wonder how the hell that kid is going to go anywhere with his poor money sense as he takes on a job which requires an investment in equipment only to abandon it shortly thereafter wasting the investment, his idea to chase down the guy who stole a glass of water by leaving behind his bucket of water and glass is a pretty good example of rial wise, toman foolish, and all the money he was spending on magazines and broken lightbulbs suggests more money to burn than any sort of plan, but I’ll chalk that up to poetic license I guess, just as I will his boat apartment, which seems a little precious to me otherwise.
It’s seems like every cup we’ve had so far there has been at lest a few films like this one, so they obviously are speaking to someone. Even with my general dislike of the little boy films, I can say that there are a few similar films which move me as well. In the first world cup, for example, I felt the The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun was an exceptional film, and it doesn’t differ too much from The Runner in it’s basic outline. Two of the most important or telling distinctions are that is about a little girl instead of a boy and, more importantly to me, that the story is treated more as a fable rather than the kind of inbetween feeling which seems to trouble people here about The Runner. This is the most interesting part of the argument here as the film does have something of a look of a film which is trying for a sense of “real” in a way which is somewhat incongruous given its method of essentialization and the lens choices. I suspect that this feeling comes in part from the sparsity of detail or objects in the film, as poor tends to more readily lend itself to thoughts of “real” than abundance, and in part due to the desaturated color of the film as vividity of color or higher contrast black and white is often used to give a feeling of heightened reality. The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, for example, is a much more vivid film in that sense.
I’m sure there is something somewhat automatic about the assumption though as well, as there is an understandable assumption that one wouldn’t exaggerate poverty like one would riches, so any film which shows the downside of life is therefore more likely to be “real” than one showing something more generally unobtainable. This too ties in with the history of films on similar subjects, a history which goes back much farther than the neo-realists, (of which The Runner seems more like DeSica than Rossellini to me even with the consonance with Germany Year Zero.) One can look back to the silent era for films with related subject matter, even if they didn’t often have the same sort of autobiographical feel, and later, one can look towards not only someone like Truffaut, but to films like Douglas’ My Childhood, which is also claimed as feeling “real” even with its obvious symbolic and otherwise mannered moments. (That, by the way, is another good example of a film with passionate admirers with which I disagreed, but can’t rightly gainsay, and one of many on the subject where trains play an outsized role. One begins to see why trains need so many damn engines, not only do they have to pull all those rail cars, but all that symbolic freighting they are encumbered with has to weigh a ton.)
Anyway, that’s my initial thoughts on the movie, I haven’t yet finished Lust for Gold, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to vote or not before the deadline, but it seems pretty clear from what I’ve seen so far I prefer Lust. Again though, none of that isn’t to say that I don’t recognize why other people may deeply appreciate a movie like The Runner in ways that I don’t. I can see where they’re coming from, but it simply isn’t the kind of movie which I generally enjoy. Simply put, I don’t tend to like movies about plucky young lads, hell, I haven’t even got around to watching 400 Blows yet for pretty much that same reason, so take from that what you will
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2012 MUBI World Cup Voting, Match #1: Iran (The Runner) vs. Romania (Lust for Gold) about 1 year ago
Yeah, I could have put it more succinctly, big surprise there I’m sure, by simply saying The Runner is a movie where pretty much all the reactions to it seem to me to be pretty easily defensible as the movie simply comes down to how well you relate to the central character as that is pretty much all there is. SO those who dislike the film and those that like it aren’t really seeing anything radically different from each other, they are just having different emotional responses to what they’ve seen for various reasons.
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2012 MUBI World Cup Voting, Match #1: Iran (The Runner) vs. Romania (Lust for Gold) about 1 year ago
Oh, and I started to make a list of films, but I wasn’t fully satisfied with it and ran out of time to submit as well as having some doubts about some of the peculiarities of the system as it would have handled my submissions. I neither wanted to have my choices over represented, especially given that I assumed many of the ones I would have most wished to see used would be the ones with the most competition, and that would have left a lot of films which I felt wouldn’t have been as widely appreciated by those participating as they were by me. I also didn’t want to knock off films which those who knew a country’s film history better might have selected, for example, I was going to select an early “Bollywood” movie for India, but I was more than pleased to see the one Apursansar chose instead and I would have felt bad if my selection had bumped one which is both more likely to be eye-opening and appreciated. Or one could say I’m just weird, which might be more to the point.
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2012 MUBI World Cup Voting, Match #1: Iran (The Runner) vs. Romania (Lust for Gold) about 1 year ago
Nah, I just know people here have a limit on the amount of melodramas and other odd and old stuff they’d want to see. if we have a pre-1960 cup sometime, I’ll be all over it.
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2012 MUBI World Cup Voting, Match #1: Iran (The Runner) vs. Romania (Lust for Gold) about 1 year ago
I dig all of those, and Khuda Gawah is particularly awesome,although I have little doubt but that its wonders would be lost on most here given the fear of the sheer power of Bollywood excess, but the one I was going to really submit was Mahal, a sort of an Indian precursor to Vertigo if you will.
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Cinema as a Force for Social Good about 1 year ago
Jazz, it seems to me that you are coming to this question from the wrong way around, and that is what is having an impact on your “answer”. If there are values to which we can all agree on without question or internal opposition, than in society those things should be able to be realized. That society isn’t able to find or maintain these alleged values should suggest that there is more to the question than saying we all can agree peace love and harmony are good. If there is something in a movie which truly bothers us, say overt racism, we will be truly bothered, and we won’t take to the film. If we aren’t bothered by the film, than it isn’t having that sort of effect on us which means we aren’t noticing any instances of racism or whatever that may or may not exist in the film. Your suggestion then is to say films need to be more forthright about promoting certain values, that is to say the films need to better highlight race and positive reactions to it to basically force people to notice what they wouldn’t have otherwise, that or films should otherwise only show positive interactions among people and avoid negative representations and objectionable actions. This would pretty much drive everyone away from the theater as those who already “know” these things would find the films tedious and heavy handed, and those who don’t would find little to interest them or would feel preached to as the necessary stooping to the lowest level would render the stories virtually inert and uninteresting.
The problem is that we actually like violence and some forms of feeling separate or different than others. Individually those boundaries may vary, but the complexity of human beings isn’t something that can be smoothed out in any reasonable manner. Art doesn’t exist to give answers, if there is an obvious answer which we already know, then a movie dealing with it isn’t of interest as it would simply be didactic and aimed at some “lesser” folk who needed the lesson. Art isn’t science, it doesn’t provide answers, it thrives on dissonance, the contradictory impulses which exist in each of us. A work of art basically deals with the boundaries between two worlds, the real one which we exist and live or day to day lives, and an essentialized or exaggerated one which is then contrasted to the real internally which is where our response comes from.
If you remember, you started a thread for me once on “needing” violence in films. This is what I’m referring to. Even in the most liberal and artiest of art films which seem to directly condemn violence, we often find our “pleasure” or gain our strong emotional response by seeing some character we empathize with suffer or die. This is where the catharsis comes from. We are both enjoying the violence as that is would provides the artistic experience while we are also repulsed by that very violence we need to fully appreciate the film. We need Hamlet to die and take out the entire court of Denmark, or Lear and his daughter to be led off to their ends. Even if a film manages to end ahppily, we still need the protagonist to suffer to make the gained end worth attaining.
This isn’t just true of high art films, or violence, it is generally true of all “art” or entertainment, even if we ourselves don’t enjoy it or find it simplistic or something, someone else might be for reasons similar to those above. Why, for example, are The Dark Knight and Star Wars so damn popular? I would suggest that a key component of their success has to do with how much people “like” the villians and wish them to succeed, or not fully fail. People “know” the so-called good guys are going to win in the end when they start watching the movies, so it isn’t a matter of suspense, but a sense of being torn between what one knows should happen and what one is also enthralled by, the allure of the “bad”. It’s easy to say something like war is bad or violence is unacceptable, but that is a facile attitude which doesn’t begin to explain why war and violence exists. We are more complex than such easy answers can account for, and that underlying complexity is what is measured out in art. Art addresses social goods by showing the contradictions inherent in the social order and in each of us. Art doesn’t exist to give answers, it exists to raise the questions.
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Cinema as a Force for Social Good about 1 year ago
Even more than no obligation, I would suggest that art is basically built around feelings of tension and release, even music, so a narrative form is almost, by definition, going to be dealing with areas of our being which don’t allow for easy moralities. Even the Christian mystery itself is based on the notion of suffering and violent death leading to redemption of the world, one doesn’t get the reward without the pain, that’s a large part of the power of the story.
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2012 MUBI World Cup Voting, Match #1: Iran (The Runner) vs. Romania (Lust for Gold) about 1 year ago
I wasn’t suggesting that there was no symbolic meaning to the ice, just that I don’t think it is quite as House would have it. My reference to temporality and the race was suggesting that while Amiro was looking at life as something which could slip away from him if he didn’t run to catch it, which is why the reward of the ice itself wasn’t of greatest significance to him it was in winning the race and being able to grasp it before it melted away, while the other kids were focused more on the transitory pleasure the ice provided. The symbolism of the film, such as it is, is somewhat interesting in that it is all, for lack of a better term, first order symbolism, which is to say that the planes, trains and the like hold symbolic meaning for Amiro himself, and not just the audience, so we are sort of seeing his understanding of their “meaning” in large part, which suits their simplicity.
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Cinema as a Force for Social Good about 1 year ago
Jazz, personally I would love to see more color blind casting for roles as most Hollywood characters don’t have any specific traits which should limit their casting to a specific race. I also would like to see more diveristy in the ranks of those who make films at every level, from studio heads to writers, and happily support any efforts to call out the industry for its failings along these lines. This, however, is a different thing than suggesting films should have some standards imposed on them in terms of the stories they tell. Trying to force art to fit a mold of some sense of how the world should be isn’t going to do the art or the audience any favors, particularly since an audience isn’t a monolithic entity but a group of people who will react in very different ways to what is being shown. Many Hollywood films seemingly aimed at providing more “positive” minority representation are those which become more widely mocked or scorned than films which don’t tackle the subject. I’m not even sure of your claim about the current racial climate in Hollywood being one where minorities are represented most as gang bangers, there is some of that, sure, but after all the grief the industry ahs received they’ve also tended to go the “magic negro” route a lot where someone like Morgan Freeman will be there just to do what you suggest, present a positive image, or where some “friend” of the main character will be a minority, but not get much to do beyond providing the protagonist with some cred for being so open minded. I’m not sure that positive portrayal for the sake of positive is any better than a more important “bad” character. Of course it would be ideal if there were simply more minority characters of all types, but Hollywood in general isn’t very adept at nuanced or subtle characterization since they generally aim their product at the broadest audience possible, thus they tend to dumb down the films or eliminate complexity which leaves little range for most portrayals of any sort.
This is sort of process is why I am even more against the whole “think of the children” attitude as that is exactly the sort of lowest common denominator attitude which will further rob the form of any interest whatsoever. A lot of the worst art I can think of is just that, aimed to be inoffensive and not threatening to anyone, it’s a hollow shell of what art could be and it does those precious children no favors by portraying some sugar sweet fantasyland which has little to do with the real world. I’m not sure that overly sheltered children are at all better off than those who aren’t so sheltered in terms of how they will later view the world or what
I would also suggest that you might be giving movies much to much credit in terms of influence nowadays as they are an increasingly limited form, one which, at its largest popular appeal is aimed so broadly as to be almost empty of merit, and one which at its other end is much more able to deal with diversity and nuance, but which few will seek out. Television, the internet and video games are much more influential I’d think. This brings up another point, and that is that it seems a little odd how so many people are worried more about the possible harm of representation when they often ignore the real harm done in so many other areas. Typing all of this out on a computer should give one pause when considering the conditions those that made the computer are laboring under, for example. Or if “thinking of the children” one might do better to look to sports like football and hockey where studies are consistently showing there is actual long term physical harm being done to children rather than any more abstract possibility of it. This, again, isn’t to say that I don’t agree with some of your diagnosis regarding representation but your prescription for a cure seems misguided to me.
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2012 MUBI World Cup - match announcements about 1 year ago
hardly anybody knows Mexican studio system Bunuel, which I think is his greatest period.
You think it’s his greatest period? Let’s just say it without the pussyfootin’, it is his greatest period, notwithstanding the excellence of some of his later work. And I say that without yet having had a chance to see Illusion Travels by Streetcar, which is very well thought of by those who have delved into this period more deeply.
I’m really looking forward to this round due not only to finally having the chance to see Illusion, but also because Apursansar never seems to bring out anything but great lesser known movies to these events. I fully expect to love both films and have a devil of a time deciding between them.
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Cinema as a Force for Social Good about 1 year ago
Yes, I think government support of the arts is often really misunderstood in how it works and what advantages it provides artists and therefore those who appreciate the arts.
There are a number of ways in which government assistance is used to help the arts. In liberal western states, like many of those in Europe or in Canada, there is or was a mandate to protect and develop the cultural heritage of the state as they viewed the arts as a important public good. To this end, fairly generous funding was often set aside in order to further this aim. There was usually a department of the government which had as part of its mission protecting and supporting the arts.
Under the mandates which these departments tended to operate under, it was often the case that support for the arts meant providing assistance to artists which could come through some direct funding or through other material aid. This doesn’t mean the government was either fully funding the projects nor influencing them in any direct way, as the methods of support would often be more indirect than that or come during the planning stages or be commissions for noted artists who would then have more freedom to create their works without concern for the same level of commercial concerns. The funding would often be even more indirect with money being given to ;larger arts institutions which would then develop commissions or help fund projects deemed of import by smaller panels of artists and curators who would offer grants to artists who came up with interesting proposals. This could take the form of competitions between artists where the money would then be divided by need and potential merit, or it could come in the form of an application for some assistance which the organization would look at.
Often what would happen in the latter cases is that the government, or some smaller local branch, might simply give a portion of the necessary funding in order to allow other public and private partners to be able to pick up the rest of the cost without having to worry as much about recouping their investment. State television stations would be another route which government funding would find its way to filmmakers as the movie would be commissioned for state tv. The advantage of this system would be even more obvious if one could simply find a list of the works made with some government assistance. A large number of what we now consider to be some of the greatest artists had the chance to work due to this assistance, and a large number of important artistic achievements in the arts came via this route as well.
This isn’t to say that such a system produces nothing but gold or is without flaws, there can be favoritism and other biases on grant panels just as anywhere else, but the mandate itself creates a very different art environment than one which commercial concerns trump all. In a way, one can think of it as being something like the government support for libraries. Just because the government provides funding for libraries doesn’t lead people to think that the books in the library or the librarians are all working to some nefarious end. Librarians, like teachers, often oppose the government which funds them as they see their institution as having a higher purpose than short term concerns about saving or making a buck.
In the US, of course, this mandate only barely exists and is often perverted by those who see no value in the cultural heritage or see it as belonging more rightly to private corporations or individuals. Government funding here has suffered repeated attacks over the years for these reasons. An agency like the NEA will get some meager funding, which they will them give out to notable arts organizations like museums or preservation groups, but sooner or later one of the institutions which received money will show something vaguely controversial, this work may not have been directly funded by the NEA, but the institution itself was so someone will claim they are deeply insulted by the work and thus funding for the arts is obviously morally repugnant. There will be cries of socialism; the work doesn’t appeal to anybody but elites, art should support itself like in Hollywood so funding for this pretentious crap is wrong, and, of course, think of the children, they will be harmed by this minority point of view, all right thinking people know the world isn’t like this.
I am fully behind government support of the arts, and this support is also attached to the copyright debate in that I believe we, as a public, own our cultural heritage, we, understandably, want to aid artists by protecting their interests for a time, but they are only caretakers for works which belong to us all. I have a hard time understanding people who love the arts but can’t seem to support funding them as a society. If the arts are important to us, and everything I can see suggests they are, even if we don’t agree on which works, then demanding support and preservation would seem to be a no brainer. But, then again, this is America and here the dollar is god and individuality built off the fear of others unlike you is the mindset, so art, which so often works against those concepts is going to have a hard time.
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2012 MUBI World Cup - match announcements about 1 year ago
Indeed, Mexico does have much to be proud of in its film history, and while I might shy away from saying there are plenty of much better films than Bunuel’s from that period, there are, at least plenty of films which should be regarded as highly. Unfortunately, there is only so much you can do with a three film limit to capture a nation’s film history. Personally. I was planning on choosing a Fernandez film if I had submitted a list as he is indeed worthy of the attention, but I can’t argue with Bunuel’s films from this period also deserving more attention on their own merits and also as providing a better understanding of one of the most well regarded directors in film history who has been all too often looked at only through the lens of some later work. It’s a similar feeling to that I had about Wiseman being the first selection from the US. Wiseman’s films haven’t been viewed by wide numbers of viewers, so any of his films could use the support, but he was selected in one of the previous cups and he is also a “known” quantity in terms of name at least for those who have spent much time looking at film history, so one could also argue that picking a movie by a less well known, on mubi, director or a film which may stand outside pantheons of great artists could have been more rewarding. It is an argument that has no good way to be answered as each path has advantages as long as both paths would end up with a worthwhile movie in the end.
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Cinema as a Force for Social Good about 1 year ago
I don’t even know where to begin with those claims…
I don’t know what you mean by more democratic, that isn’t something I would have claimed as an issue one way or the other as I’m not sure what you are even suggesting is being measured there. One could assume more democratic would be more popular as in people are “voted” with their wallets when they went to see Avatar in record numbers as opposed to something like Summer Hours, thus making Avatar the more “democratic” choice for artistic success. This is pretty much the opposite of my point which is based more around long term artistic/cultural values rather than short term financial success. Popularity of the moment is great, for those who enjoy it and commercial cinema is fairly adept at making bucks by creating films people will go see, those films don’t need much in the way of government subsidies, although they often still receive some in the way of tax benefits, write offs, and local government assistance in some form as an exchange for filming in a given location. A movie like Summer Hours isn’t going to be popular in the same way. It received government subsidies, like most French films have for decades, so I guess France’s cinematic output, like that of a number of other European nations, must be pretty much made up of unentertaining and unrisky films, as well as funding from state television, which hacks like Bergman also received, and some local government funding and material assistance from the Musee d’Orsay, which receives funds from the government as well. This assistance didn’t fund the movie on its own, there was private investment into the production as well, but the government assistance helps the private investors make some money out of what isn’t as likely to be popular in the broad sense.
If you hadn’t noticed, much of the most highly regarded art, highly regarded by those who are most involved with art as something of longer lasting significance and deeper value than that of momentary whim, often tend not to be immediately popular and as their value isn’t even judged in those same terms. Now, one can reject that view of aesthetic value or artistic importance, a great many do which is why art funding is so difficult to put together for many artists. If that’s the case, then I can see why trying to preserve our cultural heritage would seem so ridiculous as the moment is now and the past is gone, so letting those old movies deteriorate on the shelves is fine, and supporting art that only might appeal to a small segment of the population simply isn’t worth anything as if it were there would be money to be made in doing so. I disagree with that notion and believe that art provides much more to our culture than can be measured in dollars, but I’m not even going to try to get into that argument right now.
It’s great that there is are places like the Museum of Fine Arts which need so little government assistance to survive. Yes, some artists and institutions can manage to get by on purely private funds, nothing too surprising about that. Those institutions are lucky as a great many museums and other arts organizations do require some assistance to get by. If you’re lucky enough to live in a big city with lots of deep pocketed donor types, than you have the advantage, but not everyone does and not all arts are so easily housed in an institution in any case, so some people are just going to be out of luck if they aren’t in the right place, and some arts will largely wither away, which is fine I guess since they are only marginal and not popular so they don’t deserve government aid like sports stadiums or oil companies which deserve their support since they are so needed by the masses. “Capitalism” plays favorites to you know, we just like to pretend it is neutral when it serves our purposes, like in debates about cutting off the minimal funding to the arts as a way to throw meat to the crowd to keep them from paying attention to where the money actually goes. Yeah, paying 20$ to see a show is nice for those that have the dough, of course not everyone has that kind of money to spend on such things, but those that don’t probably don’t deserve arts anyway being losers. We should probably finish killing off the libraries for that reason as well since anyone who can’t afford a book likely wouldn’t know what to do with one besides color in it anyway. Heck, screw books all together, Kindles are where it’s going to be at anyway as that’s the trendy popular thing, consequences be damned.
It seems like you sorta skimmed part of my last post, which I understand since they are fucking wordy and probably not all the fun to read, but your second paragraph seems to either miss my point, which could be my fault, or to actively accept what I was suggesting as a misguided view as true. I might be misunderstanding what you are saying by “what does government intervention in the arts accomplish” though. If you mean funding, then your allusion to the painting The Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili kinda makes my point as it wsn’t covered in feces, and it didn’t receive any direct government funding. The city of New York provided general funding to the museum which exhibited the painting and then sought to have that funding pulled when Giuliani decided to score some political points by making a todo about the painting and the decline of moral values in the world. Giuliani lost that battle in court and it all came to nothing in the end other than some outrage porn.
Now if you meant that the act of having any funding for an institution like the Brooklyn Museum allows for schmucks to make those arguments and therefore it would simply be better if there was no funding in the first place so the arguments couldn’t happen, then, sure, you would be right in the sense that government officials couldn’t threaten to pull funding which wasn’t there, though that wouldn’t stop them from being outraged by the art anyway. No, on second thought maybe it would stop them as losing enough funding could get them to close their doors. Oh, sure, maybe they could come up with the extra 7 million from private donors, after all New York is a big city so they have plenty of people with cash around, the nice thing about private donors is that there disputes happen behind closed doors so the public isn’t even aware of what they will lose when the donor threatens to pull their money if things don’t go their way or sets conditions for the funds to be used. That keeps everything so much neater. Even better, the institution might be able to snag some corporate sponsors who will not only pressure the institution to avoid controversy which might effect their image, but they might be able to score some choice corporate tie ins as well, and who really minds having art choices managed by corporations with their eye primarily on their bottom line? I mean we all vote with our wallets and use their products, so it’s a perfect marriage of both capitalism and democracy, which is definitely what art should be about, the bottom line. (This is setting aside all the studies which show that government support for the arts tends to be a net positive economically as well as making locations which make the investment more desirable for living and therefore for future growth.)
Oh, and I’m not sure the forum, with it’s few hundred users worldwide, proves much about the survival chances for anything, including the forum itself.
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Prince of Darkness (1987): Coherent Philosophy, Theology and Physics or a Jumbled Mess? about 1 year ago
Jazz, one of the things I was trying to get at in that other thread goes back to the discussion we were having about Langer and aesthetics where the idea of an emotional logic was brought up. The difference between rational logic and emotional logic, I think, is partly what is causing some of the disagreements here as it sounds like, though I may be misunderstanding you, that you are thinking of this film and films in general as needing a rational logic in order to be important or meaningful and that you are speaking of morality in terms which would be better thought of as being associated with the same kind of rational process as “intellectual” logic has. That is to say there is a preferred or right answer to which one can turn or a more or less linear process of thinking which can be applied to understand a movie.
I would suggest that this is not the right way to think of art and what it provides, or the best way to understand how a movie might effect someone, regardless of whether that is how they are generally talked about in many circles, critical or otherwise. An emotional logic needn’t have that sort of rational connectiveness to it, indeed, I would suggest that the power of art generally comes from not having it even if people tend to justify what they like in those terms. It is the conflict between the perception of the real and the feeling we have which often animates our deeper responses to art and better fit how we live than more rational decisions can allow. People may intellectually believe all sorts of things which they fail to enact, the conflict between the belief and living it is something fundamental to humanity.
Just as in this film intellectual and moral beliefs are both at odds and both unable to deal with the problem in the way their certainty might suggest, we are caught in a world where our beliefs and our intellectual understanding, no matter how rock solid or certain, are constantly faced with situations which deny that certainty or challenge our position as moral and/or rational creatures. Often we may find a way to place the “blame” for this on something other than ourselves and go on holding that there is certainty out there if only others would see it or if only such and such things would happen to shine a light on what we know to be true, but I would suggest that when it comes to opur interactions with the world or each other that the flaw is more often in believing in the certainty to begin with. But I can’t be entirely sure sure about that without contradiction of course, so it’s just something to think over.
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Prince of Darkness (1987): Coherent Philosophy, Theology and Physics or a Jumbled Mess? about 1 year ago
Yes, I kinda felt that was what you were going for, and I do enjoy Jazz’s threads on all these topics as it gives an opportunity to flesh these things out, but I would also suggest that perhaps the very act of questioning in this sense almost demands a set of answers which can almost never be satisfactory as it leads towards the sort of more linear thinking which art isn’t best fit for.
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Cinema as a Force for Social Good about 1 year ago
Heh. Thanks. I just hope that I didn’t come off as too dismissive as the naive comment may have made me go a bit overboard and I wouldn’t want it to sound like I think these questions are cut and dried or that I don’t respect Jirin’s opinions on this overall. It is true that there are flaws with most methods of government funding, but when contrasted with teh alternative I know where I stand on the issue as, to me, the government should represent the sort of society in which we wish to live and act towards bettering the circumstances of people, particularly those who catch the shit end of things, often for only the fault of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time. I know my values aren’t shared by all, but to me the difference lies as much in what the downsides of adopting a given approach would be as much as in the best possible outcome, and in that sense, providing some decent funding the arts has far less of a downside than the alternative from what I can see.
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Prince of Darkness (1987): Coherent Philosophy, Theology and Physics or a Jumbled Mess? about 1 year ago
He does doesn’t he? I often wish I had his ability to frame questions as I tend to find I can’t really express something until I hear alternatives which don’t fit my thinking. (Oh, and, please, your posts are always great and far less amorphous than mine.)
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Cinema as a Force for Social Good about 1 year ago
And while you may not oppose all depictions of such things, once you start down the path of defining those issues and somehow regulating them, someone out there surely will and make demands which you yourself may not, which is part of the problem.
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Cinema as a Force for Social Good about 1 year ago
Oh, it happens, as much as I try not to let it since I know the intent wasn’t to create that feeling. I always feel bad if it does come off that way as it is usually just a momentary impulse created by associations to other things and a less than generous reading of something. I have a number of friends who are artists, and have had arguments about funding and the like before with people who, unlike Jirin, were actively jerks, so I undoubtedly let that influence my reading of his post unwarrantedly. There have been other times where I’ve said things I felt bad about later, I remember the Von Trier vs Khoo match in a previous cup going that route and I also remember an unkind remark I made about Nora Ephron to someone here once which I regretted as I think it made the person who brought her up feel unwelcome. I felt so bad about that latter one that I sat down and watched all of the Nora Ephron films my local video store had to try and find a better perspective on her work. (Note to Nora, don’t remake Lubitsch films, it can’t end well.)Go to Comment
Cinema as a Force for Social Good about 1 year ago
I think it is important to go beyond the point of how much money is being spent or should or could be added or subtracted to that total and look towards why these expenditures matter. I don’t have nor will likely have any children, and I am no longer a young man, so from a purely self-interested point of view I could say that spending on things like education or the environment is unnecessary as those expenditures will hold little benefit for me, they’re problems for people who have some greater stake in the future of the country or world than my limited time and stake. I could say that, but I don’t because I believe in government being there to represent the greatest common good for all who live under it. A world where each simply looks out for their own is inherently problematic as it is not only too attached to short term goals and simple exchange, it is also an ugly world one where people aren’t asked to see commonalities between themselves and one where we wouldn’t strive for anything beyond ourselves, where ideals of something greater than ourself and our individual wants don’t hold any value if they don’t profit someone more than they cost.
JAzz’s initial question was about whether art should be constrained or restricted to certain moral aims, underlying that question, I would say, is the idea the art is a secondhand “good”, that it benefits the culture only by sharing some moral values or readily discernible intellectual end, that it isn’t a good in and of itself regardless of some rational “meaning”. Art transcends its time and culture, it goes beyond concerns for what might be the moral issues of the day and speaks to generations of people all over the world. Art is meaningful in and of itself, it doesn’t require some secondhand justification for its existence. Our troubles and day to day battles are immensely important to us but we as individuals will largely fade from history and will be thought of as statistics, as being part of some common mass of action or lack thereof. Most history is written from the side of how we made others suffer, how we were wrong or how power was gained or lost by nations or some select powerful individuals who had some will to power. What else is there? The individual lives of anonymous plumbers, accountants or clerks simply won’t matter over time just as those anonymous figures of the past don’t matter to us outside of perhaps some relatives or remote acquaintance.
History would be a cold, sad and distant thing if that was all that we had to look at and to find significance in, but that isn’t all there is, there is also science and art, the record of mankind’s excellence of its challenge to anonymity and to bring something more to the world. We look to the history of art as some of the highest achievements of mankind. The art of the past is not only what ties us more concretely to the time, but it personalizes the connection, it shows how we are linked to those who came before and how their understanding of the world still resonates with our own. It creates an unbroken lineage of man’s struggles and aspirations, the beauty and sorrows of the individual. It keeps the world gone alive as we can “feel” that world and not only see it as a part of our own, but come to embody it as the works of the past are what we build our own understanding of the present and future on.
How does this relate to government funding of the arts? There are several primary ways why this is important. The first is simply that supporting government funding of the arts signals the importance of the arts to the culture. It establishes our values as a society and it gives context to what we believe and who we are in a way that says our interests are not simply self serving or short term, that we as a people are interested in our connection to the past and to the future as well as to expression by those who aren’t necessarily powerful or rulers. Funding the arts is a way to say there are things that are important which aren’t directly associated with profit or gain but are valuable for themselves and what they show about our interactions with the world and each other. It is a way to spread beauty, to share wonder or awe, to express fear, sadness or other passions, to criticize and to refuse to fade into the shadows of time. Funding the arts is to say, yes, these things are important to us as a people. We need not like any particular work of art to say art itself is worth protecting, preserving and creating, we just have to recognize the place it holds in our lives and our histories and to celebrate that.
Because of this we also need to ensure that art is available for all to see and that we are educating people in its history. There is little immediate profit in funding education in the arts or in giving people access to art which isn’t under the commercial control of some organization or figure, but these things are necessary, just as education in science or history would be. This is threatened not only by a failure to fund the arts, but by the way we accord rights to them. We are allowing what should be the common good to be controlled by those whose primary interest is financial and this is disastrous. There is no question but that we should protect the ability of artists to make a living with their art , but carrying that to extremes is not only wrong but inherently contradictory to the purported purpose of such protection. In capitalism it is claimed that competition will provide a sort of balance of interests, but the goal of any entity within that system is to maximize their own profits at the expense of others, so they seek anti-competitive ends as that will prevent others from threatening their gains. This failure threatens our understanding of human history and renders the past ever more obscure, or something to be played with only by those who can afford to get in the door. Art is understood through the experience of it. It needs to be accessed to be understood. You can’t share an artwork through secondhand means as it is an irreducible object. Denying or limiting access to the arts directly or by allowing that control to be held by for profit entities is equivalent to allowing a corporation to control access to certain thoughts or ideals. It is to put the human psyche up for sale.
Our public history is inextricably linked to art which was brought out before us, but we are prevented for ever accessing any of that shared history on equal terms. Allowing art to remain in private or corporate hands is to give up the very basis of our civilization to entities whose interests are purely their own. (In this I am speaking of “art” in the broadest terms including all forms of of shared thought which fall under copyright laws, not just the so-called “high arts”. By giving up this control and by not funding education and access we are favoring the ephemeral and the parochial over the broader interests of all. By not asserting a greater value for the arts, a value which those who currently control them are well aware of which is why they fight so vehemently to keep their control, we are, at the least, tacitly saying that our interests, the interests of society, is best served by being entirely in the hands of the private whim or corporate control. This is a horrible wrong which robs us of our heritage and our very own histories as we are prevented from having any claim on that which has shaped the our world.
None of this is to suggest that private investment in the arts isn’t important, indeed it is. The government neither can nor should seek to take over that role, and should work to ensure that there is a fair opportunity to profit or to share privately funded works without interference and to allow artists and those who fund them to live well off of whatever returns they can get, as long as that is done within reasonable bounds where the “rights” of the individual don’t curtail the greater needs to the society. I’m not suggesting there are clear or easily determined boundaries for these things or suggesting some definitive limits to control. What I am saying is that we are out of balance now and heading further in the wrong direction and we need to stop this trend before we lose all. Government funding for the arts is a help, not an answer, it should be meant to assist those who may not fit current profit models and to help set a tone and protect the interests of the greater society at least as fiercely as it does those who seek to profit. What I’m suggesting isn’t anything radical, no, what is radical is the direction we are going in, not only in terms of laws and funding, but in terms of how the arts are viewed overall. This last point isn’t something which funding would necessarily directly improve, although having a broader selection of arts available and better emphasizing their importance would certainly help in this regard, it is something which needs to be fought every time someone speaks of cultural vegetables, or “trash”, or white elephants. Art needs to be celebrated at least as much and as fully as the kitschy pleasures of the ephemeral or the solipsistic pleasures of the nostalgic. I have nothing against any form of art, there is no type of movie or writing or painting or music which is inherently less worthy of attention than another, but the way which we view these things strikes me as being almost completely out of whack as that which pleasures without reflection or effort is given pride of place over that which might go beyond simply reinforcing what we already know.
I could go on, but I suspect I’ve already reached a point of diminishing returns with that block of text, so I’ll leave it there.
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Roger Ebert about 1 year ago
While I’ve said some harsh things about Ebert before, I think one can profit by trying to see his good points as well as his weaknesses. He is genuine, reliable, generally open-minded, generous, and largely unjaded. He writes clearly and simply with a seemingly undiminishing passion for his work. He is also a relatively unadventurous thinker and a linear answer and connection driven one who tends towards generalities and surface interpretation. He is a fine reviewer who has done much for making movies more accessible to the average viewer, but who doesn’t provide much meat for the more informed. As a more serious critic his work leaves much to be desired, but I’m not sure that is even something he is concerned about given how he presents himself and where. His position among film writers is certainly out of proportion with his contributions in terms of lasting impact, but this is more of a by-product of his success with his primary audience than something more nefarious. Personally I don’t have much use for his writing anymore, though I did watch his show with Siskel religiously when I was young, and I to am often displeased by his outsized reputation and “say” on movies and other topics, but I really can’t begrudge him for it and I certainly can’t hold it against him as a person since he is, by most accounts, a man who seems to live,and not just perform those better attributes I associate with him.
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Roger Ebert about 1 year ago
Santino, isn’t that more of an issue which the industry should be addressing rather than a critic? I mean one of the entertainment industries biggest perceived problems is piracy, and studies show that piracy dramatically increases when there are staggered release dates for movies and television shows. For releases that already have a distributor, its like trying to hold the world to a standard which has passed.
Regarding Ebert or pretty much any published reviewer or critic, one has to think about what how they view their assumed responsibilities. I would suggest that one of the things that makes Ebert such a force is that he seems to be the reviewer he is most adamant seeing his job as being for his readers first and foremost. Contrast this to someone like Armond White or Dan Kois who seem to believe their primary responsibility is to their publications, or less generously to their careers, hence their constant need to linkbait or be contrarian, or to someone like Rosenbaum who seem to be primarily be concerned with being true to the movies themselves and letting the audience follow as they may.
This, as Matt suggests, certainly has something to do with who they write for, but I think it is also something more personal as well. I can’t even begin to believe Ebert couldn’t largely write about whatever films he wants at this point as I would bet that he is the most read writer on his paper’s staff, and therefore could follow whatever path he wanted as long as he maintained that readership. He chooses to, I think, focus on what he perceives as the interests of his readers and his responsibility to them. I don’t know whether Ebert could write more “serious” critiques well, the kind of stuff which might better fit in at film journals with dedicated afficiandos as the main audience. I’m sure he could become more David Kehrlike, and go further down that path if he chose, but he simply doesn’t view films the way someone like Rosenbaum does. This is both why he is so widely read and why his influence can be less than ideal for those who take a somewhat opposing view of art.
I’ve said before that Ebert and Kael are both the best and worst things to ever happen to film criticism, and by that I mean no two critics have done more to popularize criticism with the wider public and get them to appreciate a personal response, but both have also had an enormous influence on how movies are discussed, and in that way their influence isn’t entirely benign if one wants more than thumbs up or thumbs down and talk of trash. By being so reader friendly, they have allowed their audiences to feel that movies are there for them to judge without needing to bring anything to the movies. There is a reductive quality to their way of thinking of movies which makes the audience member, as represented by themselves, the focal point of the art. How the movie responds to the audiences wants or needs then becomes more of the issue than trying to apply oneself to the movie or to expand one’s way of viewing. This is a generalization of course, but it is largely the feel I get from their writing and why I so often oppose them even as I can also see things to admire as well.
Edit: I should also add that it is helpful to remember that most published critics are writers first and critics second, by which I mean that their job is more dependent on their ability to write well and to be get copy in on time whether or not they have anything significant to say. Most critics seem to come from fields which, at best, are only glancingly connected to film, so they aren’t necessarily going to be particularly well suited or informed about much of it necessarily. This isn’t an entirely bad thing as it isn’t like there is some better competing model out there from which “real” critics can be found.
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Roger Ebert about 1 year ago
Whether one can write that way or not and find a large general audience while still appealing to those who are more involved with an art form, any art form, is something of an open question, but it isn’t something I would normally attribute to Ebert and Kael, other than on rare occasions. That ins’t to say there that there is anything necessarily wrong with writing for a larger and more general audience, emphasis on the necessarily, but both of them have some specific attitudes which I believe create sets of expectations which I think run counter to being able to appreciate art in its fullest aspects. I put scare quotes around “serious” to signal a difference between styles, not to suggest that either Kael or Ebert weren’t in earnest about their reviews by the way. I am failing to find an easier way to describe the difference in approach short of launching into a long spiel which I would like to avoid at this point. I, of course, recognize that my interests, or those of people who want something more from reviews than what is generally given by Ebert are not the only ones out there, nor should they be seen as being as definitively more valuable than those who do like his writing, I’m merely suggesting there is a gap between the two which may be more difficult to bridge than often seem to be assumed, and that trying to find a way to bridge that gap would be a very valuable thing if it could be done.
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Roger Ebert about 1 year ago
It depends on what you are hoping for or want from art and critics I guess. My feeling is that Ebert, and even more so Kael, are given a sort of intellectual standing or weight in the culture which helps to create a context for viewing art which has some ramifications which I find deeply unsatisfactory. I, of course, wouldn’t suggest that the pleasure people get from reading them is somehow wrong or illegitimate, just that there are consequences to their popularity. Is this better or worse than some unknown alternative? I can’t say as those two certainly didn’t create the sort of cultural view I suggest they are perpetuating, the culture was moving that way before them and would likely have continued that direction without them. My problem is with some of that cultural shift and how those two, by dint of their popularity help cement it in place further. I’m not trying to suggest there aren’t good things to be said about their popularity as well, indeed I suggested some aspects of that, I’m just trying to explain the difference in appreciation of them by some of us and give some clue as to what reasons there are for that disagreement.
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Roger Ebert about 1 year ago
By the way, I’m also not trying to suggest that this is some sort of one way street where it’s Ebert and Kael, and those they influence, are the sole problems opposing some poor set of better writers who should be getting the attention instead. It’s just that we are talking about Ebert here so I’m focused on his role primarily. I could just as easily point out the immense failure of the “academic” writers to, you know, actually learn to write in a way that can be readily understood. If my problem with Ebert is outsized influence due to his giving his audience what they want, my problem with all too many deservedly unknown writers is that they can’t say anything clearly or interestingly to anyone not in a graduate film studies program, and even then I suspect there is a lot of sighing and headshaking going on. Writing well about cinema requires the author to, well, write first and foremost. You need to be engaging and to provide ideas which grab the reader and make them think about things in a different light. Academia doesn’t value that, just the opposite really, the value thee tends to be speaking to a select audience in a way that renders art almost entirely moot as it is more about showing command of thinking about thinking about art then anything else. Academic writing, a branch of which invades which many film journals, is talking to a couple dozen people at a time and trying to convince them you already agree.
Edit: Regarding the Turin Horse/Artist thing, I would first suggest that one needn’t have something become “popular” to be more popular, and that the question could be more profitably not thought of as that sort of comparison at all but as a way of looking at movies in general regardless if it is Super *, Tree of Life, Turin Horse or Twilight: Breaking Dawn. It is more the approach than some final judgement I am concerned about.
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Roger Ebert about 1 year ago
It depends. Being challenging is good, being pointless obscure so not so much. Being entertaining is neither good nor bad in itself, what one is being entertained by and being aware of it though is kinda important.
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Roger Ebert about 1 year ago
Because it has consequences, because self knowledge is a value in itself, because without it we end up with the sort of endlessly regressive cycle of diminishment where the same shit is shoveled our way over and over again and we can’t figure out why we aren’t more satisfied, or god help us, enriched. Sure, to most people these may not seem like important questions, but I believe they are even if people don’t think about it themselves. Art does more than simply entertain, it’s a complex form of communication that also tells us something about ourselves and the world. Understanding something of what we are being asked to respond to can help us see these things more clearly. A good critic does that, enlightens, and doesn’t just gloss the surface to provide a thumbs up or down so we don’t “waste time” seeing something we wouldn’t already know.
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Roger Ebert about 1 year ago
Yeah, I more or less agree with what you are saying about Ebert overall there Matt. I was mostly suggesting that he could have at least occasionally gone in somewhat different directions, not radically so, but that wouldn’t suit him anyway, which, as you point out, is kind the gist of the matter.
I am a little more ambivalent about the industry release schedule thing though since if they are planning on an eventual wide release, then the advertising costs are already going to be set, and might even be lessened as they perhaps wouldn’t need to be duplicated market by market. There is, of course, a question of theater availability involved and some other associated issues, but if they are so worried about pirating then they surely would do things to mitigate that factor, and cost, which this would help do. (I’m also thinking internationally here and not just a slow roll out in the US as the movies which most get pirated aren’t those that get that treatment here.) Whatever the case, I can’t help but feel the industry needs to find new models for distribution as the old ones are just that, old, and aren’t always really well suited to today’s world.
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Roger Ebert about 1 year ago
True, and that is a problem as it helps foster a divide, which may not be possible to ever fully bridge, but which could at least be lessened, or so I think anyway.
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