After the Gold Rush
After a week under stark New England skies, I’m back in Berkeley, searching home for the detail that only reveals itself in transition. I spent a nice morning pottering around inside and out (little difference between the two; such is Northern California’s blurry winter), and then opened the mail and made some usual web rounds. Stupid mistake. Limiting myself to film criticism—and there are some other things to keep up with, you know—the week’s haul is gargantuan and, damn you David Hudson, exceedingly well indexed. I am certainly not the first to grouse about the tonnage of “keeping up”—on a blog, no less!—nor to draw a distinction between the abundance of excellent film writing online and the actual experience traversing it. What a difference between the regenerative spark of collage—even bad collage—and this passive drift between illuminations, a whirlpool of thought at odds with memory (there is always that quaking question, “How did I get here?,” after thirty or forty minutes trawling; too tawdry to be thrilling, too emotionally absent to seem vertiginous).
Let me hedge again: there are many online hubs for insight in the spirit of encounter. What I’m really responding to, predictably enough, is the fantastic overage of lists at decade’s end, a dull spectacle of participation. I find plenty of interesting takes (both in terms of selections and approaches to the list genre), but the cumulative effect is enervating. Hypocritical? Sure. I dutifully submitted ten films to the Guardian’s poll. I also contributed an associative piece to the paper’s Year-in-Film issue, though the editorial approach there heads off history-in-the-making prognostications. But a 2009-penned decade-in-review? Shouldn’t one at least attempt modesty?
Lists can take many forms, but the kind we’re talking about infer an imperial purview, a cool coordination of marketing and taste, knowledge and power. Industry cycles come to seem “natural,” and if lesser known work attracts notice thanks to some critic’s invocation, well that’s great. But as criticism? Personally, I don’t trust my voice with these exercises. I find myself easily corrupted by a strongly worded missive—whether posed as the definitive last word or its riposte— and any idiosyncrasy I latch onto ends up feeling hammy. It’s obvious enough that I tend to overvalue the films that I’ve written about, mastery being the unspoken criteria of most lists. With mastery comes narcissism and isolation: borne out of the same concern for what others think that Mom warned against, the list goes on to consolidate the divide-and-conquer model of arts criticism. All the more reason for the reforms called for by music writer Ben Tausig (and partly realized by the happily askew polls featured on Moving Image Source and The Auteurs Notebook).
Recently, I wrote a review of Police, Adjective for the Guardian (it opens here on the 15th). I had read the Cinema Scope coverage of the film, as well as a few other notes from Cannes, but long enough ago that they didn’t crowd my thinking. I watched the film twice and wrote my piece. Afterward, I allowed myself a look at what others had written (with help, naturally, from Hudson’s cataloging). The film has already generated its mountain, with issues of form, language and history in easy circulation. As many have remarked, there is something utopic about this cognoscenti network: bypassing mainstream critics, a zone for philosophical/aesthetic concerns to flourish. One feels this, dearly, in the bloom of posts following Robin Wood’s death. But after reading five or six articles on Police, Adjective, I came to feel I was looping yet another media pileup, smoothed out by invisible handshakes. There’s not much joy in it.
I came to think of Police, Adjective as a mirror image of A Serious Man and wrote as much in a couple of sentence tucked at the end of the piece. No matter how tentative, this refraction came to matter more to me after reading through so many sufficient appraisals. One of the reasons I admire my Guardian colleague Johnny Ray Huston’s criticism is for his loose arrays, a cartographic imagination where taste is creativity explored. You can’t get what he writes anywhere else. Additionally, my Police, Adjective reading jag reaffirmed craft. There are those critics who are just such excellent, nervy writers that their choice in words locates the film with startling precision. They often refer to moments and sequences other reviewers do not, and I sometimes think this flows from their language and not the other way around.
It’s with them in mind that I set out again.
