So pleased was I with Vern’s book on Steven Seagal that I ordered his other book, 5 on the Outside, a collection of just under 90 of Vern’s online reviews all reprinted proudly with typos still intact. Self-published through Lulu, it bears a clever cover designed by one Brian Theiss and several encomiums by numerous and varied commentators. Yet Vern still isn’t getting “respect” — at least as measured by the lack of any mention of Vern’s work in recent chest-thumpings about the future of film criticism in the age of the World Wide Web.

There must be a crisis in film criticism, because the top three mainstream film journals recently said there was. The current Cineaste contains a “forum” on film criticism in the age of the Internet, featuring such luminaries as Jonathan Rosenbaum and Kent Jones; the new Sight and Sound asks, “Who needs critics?”; and the new Film Comment announces a forthcoming panel discussion asking (ungrammatically), “Film Criticism in Crisis?”, featuring — surprise — Jonathan Rosenbaum and Kent Jones.

Then I received the latest issue of Video Watchdog, just as I was starting to ponder the state of film criticism in light of the agonizing found in the other magazines. In his editorial, VW’s Tim Lucas reveals that he has been giving some thought to the editorial direction of his publication. He concludes that VW needs to move away from the tyranny of gearing its content to the latest releases — that VW “needs to fully re-engage with the kinds of movies that speak to us and the many levels on which they continue to fascinate us.”

I think Lucas’ editorial is revelatory, and offers one solution to the problem of contemporary film criticism that seems to distress the other editors.

One of the few joys I’ve experienced this summer was the completion, finally, of my collection of back issues of Movie magazine. I missed out on most of them when they were first published, and they’re hard to find now. But now I have them all, and can trace the rise of its combative auteurism from issue to issue, its celebration of Hawks and Hitchcock and Preminger and its occasional denigration of inflated reputations. The Movie writers were outsiders. Their publication was up against bulwarks such as Sight and Sound, then a middlebrow publication.

Today, though, the “outsiders” are on the Web — and the “insiders” work for publications such as Cineaste, Film Comment, and Sight and Sound. To be fair, things have loosened up: The aforementioned magazines will happily publish essays about, say, Cy Endfield. But as a reader looking for diversity, I basically see the same bylines repeatedly, from issue to issue, from magazine to magazine, covering the same movies, because all the writers went to the same festivals and the publicists for various studios provide all the editors the same information, stills, and other publicity paraphernalia so everyone can meet their deadlines. And what I see in those magazines is all thoughts, impressions, ideas, reactions; there’s very little original research to be found, nor does one find much of the film buff’s equivalent of investigative journalism — such as James Naremore’s rethinking of film noir (originally published in Film Quarterly), or coverage of all the great research that has emerged in the last few years about early silent cinema.

When the community refers to a “crisis” in movie writing, they’re really referring to a conflation of about five different “crises.”

Movie reviewers are being canned left and right from newspapers. Is this the Web’s fault? There are a lot of Web reviewers and bloggers. How many of them are truly worth reading? Is this so-called “crisis” about newspapers, or is it about film writing in general, including academic writing? It must be about newspapers only — because academic publishing on film topics has been at its height for the past decade, a summit it hadn’t previously achieved since the 1970s.

Is the crisis about of a heartbreaking loss of readership? If so: When, historically and statistically, were movie reviewers ever really that important? Back in the 1970s, I read (and still read those still writing when I can) Sarris, Macdonald, Simon and many others assiduously in their various publications. But I was under no delusion that I was part of a massive wave of readers. Indeed, I could barely find anyone else to talk to about these writers and their views, except one or two other fellow film buffs. Roger Ebert’s TV show created the illusion that reviewers mattered, and indeed maybe Ebert’s thumbs did matter for a decade or so — but most Americans don’t read, and when they do read, they don’t want to read that tertiary level of discourse called “the movie review.” They get their information, such as it is, from TV — which is why Ebert rose to power, distracting us from what a fine writer and newspaper reviewer he is.

In order to gain further insight into this matter, I turned to my friend Alexandra DuPont, who has recently reemerged, after a long self-imposed hiatus, at Ain’t It Cool News. I posited five points:

1) That several issues are conflated under one rubric, i.e., the “crisis” in criticism. But is there a crisis?

2) Print media seems afraid of digital technology, mainly because they are middlebrow and old fashioned. Those who lose their jobs in print probably deserve to, as we can see when they go off and start their own blogs but no one visits them or cares.

3) The business model is wrong. Print doesn’t understand how consumers use the Web. Print thinks that people want to read long, thoughtful essays (and some do, me for example). But most people want scoops, instant reviews, and so forth. (A friend of mine told me the other day that the New York Times just hired the 25-year-old son of a colleague whose job it is to consult with the Times about getting out of the print business all together, about transitioning from a paper world to a digital one.)

4) That ultimately, it is about content. If you print something that is readable, and if there are readers out there, the material will get distributed.

5) Print hasn’t caught up with the way that consumers watch movies now.

Ms. DuPont responded: “I would further argue that 1) The Internet has turned us into a perverse sort of super-literate culture; everyone reads more than they ever did before. They just read in shorter bursts, and often using what I’ll charitably call “mutated” language; 2) The Internet has allowed discovery of a lot of movies that would never otherwise have been found and discussed outside the cineaste clique. Film-festival breakdowns can be digested at AICN and Cinematical and GreenCine Daily, free of charge, where before you might only find those things discussed in film journals. Mind you, the festival offerings may not be written about AS WELL as they would be in journals, or as in-depth — but these shorter-burst roundups provide a reader looking to educate him- or herself with a sort of shopping list of movies to add to their Netflix down the line. And if the reader then wants to read some deeper analysis, last I checked, the film journals were still there — and I’m finding out about their essays by clicking on a GreenCine Daily roundup post. How is this a bad thing?”

Miss DuPont went on: “One thing I will say is that the decentralization of film writing has probably created a culture in which the One Great Landmark Ivory-Tower Essay that Everyone Talks About for Decades could be created is probably over. We are now in the culture of aggregators, a culture of flurries of niche discussion — in which a number of lesser writers swarm around a single issue and you kind of have to suss out the larger tone of the “cultural conversation” by reading several different pieces and the comments under them and the links to other articles in those comments. But is the ending of the ivory-tower era necessarily bad? Isn’t it kind of interesting and cool that an issue can now be picked apart from various perspectives immediately?”

DuPont add, “I would also make the point that there’s a great strength in the Web’s creation of a culture in which format and formula and what defines a ‘film journal’ are regularly destroyed — e.g. Ain’t It Cool News regularly runs 2,000-4,000 word articles. (I’m totally biased, of course, but I’d argue that between Moriarty and Mr. Beaks and Vern and Harry’s massive Forry Ackerman levels of arcane knowledge and the occasional stunt-hilariity of Neill Cumpston, AICN harbors a lot more solid writing than people give it credit for; when people slam the site, they’re often really slamming the TalkBackers and the pseudonyms.) Also, sites like AICN actually cover a broader base of content than the received cliches about those sites. I agree with you: Vern is a serious thinker about movies, or at least about a certain kind of movie. But his format doesn’t conform to the middlebrow safeness, just as Joe Bob’s didn’t before him. Looking at AICN and Cinematical right now, I see film-festival roundups; I see regular coverage on AICN of Asian art cinema.

“The best pop-analysis I’ve ever read about how the Internet changed everything forever is this manifesto called The Cluetrain. It’s specifically about marketing, but I think it makes one key and crucial point: The Internet turned EVERYTHING into a conversation. The writer now kicks off a conversation with every piece he or she writes. The onus is upon the writer (or manufacturer, or politician) to kick off and engage that conversation.”

The Cineaste forum on Web reviewing certainly tried to start a conversation; it gathered 23 critics from all walks of publication and quizzed them with four questions, of which their answers consumed some 17 pages. The four questions, in their essence, asked, 1) Does the Internet (they mean the Web) add value to film culture in general?; 2) Are blogs good for film culture?; 3) Are talkbacks good for film culture?; 4) Are traditional film culture writers getting left behind by modern technology?

My overall take on the section is that this is exactly what you’d expect when out-of-date print editors contrive to comment on a field or a new technology they don’t understand, a technology that has taken them by surprise — a technology that indeed has caught up with them and passed them by while they cling to the old-fashioned ways of doing things, to which they welcome encomiums that are half-manifestos, half-nostalgia for the old days still barely breathing.

If Cineaste wants to reach readers whom it believes are drifting away from criticism, then its material should be all online. So should the material in Film Comment and Sight and Sound. But these publications are following the business model that says give the reader a taste of the issue but withhold most of it so they have to buy it. (As the drug dealer of legend says, the first one’s free.) This model is one that has given into the belief that people don’t want to read long, thoughtful essays online, but rather want to navigate there for quick hits and instant news.

I would have been more interested if the symposiasts had been asked more expansive questions, such as, 1) Has the Web advanced serious film scholarship? 2) What is the true purpose of Web film writing, or rather, what do consumers want from Web-based film material? 3) Is there a business model that works for film criticism on the web? 4) Why are mainstream film writers afraid of interacting with their readers in talkbacks and emails?

Indeed, there are probably seven or eight more questions that could be posed, in an attempt to finely discriminate among the plethora of confusable issues bogging down the topic of a “crisis” in film writing. Questions such as, Are publicists still necessary in the age of the World Wide Web? (The answer? Blessedly, no.)

The Cineaste symposiasts were familiar names. Among them were Jonathan Rosenbaum, Kent Jones, J. Hoberman, Richard Schickel, and Amy Taubin. There were a few token bloggers. Noticeably absent were writers such as Harvey Karten, who has been reviewing movies back before there were web browsers, and Roger Ebert, one of the few newspapermen who adapted to the WWW with enthusiasm right from the start. Vern was not there with his irascible views.

It’s all a glorious circle jerk, the art of the higher logrolling, with the same names popping up from entry to entry, all praising each other. Meanwhile, Vern goes unmentioned [9/26/09: See Talkback note]. Stacie Ponder goes unmentioned. Kim Morgan is mentioned once. Maybe it’s genre prejudice, which was the war the Movie writers and Andrew Sarris struggled against. Slant, on the other hand, which publishes the toughest, most thought-provoking reviews on line, was cited by several contributors.

For me, one big take-away from the Cineaste roundtable was this: The fact that the same names get mentioned repeatedly is not a sign that there is a cadre of good Web writers who also see print publication, but rather that film publication these days is a closed system — much like the the system the Movie writers were fighting way back when. All these people know each other or know of each other, and basically they are naming their friends as superior colleagues in the film-writing dodge. It’s exclusionary.

The brevity of the entries also offered up condensed versions of what’s wrong with some of these writers. Richard Schickel flat-out admits that he doesn’t read other writers. Paradoxically, Schickel — who has gone on record expressing dislike of blogs and web writers — is now confined to the hell of contributing solely to Time magazine’s online version. Cyber justice? One online writer was revealed to all who would or could read the entry to be the ignorant snob the writer’s collective reviews had hinted at. And Amy Taubin, in virtually bragging about her ignorance of the Web, basically wrote herself off henceforth as a film writer with any credibility with webophiles.

Please don’t get me wrong. I like many of the writers who contributed to the symposium, and Cineaste has been a supremely important magazine to me over the past several years. I merely lament that for the most part the forum did not bring out the best of their thinking. And throughout the entries, it is not at all clear who the “enemies” are in this supposed crisis. What are we all supposed to be afraid of?

Meanwhile, Film Comment announced on page four that it is playing host to a conference on “Film Criticism in Crisis?”, featuring — who else? — Jonathan Rosenbaum and Kent Jones, no doubt there to replicate their cogitations from Cineaste. Fortunately, among the five speakers is also David Hudson of GreenCine Daily, flying in from Berlin (and modernity) to offer his views. I look forward to the results of this panel in a future issue of Film Comment.

NOTE: This is a revised and shortened version of a blog entry posted last week but taken down after about four hours.

NOTE: This entry was revised on Friday Morning, Sept. 26.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.