There is a genre of film criticism that I find intimidating enough that I've never managed to produce a piece of writing in it. I speak of the filmmaker overview essay. For a film-lover, it's an immensely useful and educational form. I'm always looking out for good examples of it. A couple of terrific ones have appeared online recently.

At 16:9, Adrian Martin writes about Abel Ferrara:

Most great directors have signatures: Max Ophuls’ expansively tracking camera, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s static long shot-long takes, Jean-Luc Godard’s montage-mix of sampled and interrupted sound sources. But Ferrara? There is no consistent affectation, no recognisable manner in his prodigious forms. In the prolific ‘90s, especially, diversity rules: can it be the same director who mastered, so swiftly, the hyper-Michael Mann style of cool nocturnal blue in King of New York, the minimalist ‘stations of the cross’ intrigue in Bad Lieutenant, the stark black and white exploitation-horror of The Addiction, the stately, sombre mise en scène of The Funeral and the hallucinatory, multi-layered collage of The Blackout? [...]

Yet if Ferrara lacks a signature - and maybe that, in our auteur-commodity market, slyly and subversively, is his signature - he has honed an attitude to content and an approach to form that are razor sharp. Ferrara is in the tradition of John Cassavetes and Maurice Pialat: he seeks the truth of the moment, the nub of a contradiction, the telling flashpoint of tension. In interviews or documentaries, that is all he will talk about: ‘getting the shot’, nailing something in an image, a performance, an exchange, a riff. His cinema is a postmodern gestalt, a fusion in dissonance: bodies, environments, songs, colours and edits are so powerfully compacted in his work that we can hardly separate the elements, as we can with the work of ‘cleaner’ directors.

James Quandt isn't read as widely as he should be, mainly because most of his writing is done for the Cinematheque Ontario season programme guide, which is largely unavailable at libraries and newsstands. In the new issue he writes about the latest retrospective he's assembled, the films of Nagisa Oshima:

Much parsed and puzzled over, Shohei Imamura’s famous pronouncement, “I’m a country farmer; Nagisa Oshima is a samurai” may be ambiguous in tone and intent – is it ironic, invidious, deferential? – but it emphasizes the directors’ differences: class, stylistic, and otherwise. Often paired as twin avatars of the Japanese New Wave, a term Oshima (born in Kyoto, 1932) took every opportunity to spurn and disparage, the two fit uncomfortably in that “movement” and with each other. Sharing formal and social audacity, a brilliant ability to exploit the widescreen format, a rejection of the refined and self-sacrificing tenor of traditional Japanese cinema, a propensity for mixing fiction and reality, and certain key themes – sex and criminality, the abuse and resilience of women, incest, the social fissures of postwar Japan, the aggravated acts of outcasts in a tightly battened monoculture – Imamura and Oshima nevertheless can be construed as contraries, if not opposites. (It would be illuminating to pair certain of their films: Imamura’s A Man Vanishes with Oshima’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film; Pigs and Battleships with The Sun’s Burial; Vengeance Is Mine with Violence at Noon.) Where Imamura made defiantly “messy” and “juicy” (his preferred terms) films that celebrated the irrational, the instinctual, the carnal, squalid, violent, and superstitious life of Japan’s underclass, Oshima’s films are primarily ideational, probing, and controlled even when anarchic (e.g. Three Resurrected Drunkards). Which is not to say they are dry (as opposed to juicy) or cerebral. Even at their most complex – the densely structured Night and Fog in Japan, for instance, all but dictates a second viewing – Oshima’s works exhibit such wit, beauty, and furious invention, never mind profound feeling, that their conceptual gambits take on sensual and emotional force. They are less the product of a postmodernist sensibility, as some critics have characterized Oshima’s strategies, than of a desperate intelligence. Oshima made films as if they were a matter of life and death.

The Oshima series has been producing a bumper crop of writing, a lot of it available online. At Artforum, here's Jonathan Rosenbaum:

Oshima's cinema consists of particular interventions in Japan’s internal political debates, and freely draws on forms as well as styles that seem to come from everywhere, including Japan. Some would call this disconcertingly voracious trait “very Japanese,” and it helps to account for the truism that no two Oshima films are alike. Each new feature critiques its predecessors: After vowing to abolish green from his palette in his first foray into color, Cruel Story of Youth, as a way of refusing any trace of domestic tranquillity, he used green frequently and effectively two features later (without suggesting much domestic tranquillity), in his first truly personal work, Night and Fog in Japan, meanwhile countering the earlier film’s neorealist locations and handheld-camera movements with artificially lit theatrical spaces and smooth if restless pans between characters at a wedding party. Both films are steeped in the dark pessimism characteristic of Oshima’s films of the ’60s. [...]

Where Oshima differs most strikingly from an antisentimental, leftist provocateur like Buñuel is in the relative absence of humanism in his work. (Boy, a mainly sympathetic look at a lonely ten-year-old con artist, is a rare exception.) If The Sun’s Burial (1960)—an early shocker about rival street gangs in an Osaka slum—was partly inspired by Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1950), as the British DVD’s liner notes maintain, the notion of Oshima showing any tenderness toward his doomed punks, as Buñuel does toward Jaibo, is unthinkable—even if Oshima is no less outraged by corpses being dumped like garbage. And the repeated occurrences of sexual assault (mainly rape) in Cruel Story of Youth, The Sun’s Burial, Violence at Noon (1966), Sing a Song of Sex (1967), Death by Hanging, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1968), The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970), Empire of Passion, and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence—usually committed by his protagonists and often seen as acts of rebellion against the Japanese state (a view at least contested in Death by Hanging)—suggest that, with the possible exception of In the Realm of the Senses, feminism and nonviolence are not exactly hallmarks of his leftist positions.

John Wakeman's two-volume World Film Directors (1988; Norton), which weighs in at 2000+ pages, was the first book of filmmaker overview essays I can remember buying. Today, it seems stronger to me on informational detail than on personality. Richard Roud's 2-volume Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (1980; Martin, Secker & Warburg) is probably my single favorite collection in the genre. The list of writers includes: Noel Burch, Edgardo Cozarinsky, Jean-Andre Fieschi, Tom Milne, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Andrew Sarris, Robin Wood, and many others. The essays in the St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia edited by Andrew Sarris (1998; Visible Ink Press) are less lengthy and substantive in comparison to the Roud, but they have the advantage of including a wider range of filmmakers, many of them recent. Speaking of Sarris, his You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet: The American Talking Film, History & Memory, 1927-1949 (1998; Oxford) has the edge on his classic The American Cinema (1969) in one respect: its filmmaker essays are longer and meatier. A rare example for avant-garde cinema: Arden Press released two excellent volumes under the title Film: The Front Line, written by Jonathan Rosenbaum (1983) and David Ehrenstein (1984). A few years ago, my first encounter with David Thomson's The Biographical Dictionary of Film occurred with the most recent edition (2002; Knopf). I was struck immediately by the cursoriness of recent world/art cinema coverage and, annoyed, I put away the book. I picked it up again recently and loved the older pieces on Hawks and Rivette. I need to cherry-pick my way through it for the good stuff. Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Pierre Sauvage's 2-volume American Directors (1983; McGraw-Hill) is a recent discovery that I'm eager to dive into. Finally, the Senses of Cinema Great Directors database is the definitive resource of its kind on the Interwebs.

Can I ask: Do you have some favorite examples of either books or individual essays, print or online, of filmmaker overview pieces? Perhaps this post could serve as a collecting place for recommendations and suggestions.

Some links:

-- "Manifesting the Ineffable": Darren has a wonderful conversation with Nathaniel Dorsky at Auteurs' Notebook.

-- Adrian's monthly column at Filmkrant: "Has film criticism entered its decadent phase? That term is used by art historians to designate the historic moment when an art form or medium turns its attention away from everything outside of itself - such as the real world - and looks inward, to its own devices, its own position, its own history. Decadence - or, to use a less loaded word, self-consciousness - tends to come around cyclically, at moments when, for one reason or another, such introspection becomes pressing. The art or discourse must take stock of itself, temporarily, in order to renew itself and continue its outer-directed mission."

-- Steven Shaviro discovers that the new issue of a poetry publication contains a poem credited to him that he didn't write. It prompts him to share some reflections on present-day "avant-gardism." (I'm in the publication too, credited with a poem I've never laid eyes on. Steve and I are both on poet Ron Silliman's blogroll, perhaps the reason why we ended up being unwittingly 'harvested' for this conceptual art project, if that's what it is.)

-- Speaking of filmmaker overview essays, Jonathan Rosenbaum has just posted one from 1988 on Sergei Parajanov.

-- Via Jonathan: an annotated shot list for RR from James Benning; Kristin Thompson's comments on the film from Vancouver (scroll down a bit); and Benning himself has a piece at the Wexner Center blog.

-- Kimberly Lindbergs has a post on fashion and The Thomas Crown Affair. (I must now see this film. Also, the Michel Legrand soundtrack is one of my favorites.)

-- At Owen Hatherley's: Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica's short film Dom (1958).

-- Tucker Teague at Pilgrim Akimbo: "How the Post-Christendom Church Mirrors the Impulse of Postmodern Art."

-- Jason Sperb and Will Scheibel announce a James Bond blogathon at Dr. Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope.

-- At The Listening Ear: an analysis of the crane shot in Ozu's Early Summer.

-- Philip Horne on Thorold Dickinson in The Guardian.

A really strong family play - and teh end of summer - meant a big bump for Disney on the weekend. Very impressive. And now, the opening is just behind Eddie Murphy's Dr. Dolittle as the third best talking animale live action opening of all time. And it'e more than double the previous best non-summer, non-holiday opener in the category (Goiod Boy, $13m in the same slot in 2003).

Eagle Eye continues to keep a pace about 30% ahead of Disturbia. Is it genre or Shia orpeople just plain having more interest? Hard to say. But continuing at that rate, cracking $100m domestic is not out of the question.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist isn't a great movie... it's pure John Hughes with a 2008 sex & booze bent, but it is not quite as well conceived. Not ever painful. Pleasantly blase about sexuality, though very thin on ethnicity (aside from Asian). But the real life audiences I saw it with last night had a great time and I suspect that Sony's genre 3.5x opening (nice legs) will occur here too... "deserving" not being an issue.

Appaloosa had a nice enough expansion that it suggests that WB should have opened the once-NL picture wide instead of the mess of The Women.

This is really the most interesting area of the chart this weekend:

Fireproof has its own thing going with a strong play in a niche area. Congrats... it means nothing to the industry, as the industry learned the hard way chasing its god-loving tail after Gibson cashed in.

But when the whining about a weak, overloaded market starts again, as distributors try to make excuses for why they couldn't make their movies work, remember this week. Five movies, 500 screens to 1700 screens... all pretty much D.O.A. You could argue that Religulous looking at $10 million domestic is a win... it's the second best doc opening in history, though docs almost never open this wide... and it will be among the top ten docs of all times... assuming we consider it a doc... but it's still half a Michael Moore. As for the rest, Blindness will makes its money back overseas and Miramax might take a small hit. But the others will lose money. So, did they go limited because "they knew" or do they now know because they went limited?

Welcome to Reader Mailstrom, a chronicle of stand-outs from the daily maelstrom of Looking Closer email. 

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BEHOLD… BALLAST!

A little while back, you posted a trailer for Lance Hammer’s Ballast on your blog, which I watched and decided to check out sometime.  To my delight, Ballast just had its Canadian premiere at the Vancouver Film Festival, and I was able to catch that screening.  I’ve posted my review of the film at my blog: http://filmatical.wordpress.com/

Ballast is an excellent film, and I want to thank you for putting it onto my radar.

By the way, I’ve started reading Auralia’s Colors and I’m really enjoying it so far.  I’m trying to get caught up quickly to join in on the Cyndere’s Midnight fun.

cheers,

Nathan

MY REPSONSE:

Thanks, Nathan!

Yeah, Ballast was hard to watch… due to its dispiriting and yet convincing portrait of a boy starved for love and trapped in a world so bleak it might exist on the edges of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s haunted me since I saw it, and I look forward to seeing it again. As the credits rolled, the event organizer announced that Lance Hammer was present, and would take questions. I was in a rush to meet someone for dinner, alas. But on my way out, I passed him in the aisle, shook his hand, and congratulated him on a stunning debut.

You’ll find even more thoughtful reviews here.

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GERVAIS + KINNEAR = CHEMISTRY!

Bryan writes:

I’ll try to rein in my enthusiasm, but Ghost Town was actuallly WONDERFUL, a nearly perfect variation on the Christmas Carol story! Is it a great film, a deathless cinematic achievement? Don’t know, don’t care. I just know that I laughed my ass off and was also tremendously moved. Not being familiar with Ricky Gervais, I became an instantaneous fan. Greg Kinnear has even more chemistry with Gervais than he did with Pierce Brosnan in The Matador, and I didn’t think that was possible. High points for Tea Leoni as well. Since it’s been getting such faint praise (2 1/2 stars, B minus, etc.), [my friend] and I agreed that it is automatically the most underrated movie of 2008.

MY RESPONSE:

Wow. You’re not the first person to tell me this. I’ve got to see Ghost Town.

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TED BAEHR AT BAYLOR

From James:

This past week has been an interesting one for me.

For my purposes it all started last Saturday when I caught up with your [Through a Screen Darkly] article and decided to watch The Island upon your recommendation. Wow. Once again you’ve proven your ability to really find the gold. It was a sheer joy and delight to find such a film and I can’t thank you enough. If we could only get Christians to watch these kinds of films instead of Facing the Giants.

Which segways me into my next notable point of interest. Monday I discovered that your favorite Christian Critic (sarcasm intended) Ted Baehr was on my college campus for a lecture and luncheon. I attended both.

It was rather depressing what he was telling everyone. Essentially he touted that “Christian” ideas are present in most major Hollywood blockbusters and are a big part of what makes them successful (The William Goldman quote “No one knows anything” popped immediately into my mind.). His big example was the failure of The Golden Compass in comparison with the success of Prince Caspian. Films like Gladiator and Pirates of the Caribbean struck me as almost militantly anti-religious.

He seemed to make his points quick, cite on example, and then move on. But he seemed to be pulling out the exceptions than the norm. But where he really incited some personal emotion is when he scorned the indie industry with a couple of scathing quotes labeling it snobbish and elitist. He also shoved the Oscars into this category and all I could think is that I saw all the Oscar films last year and they were all good (unlike a lot of the blockbusters of 2007 I saw that he touted as “promoting Christian values”).

At the luncheon we got to ask questions and being diplomatic I simply asked him if he ever thought nudity was appropriate in a film. His short answer was no, his long one was vague and ambiguous, talking about it’s degrading effects on unhealthy perceptions of sexual life and women (from a Male perspective). But I framed the question in the context of more, what I labeled as “spiritually transcendent” films. He was taking it as a whole, but left it a bit ambiguous. I’m not sure what images of films he was conjuring but I was thinking along the lines of a Kieslowski or Bergman film.

And he of course spent most of his talk on how language, sex and violence are bad and actually make a film’s boxoffice results worse off (maybe it’s because parents don’t take their kids to films with language, sex and violence–imagine that!). For him the bottom line was Christian values and boxoffice results. He wanted Christians in Hollywood. He even said not to get into the indie industry because it is “dying”. (Which strikes me as a totally basless sentiment given that two of the biggest cultural films of this decade–Juno and Napoleon Dynamite –were both indie films.)

But you probably already know most of his views. For me it’s a realization how much harder your work must be since you are probably stereotyped as in the same category as guys like this. It makes me appreciate your views all the more so thanks a lot for keeping on.

But while my small exchange was mostly a sad reminder of how narrow minded so many Christians are I got the opportunity to talk to lady in charge of our schools Honors Film Society. We had a great conversation and I told her about The Island. I also told her about your article and book, Through a Screen Darkly.

And speaking of books I picked up Cyndere’s Midnight. I haven’t gotten too far yet but am enjoying it so far. Fantastic opening with the waterdragon skeleton. In fact, I think I’m going to read the rest right now.

Keep up the great work.

MY RESPONSE:

Thanks, James. I hope you enjoy the rest of Cyndere’s Midnight, and I hope the woman leading your Honors Film Society enjoys Through a Screen Darkly. (Chapter Two of that book is affectionately dedicated to Ted Baehr and Movieguide.) I’d be happy to talk with her about the book if she’d be interested. I’ve visited a lot of schools in order to talk with the students about faith and film, and it would be fun to come to Baylor.

Since 2003, some of us at Arts and Faith have been monitoring and discussing the wild, wacky world of Movieguide.

And you might find this interesting….

A few months ago, I received this testimony from Lindsay Marshall, a former reviewer at Ted Baehr’s Movieguide. And if it seems suspicious, well, check out this testimony (here), which I received last year.

Here is my Movieguide story in all its gory detail. Feel free to use it on your blog if you’d like.

And feel free to use my name - I’d like it redeemed.

My brief stint as a movie reviewer and why it’s Movieguide’s fault I probably can’t go back to it again. (Or something to that effect.)

There’s not a lot I can add to Sean’s account of his own experience working for Movieguide. I, too, was in on the earlier days of the magazine (back before anyone had learned html, from the looks of the website). I was just a starstruck kid from the heart of Texas who was shocked that anyone would hand her pen and paper and send her in to meet famous people. My mom worked for Movieguide casually the first year or so they lived in southern California, and I tagged along with her a couple times until her boss agreed to give me an assignment.

I was given their list of ridiculous acronyms and their template for their reviews, but I wasn’t given any guidance beyond that. Foolishly, I assumed that I should simply catalog the items Movieguide subscribers might find offensive, then write a standard review of the artistry of the film from its technical aspects to its literary traits. I was a dutiful film student at the time, so I really did my homework and worked hard to fulfill their required content reporting as well as avoid sounding like a complete rube when it came to my comments on the actual film.

My mom and I joked a lot about the futility (and wicked nature) of counting every single f-word or trying to make sure we saw every single exposed anatomical feature to report accurately, but we were also having a lot of fun getting to see movies first and on rare occasions interview the filmmakers. That is, until I started reading my own reviews on Movieguide’s website.

Like Sean, I was far too small potatoes to have contact with the might Baehr. However, my editor was not, like his, interested in pushing past the ‘tee hee hee’ factor of finding all the naughty things in films. He was a frequent imbiber of the Ted Baehr kool-aid, and he was rewriting my reviews, and then selling them … without telling me… or changing the name on the review.

I wouldn’t have minded too much if what Tom was writing in my name wasn’t both completely incorrect in relation to the film and, from what I can tell (and I consider myself a pretty serious scholar of the Bible), non-biblical. It all came to a head with my review of Seabiscuit. Where I saw the film as a story about the redemptive power of hope, personified by that funny little horse, Tom (and Ted) saw it as a tract for communism. Tom rewrote the entire review, leaving maybe a few scattered sentences of mine intact, and then distributed it so that in various websites I railed against the evil FDR (one my personal heroes!) and stated that it was anti-Christian to suggest that the state offer material aid to the poor.

I couldn’t let that one go.

After a heated round of emails (which I saved, just in case), I convinced Tom to remove my name and, sadly, resigned from one of the more fun jobs I’ve had. I just couldn’t continue to work for people who were destroying what my fellow Christians were trying to build in Hollywood. I thought for awhile that I could fight the bad tendencies from within, but as they continued to nitpick over naughtiness (thus making the entire focus of their publication sin, not virtue, irony of ironies), I realized change wouldn’t come to that organization as long as Ted Baehr was at the helm.

Beyond that, I came to realize that writing reviews their way was bad for my soul. Instead of seeking Truth and Beauty in a film, I was training myself to look for evil in it. That’s a very bad habit to develop, and I’m glad God allowed me to have that huge argument with my editor before it became too deeply engrained in my practice.

So thanks for letting me tell the story. I still pray for the group, and pray for those it hurts or trains up in the wrong way. But I have confidence in Christ’s mission in Hollywood, and if the gates of Hell shall not prevail against Him, neither will a couple crystal teddy bear statues.

I appreciate the willingness of Lindsay, and of Sean, to share their stories. I wonder what the folks who brought Baehr to Baylor would say if they read through all of this.

Once, I was interviewed on the radio by Dick Staub about the value of fairy tales. Baehr was the next guest on the program. When Staug asked him what he thought of my views on fairy tales, Baehr’s answer was, “Well, he’s never read the Bible. And he’s been blinded by the glitter of Hollywood.” You know, I *have* read the Bible, and it makes heavy claims about the punishment awaiting those who claim to have powers of clairvoyance. The only way Baehr could make such a claim about me was if he was clairvoyant… and even then it would be a lie, as I’ve grown up in a Christian home and Christian educaiton, and been a lifelong churchgoer. Never read the Bible? That was his claim about me on live radio. If he’s so quick to cast false and damning judgment like that, imagine how trustworthy he is on the subject of art.

If you have the stomach for it, you can now read a chapter online from Baehr’s book The Culture-Wise Family: Upholding Christian Values in a Mass Media World.”

The chapter is called “Who Stole Our Culture?”

It’s quite revealing. To say the least.