project film school

pfs roots and jonathan rosenbaum

a big part of the reason that i wanted to try and start something like project film school was because of a lack of real voice when it comes to cinema. there are of course lots of film "critics" out there, filling newspapers, blogs, and other media outlets - but folks who speak about cinema outside the mainstream (this includes sundancey films and high profile foreign films) and look to what we actually have access to are extremely rare.

the one critic that i always follow - and that does work outside of the capitalist critic mold is the chicago reader's head critic jonathan rosenbaum. i finally ordered his book Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We Can See today- which i have been meaning to read forever. (you can read more by clicking on the above link)

i thought on that note i would post an excerpt from that book that deals with the above:

"One of my oldest and dearest friends, Meredith Brody, is a cinephile who lives in Hollywood and frequently writes about movies. She's as addicted to movie lists as I am and keeps a scrapbook devoted to all the films that open locally, pasting in newspaper ads of them.

While I was visiting her in December 1998 she started to read aloud some of the Hollywood titles in her scrapbook, all pasted in over the previous six months. Most if not all of these movies had played in Chicago, which meant that even if I hadn't seen them, I'd read promotional material about them and written a descriptive capsule or assigned them to the second-string reviewer at the Reader and read her review. The disturbing thing about Meredith's list was that a good 80 percent of the titles had no resonance for me, even after she read me the ad copy.

Could it be that I'm going senile in my mid-50s? I doubt it, because if I heard a list of random commercial titles from the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s I wouldn't draw the same blank. Some might argue that it's easy to forget how many wretched movies were made during those decades, when the task of regularly furnishing theaters with product made the likelihood of indifferent and unmemorable work high, but I'm sure I remember more of the lesser movies of 1956 than of 1998. The reality is that movies can get away with being terrible these days without causing any crisis in the film industry because no matter how much the capacity to make movies that matter has been impaired, the capacity to advertise, market, and disseminate them has only improved.

If most Hollywood movies today have become as terrible as I'm implying, wouldn't people stop seeing them? Maybe. But I don't think the will of the people is as decisive an influence as we like to believe it is. Much as the enforced "consensus" of the Stalinist state made it impossible to figure out what Soviet citizens really wanted until that state was overturned, the interests of corporate executives make it hard to find out what the American public really thinks about movies. And we can't turn to journalists for a definitive answer, because most of them are devoted to doing variations on the corporate stories.

Consider what might happen if Roger Ebert couldn't find a single movie to recommend on one of his weekly shows, which has undoubtedly happened. How much freedom would he have to give a thumbs-down to everything, especially if he did it three or four weeks in a row? For all the unusual freedom I enjoy at the Reader, how long could I keep my job if I had nothing to recommend week after week? For just as communist film critics were "free" to write whatever they wanted as long as they supported the communist state, most capitalist film critics today are "free" to write anything they want as long as it promotes the products of multicorporations. The minute they decide to step beyond this agreed-upon agenda they're likely to get into trouble with their editors and publishers. This isn't to say that critics aren't free to express their dislike for expensive studio productions, but most of them aren't free to ignore these releases entirely or to focus too much of their attention on films whose advertising budgets make them marginal as far as the mainstream media are concerned. That I have considerably more freedom to focus on what I want than most of my colleagues is merely the exception that proves the rule, and it's true only of my writing for the Reader. As I've noted recently in these pages, the only two times I've appeared on Chicago Tonight I've been forced to speak almost exclusively about studio releases. The first time, in 1994, was around Oscar night; the second time was the day after Christmas two years later, and, weary of being obliged to promote only movies that were "important" because of the studio muscle behind them, I agreed to appear only if I'd be allowed to speak about a couple of foreign and independent pictures. This privilege was eventually granted to me -- after a show devoted exclusively to promoting garbage such as Evita -- over the brief closing credits, and it's why I'm unlikely ever to agree to appear on the show again. (I had a much happier experience appearing on Roger Ebert's TV show in July 1999 -- along with fellow reviewers Dann Gire, Ray Pride, and Michael Wilmington -- on a special show devoted to Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, a film all of us liked, in contrast to most of our New York colleagues. This experience confirmed my suspicion that network television is paradoxically more open to alternative points of view than PBS. The constraints of the show's format clearly limited what we could say, but I think the final editing of Ebert's show fairly and accurately represented what we said during the lengthy taping.)"