This past summer saw the debut of Project: New Cinephilia, a day-long symposium at the Edinburgh International Film Festival preceded by essays, online discussions 1+2,  sound, video and artwork, as well as a hefty library of cinephilia resources on this website and discussion on the forums of MUBI.

You can find coverage of the symposium from Jeff Reichert at Sundance Now and Michael Koresky at Criterion, as well as a PDF of the PNC Programme Notes here.

As we consider where the project may lead, we’d like to thank everyone who took part as writers, readers, speakers, audience members and forum commenters. If you would like to get in touch you can find our contact details here or follow us on @ProjectNC.

By Michael Azerrad

Project: New Cinephilia invited music journalist and book author Michael Azerrad (Our Band Could Be Your Life; Come As You Are) to create an audio/video installation that spoke, in some fashion, to the way that rockers are depicted in the movies. As co-producer of Kurt Cobain About a Son, a documentary based on his marathon conversations with the Nirvana frontman, we figured he would have something provocative to say about such representations, and we weren’t disappointed. “Hot Freaks: Fictional Rock Stars on Film” is an annotated guide to a very prevalent, but under-noticed conceit in the movies. It will be on display at Festivalhouse@Teviot from June 16-23, 2011, as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

“From Elvis to Michael Jackson, from Kiss to Marilyn Manson, the lines between pop artist and sideshow freak have always been blurry,” wrote New York Times critic Stephen Holden in his review of Brothers of the Head (2005).  Some of that blurring has been intentional on the artists’ part, but a lot has been the work of mainstream media and in particular feature-film depictions of rock stars.  The cinema has rarely, if ever, been able to deal with rock stars on a realistic, human level, instead cartooning them as marginalized, debauched, a threatening other — freaks.

The concept has long been part and parcel of the popular imagination: Mike Watt, bassist for the workingman’s art band the Minutemen, once described to me his childhood perception of rock stars: “They were ethereal. They were a different class of people or something, like Martians.” Punk was supposed to be the great leveler of that idea but it has never entirely dissipated.  I once asked Courtney Love why she and her husband were such tabloid fodder and she referred me to Jackie Collins’ Rock Star, an early ’90s  fantasia of mansions, cars, sex, drugs, parties. “That,” she said, “is what your average housewife thinks our lives are like.”

Spotlighting fictional films was key for this project because they reflect, or attempt to accommodate, the popular conception of rock stars.  It’s likely that most rock films are so unrealistic because the producers don’t believe that the public will believe — or, more importantly, be entertained by — the actual truth of a rock star’s existence. The following clips trace the history of this meme across the decades, mostly in US film, starting with the pre-Beatles-era depiction in Bye Bye Birdie (1963) and up to the present-day teen flick Camp Rock (2008). Over time, the perception has moderated, but this essential notion remains: rock stars are not like the rest of us.  And we don’t want them to be.

BYE BYE BIRDIE (1963)

Director: George Sidney

Starring: Ann-Margret, Dick van Dyke, Janet Leigh, Paul Lynde, Jesse Pearson, Bobby Rydell, Maureen Stapleton

Columbia Pictures

In less than a minute, this scene packs in a lot of information. As part of a publicity stunt, Presleyesque teen idol Conrad Birdie stays at the home of an average family in suburban Ohio, where his overwhelming sexual magnetism disrupts the town’s social fabric.

“What kind of a dump is this?” Birdie hollers at his host.  He violates linguistic decorum, speaking ungrammatically, spouting youth slang. His freaky monogrammed tiger-print robe and silk scarf signify both absurd wealth and garish taste, in pointed contrast with the two other men, with their conservative haircuts and suits.

He’s commenced drinking, and it’s not a genteel Stinger or a Rob Roy at cocktail hour, but a can of beer.  Birdie retrieves a can opener from his motorcycle, which is parked in the den; this iconic rebel vehicle, with its red taillights blinking, makes the room look like a lurid crime scene. When he opens the can, it ejaculates beer all over the place; he is completely oblivious to his rudeness.

But perhaps most dangerous of all in early ’60s America, Birdie is an unabashedly oversexed libertine: “Tomorrow’s Saturday, and that’s my real tense night,” he says with a leer, then roars like a randy lion, libidinously shaking his hips just out of frame.

Just as Bye Bye Birdie pitted the fading Broadway musical vs. rock & roll, it also embodied the vain struggle of ’50s conservatism to fend off ’60s progressivism.  In a ham-fisted effort to stack the deck, it does what so many movies would do: marginalize the rock star as a cartoonish, unsocialized miscreant.

PRIVILEGE (1967)

Director: Peter Watkins Starring: Paul Jones, Jean Shrimpton

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062155/companycredits

Somewhere between A Face in the Crowd and Tommy, this obscure 1967 film is one of the greatest fictional rock films, if only because it is one of the very few to acknowledge — rather than perpetuate — the dehumanizing effects of pop fame.  It’s also visionary political satire that stunningly recalls Mussolini’s infamous words, “We play the lyre on all its strings: from violence to religion, from art to politics.”

Steven Shorter (played by real-life ’60s rocker Paul Jones) is a mega pop star whose act involves being beaten up onstage by policemen and thrown into a cage.  But, as ever, the rock star symbolizes a threat to the status quo that must be neutralized. And so the Establishment co-opts Shorter, using his celebrity as a release “from the nervous tension caused by the state of the world outside.” They build him up into a figure of messianic proportions in order to further a creepy Christian nationalist agenda.

This is the climactic scene — Shorter can no longer bear the soul-sucking effects of his own celebrity, and lashes out an awards ceremony before the entire UK music industry.  Rarely, if ever, has a movie so brutally limned the humiliation of pop stardom.

PERFORMANCE (1970)

Directors: Donald Cammell, Nicholas Roeg

Starring: James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg

Warner Bros. Pictures

The proper rock star is debauched, androgynous and profoundly transgressive, a notion that was especially fashionable in swinging ’60s London.  For the notorious Performance, Mick Jagger was more than willing to play up to this archetype.  The funny thing is, although he answered to all those attributes, he wasn’t playing himself so much — recall he was the ambitious former London School of Economics student who eventually oversaw much of the band’s business.  Instead, he was channeling his star-crossed bandmate, the evanescent Brian Jones.

Turner is a reclusive washed-up rock star.  His home is a womb-like playground of sex, drugs, and bizarre mind-games.  It’s also a stage where even one person can be an audience.  Here, Turner toys with an interloper, the gangster Chas (James Fox) the best way he knows how: by performing.  Over the course of the film, Turner and the brutish Chas gradually merge personalities, underscoring the trope of rock star as outlaw (and vice versa).

“The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way,” Turner says in the film, “is one that achieves madness.”  There’s plenty of madness here in Jagger’s idiosyncratic flouncing and pretentious babble, enough to inspire Chas to top him, so to speak, at the film’s climax.

A STAR IS BORN (1976)

Director: Frank Pierson

Starring: Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson, Gary Busey

First Pictures

Kris Kristofferson plays grizzled rock legend John Norman Howard, a booze-addled hybrid of Jim Morrison and Gordon Lightfoot, who is well on his way to becoming what his manager calls “a cosmic joke.”  This being a mid ’70s film about a rock star, Howard’s sunny afternoons in the pool are spent surrounded by his manager, his Jewish accountant, his bodyguard and a gaggle of hangers-on.  Falling into the water on his crutches, Howard obeys a cardinal rule of filmic rock stardom: be self-destructive and yet (for a while, anyway) indestructible.  Here, he even gets away with taking pot-shots at a pesky helicopter.  But like every true rock star in the Hollywood lexicon, he ultimately pays the price for his excesses.

ALMOST FAMOUS (2000)

Starring: Billy Crudup, Frances McDorman, Kate Hudson

Director: Cameron Crowe

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181875/companycredits

The stereotypical rock star is out of touch with the common people.  He lives in a separate universe: often on tour, he is from nowhere, his life a blur of buses, backstages and bacchanals.  When he was starting out, he dreamed of the spoils of stardom.  Then, once he attains them, he longs for “reality.”

That’s one of the classic tropes featured in Almost Famous.  In this scene, up-and-coming rocker Russell Hammond temporary flees his band’s tour to hang out at a high school kid’s party in the pointedly anonymous town of Topeka, Kansas, so he can experience something “real.”  He does this, of course, with the obligatory bottle of Jack Daniels in hand.  It’s dubious how much Hammond actually wants to identify with the common folk: moments later, he will stand atop a roof, tripping, proclaim “I am a golden god!” and jump into a pool with all his clothes on.  And that embodies one of the vexing questions about Almost Famous: How much is the film spoofing this trope and how much is it embracing it?

ROCK STAR (2001)

Director: Stephen Herek

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Jennifer Aniston, Dominic West

Warner Bros. Pictures

This morning-after scene is a turning point in Rock Star.  The debauchery of being a rock star is destroying the traditional heterosexual monogamous relationship which has thus far sustained the film’s protagonist Chris “Izzy” Cole.

To add insult to injury, Wahlberg’s character discovers that a band staffer whom he thought was a woman is actually a partial transsexual — and even worse, is wearing his trousers. Undoubtedly, scenes like this did happen in rock’s decadent heyday, but probably not as often and as massively as the popular imagination would have it. The real point of the scene is to (heavy-handedly) underscore that rock & roll’s dionysian excess corrupts absolutely, and that Cole must renounce his excesses and return to his hometown and his girl in order to obtain redemption.

BROTHERS OF THE HEAD (2006)

Directors: Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe

Starring: Harry Treadaway, Luke Treadaway

IFC Films

The film’s tagline — “For some people… rock & roll was always a freak show” — really does say it all.  Brothers of the Head provides an utterly artless metaphor for the rock star as exploited freak: its protagonists, the rhythm guitarist and the lead singer of a mid ’70s proto-punk band, are Siamese twins. Their widowed father essentially sells the troubled Howe brothers (played by real-life twins Harry and Luke Treadaway) to an unscrupulous impresario; a thuggish manager literally beats them into becoming rock musicians.

Conjoined twins are also an excellent metaphor for being in a band — seemingly joined at the hip at all times, the musicians virtually never get a break from each other’s company and must work out a symbiotic balance of egos if they want to continue to make music together.  The two states — mutual enslavement and marginalization — are the basis of the film, and one can’t help but draw comparisons to famously feuding rock brothers like the Gallagher brothers in Oasis or the Davies brothers in the Kinks.  The film implicates the viewer in this freakshow concept too, with a recurring shot of the two brothers bathing naked, then looking resentfully at the camera.

Naturally, a woman pulls the brothers apart — emotionally, anyway.  And, as ever, the debauched and self-destructive rock stars meet a tragic end.

CAMP ROCK (2008)

Director: Matthew Diamond

Starring: Demi Lovato, Joe Jonas

The Disney Channel

By 2008, the rock star had been tamed and co-opted enough to figure in an inane Disney teen trifle.  In Camp Rock, real-life teen idol Joe Jonas plays Shane Gray, who threatens no social convention other than good manners.  Fame has made him petulant; he has become, in the words of one of his bandmates, “a bad boy to the press, and the label has a problem with that, which means we have a problem with that.” (The film presents this as a mark of savvy rather than a craven capitulation.)

And so Jonas gets sent to a rock summer camp — a kind of G-rated version of a rehab center — so he can find his humility again.  Best of all, notes a bandmate, it will be “good p.r.”

This scene displays his arrogance: Gray brags that “even the kitchen help” knows who he is.  ”You’re kind of being a jerk,” declares co-star Demi Lovato.  But, as the Jonas character helpfully explains later in the film, “Being a jerk is part of the rock star image.”  And yet he ends this scene with his tail between his legs.

Forty-five years before, Conrad Birdie violated all kinds of societal norms; in Camp Rock, the rock star’s signature sin is impetuously dipping his finger in the icing of a cupcake, and he can be chastened by a purehearted teenaged girl in the space of a minute and a half.

—

Michael Azerrad is the author of Come As You Are: the Story of Nirvana (Doubleday, 2993) and Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 (Little, Brown, 2001).  A former contributing editor for Rolling Stone, he has also written major pieces for the New Yorker, Spin, and the New York Times, among many other publications, as well as writing for MTV News.  The founding editor-in-chief of eMusic, he is also the co-producer of the award-winning 2006 documentary Kurt Cobain About a Son.

—

Click here to leave a comment and join the discussion at MUBI.

At Edinburgh’s Inspace gallery on June 16, Project: New Cinephilia proudly debuted Reverse Shot Video’s inaugural attempt at video film criticism following a panel entitled “Critical Approaches II: Tools, Formats, and Experiments.” The four-part piece puts two quintessential New York filmmakers–Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen–under the microscope, finding correspondences and divergences between their depictions of urban space in Taxi Driver and Hannah and Her Sisters, respectively, while also laying bare the process of the filmmakers themselves. It was presented by Eric Hynes, Jeff Reichert, and Michael Koresky.

Click here to leave a comment and join the discussion at MUBI.

By Gabriele Caroti and Lili Chin

Opening Seen debuted in March 2008 at the Whitney Biennial, as part of a live broadcast on Neighborhood Public Radio, a guerrilla radio group which sets up temporary booths and broadcasts content via FM radio and over the Internet. It was then streamed a month later on Viva Radio, an Internet radio station where Gabriele Caroti hosted a weekly radio show called “The Thicket.” The annotations appear here for the first time at the Edinburgh Film Festival’s “Project: New Cinephilia” web site, along with the entire program, which is free to download.

An Italian suspense movie marks the journey for a sonic exploration of images; the only challenge is to see with your ears. Our passage into the realm of filmic sounds from opening scenes seeks new and random encounters where the esoteric and pop collide. But these aren’t just soundtracks, they’re suspense-less chases in early ’70s Po valley, pale and silvery moons in medieval Japan, Raquel Welch in stirrups, cardboard + rubber cement galaxies with mutton chops in tow, car crashes in Australian meadows, Alice in Wonderland, and more. Starring Amon Düül II, Jerry Goldsmith, Fumio Hayasaka, Mauricio Kagel, Carl Stalling, Daffy Duck, et cetera.

1. From Alice (1988, Jan Švankmajer)

“Alice thought to herself… Alice thought to herself, ‘Now you will see a film… made for children… perhaps…’ But, I nearly forgot! You must… close your eyes… otherwise… you won’t see anything!” The opening lines from the opening scene of Švankmajer’s debut feature is, ahem, Opening Seen’s proverbial maxim.  We force the audience to close its collective eyes by removing the image from the motion picture, thereby essentially creating something wholly new. By making this piece, we’ve discovered that although a visual art form, films without any images whatsoever can hold up on their own as purely auditory works, reinforced by the listener’s imagination—much more powerful than any singular image could ever be. And in the case of many of these extracts, they are stronger works than the original artifact as a film with visuals. (Gabriele Caroti)

2. From Revolver (1973, Sergio Sollima)/“Un amico” (Ennio Morricone)

I’ve probably watched the opening to Revolver (aka Blood in the Streets) close to twenty times. And I’ve never been able to get through more than half an hour. No matter—this is one of the greatest, strangest, most baffling openings ever. On a crisp winter morning, a criminal on the run (the swarthy Fabio Testi, a mainstay in later Monte Hellman pictures) buries his partner in an extremely shallow grave (really just a mound of rocks) at the side of a river. The scene is infused with such passionate, religious homoerotic fervor between the two it’s baffling; how can such emotional ardor seemingly out of left field take place in the beginning of a film? And the heights of their love couldn’t be expressed without the greatest Morricone opening music, a dramatic ascending orchestral (yet totally swingin’!) theme. Proof that “il Maestro” never reserved his best work for great cinematic treasures; his brilliance could be found anywhere, even under a pile of rocks. Decades later, “Un amico” found a much nicer home in the projection booth of none other than poliziottesco connoisseur Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. And another tidbit: Revolver also stars Oliver Reed and the voluminous Peter Berling—of Fassbinder, Herzog and Sátántángo fame. (GC)

3. From Doctor Zhivago (1965, David Lean)

I remember my mom singing along to Doctor Zhivago’s “Lara’s Theme” by Maurice Jarre from a “Greatest Movie Themes” eight-track. The song made me very sad as it would signify her absence: that melody became my mother’s theme (in a sense, her musical equivalent) when she would drop me off at preschool. Not a celebration of her, but a mourning: the melody is bittersweet. She always loved very strong, sweeping melodies… I remember her humming along to “Michelle” and “Girl” by The Beatles from a cassette (not eight-track) of 1962-1966. This Zhivago clip is just dialogue and production sound. It doesn’t contain any of Jarre’s music. (GC)

4. From Marketa Lazarová (1967, František Vláčil), music by Zdenek Liska

Cited as the best Czech film of all time, Marketa Lazarová has been a cult film for many years. Although now available on DVD from a pristine master, only a few years ago the film was very hard to obtain. The first time I watched it was on a bootleg VHS copy. I’ve seen it twice since, finally upgrading to viewing it on the big screen, the only way that anyone should ever watch it. The dreariness of thirteenth century medieval Europe and its overt religious undertones, combined with astounding cinematography and an ominously beautiful soundtrack leaves me fantasizing about being transported into the past—effortlessly. (Lili Chin)

5. From Ugetsu (1953, Kenji Mizoguchi), music by Fumio Hayasaka

Foreboding yet traditional Japanese shamisen dissonance opens to an arid country side in sixteenth century Japan. Mizoguchi’s masterpiece, a timeless, haunting ghost story, was pretty much ruined for me when I saw it with a friend at a theater who basically kept yapping the whole time and questioning the film’s excellence. “Anthony Lane liked this?!” she would ask. That also happened to me again, with a different friend, and a different Mizoguchi film! (This time, Street of Shame.) Anyway, Ugetsu is basically the gauziest movie ever made. I’m serious. Name a gauzier one. I dare you. Oh and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers have a record and tune called “Ugestu,” one of the prettiest hard bop compositions ever. (GC)

6. “Brothers” (Ry Cooder)/From Paris, Texas (1984, Wim Wenders)

A longtime collaborator with Wim Wenders, slide maestro Cooder played with many, including Neil Young and Crazy Horse, the Rolling Stones and Captain Beefheart. Based on a tune by Blind Willie Johnson, Cooder’s guitar at the beginning of Paris, Texas is obviously evocative of the desert backdrop of the American Southwest. With long drives and rustic abandoned landscapes, this film is a mesmerizing portrait of loss and discovery in a bleak and hot climate. (LC)

7. From Drip-Along Daffy (Chuck Jones), music by Carl Stalling

“Put down that comedy relief! I’m the hero of this picture!” Looney Tunes in a microcosm: from the breakneck speed, constant shifting of gears and Stalling’s manic music to the pure hilarity of the writing, the Brechtian breaking of the fourth wall, and the amiable stereotypes. Plus, Paris, Texas and Drip-Along Daffy are the best pairing in this whole set! This clip is still my favorite out of all twenty of these. Seriously, it’s best movie of the bunch. Oh and we cheated here: this scene actually closes the cartoon. (GC)

8. From The Cars That Ate Paris (1976, Peter Weir), music by Bruce Smeaton

From Paris, Texas to Paris, Australia. One of the most messed up, shocking openings of any movie. The interplay between Smeaton’s impossibly funky into music shifts to a heightened, climactic car crash: the sound design lays bare atrocities brewing underneath. A dark comedy, so dark it’s not funny anymore. (GC)

9. From L’inhumaine (1924, Marcel L’Herbier), music by Darius Milhaud

Avant-garde sci-fi from the 20s, L’inhumaine caused a great degree of controversy when first released. A love story involving an opera singer during the age of evolving technology, with cubist set design by Fernand Léger and art deco architecture by Alberto Cavalcanti, L’inhumaine’s Milhaud score establishes modernity as it engages with early twentieth century aesthetics. If you like theatrical futurism from the turn of the century with elaborate sets and intricate deco costumes, you’ll fall under the spell of L’Herbier’s film and its craft. (LC)

10. From The Big Mess (1971, Alexander Kluge), music by Amon Düül II

Sci-fi follows sci-fi. Kluge’s obscure but incredible movie is a film set in 2034 is made totally lo-fi—essentially a collage. Combining intertitles with small sets, props and close ups of mechanical devices, Kluge builds a story about outer space, the Suez Canal and galactic battles, with a rare appearance by Amon Düül II. I remember watching it and seeing members from the band floating in “outer space,” perplexed and amazed at this odd juxtaposition where lo-fi fantasy meets kraut/psych/prog in our galaxy’s ether, thinking, “Oh, Kluge, you just push the limits and every step of the way… sublime imagination, beauty and always impossibly unexpected!” (LC)

11. “Main Title” (Jerry Goldsmith)/from Bandolero! (1968, Andrew McLaglen)

The composer of the pseudo avant Planet of the Apes score returns two months later with a jaunty opening featuring a killer arrangement: whistling, muted picked bass guitar, jew’s harp, and a melodica. From a film that I actually haven’t seen and have always been avoiding starring the most leathery of casts: Raquel Welch, Jimmy Stewart, Dean Martin and George Kennedy. This has less of a personal connection to me than it represents an eclectic style of mixing that I embraced a few years back with disparate pieces of music fitting next to each other seamlessly. (GC)

12. From The Return of the Pink Panther (1975, Blake Edwards), music by Henry Mancini

Totally badass—one of the top five heist scenes ever. This clip suffers the most without the images. An all-black clad figure slides hundreds of feet on the ground using an elaborate pulley system, all done by shooting a small arrow from a steel crossbow. The figure then pulls out a precision instrument and comes away with a very large diamond. How cool is that?! The escape, heard here, includes a touch of slapstick and all takes place at the national museum of a fictional near-east country called “Lugash,” which appears numerous times throughout the Pink Panther franchise. Also stars the big-eyed beauty Catherine Schell who I was in love with as a 6 year old. I never fell out of love, either. (GC)

13. From Ratcatcher (1999, Lynne Ramsey)

Ramsey’s debut feature is set in an industrial, dreary and grey version of Glasgow, focusing on young boy as he grows up in a decaying landscape. The opening sets the stage for a daydreamed state interrupted by a frustrated mother. Poetic and melancholic, we experience desire of freedom and fear through a child’s eyes.  This overcast gradation of weathered industrialization both parallels and contrasts my impression of some American cities such as Buffalo and Rochester, NY. (LC)

14. From Is There Sex after Death? (1971, Alan Abel & Jeanne Abel)

Pretty much speaks for itself. A proto-Kentucky Fried Movie, a mockumentary shot in dingy 16mm following Dr. Harrison Rogers (played by Abel) of the Bureau of Sexological Investigation starring Buck Henry; Robert Downey, Sr. (as himself); Holly Woodlawn (as herself); Marshall Efron; Mink Stole (as a dominatrix); and others. Timeless tuba! (GC)

15. From That Obscure Object of Desire (1977, Luis Buñuel)

In a world of eroticism and entanglement, Buñuel rediscovers his surrealist roots. Two female leads, one from France, the other from Spain playing the same role make this film strange and humorous in this tug of war filled with prolonged, sexual tension. As you hear car doors opening, footsteps and explosions, we realize Buñuel’s tradition of these desires must be set in a time of societal turmoil and unrest. (LC)

16. From Watermelon Man (1970, Melvin Van Peebles), music by Van Peebles

“Your teeth are very white!” “That’s the contrast!” Godfrey Cambridge in whiteface goes to bed and wakes up one morning looking like, well, Godfrey Cambridge, to his shock and his wife’s dismay. It’s amazing that a film with a very “visual” plot in this case really doesn’t really need images; Estelle Parson’s screech alone will make millions jump out of their respective seats. Although the film was actually based on a book by Herman Raucher, who also wrote the screenplay, Van Peebles is still the true visionary, simply by getting a major studio (Columbia Pictures) to produce and release it. Oh and the movie has nothing to do with the Herbie Hancock’s hard bop tune (Two films associated with hard bop in one mix! Wow!), but it needs to be noted that the director also composed the music to all his films and along with The Last Poets and the late Gil Scott-Heron, is one of the godfathers of rap. (GC)

17. “Tony’s Theme” (Giorgio Moroder), from Scarface (1983, Brian De Palma)

A dance floor prophet if there ever was one, Giorgio Moroder went from his early Südtirol days of schlager to a forward-thinking maven of four-on-the-floor experimentation—E=MC² was the “first electronic live-to-digital album”. This exemplifies his dramatic pulsating early 80s electro-disco style. Not his most memorable selection, this was a choice of utility as it fits perfectly inbetween Van Peebles and Kagel; the two provide hilarious counterpoints. Watermelon Man and Antithèse are both decidedly unserious. (GC)

18. From Antithèse (1969, Mauricio Kagel)

Although formerly known as an important twentieth century composer, Kagel also made wonderful surrealist films. Antithèse involves a mad scientist engineer surrounded by a world of instruments and mechanical devices. Witty and bizarre, Kagel builds suspense with shots of the fantastical interior as the scientist in his lab coat spirals into a bizarre psychic universe, searching for the audible source of his madness. The visual world of this film odd and wacky, reminding one of a sci fi world that you see in Leslie Thornton’s Peggy and Fred in Hell or Marker’s La jetée. (LC)

When Lili showed this to me, my jaw hit the floor—a true masterpiece! (GC)

19. From Rabid (1977, David Cronenberg)

A horror film about a woman who gets into a car accident and has to have surgery.  She develops a growth and it turns people into zombies that feed off of each other. They all begin to bite others and the whole world runs amok. I’d rather not imagine a world gone wrong like this. That is all. (LC)

20. “Polyrhythmic Sexuality and the Three Boys” (Manos Hatzidakis)/from Sweet Movie (1974, Dušan Makavajev)

Controversial and banned when first released, Sweet Movie explodes with sexual and political energy. I’ve seen it a few times, and the film still remains bizarrely popular and entertaining on my roster of films to show friends. Makavajev’s provocative tale of Communism and commodity culture come to a head when a “virgin” Canadian beauty queen marries a tycoon. Viennese Actionist Otto Muehl makes an appearance in this powerful and bizarre Eastern European film. (LC)

Both enduring, contrapuntal, and a fitting closer! (GC)

By Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert

Why would we ever want a website? That was the question that arose among Reverse Shot’s founding editors in 2003. It had been almost six months since we, along with our friends Neal Block and Erik Syngle, started what we had then dubbed, somewhat grandiosely, “the new magazine of film culture,” but until that moment we hadn’t much considered the possibility, let alone the necessity, of establishing a web presence. But now we knew we had to give it serious consideration. Reverse Shot was at this point a staple-bound, 8.5 x 5.5–inch twenty-plus-page print magazine with a “widescreen” design, self-published and hand-distributed around New York art-house theaters and museums; those who knew about it knew because they had grabbed a free issue after a screening at Film Forum or Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAMcinématek, or after a shopping trip at dearly departed Kim’s Video on St. Marks, the Valhalla of rental stores (its contents currently taking up space in Sicily). It seems a lost continent now, but there was still a romanticism about paper publications, a sense that the effort expended upon writing, designing, formatting, sending to the printer, and toting the resulting wares around the city gave the printed words credence that an online journal, which at the time seemed antithetical to the type of intellectual legitimacy we were seeking out, couldn’t possibly attain. To “take it online” was giving in to the barbarians, or so we thought.

Even though our magazine was distributed to readers at no charge, we were still not completely ready to embrace the utopian notion of freely exchanged digital content—after all, in controlling the printing and circulation we were able to clearly target those areas we felt were filled with “our people.” The period in which we started Reverse Shot was before the term “blog” entered regular conversation. Furthermore there was a stigma around online writing—that it was largely unedited, unfiltered, uninteresting, and, well, unusual. We envisioned our publication as a product of a particular culture—that of the “film-as-art journal,” which we knew only as specifically the domain of print—one we might have known was dying around us if only we’d checked our impetuous enthusiasm long enough to pay attention.

Were we unready to dive headlong into the future? Cinephilia is sometimes termed a malady; for us the initial symptoms were a sort of stodginess, one that undoubtedly comes with nostalgia, a key component of the affliction. Were we too much looking back? At least we were stuck in an outdated mindset of what a publication of this sort could be. We were equally influenced by the legacy and continuing relevance (as we saw it) of Film Comment and the call-to-arms of Cahiers du cinéma, even if we were resigned to the possibility that one day we would “merely” have the impact of a Cineaste or a Film Quarterly, which were more rigidly academic in their approach than that which we aspired to. But what was our dream? That our volumes would one day sit on a dusty shelf somewhere alongside undisciplined but revelatory long-defunct publications like Film Culture or Films and Filming?

We desired an outlet. The future French New Wavers had Cahiers; Andrew Sarris had the Mekas brothers’ Film Culture; Pauline Kael had the Berkeley Cinema Guild notes—what could be more romantic than manufacturing a periodical of our own? When we tipsily conceived of a new kind of film magazine, at a brightly lit Dallas BBQ in the East Village, sitting around a table heavy with chicken and monster goblets of alarmingly blue mixed drinks, we thought of the future but only concerned ourselves with the now. We didn’t begin Reverse Shot to flaunt knowledge, but to share our passion with others—to feel connected is to feel human—and we saw a void of educated, articulate passion in film writing that we desperately wanted to fill. We wanted movies, good movies, to unite us. And we weren’t impressing professors anymore—they no longer had to reflect our understanding of Metz or Schatz, Mulvey or Turvey. Yet we did want an elevated dialogue, existing somewhere in the nether regions between academia and populist film criticism. Reel them in with passion, we thought, and sideline them with smarts.

So every few months we pooled our meager financial resources, navigating printers and bindings to publish Reverse Shot. We didn’t want to do anything cheaply, and when the quarterly day-two boxes would arrive at the distribution office where one of our founders worked, it was akin to a holiday. To us, online film criticism at the time seemed the purview of geek hacks who didn’t know how to undo the caps lock on their keyboards; there didn’t seem to be any sort of rigorous cinematic community. Needless to say, this way of thinking was a cultural radar blip. There was no single moment we can point to when we realized how full of hogwash we were, though our growing realization of the unsustainability of a costly print magazine surely hastened our transition. We kept alive the dream of resuscitating Reverse Shot as a glossy print magazine many years into its success as a web journal, but the moment we published our fifth issue solely online, we clearly had evolved.

Our distrust of the web as a proper outlet for what we hoped would be intellectually rooted discussion had less to do with our generation’s ambivalence about online culture (we were the ones who were supposed to “make it happen,” following the slow bursting of the dotcom bubble) than it did our vision of having a place outside of “normal” culture, even outside of time, for our particular discourse. All too often the way we felt about cinema was at odds with the dominant culture’s point of view. In the years before we started Reverse Shot, we’d already felt somewhat safely ensconced in a small, carved-out world of like-minded folk who agreed with us when we asserted that a “difficult” work such as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive or Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies was clearly the film of the year, while the Academy seemed fit to give their highest award to a Ron Howard movie. Even our takes on mainstream Hollywood fare seemed hopelessly, proudly out of touch—why were we suddenly the ones championing Steven Spielberg at the exact moment (A.I.) when most of the world seemed to delight in his failure? It clearly wasn’t contrarianism, but rather a formation of our individual sense of purpose and aesthetic temperament.

The question became: how to forge our own path? With so few publications devoted to the kinds of films we championed or the kind of writing we wanted to read about those films, it certainly didn’t seem a crowded field. Our aspiration to shake up the “official” cinephilic world was complicated by our close proximity to it: the four of us who had established Reverse Shot might never have met one another if not for our connections to Film Comment (run out of the Film Society of Lincoln Center), where one of us was working and another interning. The goal was then to set ourselves apart; even in conception. It would have been easy to slap together collections of reviews of new releases, interviews with prominent directors, and the odd DVD review, but we wanted to do better than that. After some struggling and casting around in the dark we realized the idea that is the bedrock of the journal until to this day: our symposium approach. Film has always been (and is now perhaps more than ever) such a hotly debated medium—in terms of presentation, reception, and interpretation—that one can get lost in its present moment. But what if there was a journal that placed cinema’s past in dialogue with the present? One that used films as a way of making sense of the world around us, and used the world around us to make sense of the history of film? We decided to build each “issue” (an outmoded term we still cling doggedly to) of Reverse Shot around an idea, and then leave the handling up to our writers. To this day, as the two remaining editors of Reverse Shot, we approach each gaping hole in the symposium calendar with an equal mixture of excitement and fear: how will we avoid repeating ourselves and continue to provide our writers with interesting challenges?

Once we settled on that core plan, the possibilities were endless. Thus we have centered discussion around what constitutes a war film, an “American” film, or what exists in the space between an “Eastern” and “Western” film or between a Hollywood and an “independent” film. We have devoted issues to contemporary directors either important or divisive enough to merit investigation from a variety of critical perspectives, including Olivier Assayas, Steven Spielberg, Claire Denis, Gus Van Sant, Hou Hsaio-hsien, Brian De Palma. We have asked each writer to boil down his or her reading of a film to a single shot, cut, or sound, in order to discuss how that film is being presented to us. And, in a developing self-analytic strand we think has grown ever more central to the Reverse Shot project as a whole, we’ve tried to get a better understanding of what makes our generation of film watchers and writers tick (an admittedly relative term since today the ages of Reverse Shot’s writers stretch from early twenties to mid forties), attempting to define our particular way of seeing, by commissioning essays on such topics as coming of age during the rise of home video or the experience of seeing a classic for the first time following decades of canonization. The topics uniting these articles have tended to fall into one of four groups: a) auteurist, b) thematic/generic, c) technical/formal, or d) anecdotal/generational. We never intended such parameters—they just were the natural outgrowth of our interests in film, our attempts to locate its peculiar power and understand its possibilities, and, perhaps most importantly, our belief that anything published in the journal should be justified, and that the collections of articles should work together in a polyphonic fashion. Reverse Shot’s writing exists in a community; it’s unsurprising that its writers have largely followed suit.

More than eight years later, Reverse Shot is an exclusively “web” publication, but that term doesn’t begin to define it. And though it is part of an implicit online community that includes such collective cinephile havens of the blogosphere as the House Next Door and Not Coming to a Theater Near You, the strong individual-personality driven blogs of Dave Kehr, Glenn Kenny, Girish Shambu, and more rigorous but still accessible and populist sites as Moving Image Source and Bright Lights Film Journal, the various branches we have grown from our basic, sturdy trunk disallow for its easy categorization. It’s not only the community itself that’s shifted and expanded over the past eight years but also Reverse Shot, which now encompasses an array of video content, an attendant indieWIRE–hosted blog, occasional themed film series, and more. Reverse Shot has necessarily evolved as the medium itself has evolved—the magazine has bore witness to, and been energized by, the “death” of cinema and its rebirth, the slow shift from celluloid to digital, the domination and ongoing freefall of DVD, the gradual migration of content to various cable and online streaming services. Everyone thinks they live in a radically changing moment, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the past decade has been one of singularly rapid evolution.

As Reverse Shot’s grown and gained a significant audience, many of its contributors have gone on to write for other notable publications (the Village Voice, the New York Times, Slate, and the New Republic, for instance), but have also remained part of our loose, ever-growing family. The collective soul of the endeavor thus remains intact, even as it has necessarily expanded. But as we reach out, and as we age (the most radical change of all, and it takes place with every newly written word), the basic questions remain the same. What is a film critic? Do we even claim such an appellation for ourselves? The term itself dredges up easily lampooned images of pasty-faced miscreants whiling away their hours in darkened theaters, sure—but more importantly it implies that what we do is founded upon evaluation, and that our merit as writers is based upon the strength of that evaluation. Reverse Shot’s contributors write for us because they want to, not out of necessity—and many of them are not “critics” at all, but folks who work in distribution, or are filmmakers and artists themselves, or those who would more often call themselves reporters or novelists. The definition of what constitutes a professional film critic has been slowly eroding for years, as more and more critics have lost their paying positions at dailies and weeklies due to both the devaluation of their jobs and the slow erasure of print media—but at Reverse Shot we never believed in such categories at all. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why the transition into this brave new world has been so smooth for us.

Where are we now? What was this last decade of cinema that sucked up our twenties and thirties, and which forced us to keep revising our desires and ideas on what this particular art form should be? It always feels absurd to place stark political and social parameters around the moment in which you are currently living (we all try to make sense of our world regardless of how tumultuous things are), but our ever-expanding global community has affected movies—the dissolving of international boundaries has undoubtedly resulted in the radical reimagining of narrative cinema itself. Death-of-cinema scenarios aside, there’s a lot of reason to be hopeful, as movie audiences grow ever more accustomed to the notion of linearity as an option, rather than a given. The malleability of filmmaking now seems to match viewers’ willingness to redefine cinema from platform to platform. Perhaps this is really a golden age all its own. As movie watchers, writers, editors, and publishers, we at Reverse Shot are just happy we’re here to see it and grateful to those who join us. We may have given up the paper chase, but we’re still in hot pursuit of transformative movie experiences.

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Michael Koresky is the staff writer and an associate editor at the Criterion Collection, as well as the co-founder and editor of Reverse Shot. He has written for Film Comment, the Village Voice, Interview, Moving Image Source, Cinema Scope, Stop Smiling, and other publications.

Jeff Reichert is co-founder and editor of Reverse Shot. He also wrote and directed the 2010 feature documentary Gerrymandering, which explored American democracy and the method through which it allows politicians to control electoral outcomes.

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Cinema is a medium tied to temporality.  We experience a film one frame at a time, and barring a projector meltdown or remote control mishap, we watch it from start to finish in the order designed by the film’s creators.  Comics, on the other hand, are a profoundly spacial medium.  Time is read between the lines and between the panels, but it is the space of the page that we primarily consume.  Over a two-page spread, all moments are one, and page-time is traveled as the eye darts back and forth across the page.

For almost two years I have been creating comic book essays on film theory, in the shape of my self-published comic series Filmish.  Each issue deals with a different thematic frame, for example ‘Sets and Architecture’ or ‘Point of View’, delving into the multiple meanings and connotations for film of such themes.  I admit to focussing primarily on English language cinema, and primarily on mainstream cinema.  But then, I was never a particularly picky cinephile, and growing up in the age of Spielberg has left me with a love of that brand of Hollywood storytelling.

The thing that’s interesting is the act of translation from a primarily temporal medium to a primarily spacial medium.  In drawing film I essentialise it, boiling it down to its timeless iconography.  On the page, Godzilla, Gort and The Fly can occupy the same space, and an entire film genre can be demonstrated with one image.  Some may call this reductive, but when those time-ties are cut, when we essentialise on the page a world we already have lived, we can then begin to understand it anew.  There is nothing cinephilic in the act of synopsis.  But when past, present and future are thrown together, when a film exists outside time, we can begin to understand how it is timeless.

But this is nothing new, is it?  The very act of cinephilia is one of breaking down the temporal prison of film watching.  If early cinema, and mainstream entertainment cinema too, is largely ephemeral, then rewatching, reviewing and reinterpreting is an act of rebellion against that temporality, that disposability.  In producing our own works of cinephilia, we put an end to cinema’s temporal trap, and in so doing, invest the moving image with space.  The space to be understood on new terms, to be meditated upon, to be loved rather than merely lived.

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Edward Ross is an Edinburgh-based comic book artist and writer who will be speaking at the Project: New Cinephilia symposium at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Copies of  ‘Filmish’ issues 2 and 3 can be purchased from Edward’s blog and you can download a free copy of Filmish issue 1 here.

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From Genevieve Yue

Michael pointed me to David Bordwell’s great and polemical piece, “Academics Vs. Critics,” and while I agree with much of the essay (I appreciate, especially, the care Bordwell takes in offering a bridge between the two camps), the scholar-critic divide doesn’t appear quite as stark to me. Of course I’m writing with only six years in the academy and not Bordwell’s thirty, but that might be part of the generational point. If film criticism was considered a lower form of journalism than art or architecture writing in the past, then it’s certainly on par today, at least from the perspective of university training. While it’s true that a lot of current criticism is generated at the level of IMDB user commentary—due, no doubt, to the ease and rapidity of publishing on the Internet—there’s still a tremendous amount of thoughtful, informed, and lively criticism that’s readily available. As Michael Joshua Rowin’s wonderful essay on reentering graduate film study makes clear, “intellectual meticulousness” is hardly the domain of academics alone. Undergraduate and master’s students in film studies often aspire to and end up critics, and many full-time academics, Bordwell included, contribute regularly to very smart and reader-friendly journals like Film Comment, Cinema Scope, Sight & Sound, and, of course, Cahiers du Cinéma.

I’ve actually found considerable support in stepping outside the ivory tower to write criticism and to program films: from a practical standpoint, these activities expand my teaching repertoire and enrich my own research by keeping me outward-looking. From a more philosophical perspective, or even possibly an ethical one, they allow me to be actively involved with the communities I study. Because I concentrate on experimental cinema, a practice that is both under-recognized and difficult to access, I see advocacy as an important part of my work. Maybe advocacy’s too strong a word—at the very least I aim to open a view onto often obscure or seemingly unapproachable work, to make things less foreboding by providing context and suggesting critical angles to begin a conversation.

In this sense, I’ve never been terribly interested in aesthetic evaluation (thumbs, stars, clipart in general) of the sort that Bordwell attributes to criticism. I also find that, on the side of academia, “Grand Theory,” as he calls it, is treated with as much suspicion as it supposedly harbors; in an essay responding to Bordwell, Chris Fujiwara suggests a restoration of aesthetics as a category of film scholarship. The debate about what critics and scholars should attend to certainly isn’t new; Rudolf Arnheim, writing in 1935, contended the opposite of Bordwell’s point by demanding that film be viewed as “an economic product, and as an expression of political and moral viewpoints,” not the aesthetic veneer under which such forces might hide. J. Hoberman picked up on Arnheim’s argument in 1998, sharply interrogating the critic’s role in the publicity machine of the film industry. (Many thanks to the Project: New Cinephilia curators for compiling such a rich set of texts under the Resources tab.) I think, to echo Michael, that it’s most interesting to consider what films do, and we should accept this as an open question, looking always carefully at how films interact with each other, with other art forms, with culture, with our own subjective experiences, and, not to lose track of the cinephilic impulse, our desires.

I really like Daniel’s proposal of imagined alternatives. It can be an effective teaching tool to frame a film, like any work of art, as a series of choices undergirded by various motivations, aspirations, and exigencies. To imagine what we see as possibly, or impossibly, different, helps us to understand matters of style, on one hand, and the material conditions of production, on the other. At the most basic level, it reveals cinema as a craft, an ongoing process of accident, deliberation, and compromise that continues even after the release print has been struck. This is what I meant when I suggested in my last post that cinema is an activity; its meaning is made by many hands, auteur and otherwise, and it includes our own when we settle down in a theater or work through our Netflix Instant Queues on our laptops.

We can also look at criticism and scholarship, the interpretive branch of film culture, as a series of choices: Why might we discuss a particular film over another, or privilege a certain genre, national cinema, historical period, or another categorization? What conventions do we adhere to when we compose a review or a scholarly article? Daniel indicates ways to think differently about performance, and I think this is very useful, conceptually—in writing, as with filmmaking or any creative endeavor, distinct voices emerge when they make us reconsider the way something is accomplished. And the very best make us marvel at what they can do despite the restrictions imposed by the form. They can make us forget the form altogether, or convince us that it’s being ingeniously invented along the way. (Ostensibly we’ve been talking about cinephilia, but I’ve also noticed among this group a great admiration for individual writers; for me, Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces was the book that changed everything.)

In his essay on video criticism, Damon Smith demonstrates, furthermore, that a thoughtful response doesn’t need to be restricted by medium. I’m particularly struck by a quote he cites from Phillip Lopate: “An essay is a search to find out what one thinks about something.” Latent in that statement is a sense of not knowing, of risk; we might think of essays as an impulse, a dare, a following-through on a hunch. And perhaps what brings us scholars, critics, curators, and filmmakers all together, more than our cinephilic admissions, is the urge to explore. To try, as the French essai translates into English, even if that means leaving our thoughts unfinished. We sound a call in the hopes that others might hear it and respond. That we might make something, maybe even something beautiful, out of that accumulated effort.

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Find all related discussion here, tagged Online Roundtable 2.

From Daniel Cockburn:

Michael mentioned that “usually only passing remarks are made about cinematography, lighting, sound design, etc., as if they’re tangential aspects of a film rather than the entire presentation.”  Which may be true.  But of course that’s not the whole story either—plenty of writing on film exists which makes mention of the more technical, artisanal aspects of filmmaking (some would call these aspects more “cinematic,” which is a blood-red herring if ever there was one) to no insightful end. Some of the most exciting film writing I have read is that which talks about actors (stars or not) and performance in a genuine attempt to articulate what these performances are, and what they do to us.  Acknowledging performance as a series of cues beholden to (or breaking) traditions, standards, and cultural shorthands, talking about this or that performance not just as something to be graded or rated, but as a complex of meanings and stimulus-responses —and then talking about said performance as one of the elements which constitutes the film’s overall meaning-map—is a practice which is certainly alive but not exactly common practice, and I’d sure love to see more of it.

Michael also says, “what I think you’re really getting at, Daniel, is an entirely new paradigm, one brought about by the rapidity with which films are now made, viewed, and discussed.”  I’m not sure that the paradigm I was proposing is entirely new—as has been pointed out on the MUBI discussion board for this roundtable, there are and always have been filmmakers whose work has an obvious critical/criticism tendency (Assayas was mentioned; Godard pops readily to mind). I suppose I was just saying that, again, it’s something I think we could stand to see more of. And to be honest, I’m not even sure what that paradigm I’m asking/hoping for is. Something that already exists, but not enough of it? Something that should exist but doesn’t quite yet? Both, really. My rhetoric could be taken as a paradigm for a paradigm, a starting point or ghosted boundary. Interesting, though, to think that it might be connected with the New Rapidity of creation/presentation/discussion(/dismissal). It’s not as though I think that the ideal future of film-making and -thinking lies in the venue of online presentation and associated discussion boards. There’s surely something to be gained there. But I’m so stuck on the idea of the “cinema” (as in the building that you enter and sit down in) that I’m shifting towards that paradigm as slowly as possible. I’ll end up there, I’m sure.  But I doubt I’ll ever feel like rapidity has anything lasting to give us that would counterbalance what we’d lose if we lost slowness.

Ultimately, the essence of criticism for me is imagination, just as the essence of any viewer’s response is imagination. When we see a film and think/talk/write about what we liked and didn’t like, we are (consciously or not) imagining alternate versions of that film, and comparing them to the one that actually exists. Anybody who doesn’t do that on some level is taking the film as writ, as some unchangeable essence, and this is childish. I mean that literally—so, actually, it’s probably kinder and wiser to say “child-like”—there might be something to be learned there. But generally, if you don’t imagine alternate versions of a film you’ve seen, you can’t evaluate it or even really form an opinion of it, beyond liking it or not the same way you like or don’t like mashed potatoes.  A common point of contention, around informal/conversational viewer responses and criticism alike, is the question of where to draw the line: How much alternate-imagination is valid and constructive, and still gives us some insight about the film and us and the space between the two, and at what point does a response/essay sink into “just imagining the movie you wanted to see and praising/condemning the movie for not being that”? Not that I think there’s a clear answer or guidebook for that; it’s to be tested on a case-by-case basis. But the fact that different people draw that line in different places is, I think, the crux of much disagreement about films and criticism, and it must strike at something quite basic—maybe very near to people’s sense of their own identity —because the response to such a disagreement very often seems to be anger.

But, location and shape of the line aside, I find excitement, fascination, and hope in this idea of imagining alternate versions of things—if you allow that it’s a foundation of response/criticism then that means that response/criticism have the same foundation as does filmmaking. It makes for a lot of overlap and subsequent ire, but I prefer to embrace the overlap and try to think of ways to explore it.

POSTSCRIPT:

Kent, in talking about the “two different planets” of filmmaking and criticism, has twice used the word “just”: “a just relationship between the artist and the critic”, and “just alignment between filmmaking and its critical appreciation”.  For some reason these usages free-associated me to the phrases “just temperament” and “equal temperament”, and hopefully I remember my long-ago music classes well enough to not completely garble their definition:

Just Temperament is a system of tuning which is based on internal mathematical purity, but the purity is rigorous in a way that makes that system only harmonious in one key (and therefore, an instrument tuned in that system can only be played in one key).  Equal Temperament is a system of tuning which is more “averaged out” on a step-by-step basis, so that it has a bit of internal mathematical disharmony but sounds equally (and sufficiently) harmonious in any key.  So, with the invention of Equal Temperament, we became able to tune instruments so that they could be played in any key.  This meant, however, that where originally, under Just Temperament, each key had its own unique mathematics and flavor, now under Equal Temperament there is really no difference—all keys are intervallically identical. So, if someone said “I really like F minor” in the days of Just Temperament, there was genuinely something there that they liked.  Now if someone says “I really like F minor”, they’re probably just saying they like songs that they’ve heard in F minor, because the key no longer has any unique attributes of its own.

J.S. Bach composed “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” a series of preludes and fugues in all different keys, to be played on one Equal-Tempered instrument. It was a concentrated, definitive effort to showcase Equal Temperament, and it worked. Western musical history basically never looked back after that.

What’s the word for something that’s just the first half of a metaphor?  A description of a thing, but not an indication of what that thing is like?  If there is such a word, it probably describes what I just wrote here.

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From Melissa Anderson:

Michael, in response to the question you posed to me—“How has the new accessibility of cinema changed your way of taking it in, or, as you put it, your ‘bingeing,’ and how has that affected your writing and consideration of film?”—my answer is simple: not at all. I don’t collect DVDs, am not a member of Netflix, don’t have cable, and own few gadgets (my home/portable screens are limited to a TV and a laptop). Keeping up with my journalism assignments requires me to watch three to ten films a week; the average skews higher if I’m covering a series. Most of the films I review I see in screening rooms, though occasionally titles are available only on screeners.

Perhaps my greatest filmgoing anxiety, which hasn’t changed in the eleven years that I’ve been writing about movies, stems from making time to see something just for sheer pleasure—and with a paying audience. My girlfriend and I have a semi-regular ritual of going to Saturday-morning multiplex matinees, which is a great way to keep up with current releases. But the real hand-wringing comes from all the repertory titles I try to squeeze in and the regret (self-flagellation?) that inevitably follows. Why didn’t I see Went the Day Well? at Film Forum last week? Will I be able to catch Out of the Blue at Anthology Film Archives before it closes on Thursday?

Since I live in New York, where more than 600 films are released each year, there will always be plenty to gorge on (and write about). I sometimes wonder, though, whether it’s better to have too much than too little, particularly when great films get lost simply because they’re competing with an outrageous number of other titles for the attention of ticket-buyers. João Pedro Rodrigues’s exceptional To Die Like a Man, one of my favorite films this year, was released in New York on April 8—the same week that 18 or 19 other films opened in the city. It vanished after seven days. Would it have played longer if it were one of nine movies that opened that week?

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Everyone has a relationship to movies. One of our goals at Project: New Cinephilia has been to invite contributions from artists, writers, and others across non-cinematic disciplines to share with us the ways in which film has shaped or informed their creative practice. At Edinburgh’s Festivalhouse@Teviot on June 16, we’ll be debuting a new exhibit entitled “At the Movies with Marcellus Hall: Illustrations from The New Yorker, 1993-2010.” Accompanying the illustrations are annotations we’ve commissioned from Hall that speak to both his process and, at times, the impact of the films he has been assigned to cover. Below are two pieces that ran in other magazines, three from The New Yorker, and one previously unpublished work, debuted exclusively online by P:NC.

E.T. – The Village Voice 1992 – 16.5×12.5 inches

This was for the Village Voice.  I don’t remember what the article was about besides the movie E.T. and the fascination it held for children.  I hadn’t seen the movie at the time, but I had fun with this.  Because the Voice is (was?) a leftist renegade publication, an illustrator is allowed more editorial freedom when working for them.  I always chafed when mainstream publications asked me to make certain images benign.  But one has to pay the rent, right?

Film Shooting in NYC – Habitat magazine Feb 2008 – 11.5×9 inches

This illustration was for a magazine catering to co-operative apartment and condominium owners in New York.  The article was about how to cope with a film shoot on your street.

The Luzhin Defence (Emily Watson, John Turturro) – The New Yorker Apr 23 & 30, 2001 -  11×8.5 inches

I still possess the VHS copy of this movie.  I might have overdone John Turturro’s nose here.

The Original Kings of Comedy (Steve Harvey, Bernie Mac, Cedric the Entertainer, D. L. Hughley) – The New Yorker Sep 4, 2000 – 8×10 inches

I like the way I was able to depict the audience in this one with just line.

The Grapes of Wrath – uncommissioned 2009 – 7×6.5 inches

Feeling confident enough to control a pen nib for an illustration assignment (as opposed to brush, like in most of these examples) is not my forte.  But occasionally I’ll attempt it.  This was uncommissioned and has never been published.

Waiting For Superman – The New Yorker Oct 11, 2010 – 11×9 inches

For this assignment I was provided with only a link to the trailer as reference.  I needed to convey something general about education.  I found a photo online of a student with a raised hand in class.  Capturing his gesture was key to this drawing.  Also, I was happy in having successfully limited my color palette.

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Marcellus Hall is an illustrator/musician living in New York. His illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and Time, as well in American Illustration, the Society of Illustrators, and Communication Arts annuals. His first cover for The New Yorker was published in 2005.  Hall has illustrated children’s books for Abrams Inc and Simon & Schuster.  As a musician Hall has made recordings with bands Railroad Jerk and White Hassle and has toured the United States, Europe, and Japan. A solo album, The First Line, was recorded by Hall with accompanying musicians and released on Glacial Pace Recordings in February 2011.