The Circuit

In prepping the audience for the ominously titled "Film Criticism in Crisis?" panel at the New York film fest, Film Comment's Gavin Smith (pictured) said "If you've come to see the fur fly, you may be disappointed.  We're not going to have a showdown between online and print.  Hopefully we've moved beyond that."

Immediately after, critic Kent Jones said exactly why they'll be no fight -- print doesn't have the strength to fight. 

"It's certainly an economic crisis seeing the number of people dropped from newspapers and magazines.  It's also alarming to note the difficulty with which magazines and newspapers have in just staying alive.  But that is economic crisis and not a film criticism crisis.  There are a lot of very devoted and eloquent people out there online."

Cahiers du cinéma editor Emmanuel Burdeau continued the theme: "One could say they has always been crisis. If I want to be honest, I can only talk about the current situation with Cahiers.  As you know the magazine has been owned by Le Monde... and it's been losing about 100,000 euros a year.  The situation is dramatic.  The enterprise itself doesn't mean anything right now.  If you want to buy it, you can have it for a single Euro." 

Burdeau said the publisher Phaidon is interested, but it's a matter of how much a buyer could put up to reinvent the magazine, not just own it.

Burdeau linked the decline of Cahiers to the decline of French distribution.  Abel Ferrara's two last movies haven't been released in France, he bemoaned. 

Burdeau's idea is for reviewers to take on a more "militant" role -- reviewers should become distributors, pushing a title through a website, where viewers can read, watch a scene, comment on it, and buy the movie.

Jessica Winter, film critic for O Magazine, seemed to feel as a fish out of water among the group.  She only spoke twice, offering a counter to the crisis by saying her readership is so vast and vastly different in a geographic sense that "I can't define who my readership is."  Yet she sees her job more a curator.  Now that Netflix has entered the mainstream, she can push smaller films that normally wouldn't make the cineplex.

Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum remembered that to write for film meant living in New York, London, or Chicago. "Now sophisticated film criticism is coming from the middle of nowhere.  I go to my man, David Hudson," he said, motioning down the table to the prime aggregator of film words.  David Hudson's blog on Greencine has long been a first-stop for cineaeste's daily fix.

Rosenbaum also said he's happy not to go see new movies all the time.  He waits for the DVD.   That prompted Smith to remark on DVD's ability to breakdown the TV/film barrier, and where film criticism seems to be going.  Interestingly, the most discussed movie on the panel wasn't a movie at all.  Jones and Burdeau both professed to be moved and completely sucked into "The Wire." 

"I think everyone is crossing the lines," said Burdeau  "The discussion in France right now isn't about a movie but 'The Wire.'  That is what people are talking about.  And it's not contrary to a very conservative point of view that TV is better than movies.  It's that DVD's are another way of saying 'we' as my friends and I pass these DVD's around and discuss them.  It's a fragmentary community which in a very paradoxical way is more suited now with television than with movies."