There’s a lot to say about Amy Taubin’s takedown of mumblecore, which recently appeared online as a preview to the November/December issue of Film Comment. Unfortunately, I’m traveling this week and don’t have much time to devote to it; fortunately, David Hudson and Matt Dentler (himself the target of some of Taubin’s wrath) have picked up the slack. Go read their posts for a coherent view; then, click through the jump for some thoughts I scrawled late last night at the Denver airport. If this meme has any staying power, I’ll revisit it when I’m back in New York.
First thing’s first: Taubin questions whether or not a common interest in imprecise speech is a “sufficient basis for a film movement.”
Well, fair enough. And I think most of the filmmakers who have had the questionable fortune to fall into the mumblecore hole would agree with that. In my experience, it’s exactly that proccupation with the vagaries and limits of language that leads many of these filmmakers to grow impatient/uncomfortable with not just the big-M M-word, but the little-m m-word as well. In other words, don’t call it mumblecore, and don’t call it a movement.
Most of these guys will cop to a taste for collaborating with their friends, but that doesn’t seem unusual. Is it any different from John Cassavetes making five films with Ben Gazzara?, Or, to use a more recent example, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodrigeuz leading one another around by the dick?
It’s an oddly cranky setting of terms, but who is Taubin really angry at? Bloggers, festival programmers, filmmakers? We all get a bit of it. She opens by defining mublecore as “the indie movement that never was more than a flurry of festival hype and blogosphere branding.”
It’s one thing to point fingers at someone like Matt Denter for trying to draw attention to the events that he makes a living putting together––nevermind the fact that Taubin’s own publication has spread the flogging of its own film festival picks across two full issues of its print magazine this fall. And it’s fine to blame myself and my fellow bloggers for using linguistic shortcuts (even though many of us have spent more time defining what makes these films different than branding them blindly) in order to make it just that much easier to contextualize and draw attention the films that we find exciting (and by the way–if you can find me the blog post that used the big-M M-word in any non-joking way published BEFORE the NY Times cleared the path for that sort of thing, please let me know, because I think I missed it).
But if the hype is the problem, then don’t penalize the filmmakers. Neither the festivals nor the bloggers mandated (or really, even encouraged) these filmmakers to work together, again and again, on projects as disparate as Katz’ Quiet City, Swanberg’s Young American Bodies, and Mary Bronstein’s upcoming (last I heard, tentatively titled) Yeast. And as Dentler points out, if there was “never more” than hype and branding, why devote space to it in your magazine? And did Taubin’s editor remove an even more scathing ode to the Duplass Brothers, who Taubin casts in her “branding order” even lower than Joe Swanberg, and then fails to return to?
“Instead, the mumblecore guys selected Ry Russo-Young, who plays a supporting role in Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs (07), as their token female director even though her first feature, Orphans (07), with its heavy-handed visual metaphors and anguished examination of the symbiotic bond between two sisters, seems closer to Bergman than Bujalski.”
A Flickr search reveals that Russo-Young literally goes to the same parties as some of these other folks, but as far as I know, Orphans was not included in any of screening programs that sprung up post-SXSW 2007 (see here, here and here). I can’t think of anyone who has mentioned Russo-Young in the same breath as any of these other films without noting that Orphans is very different. It’s interesting that Taubin, who seems to be a fan of Frownland (although her branding it a “clammy slap in the face of mumblecore” just seems temporally inaccurate), fails to consider Mary Bronstein, who gives a frightingly strong and totally idiosyncratic performance in that film, and who is currently making her own feature.
Finally, Taubin cites GreenCine, indieWIRE, and Matt Dentler’s blog as sources, but one quote is used without credit. Taubin writes: “One blogger, trying to justify Swanberg’s importance, praised his “trademark casual camerawork.”
As of this writing, Google has no record of this phrase being used anywhere on the internet, other than in Taubin’s own piece. Did she misquote? Did the guilty blogger freak out and remove the post after Taubin’s story was published? I’m not trying to be a stickler for fact checking, but if I have to continue to defend my chosen profession against attacks, it would be useful if both sides were working from the same set of evidence.
