Over our five days at the Institute, we kept returning to a series of binary oppositions: print versus online; doing it for the passion versus doing it for the pay; criticism as consumer reporting versus advocacy for artists. With such circular questions, it’s hard to get anywhere, making it easy to lapse into what filmmaker Kelly Reichardt jokingly referred to at one point as “glass half full of shit” thinking. But out of the morass of questions and unresolvable clashes came an emphasis on compromise and balance: nearly every guest speaker made some mention of making trade offs, of covering for noble failures with less-noble successes.
This seemed most prevalent on Saturday, with Reichardt and Tom Kalin’s independent filmmaker panel; Ryan Werner of IFC and Don Krim from KINO representing indie distribution; and, particularly, the online film criticism panel, featuring Eugene Hernandez (indieWIRE), Michael Koresky (Reverse Shot), Matt Zoller Seitz (The House Next Door and The New York Times) and Stu Van Airsdale (The Reeler and Defamer).
The issue of blogs as an alternative/corrective to the mainstream media came up early in the day, with Seitz’s explanation for how The House Next Door got started. “I was really irritated by the negative reviews of Terrence Malick’s The New World,” he said, “And I just wanted to write about how great it was like every day.”
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Answers to the blind items thrown out from my notes on the Moving Image Institute:
“There are certain people who only exist to show up on websites in order to tell you what an idiot you are.” — Matt Zoller Seitz, speaking on the Online Film Criticism panel, about which more later today.
“I don’t see it as a queer movie, other than that a sodomite made it.” –– Filmmaker Tom Kalin, speaking about his upcoming Savage Grace.
“I’m a great Dumbo enthusiast. I think it’s the greatest animated film I’ve ever seen. I like elephants.” — Andrew Sarris. More on his session here.
image via Stop Smiling.
“I’ve been struggling to try to do a memoir,” said Andrew Sarris at the beginning of the Moving Image Institute session with he and fellow critic/wife Molly Haskell. “I haven’t made much progress, so don’t hold your breath.” Not to brag, but anyone who was in that room won’t have to. The Haskell/Sarris Hour (actually, several hours––the discussion continued over dinner, including wine for many of us and a vodka tonic for Sarris) was, for me, both the most purely pleasurable session of the Institute, and the portion of the program that gave me the strongest dose of film cultural-historical education. It all came down through Andrew and Molly’s candid storytelling. MOMI’s David Schwartz more than once credited Sarris for having mastered the lecture-as-stand up comedy, but in our small group, with Haskell at his side snarkily finishing sentences, it felt more like lecture-as-autobiography. With jokes.
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Today marks the final day of the Moving Image Institute (see my previous coverage here and here), and though I’ve been taking copious notes, I’ve been too busy actually participating to do much writing. I hope to get caught up posting takeaways by the end of this week. In the meantime, I’m going to throw out three random quotes from my notes from the past four days. Take a look at the list of speakers here, and see if you can guess who said what.
1) “There are certain people who only exist to show up on websites in order to tell you what an idiot you are.”
2) “I don’t see it as a queer movie, other than that a sodomite made it.”
3) “I’m a great Dumbo enthusiast. I think it’s the greatest animated film I’ve ever seen. I like elephants.”
The first guest speaker on the first morning of the Moving Image Institute in Film Criticism and Feature Writing, New York Times critic A.O. Scott made a comment about the problematic nature of Iraq films that seemed to me to serve as a wider metaphor for the current crisis facing those of us struggling for security and longevity as film writers. To paraphrase, Scott suggested that dramatizations of the Iraq conflict have so far been generally disappointing because not only do we not yet know the outcome of the war, but it’s hard to hypothesize what either a positive or negative end would actually look like. This is essentially how I’ve come to feel about my chosen profession of late: unable to imagine what either a best or worst case scenario would actually look like, the idea of establishing long-term career goals seems unfathomable.
The Scott session, for me, reinforced the notion that there’s a divide between those of us who struggle to cobble together a living out of our engagement with the online film community, and those who, because of age or professional stature or other factors that I’m too young and naive to grasp, see the increasing empowerment of the audience as a nuisance.
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I’ve had an amazing time in Sarasota over the past week but, alas, I’ve headed back to New York for my next event: I’ve been invited to take part in the Moving Image Institute in Film Criticism and Feature Writing, a five day series of workshops and panels co-sponsored by the Museum of the Moving Image and the New York Times. I’ll be blogging as much as I can from/about the events, which run through Tuesday. In the meantime, you can browse the schedule and the list of participating speakers and journalists at the Museum’s website. Let me know if there’s anything in particular that you’d like to hear about.
As my fellow participant Doug Cummings puts it on his blog, “With the demise of so many newspaper and magazine film critical positions, and the continual growth of serious film writing and discussion on the Internet, this is an interesting time to be reviewing the state of the art.” Swap out the word “interesting” for “terrifying”, and you’ll get a sense of why this was something I wanted to be a part of. In order to write a movie blog for a living, you have to be completely present-focused; it can actually be a liability to look too far into the future. These next few days, for me, are all about taking a few days to confront the void that I spend most of my time pretending is not standing right before me. Wish me luck!
While I gather my final thoughts on the 
