• Anne Thompson sorts out truth from rumor in the fallout of the Paramount Vantage absorption. Notable: Vantage’s Nick Meyer will still be able to produce and acquire films, “It won’t be the originally planned 12 movies a year. It will be more like six, and they will be more likely to be commercially accessible, less arty films.”
• The Museum of the Moving Image has launched a long in-the-works website called Moving Image Source, featuring criticism, promotion of international events, and access to and information about some of the museum’s resources. I’m currently reading this piece by B. Kite on Jean-Luc Godard.
• “I forgot, until someone reminded me this morning (and I can’t remember which blog, sorry), that yesterday was the anniversary of Congress approving the 19th Amendment,” blogs Jette Kernion. And what better way to celebrate than with a little “Sister Suffragette”?
• At the Indiepix blog, Danielle points to the above clip, which I really should have seen before but haven’t. It’s Called Lucky Three, and it’s a short film by Jem Cohen, starring Elliott Smith.

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.”
…Read more

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.

…Read more

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.

…Read more

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!

At once playfully ecstatic objects and cultural time pieces, avant-garde classics and foundation texts for queer cinema, the nearly two dozen Warhol films I’ve seen (out of some 160 nonscreen-test titles) enliven and excite. They also underscore just how calcified much of cinema is, including work made under the generally meaningless rubric of independence. To watch most commercially produced movies is to watch the same endlessly recycled three acts and cautiously modified visual tics again and again. The names change from product to product, country to country, but little else. To watch a Warhol film is to rediscover cinema’s plasticity, boundlessness, mystery and possibility.

That’s an excerpt from a long Manohla Dargis essay that appeared in the New York Times this weekend, in advance of the November 11 opening of a 33-title retrospective of Andy Warhol’s films at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Whether or not you plan on attending the retrospective, the Dargis essay is a must read. Above that, you’ll find a fair illustration of what she’s talking about: a clip from Warhol’s Vinyl (1965).

I finally met Lance Weiler at SXSW this year after a couple of years of reading his blog and Festmobs. Lance’s first film, The Last Broadcast, was the first feature to be distributed via digital satellite (it was also thought by some to have been plagiarized by The Blair Witch Project). His second film, Head Trauma, premiered at LAFF last year and is now available on DVD.

Weiler has basically spent the past year using Head Trauma as a starting point for a number of experiments in film exhibition, marketing and distribution. I’m super-excited about a Head Trauma event coming up next weekend at The Museum of the Moving Image (which, weirdly, is the closest thing I have to a neighborhood movie theater here in southwestern Queens). Weiler calls it his “cinema ARG”, or, alternate reality game:

It consists of three core parts. There is a pre-screening event which plays out across a number of city blocks surrounding the museum, the screening mashup which is NEW and improved, and a post screening leg that follows audience members home. The home version of the cinema ARG will involve user-generated materials, remixing, emails, SMS and phone calls.

While you await my full report on that, check out the above clip, in which Weiler explains another Head Trauma spinoff, in which he invited a number of bands to compose an alternate score for the film.