So, we’re taking the rest of the week off. Enjoy your, uh, eating and shopping? That’s what people do, right? (I’m half-English, so I’m only half willing to admit that Thanksgiving even exists.) But first, for your holiday browsing pleasure, here are a bunch of stories from this week that I meant to comment on but ran out of time. Let me know if there’s anything in particular that you’d like me to revisit in depth next week.
- “Auteurism had Andrew Sarris. Abstract expressionism had Clement Greenberg. Punk rock had Lester Bangs. Where is the equivalent voice for today’s documentary scene?” So ponders Thom Powers, before offering a number of tips for those of us who might aim to fill the position.
- “Is there room in that diverse [film festival] community for people of faith? For people of more conservative political beliefs? Or are film festivals only for the support and promotion of those who agree with a specific, left-of-center political philosophy? And therefore, must major film festivals — and their primary staff — have a de facto bias toward that philosphy?” AJ Schnack examines the implications of the Prop 8/Rich Raddon situation.
- Eric Kohn visited the Futures of Entertainment conference, sponsored by the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT. “As the conversations progressed, so too did a flurry of typing from numerous laptops throughout the audience: Microblogging and online chatter created a series of miniature conversations that converged into a unified whole.”
- In the second of potentially three posts on Synechdoche, NY, Filmbrain runs Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut through the ringer of the Jungian concept of individuation. “The individuation process is about the uniting of opposites — good and evil, masculine and feminine, matter and spirit, body and psyche. There’s no question that Caden undertakes the journey, but he fails to become an individual, both literally and psychologically. Caden treats his life (both the conscious and unconscious elements) like a stage play, yet his attempt at directing from an omniscient position robs him of (in alchemical terms) the prima materia required for one to be a person.”
I had heard a rumor about this earlier this morning, but Mike Jones at The Circuit is the first to confirm it: Rich Raddon has resigned from his post as the director of the Los Angeles Film Festival. Raddon, who is a practicing Mormon, first submitted his resignation last week, when it was revealed that he had made sizable donationto the campaign in support of California’s anti-gay-marriage Propositon 8. The FIND Independent board who govern LAFF chose not to accept the resignation, but instead met, talked it out and took no action. The conversations calling out Raddon for putting his money where his beliefs are did not stop, and when Raddon submitted his resignation again last night, LAFF accepted it.
UPDATE: As I commented below, I didn’t mean above to take a stance one way or another on any of these issues, and I think if anybody had read what I wrote carefully rather than jumping to conclusions, they would see that. But because nobody seems interested in actually reading anything carefully and I don’t have time to defend an innocuous statements from the instant emotional responses of everyone on the internet, I’ve deleted a paragraph in which I essentially said that this is a bad situation for all involved.
