>>10003
>Your book Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons stresses the importance of maintaining certain masterworks, classical, international and contemporary, as quality standards and reference guides when thinking and writing about film. What are some of the characteristics shared by those films that make them “canonical”?
The only answer I can provide to this question is a personal response. For me, what makes them canonical is the number of times I can watch them without them ever seeming to lose their freshness. In other words, “canonical” equals “inexhaustible”.
>In the Criterion essay about Playtime, you wrote: “The utopian vision of shared space that informs the latter scenes is made unthinkable by mobile phones, whose use can be said to constitute both a depletion and a form of denial of public space, especially because the people using them tend to ignore the other people in immediate physical proximity to them.” Have cell phones also been detrimental in some way to our appreciation of film?
Yes, and I’d go further and describe them as detrimental to all forms of concentrated attention. One thing that impressed me enormously about the Melbourne International Film Festival when I attended it last year was that I never saw another spectator checking her or his mobile once during any screening.
>Do you miss anything in particular about the days when you started out?
I miss the experience of communal and theatrical filmgoing, mostly as a child in my family’s theaters in Alabama during the late 1940s and the 1950s. Part of that experience was quite clearly the experience of being part of a community, which is much harder to find and to feel these days in the United States—except, perhaps, on the Internet, where it’s a radically different notion of community, both physically and metaphysically.
>If you had to move to a space station and could only take with you films from a single country, what country would that be and why?
It would probably be films from the U.S.—and not only because I’m an American myself, but also because I suspect that my country has produced the richest national cinema. On the other hand, if I was as fed up with American solipsism and arrogance and stupidity as I’m feeling at this moment, I might opt for French cinema instead, both in order to improve my limited language skills and as a better cultural reference point for what I believe culture and society might be—and also because France has a pretty rich national cinema of its own.
>Your writing often analyzes a film’s politics even when the story is not directly making a social or political statement. Is a film’s political conscience an indicator of the filmmaker’s artistic maturity? Are there apolitical films? Should a filmmaker have a sense of social responsibility? Tarkovsky and Malick, for example, seem to be more concerned with atemporal, universal matters of the “soul,” than their characters’ relationship with society or the underlying economic tensions of their misfortunes.
Intentionality is often a hazardous and bogus criterion in film criticism. Regardless of their intentions, the films of Tarkovsky, which I admire enormously, are deeply misogynous, and the films of Malick, which I admire less, are the expressions of a football player. Both filmmakers are obviously talented as well as soulful individuals, but regardless of how apolitical they may be (or think they are) in terms of their artistic intentions, their films both reflect and have political and ideological aspects, some of which might be regarded as consequences.
>Do you have any advice for the struggling young but hopeful filmmaker?
Don’t give up.
>If you could live inside the world of a film, what film would that be and why?
Perhaps Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, because of the music and colors and people and feelings inside that film. I wouldn’t mind the food and the sex, either.
>Do you have a personal top 10?
Theoretically, this list changes all the time, but for the moment, without thinking about it too much, my top ten are as follows (in no special order):
PlayTime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
Satantango (Béla Tarr, 1994)
Ordet (Carl-Theodor Dreyer, 1955)
Spione (Fritz Lang, 1928)
The World (Jia Zhangke, 2004)
City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999)
Stars in My Crown (Jacques Tourneur, 1950)
The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)