I’m not sure that I’m actually all that interested in what ‘s being said in this dialogue between film critics Matt Zoller Seitz and Keith Uhlich. They care much more than I do, for instance, about whether directors are using film or video to shoot (to be fair, they’re mostly trying to clear away the deadwood, arguing that critics have been approaching the question from the wrong direction, but still, deadwood-clearing doesn’t make for very interesting reading most of the time).
That said, I find what they’re doing pretty exciting. As Seitz writes:
What you see when you read Internet film criticism is criticism that is not constrained by word count. You don’t have to cram it into 30 or 60 seconds or less, like a lot of TV-based reviewers do. The presence or absence of a still picture illustrating the text, or the decision to run the piece on the front of the section versus inside — none of this stuff has any bearing anymore, it’s all about the content of the piece. Not only can you go long if you want, you can do multiple posts on the same film, or on the same director. You can write about a movie that’s 30 or 40 years old and connect it to something today, and nobody can say boo to you. You can illustrate your essay with frame grabs, to indicate visually exactly what it is that you’re talking about. Or you can refer readers to YouTube if there’s a relevant clip up there. Or if you have a lot of server space you can pull your own clip and hope the studio doesn’t sue you.
Film criticism, in the past, has been particularly corrupted by its relationship to the movie industrial complex. Readers want to know what movie to see this week, and they want a certain amount of plot summary, and they want thumbs up or thumbs down, or an assessing of the avocadoes, and by the time even the best-intentioned critic gets through all that, he maybe has only a hundred words or so to say something insightful. Even worse, he’s probably only seen the movie one time, and it was just a few days ago, and serious critics really need more time, and repeat viewings, to figure out what needs to be said.
What Seitz et al are doing over at their blog, The House Next Door, is really as necessary, and as revolutionary, as what Josh Marshall is doing at his blog Talking Points Memo. They’re liberating journalism and criticism from the worst constraints that were placed on it by the industry. What Marshall’s doing is even more impressive in that he’s finding ways to finance his endeavors as well. The House Next Door guys pretty much pay their rent writing for the old reliables (Seitz, for instance, just started freelancing for the Times).
Anyway, huzzah to all of them. I don’t know if you should actually read the whole Seitz/Uhlich dialogue, but maybe peruse to get a flavor of where we’re going.
