In the interest of full disclosure, I need to get a few things out of the way; Oren Moverman’s The Messenger has been a very important film for me this past year. I am unable to assemble my thoughts about the film itself; I have no critical distance when it comes to this movie. Let me just say I think it is one of the finest movies of the year and an instant classic. I saw the movie at Sundance and fell in love with it. With a little help and some true generosity, we were able to showcase The Messenger as the Opening Night Film at the Sarasota Film Festival back in March. Coming to us right after a triumphant trip to the Berlin Film Festival, we worked with the team from the film to bring in several soldiers and veterans for the screening and party; everyone had a great time. During the festival’s opening weekend, I got to know Oren and the cast a little bit and I was as shocked by their kindness as I was by their talent. I am indebted to all of them for taking a chance on our idea and bringing the film to Sarasota so early in the process.
I have been waiting for this weekend for months now; the film is opening in NYC and DC and rolling out wide next week. All I can hope for in the coming weeks and months is that the film is as warmly received by the national audience as it was by our festival’s. Not only will your support offer tremendous help to a very talented group of artists, but it will also signal an investment in the type of serious, American cinema that desperately needs a boost. My fingers are crossed for the good people at Oscilloscope and for my Messenger friends; here’s to engaging hearts and minds.
Don’t trust them? Trust me; just go see it. Go. Go go go.
* A special mention for film critic movie-loathing-contrarian-for-the-sake-of-it Armond White, whose review, a complete misreading of the film that underlines his own condescension and deep insecurity, opens with the following sentence: “Despite the many things wrong with Brian De Palma’s Redacted, the acting was superbly on-point.” Why read on from there? Say hello, wave goodbye. Seriously?!
In reading the reaction to today’s announcement that Newsweek film critic David Ansen has joined the Los Angeles Film Festival as its Artistic Director (congrats to David, and to my friend and colleague Doug Jones, who received a much-deserved promotion, and to the LAFF for finding their man), a number of lights switched on for me, most of which have been flickering for weeks now. It’s been a tough couple of years for print critics and film criticism in general, and with Ansen’s appointment and the recent wrap of the AFI Fest (programmed by film critic Robert Koehler), it seems like critics are finding refuge among the ranks of professional film programmers like, well, me. Anne Thompson makes a case for the change in her analysis of Ansen’s move when she writes:
“Who better than a critic to make the final picks on the LAFF?...As journalism becomes more and more inhospitable to film critics, film festivals become a viable alternative. Ansen landed at LAFF. And there’s still a position open at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which mounts the New York Film Festival and books the Walter Reade Theatre, for a full-time programmer to replace Kent Jones, who left to work with Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation. Several critics are in contention for that slot, including LA Weekly survivor Scott Foundas. I’d argue for Foundas to keep doing what he does so well. But what future can he reasonably count on…?”
Which, you know, makes the idea of film programming sound a little bit, well, like a bomb shelter; a place to hide out while the world collapses around you and hopefully you can get back to normal once all of the madness dies away. What it doesn’t do, really, is advocate for the reality of film programming, the meaning and importance of the job to a festival, an audience, a community and, probably most importantly, festival colleagues who will be called upon to execute the million details involved in putting on a large event. Which is not to say that David Ansen or Robert Koehler aren’t great programmers, but I think the perception and the reality of the press in addressing this new wave of critics-turned-programmers misses one of the great chasms between the two jobs: No one has begun to describe the dissonance between thinking and acting like a film critic, which entails giving an honest, personal assessment of a film (good or bad), and the constant compromises required by festival programming. In one job, you serve an audience of anonymous readers who seek out your opinion (which you give in a relatively unfettered form, if you’re any good) and in the other, you’re serving both your audience and the industry, the very same filmmakers, actors and distributors you may have taken to task as a critic.
It is interesting that Anne mentions Scott Foundas, an excellent film writer who serves on the NYFF selection committee, as Scott recently talked with Robert Koehler as part of his coverage of the AFI Fest;
“Our first conversations about this [job] really began almost at this time last year,” Koehler adds. “From my end, I just wanted to get much more involved with programming. Not programming film series, which I’ve been doing, or coming up with a juicy little wish list and then phoning it off to the folks who really do the spade work in terms of getting the films. What I wanted to do was blend the conceptual side of it with the spade work.”
Koehler’s appointment was not without its share of raised eyebrows. Writing about the hire last April, Cinematical blogger Peter Martin (himself a former AFI Fest employee) deemed it an “odd move” while quoting at length from a Koehler essay in the Canadian film quarterly Cinema Scope that chided North American festival programmers for their laziness and herd mentality: “The essence of interesting, vital festival programming is an intelligent argument for a certain kind of cinema — this kind, not that kind.” With his new job, Martin surmised, Koehler would get a chance “to put his money where his mouth is.”
Implicit in Martin’s provocation was the bane of every film programmer’s existence: how to challenge an audience without alienating them? How, in Koehler’s case, for a passionate champion of radical and avant-garde filmmaking (his “certain kind of cinema” in a nutshell) to program a festival with movies that Joe the Plumber might also want to see? As Koehler himself puts it, it all comes down to “finding a balance of tendencies, of kinds of films. You certainly want to avoid both a vanilla drift toward the middle on the one hand, and you also want to avoid an ideological purity that veers on the obnoxious on the other.”
First of all, I love Koehler for understanding and articulating the idea of “spade work”, because for me, that’s right on. But maybe it is the privilege of criticism, the ability to look at work from an idealistic distance, that makes the second part of his statement ring as, let’s just say, diplomatic. I’ll say what he can’t say; When you’re dealing with a sponsor driven, non-profit event, you can’t show all the movies you love and you have to show a few you don’t like. Unlike the process of developing a critical corpus and a theoretical vision for “a certain type of film”, the job of festival programming is not about having great taste (which, by the way, everyone thinks they have). It is about, as Koehler rightly states, “finding a balance” between a complex set of interests that do not exist in the critical world.*
For most of us in the world of film programming, life is a series of qualifiers; we like to think that by assembling a program from the available, relevant films in our festival window that will agree to play the festival, we’ve worked hard to bring the very best that we can to our audiences, given the unique circumstances of each event. There are a few out there who, because of their size and status in the festival marketplace, have the unique privilege of saying no far more often than they hear it from others. Depending on the demands of the festival mission (i.e. whether or not you’re going to play the “premieres” game—it is duly noted that AFI dumped their premiere status requirements this year, as I did too in my first year in charge of a film program), most of us in the film festival world are, let’s be honest, not in a position where high profile, high quality projects are beating down the door to be a part of our event. So, when your festival is looking to hire someone to take over the film program, finding a professional with name recognition and a long history of quality relationships in the world of film PR makes a LOT of sense. I totally get it.
But, in welcoming my critic friends into the community of programmers, I offer a little bit of hard-won wisdom; film programming is a harbor for constant disappointment. We’re told “no” constantly, we have to tell other people “no” all the time, we do our best in negotiating all sorts of tricky problems between a multitude of interests. Now, obviously, people as gifted as David Ansen and Robert Koehler are amazing film scholars and have proven through their criticism and programming work, time and again, that they are excellent at what they do. I have no doubts that their work will be superior to my own in every way. But I do find it curious that so many festival directors seem to be looking to the world of criticism to find their programmers, and more importantly, that an honest discussion about what that means for programmers and critics alike hasn’t really started. So, maybe we can start now? Honest opinions welcome.
* By the way, Robert Koehler also has a huge advantage that most programmers can only dream about; he’s going to pack the house every time because his festival gives away all of their tickets for free. Which begets a note on the recent press regarding AFI’s free film tickets: They were paid for. By Audi. Who then gave them away. Putting that model out there as the next big idea in film festival management is a little bit like hitting the Mega Millions and then advocating that the lottery is the best new model for obtaining personal wealth. AFI was great in their acknowledgement of this incredibly special, generous sponsorship, but the press needs a reminder; let’s not trend “insanely good fortune” as being a reasonable approach to the business.
I can hear you, can you hear me?—R.E.M., Sitting Still
R.E.M. is the absolute seminal band for me; their albums are the soundtrack of my life. I was a thriteen year-old heavy metal-loving dork living in working class Michigan in 1984 when, on Easter vacation in Toronto, I stumbled upon Chronic Town in a cutout bin at Sam The Record Man on Yonge St. From the moment the needle hit the vinyl on my shitty, department store turntable, I was literally tranformed into another person. It is hard to remember the fabric of a pre-internet, pre-iPod, pre-video on demand world, but I clearly had a sentimental attachment to the sensation of having a secret, of loving something and finding almost no connection among members of my community, my friends, my peers; is that even possible anymore? I have a very young son, and I often wonder if he will ever feel what it is like to not know a single person who shares his passion for an artist, an idea, a song. Today, we connect online, we find a universe of articles and fans sites and links and history and community among like-minded people around the world. For me, cracking open Chronic Town in Flint, Michigan as a thirteen year-old kid felt like a secret, private revolt. I would literally spend days listening to R.E.M. records, singing along in jibberish, blissfully alone, disconnected, changing into what I now consider “me.” Is that possible anymore?
Smitten with Chronic Town, I immediately dove into the R.E.M. catalogue, picking up Murmur, already a year old, and Reckoning, which had just come out. I was inseparable from those records during Middle School, literally wearing out my vinyl copy of Murmur within a few months. The following spring, 1985, I picked up Fables of The Reconstruction and my step-dad took me to see the band in concert at the Fox Theater in Detroit, which blew my 14 year old mind. I can remember almost every detail of that show to this day, from the expressionistic lighting to the huge sound to the cover of Aerosmith’s Toys In The Attic that came out of nowhere. The band was always mysterious; who wrote which song? What was Michael Stipe hiding from behind his curly hair? What was he singing about? Every once in a while, an interview would appear in a magazine, a clip on MTV, and I would gobble all of it up, trying to understand the band and the reasons I felt so connected to their music. It was and is a mystery to me; Stipe’s voice is in my own vocal range, so I could sing along, the abstract imagery of the songs hit me, the jangly guitar connected to classic songs that I loved, there was an outsider’s perspective that the band conveyed that felt true, a million reasons.
But most of all, they were singing songs that felt like being young and feeling eternal, about the impossibile reality of death and growing old, mixed with a deeply curious attachment to passing ways of life, regional, local experience, to just living and not giving a fuck. I felt like I could live a million years, secluded and all along the ruins and on and on.
Most of all, though, R.E.M. felt like something in stark opposition to the conservative literalism of Regan’s America, something much smarter and bigger than Middle and High School, connected to an almost impossibly vibrant scene (Athens GA, a place I dreamt of for years), an ideal of creative work, of personal possibility for me. There are infinite numbers of stories of kids claiming that bands saved their lives; my life didn’t need saving, I was a happy, confident kid. R.E.M. didn’t save my life or give it purpose, they simply offered me a portal into the possibilities of living, of a larger world. I listen to those records today and more than the music and the words, they convey the texture of memory and experience for me; they make me feel the same feelings, but through a new, changing perspective about who I am.
For no reason other than my own inability to appreciate the grand scale of the stadium concert, I stopped going to R.E.M. shows after the Green tour. And in truth, after Bill Berry left in 1997 to recover from a brain aneurysm, I felt like the band and I both had changed, which, fucking right and fair play. There was nothing revoked between the music and me, but all of doors that R.E.M. had opened for me had been populated by a million other moments, experiences, songs, shows, loves. I grew up, got older, and they did the same. I haven’t felt a deep connection to the band’s new work in the same way I did their 1980’s work, but who feels the same deep connection as a thirty something that they did as a teenager?
I am going to die someday. I have a son to whom I want to give the entirety of the world and all of myself. I have a wife that I love in ways I thought impossible. So many things I dreamed of doing will never get done. And I feel completely content.
That said, whatever connected inside of me, it is still very much alive. Today, I picked up a copy of R.E.M.‘s new album, Live At The Olympia which has essentailly forced me curl up in a ball in my bedroom with my headphones on, a irrevocable grin plastered on my face, emotions and feelings I haven’t had in years flooding through me. It is an absolutely amazing retrospective of everything that made the band vital, crucial, meaningful to me. The song selection is unreal (they play so many of my favorites) but it is the muscular, urgent sound of the performances on this record that prove just how important and powerful a band R.E.M. are. All of that is well and good and yes yes yes, but the real gift here is the way Michael Stipe just CRUSHES these songs—I just can’t believe how good and clear he sounds on this record; the performances of Sitting Still, Carnival Of Sorts and especially 1,000,000 as they are performed here are achingly, jawdroppingly great. I had forgotten what they mean to me and this album feels like a reclamation of everything I loved about discovering their music, everything I was and wanted to be. I can’t believe it. It’s still there and I forgot how much I missed it.
For the second year in a row, and, I fear, the last (since I know the Gothams try to mix up their nominating committees), I was asked and honored to serve as a Nominating Committee member for the Documentary Feature category for the 2009 Gotham Awards. Yesterday, I watched with some interest (and a little horror) as the nominees in all categories were announced and feedback began rolling in from all over the internet. While many reactions targeted omissions (Lee Daniels’ Precious: Based On The Novel “Push” By Sapphire seems to be drawing the most curiosity in its absence), other reactions* weighed the relative value of the Gothams as an awards season bellwether and so on. So much analysis, so little relationship to my own reality. Having served for two years now, and say what you will, the Gotham Awards process is about the nominating committee coming to consensus on a list of nominees and, honestly and truly, that is all there is to it. If that offends or is not “serious” enough (which is to say, it does not conform to the values of a good, obedient awards program, meaning it has its own stand-alone relevance outside of Hollywood and box office and the Academy—see previous reactions to Cannes awards, etc etc.), well, so be it, I guess.
This year, we watched 50 eligible documentaries; One of the reasons film programmers and critics tend to make good committee members is that many of us have seen most of the films by the time the list of eligible titles is available. I ended up only needing to see 10 or so films of the 50; not bad. Unlike other awards, say, the Academy process, where thousands of screeners are sent out and screenings set up in order to have enough people see a film to help secure a nomination—you literally do need a ton of money to run a nomination campaign—there is no “For Your Consideration” campaign with these awards; if it was eligible under the IFP’s rules, we watched it. None of the committe members talked during the screening process; we met for the first time during the nominating meeting. Once we got together to nominate, we were given our guidelines for nomination; choose whatever films you like for whatever reasons you like but come to a consensus on each film and the final list. I did ask specifically about the role of New York films in the process and we were told that the Gotham Awards had no specific New York City mandate; we were simply asked to choose what we believed were the best films. Each member champions their own titles and, over the course of a few hours, a consensus is reached and a final list emerges. That is all there was to it for my committee.
While the deliberations are secret, I can tell you that the committee never talked about “box office” or “what other award bodies may do”; we just weighed the artistic merits (as we saw them) of dozens of films and simply made our list by talking to one another and trying to find consensus on the films we thought were the best of the year. Now, how that plays into what other committees and organizations do and why and when; I have no idea. I play the Oscar pool at work like everyone else, I watch the Spirit Awards and feel pride when films I admire get recognized, I read the prognostications of the industry “insiders” as to who will win what. It’s a fun diversion, sort of like fantasy football; it has no impact on the actual value of a film or performance, but its fun to win a little money from your friends by beating them at guessing who will win. I know that award recognition can help people make money and get their film seen, which, more power to them (and to the audiences who care about awards in making their film-going decisions—I don’t begrudge anyone going to the movies—just go and enjoy!) But for me, none of that was ever a factor; I just wanted to do right by the eligible filmmakers by taking the process seriously and by applying my own critical thinking to the group’s decision making. Do I think the final list is one of multiple possible lists, had dynamics and reactions been different among my colleagues? Obviously. But I am very proud of the list we put forth, stand by it 100% and look forward to seeing who the voting members choose as a winner. I hope to be back one day and to serve again, as I love this process and feel a strong affinity to these awards and the values they represent; subjectivity, collaboration, critical thinking and artistic merit. That and a cocktail? Good enough for me.
* A quick note about this; What the fuck is going on in film writing land? Did someone spike the blogger Kool-Aid with virulent strains of pettiness, ego and manic self-righteousness? From the namecalling and ridiculous navel-gazing deluge of “who got the scoop/ whose analysis is best” to the boring Hollywood-as-business blogging (ITEM! Suit lunches with other suit! Suit fires other suit! Suit denies it’s “personal”! Other suit to start stand-alone production business! Suit now 31st Most Powerful Suit in Hollywood!) to the relentless bombardment of reality TV show and video game sales analysis that clogs the indieWire blog feed these days, the contrast in tone and focus between writing about “the community” and “the business” seems stark. The difference? The community folks hold an independent film summit. The business bloggers spend time attacking each other and sniping about the accuracy and meaning of the studios’ Human Resources departments. I mean, good for you that you guys love power and numbers and the business side of film—rah rah, that’s where the action is, hooray for Hollywood, indie film is irrelevant, guys with money love seeing their names in print and blah blah blah. Your ad sales and traffic and “professionalism” are all more meaningful than mine; I leave you to your passions. But any chance you’ll tone down the personal attacks? Or maybe, indieWIRE can stop honoring this stuff with real estate and analysis on its own site? Just sayin’.
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