"If the outstanding films are never all visible at the same time until the window of their contemporaneity has closed, it means they are truly contemporary only for a small group of people—critics, programmers, and distributors. (The rest of us are like people looking at stars that appear bright but, in their own real time, may have already gone dim.) And if we indeed have a common agreement that this small group can declare what the contemporary cinema is, let’s acknowledge that the conditions under which they exercise their judgment are usually bad. Programmers see almost everything on DVD—usually in an office, at home on TV, on a laptop—or else, like critics, at other festivals, often at the rate of three or four a day, a rate that pulverizes both discrimination and memory."
(Chris Fujiwara, "To Have Done with the Contemporary Cinema," n+1)
3 comments:
Another dvd bashing quote. Sure, it's not same thing as watching at a cinema, but it doesn't have to be. Watching a film from a dvd is a form of watching it. And I usually prefer it, since it nearly become impossible to watch with other people without someone disturbing your experience.
I think the point, Anonymous, is not so much the medium of the watching, but the assembly line process of selection, where one film, barely watched, can make another glow unjustly.
Todd McCarthy talks about the pros and cons of how these things work in his latest post...
http://blogs.indiewire.com/toddmccarthy/archives/up_in_the_basement/
Yes, I don't think the piece was very invested in bashing DVDs - but rather in indicating that most of what we think of as 'cutting edge' or 'current' in cinema is in fact a function of highly specialized film festivals with relatively tiny audiences, which in turn are put together & commented upon by a small number of people who see a lot of these films in less than ideal conditions.
Thus, "contemporary cinema" - what does it mean? Perhaps less than we may assume it does.
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