The uneasy status of Film Criticism is readily discussed. In brief: this profession, which few have ever made a living from, offers decreasing opportunities for remuneration. This publication was born from anger at the shuttering of Film Comment as a print entity. Now the venerable Canadian journal Cinemascope has, in the last month, announced the ramping down of publication. Even slower-paced criticism finds no way to avoid the reality of spiraling publishing costs against dwindling readership attention. So why try? The major leaguers who cart themselves from festival to festival, offering first-looks and a taste of proximity to cinema’s ‘cutting edge’, whatever that may be, are unable to turn a profit. So perhaps enthusiast-driven writing on niche titles is generative of gripping prose that is unbound from PR spin or urban-chic vanity. Forget the Barclays, the proper game still takes place in the Sunday League.
We are told that the seventh art is a dying or dead form. Box office decline. Diminished interest in ‘articles’. Discourse limited to online spaces which flatten nuance. The hellsite. Criticism is a trashfire. Last night was a movie. So why does film remain of such interest to writers?
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Publisher of multiple Nobel Laureates in Britain, Fitzcarraldo books has made an intervention to the space of film criticism which has gone slightly under the radar. The titles themselves, have all been variably well received and bookstagramably posed with. But just as interesting is the very fact that three books closely related to film have been published by the same house across the span of six months.
In April, Ian Penman’s moving Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors (2023) reached shelves. He who gave Hauntology its pop-cultural context approaching cinema’s greatest burn-out is a delectable proposition. Rather than add to the pile of Fassbinder biography, Penman takes a self-conscious ‘disco ball’ approach: part biography, part criticism, part memoir. Individual films barely get a look in. The Third Generation (1979), In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), and Despair (1978) probably get the most attention. Penman suggests this is a focus on difficult or objectionable works, but all of Fassbinder’s films are to some degree difficult or objectionable. The sections, each numbered, strive for the aphoristic. ‘158. He never stopped watching television. He liked to have it on all the time, a TV screen in every room.’
I feel that. My experience of Fassbinder’s work during early April 2020 was transformative in my approach to watching and understanding film, culminating in a binge of Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) over the course of 5 lockdown days around Christmas of that year which reached almost religious purity and dedication. Penman finds it disappointing on a rewatch. ‘[Fassbinder’s] dream of… 1928 Berlin isn’t, as might be expected, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the modernist city. Rather, it inhabits… (not without irony) Fassbinder’s comfort zone: people in bare loveless rooms… repeating the same mistakes, time and again.’ That’s the zone I want to be in with Fassbinder, a lukewarm bath of repetition liable to nod out. Penman, who openly discusses his history with addiction in the book, needs to reject this element of Fassbinder’s work to make it through a revisit.
Brian (2023) by the author-antique dealer Jeremy Cooper, became the feel good book of the summer. ‘Brian!’ people will invariably shout at each other upon recognising another reader. Brian, the character, attends the BFI Southbank almost every day across the novel’s span of four decades. He takes a particularly fond interest in Japanese films. He finds a community of like-minded amateur cinephiles in the foyer. They all carry plastic bags.
Cooper’s book will remind you of John Williams’ Stoner (1965), a simple life given the epic treatment. One feels a life both wasted and truly, emotionally felt time slippages that from sentence-to-sentence take us to increasingly thinning, greying hair. The opening stretch of Brian is so impressively insular that it’s almost a disappointment when the 7/7 bombings take over the narrative for a while. This, Cooper is suggesting, is too great an event for routine-driven Brian to ignore. The only other contemporary reference I caught was the totem of Princess Diana. Brian is revealed, around halfway through the book, to have a traumatic past. Maybe that’s why he plunges into Woman of the Dunes (1964) and In the Realm of the Senses (1976). There seems no other reason to watch them.
In Porn: An Oral History (2023), a chore of a text, Bristol-based Polly Barton interviews various acquaintances – and acquaintances of acquaintances – about their experiences of pornography. While there is clear value in the prevailing notion that people would be happier if they were more open with each other about their porn consumption, this is an odd way to go about it. Barton’s self-regarding approach of only speaking to people with broadly the same economic status and political worldview is ultimately myopic. She rarely takes into account the experiences of sex workers (one participant refers to their earlier work in passing, a moment begging for exploration), or the ways that the porn industry is set up to (dis)empower people other than as second hand information. A chat with a lesbian participant, for example, leads to conversation about the ethics of Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013), which reads like people repeating half remembered bits from The Sunday Times Magazine.
There is some notion that this is my oral history, a history of porn consumption that is occuring around Barton, and around all of us. What does this view do, other than reaffirm a gratingly middle-class and ‘emancipated’ (the word recurs through the text) view of pornography as ‘problematic’ (the only word that recurs more)?
Fitzcarraldo laughs in the face of that phrase, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ by providing the consumer with two options: blue or white. That aesthetic joins these three books under one banner of inquiry into the forms and powers of the moving image. This issue of Cinema Year Zero is an effort to do the same. We asked contributors to respond to ‘Film Criticism’. The results are illuminating, showing shared joys, anxieties, and treatments for the current predicament. Most of all, they explain why we bother in the era of the semi-pro.
Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!
CINEMA YEAR ZERO 