Film Flam

Despite my posturing and claims about not reading any contemporary film criticism, I fully adore and endorse anything that Matt Zoller Seitz does. His films for the Museum Of The Moving Image, as well as his his articles for Salon.com are precise and astute analyses of both the language of modern cinema and the overall effect it’s had, and continues to have, on the continuing development of cinema. Seitz, along with David Bordwell, who’s book The Way Hollywood Tells It, is a must read for anyone interested in the visual mechanics of cinema today, is the best American film historian living today.

In the above clip (part 5 in a series of video essays on fame in the movies), Zeitz highlights some of the elements of what he calls Maverick heroes in film. Here the characters are radio personalities; their dramatic responsibility is not only to provoke, engage, and entertain the characters in the world of the film — but also us, the viewer of the film itself.

The power and charisma that these personalities hold is due in no small part to their having a microphone in front of them. This access to a “higher voice” makes them, and by extension their ideas and arguments more compelling — what George Saunders calls The Braindead Megaphone — simply by being louder.

You can find more Seitz on his twitter feed and more Saunder-isms in his book and website.

More and more I see trailers like these; brilliant documentaries on miscellanea that I don’t think I’ll get the chance to see. The standard process for documentaries, and independent films in general is to shuttle them around to various film festivals where they’ll (fingers crossed) get picked up by a distributor and they can live a longer life on DVD or some other home video alternative.

I often wonder if filmmakers ever consider releasing their films under a Creative Commons license, thereby making their films accessible to a larger audience. I understand the need to recoup and investment. Making films is possibly the most expensive art form in existence, and giving away your “product” might seem stupid, but like Tim O’Reilly says, “the greatest threat to an artist isn’t piracy, it’s obsurity”.