Things to Read and things to Argue About

Hello world - rather a lot going on in blogland this week, and coming up next week. The big event, I imagine, is the For the Love of Film: Film Preservation Blogathon - starting Sunday and running all week, hosted by Ferdy on Films and the Self-Styled Siren. It's a blogathon and a blog-a-thon - promising what looks like an overwhelming slate of writing on the subject, as well as providing direct support for the National Film Preservation Foundation. An important and fascinating topic - should be a good week of reading...

Meanwhile - Girish has another discussion of Auteurism at his blog - I'm not sure I can stand it. I can't even bring myself to read through it, to tell the truth. I run into an argument about auteurism every couple years somewhere - 2 years ago at Girish's blog, for instance - I can't muster any enthusiasm for another go... On the other hand, Girish posted an interesting question on Facebook yesterday - a question about the diegetic status of Fontaine's voiceover narration in Bresson's A Man Escaped. Is it diegetic or not? the consensus in the thread seems to be that since Fontaine is a character in the world of the film, his narration would be diegetic, even if displaced from the time of the images. Sounds good - though it strikes me that there could be times when you would want to distinguish between diegetic words, and diegetic sound - that is, between words (or perhaps the thoughts or meanings they express) that issue from within the depicted world - and sounds that, perhaps, do not exist in that world. I suppose the Bresson film is not the best example - but what about Joe Gillis' narration in Sunset Boulevard? the words seem to me to be diegetic enough, coming from a character in the film (even if he is dead as he says them) - but couldn't you say that the speech, the actual sounds of those words, don't exist in the real world of the film? Or other examples - Mark Whitacre's voiceover in The Informant! - or Takeshi Kinoshiro's character's words in Fallen Angels. Whitacre's voiceover is presented as his stream of consciousness, but the sounds - the spoken words - do not have the same reality that the dialogue has; Kinoshiro plays a mute - the words are, again, in his head (more narration after the fact - time and memory being a central theme in Wong Kar-wei's work), but never spoken - the words express diegetic thoughts, but the sounds of the words are not real in the fictional world. I'm not sure if diegetic/non-diegetic is the right distinction to make on this - but I think it is important to pay attention to the materiality of the sounds in a film, or the precise form words are given. Filmmakers play with these things, use them - think of how much Soderbergh gets out of the ways the voices in Whitacre's head interact with the words spoken in the film... This question threatens to keep expanding - like, what can you do with the different conventions for presenting a letter in a film? the paper and text on screen; the reader's voice reading (literally, or as voiceover); the writer's voice, the various tricks, like showing the writer writing and saying the words out loud... There's a lot there.

And one more bit of blog business - an interesting discussion springing up at Wonders in the Dark - Sam Juliano ponders the importance of professional criticism, and its relationship with amateur criticism - on the internet, particularly. The proximate cause was this post - a Why I Don't Like Citizen Kane essay by Stephen Russell-Gebbett. Both posts have garnered millions of comments, which makes adding anything to the fray pretty foolish... But, having read the two essays fairly carefully (and skimmed the comments), I can't help adding a word or two hundred.

First - it's a strange piece for Juliano to hang his complaint on - whether Mr. Russell-Gebbett is a professional or not, his post is a fairly serious attempt to make a case against Citizen Kane. The idea, the reasons, could well have been written by a professional - the prose even seems to be competent, careful, etc. - it rather undermines Juliano's point. As does the fact that Russell-Gebbett never says anything that would pass as an attack on professional criticism. He doesn't claim to be taking on the critical establishment, doesn't claim that he's as good as anyone else and just as entitled to his opinion, or any of the other myriad ways bloggers avoid accountability when these arguments crop up. (Maybe there's something like that in comments - I didn't see any in my scan of the comments, but maybe there's something there.) I'm not sure why Juliano attaches that particular set of arguments to Russell-Gebbett's post. (If anything, Juliano indulges in the professional's version of the duck and weave - appeals to authority, deference to authority - the critic's way of avoiding accountability.)

Second - one of the problems in debates like this is that the arguments tends to congeal around the question of whether professionalism makes you a better writer or critic - it doesn't. There is no reason why amateurs can't match professionals at this game, especially in blog sized posts. (And no lack of evidence that amateurs do just that.) It is true that professionals, on balance, are better writers and critics than amateurs - not because professionalism conveys authority so much as that ability tends to get people to be willing to pay you...

Which brings me to a third point, and one I don't see being made that much in this argument. What actually makes you a professional is not a paycheck, but an editor. And particularly, a professional editor. Professionalism is more a matter of credentials than anything else. For academics, the credentialing is explicit - you have to earn a degree, by proving to credentialed experts that you have mastered the field. It's not so defined for writing, but it really does amount to proving to someone that your work deserves to be published under their name. It's the editors that make the professional writer. And in practical terms, for telling the difference between professional and amateur writing online say - that's true for both senses of "editor" - editor as selector of the best work; editor in terms of crossing the t's and dotting the i's and making sure you don't use "barnstorm" when you mean "firestorm." (Not to pick on Mr. Juliano, but...) Professionalism, and whatever authority it conveys, depends on the matrix of professionals vouching for one another - a critics' value is determined by their being accepted and cited by other critics, and by knowledgeable readers.

That, I suppose, brings us around to the facts on the internet. The technology is changing: much of the discourse of professionalism is tied very closely to the technological fact of text being distributed through ink on paper. But text now is distributed almost as much through bits on screens as ink on paper, and the costs and labor and material involved is so different as to be impossible to compare. 20 years ago, if I wanted to play media critic, I might have printed this out and handed it around to my friends; 30 years ago I would have had to type it up and then xerox or mimeograph it. Now, I type it in blogger, hit publish and 20 or 30 people end up reading it before the day it out! a brave new world! But it is - the means of publication changes the dynamic between writer and editor - makes it possible for anyone to be their own editor, basically.

That, however, does not make all writing equal - what it does is create a problem - when anyone can publish more or less at will - how do we credential one another? One way, obviously, is through sites like The House Next Door - edited websites, that can vouch for the ability of the writers there. But they also provide a lot of links to blogs and sites that aren't professional in any meaningful sense - and provide a kind of endorsement of them, as well. But that's a different kind of endorsement, and implies a different kind of relationship among writers, readers, editors and the like. The internet does undo the hierarchical model of credentialing that editors provide - but that doesn't make all writing and criticism equal. Good writing is still good writing; good criticism is still good criticism. (And professionalism is no guarantee of good criticism - has everyone forgotten the Tom O'Neill's Sunrise article? He's a pro...) What I think it means is that "credentialing" becomes less formalized - it becomes a function of links, from people you trust to other people you trust - from good critics to other good critics, or maybe more precisely, from good readers to good writers...

I think there is too much attention paid to the internet as a means of publication, as an outlet for writers, and not enough to the ways the internet creates a network of readers - who then report on their reading to one another. I think this is a responsibility we need to pay more attention to - we need to be better readers, and to act as readers who can recommend strong (interesting, knowledgeable, creative, what have you) writing. I think perhaps people reading and writing on the internet need to pay more attention to the way that we are becoming collective editors. I don't know what will become of journalistic criticism, in its current form - I don't know if it will last very long. I think in fact, blogs and whatever sites carry on this kind of writing, might well absorb most of the functions of that kind of criticism. Indeed have - blogs now are as good a read as most professional reviewers, and often approach the quality of good film journals - though you have to wade through a lot more second rate stuff to find the good stuff. Not to mention the way blogs and Facebook and the like blend more or less serious film writing with all manner or fluff and all kinds of other writing... though for me, that very mixture of discourses is a feature of the medium, not a bug. It's one of the main attractions...

I better stop, before I start thinking about the future of academic criticism, and film books... cause that's a whole other set of questions, isn't it...