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Cooler Heads Prevail
🕑 Added 2022-08-21 05:49:10 +0000 UTC
So yeah. I've taken some time, and I feel like I have a more measured response to some recent events. And it seems worth sharing them with you, in case you're curious.
There are some major stressors at present, mostly relating to my home life. I am having a bit of a parenting crisis, and I won't go into detail, but I do feel that Jen and I are facing one of those moments where our success or failure in redirecting our son's patterns of behavior will truly have long-term consequences. And, well, it's an exhausting time all around.
I also had an extremely unpleasant clash with a filmmaker, and while that's happened a few times -- mostly disgruntled missives from folks who thought I misunderstood their work -- this one became very personal very quickly. I am hopeful that the matter is resolved, and despite the conflict I still very much admire this person's work. But it was the kind of misalignment of worldviews that tapped into my own self doubts. (Am I too old to be doing this work anymore? Am I inadequately mindful of my white male privilege? Have I rounded a corner where my work does more harm than good in the world?) So yeah, that sucked.
And finally, the fall festival season is upon us. This used to be like Christmas morning for me, with a whole panoply of exciting treats and opportunities waiting to be discovered. This time, it just feels like a lot of labor that I don't really want to undertake. And while I know that at least half of the problem may be the depressive anhedonia occasioned by the issues addressed above, I also think that cinema -- a small world I used to cherish as a shelter from the more repugnant aspects of existence -- has almost completely fallen prey to the attitudes -- corporate, institutional, lazy, incurious -- that sicken me in other facets of life.
The ongoing diminution of Wavelengths by the TIFF brass is bad enough. (For a number of reasons, I've decided not to write my annual breakdown for Mubi. It's time to pass the torch, I think.) But the same day as a lot of other shitty things happened, NYFF dropped the Currents lineup. And that alone was nearly enough to make me throw in the towel.
The shorts programming, while not exactly great, is an improvement over last year, and features new work by some of the film artists I hold in the highest esteem -- the ReStacks, Mary Helena Clark, Ben Russell, Sylvia Schedelbauer, and a few others. But the majority of selections display an appalling lack of curatorial investment. That is a series that, for the most part, could have been cobbled together by an intern who spent two working days combing through Festival Scope.
But the features series is most galling. When it is not just copying AndrΓ©a and Jesse's work on Wavelengths ("consensus!"), it is serving as a kind of second tier, Un Certain Regard slush pile for films that didn't make the cut for Main Slate. Again, these are the films that anyone could have predicted, but aside from a new Emigholz feature (he seems to be the committee's favored avanty, for some reason), this is a selection that any one of fifty people I know (myself included) could have assembled in an afternoon on the back of a manila envelope.
How can one claim that Adventures of Gigi the Law represents some bold exploration of form? What, aside from name recognition or lack thereof, makes De Humani Corporis Fabrica more or less experimental than The Unstable Object II? And why has the film intelligentsia decided en masse that Berlin is the one-stop shop for all things cinematic? If that's the case, why have other festivals at all?
I may not need a break, exactly. I find that I can't stop writing even when I want to, even when I'm utterly fried. But I want to step back from the areas that have taken so much of my focus over the years, because I think I need some time to figure out how I want to continue, and what I might best be able to contribute. In short, I want to watch older movies, stop trying to will myself to appreciate trends that contravene my basic aesthetic and political programming, and maybe just chill for a bit.
Which doesn't mean I'm going to start writing about TV. I haven't completely lost my mind.
Comments
James Hansen
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Peng
I haven't commented on here (or my other followed Patreons) much, but I agreed with Tim on willing to continue contributing without any directive input on what you need to watch, apart from voting on polls and stuff like that.
Tim boom
Not sure what difference it makes, but I am very happy to contribute monthly to "Michael Sicinski writing" without any need for it to be on current cinema or the latest festival line-up. So at least I don't think you should feel any pressure there - the appeal of Patreon is that it should allow you to write on 1960s Armenian structural film or whatever with some degree of freedom. I imagine most other contributors feel similarly
