“The cinema is always as perfect as it can be”

Posting may continue to be light for awhile, what with the beginning of the fall term and football season and autumn weather and all, but the Pittsburgh Film Calendar at the top of the sidebar is as up-to-date as I know how to make it. Among the events I recently added are the screening dates for the “Pittsburgh Neighborhood Narratives” films that were commissioned as part of the city’s 250th birthday celebration, the weekly screenings in the Amigos del Cine Latinoamericano Latin American film series, a “Japanese Film Festival” sponsored by Pitt’s Asian Studies Center, and screenings included on Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ September calendar.

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While poking around the blog Quiet Bubble earlier today I rediscovered a website where some industrious soul has made 2,846 short reviews by Pauline Kael available online. I’ve added this site to my Film Blogs, Etc. custom search engine. Huzzah!

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I would be remiss were I not to mention the passing of the film critic Manny Farber on this blog. To read more about the man and his work, see David Hudson’s GreenCine Daily post “Manny Farber, 1917 - 2008.” I am in the process of extensively reevaluating my beliefs about film criticism; if I am careful, and honest, and thorough, then one day I’ll have something meaningful to say about Farber. In the meantime I hope it is enough to note that he left us plenty to think about.

Above is a diagram I asked a friend put together for me to help with the Pixar post I’ve been talking about for awhile. I’ve finally started stitching it together, so if you don’t here from me for a week or two, that’s why.

I was going to post something about next month’s Sunday night series at Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ Regent Square Theater “Life on Mars” today, but I’ve decided to hold off until I’ve seen the Carnegie International, which it’s named after. I want to catch Sharon Lockhart’s film Pine Flat (2006), so the earliest I’ll be able to go is next Thursday. Since whatever I post won’t be a “preview,” here, instead, is an observation:

This isn’t the most daring lineup of films, but everything included is something that really should be seen on the big screen. Blow-Up (1966) is about looking at the world and Playtime (1967) is about living in it; these are big themes and both films require space to be effective. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) requires the dark theater: the extent to which it affects you is the extent to which it envelops you. Brazil (1985) is a mechanical film and it needs a noisy projector, preferably one that has seen better days. Alphaville (1965) is simply a fantastic film, and all good movies should be seen the way their makers intended them to be, which in this case is means in a place not unlike Regent Square.

For more information, check out Filmmakers’ showtimes page. I’m planning on seeing 2001, Playtime, and Alphaville.

I’m just one project away from the end of the semester, so I’m going to make myself scarce around here until it’s done. It’s due on Thursday at 6pm, but I hope to finish it this weekend. Before leaving, though, I wanted to post this picture my friend Lisa Campbell, whose tantalizing blog Pittsburgh Needs Eated was responsible for my short-lived interest in food blogging, took at last Sunday’s Cinema in the Park screening of The Iron Giant (1999). Pretty, no?

(Yes, I’m totally going to keep recycling this sweet post title whenever appropriate. Wouldn’t you?)

I’ve added information to this site’s “About” page that actually tells people about who I am and what I’m trying to do here. I’ve also added an “Editorial Policies” section and a bit about my approach to my blogroll. Feedback would be appreciated!

I’ve added a link to a Google Custom Search Engine I’m calling “Film Blogs, Etc.” to my blogroll’s “Film Sites - Reference” section. This search engine is meant to supplement the other resources in that section, so it doesn’t include publications indexed in either the FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals Plus or Film Literature Index Online databases or listed on the Metacritic movie review website. Most of the 114 (and counting) sites it searches are blogs, but there are a few journals (such as Senses of Cinema and Rouge) and other kinds of publications (such as indieWIRE) here as well.

Professional film criticism as a whole is superior to amateur/online film criticism (as a whole) in only one way: it’s organized better. I recognize the value of essays like this one (I’ve written a few myself), but I don’t necessarily think there’s anything wrong with the “film blogosphere” as it is right now. The biggest task facing champions of amateur/online criticism is not making it better, but making it easier to use. This is, I hope, a step in that direction.

Feedback is appreciated and I’d welcome a “contributor” or two. The film-specific search engine idea is not original to me: Rob Davis of Errata made one of these a year or two ago, and Harry Tuttle of Screenville has one called “Screenville CritPit.” (Note, 6/10/08: This post originally linked to Harry’s other CSE, called “Online film videos”)

A year or two ago I was going to the movies so often that it was nearly impossible for me to make plans with other people: by the time my friends realized something had opened, I’d already seen it and was on to the next film. In response to this problem I started a mailing list for everyone I knew who was interested that discussed what was new, what looked good, and when I was planning on seeing everything.

These days I spend a lot less time in movie theaters than I used to and I’m not nearly as uptight about seeing things right away. At 1-2 films a week, though, I’m still seeing more films than almost anyone I know, and I’m just as finicky about making plans as ever. Plus, I always enjoyed writing those e-mails, so earlier this year I decided to bring the list back.

I started with a small group of good friends, but after about two months I believe I have a handle on what I’d like these e-mails to look like and I’m going public: you (yes, you!) can now subscribe to “The Movie E-Mail” using the short form on my sidebar (it’s after the calendar but before the blogroll). The weekly e-mail, sent every Friday, is a digest of everything on the calendar for the upcoming week supplemented by off-the-cuff “critical” remarks on what I’ve seen recently. Unsubscribing is easy: just send me an e-mail at any time saying you want off. Hooray!

Tomorrow morning I depart on a trip to Japan. Mirror/Stage will be on hiatus at least until I return on Sunday, May 4, and probably just a bit longer–I think I’ll take a few days to update the calendar (Filmmakers just added a bunch of stuff to their “Coming Soon” list, by the way), pick a few pictures for a future post about my adventures, and then resume blogging with dispatches from the Silk Screen Asian American Film Festival.

For the curious: I’ll be traveling to Tokyo, Sakata, Kyoto, Nara, and possibly Kamakura (we’ll see: I don’t have time to both try Pierre Hermé’s pastries and visit Yasujiro Ozu’s grave). Drop me a line if you want to chat about these places!

Now that I’ve “officially” relaunched this blog, there are one or two features that I’d like to draw attention to by posting about them. The first is the “Pittsburgh Film Calendar” that you see at the top of the sidebar on the left of your screen. This calendar is, in many respects, the whole point of Mirror/Stage. When I first started working on this site way back in May, my goal was to produce a tangibly useful film resource for people living in my geographic community; an easy-to-use, long-term calendar was the centerpiece of that original vision. I was going to build a stand-alone “film section” around it that redressed what I perceive as the shortcomings of the film coverage in the City Paper, Post-Gazette, and Tribune-Review, but that proved too ambitious for a half-time grad student working a full-time job (or at least this high strung, rather self-critical one).

While I focus on free, unusual, and “special” events, I’ll occasionally mark the Pittsburgh opening of the commercial runs of films I’m particularly excited about. For now it’s enough for me to just post information for the events I hear about, so I’m doing a lot of copying and pasting and linking. You’ll start to see more of my thoughts and opinions in the calendar posts as I relearn how to incorporate blogging into my workaday life. If you know about a screening that I don’t have listed, please e-mail me! I’d like this calendar to be as comprehensive as possible.

Art too is only a way of living, and, however one lives, one can, unwittingly, prepare oneself for it; in all that is real one is closer to it and more nearly neighbored than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend proximity to some art, in practice belie and assail the existence of all art, as for instance the whole of journalism does and almost all criticism and three-quarters of what is called and wants to be called literature.
–Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Movie watching (or “moviewatching,” a neologism I like as an all-encompassing term that describes all the things one can do with a film: watch it, discuss it, “mash” it up with something else, blog about it, etc.) is not an inherently a self-evidently (5/23/08) worthwhile activity. Every film represents a significant investment of time, money, and effort, not only for the filmmakers, but also for the audience. Always, there are questions: How else might this money have been spent? What other things could have been done with this time?

Film writing–by which I mean writing, including but not limited to critical writing, that has film or individual films as its subject–is generally concerned with the question of which movies are worth watching. The best film writing tackles the much thornier issue of whether or not it’s worth watching movies. In this, it shares a common purpose with the cinema itself, which has to constantly argue for its own continued existence.

This blog is intended as a forum where I can work through my experiences with movies in the hope that I will learn to articulate to myself and others the role film can play in helping me live a happy, productive life, an understanding that I can then parlay into the sense of purpose I need to produce good film writing.

That’s going to take awhile. In the meantime, I’m going to make myself as useful as possible to readers of this site by maintaining a film calendar for Pittsburgh that’s as comprehensive and up-to-date as I can make it, highlighting particularly interesting events with blog posts, and sharing my limited (but growing) cinematic expertise.

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In her contribution to “Letters From (And To) Some Children of 1960,” published in Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin’s Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia, Nicole Brenez speaks of cinephilia as a “mode of existence.” She argues that far from becoming “apolitical creatures, cut off from the world,” young cinephiles in fact “immerse themselves in the critical thoughts of history as they proceed past Pier Paolo Pasolini, Fassbinder and Godard instead of past Hegel or Marx (which they discover next).”

This hasn’t been the case for me in the past, which is why I think my “cinephilia” (I’d like to distance myself from this term for the time being) has been at best unhelpful and at worst counterproductive to my attempts to engage the world as an adult human being (and to “lead a flourishing life”). To use a tool effectively, you must know how it works; the problem, I think, is that I was spending too much time watching movies and not enough thinking about what they are, what they do, and how they do it.

When I started my first movie blog in 2005 it was in the spirit of wanting to learn more about film; this incarnation of Mirror/Stage is an attempt to return to my roots. Now, as then, I hope that by developing my understanding of one thing (cinema), I will gain a mastery of the world.

But that’s really more in the nature of a long-term goal, yeah? Because I anticipate that much of the work I want to do with film will be done “offscreen” (research, taking films apart, film production exercises) and result in a small number of posts each year, I’ve decided to return to my roots in another respect as well: this site, like my first one, will be very much the “personal web log,” an informal, mostly first-person account of my thoughts and activities. The day-to-day aspects of this site are just as important to me as the more in-depth, researched projects that they will augment; the trick will be getting everything to play nice together.

That will do for an introduction, I think. The rest is what I do with it . . .