Starting with its premiere last night on HBO, I’ve been watching bits and pieces of Recount (IMDB), the cable channel’s dramatization of the month-long battle between Democrats and Republicans in the aftermath of the 2000 election. I did ultimately watch the whole thing, but it’s a hard movie to take in a single sitting. Like a lot of bloggers I admire, including Atrios and Eric Alterman (who chose not to watch), I was somewhat ambivalent about revisiting these events, especially since I believe, as Alterman himself documents in What Liberal Media?, there is plenty of evidence that Gore won a plurality of the votes in Florida. But my interest in political drama outweighed my better instincts, and I’ve been watching it, usually in a state of distraction, in part because it’s difficult to watch the film without being acutely aware , to borrow from Leonard Cohen, that the the good guys lost. But while the film acknowledges many of the troubling problems that cast doubt on the legitimacy of Florida’s vote–the illegitimate purging of thousands of names from voter rolls, the divergent standards used to identify the “intent” of voters, the problem of political appointees overseeing election results–Recount is forced to stop short of asking some of the more troubling questions about how elections are conducted and how they are covered.

It would be easy, perhaps, to treat the 2000 election as “ancient history,” as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia urged in a recent interview cited by Alessandra Stanley in her New York Times review, but as Stanley herself observes, the film and the ambivalent reaction it has received, among liberal bloggers in particular, illustrates how that is far from true. In fact, many of these very questions are being revisited again in the ongoing drama of the Democratic presidential primary, as many people have pressured Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race, while Clinton cautions against wrapping things up so quickly, making HBO’s film perhaps even more timely than ever.

It’s pretty clear, of course, that Recount starts with the assumption that the Dems were on the right side in Florida. The film’s primary points of identification are Michael Whouley (Denis Leary) and Ron Klain (Kevin Spacey), who had been Gore’s Chief of Staff before Gore fired him in 1999. At the beginning of the film we see Whouley noticing, just as Florida was being called for Bush that “there’s something wrong with the numbers.” As the true nature of the problem begins to emerge–the infamous butterfly ballot in Palm Beach county producing thousands of unintended votes for Pat Buchanan–the Gore team launches swiftly into action, pushing Gore to withdraw a statement conceding the election. On the other side, Republicans, led by James Baker (Tom Wilkinson) with a strong assist from Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris (Laura Dern), immediately work to slow down the recount and to protect Bush’s narrow margin of victory.

This focus on political insiders sets up one of the film’s chief interpretations of the Florida recount: in essence a small number of lawyers and political operatives essentially hijacked the election, and the Republican lawyers happened to play a little dirtier (or at least had a few more seats on the Supreme Court). And I think the film does a good job of depicting Baker’s technique of creating tension by inciting demonstrators to protest on behalf of Bush, with a helicopter flying overhead pulling a banner reading “Surrender Gorethy,” while polo-clad marchers chant and shake their fists. As Cynthia Fuchs points out, Baker’s strategy was to provoke such tension that the American public would demand a quicker resolution.

More crucially, as the hand recounts began in several districts, Republican vote monitors sought to challenge any ballot on pretty much any grounds imaginable. Significantly, the candidates themselves are virtually invisible in Recount, appearing primarily in archival footage or in very brief exchanges, as when Gore retracts his concession, by phone, to Bush. Given the context of the film, I think it would have been somewhat difficult to “personify” either of the two candidates using actors, but the primary effect is to distance the candidates themselves from the chain of events that eventually led to the Bush presidency, as if Bush and Gore have less control over the outcome than the insiders who ran the campaigns, submitted the lawsuits, or in Katherine Harris’s case, started and stopped the recounts, often in seemingly arbitrary ways, although Harris, as played by Laura Dern, seems less in control than a pawn caught up in a larger Republican system. And I think that’s one of the great strengths of Recount: the recognition that the candidates were both somehow more and less than the public images that represent their campaigns.

But the focus on the political insiders neglects, to some extent, the role of the press in fostering this crisis, and in many cases, operating to support the legitimacy of the Bush presidency (something, again, that Alterman documents as well as anyone). Instead, television news seemed to exist on a separate domain from the political insiders, reflecting the chaos rather than contributing to it. We get several shots of Klain, Whouley, Baker, and David Boies (played by electrical car pioneer, Ed Begley, Jr.) watching events unfold on television, sometimes out of their control, but just as often the result of hastily written memos and press releases they had sent out hours earlier. In that regard, the journalists covering the recount are seen as more or less autonomous from the political machines that run the election, rather than part of a larger cultural and political system. And, again, Recount seems to imply that Baker gamed the system better than William Christopher (John Hurt, whose performance Christopher has criticized). Again, by creating such clearly defined villains–Republicans even wear dark suits while Dems wear beige and light blue dress shirts–Recount stops short of really following through on a deeper political critique, implying, as Fuchs points out, that had both sides “played fair,” things would have basically been alright.

Given the political subject matter, it’s tempting to compare Recount with another political thriller, All the President’s Men, and I think that comparison works, especially given that President’s Men seems to serve a similar ideological purpose. While there may be a few bad apples, the system eventually works. Deep Throat leaks the truth to Woodward and Bernstein, and Nixon’s crimes are revealed. Recount exposes the nature and depth of voter disenfranchisement in Florida, and we the people hold our elected officials accountable and throw the bums out, as “we” began to do in 2006. But there’s something a little more unsettling about Recount–and it’s not just the film’s score that eerily reminded me of the music in Coppola’s The Conversation. Instead, it’s the whole contingency of Bush’s election and how close we might have come to four or even eight years of a Gore presidency, something many of us have no doubt fantasized about. Recount alludes to this contingency briefly at the end of the film when Klain and Whouley lament the many variables that might have changed Florida’s results (the butterfly ballot, the Nader campaign). But as Fuchs points out, the film is forced to stop well short of pushing these questions to their logical conclusion about some of the more “entrenched problems” facing the processes by which elections are conducted. In this regard, I do wish that Recount had been a little more daring, but as political theater, it is a fascinating if incredibly bumpy ride.

We have the terrorists on the run. We’re keeping them on the run. One by one, the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice.–George W. Bush, State of the Union address, January 28, 2003

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.–Dick Cheney, Meet the Press, September 16, 2001.

No matter what else it does, Alex Gibney’s measured, thorough documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side (IMDB), provides us with chilling evidence of the use of torture on detainees at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram, while placing that evidence in a powerful narrative that should force audiences into a more open conversation about the use of these techniques in fighting for American freedoms. Unfortunately, I fear that despite the film’s well-deserved Oscar, Taxi will not find the audience it deserves or needs, whether due to Iraq War exhaustion or due to other, external factors such as a crowded indie film marketplace. Just as the recent Winter Soldier hearings seem to have made barely a ripple in the mainstream media, Gibney’s provocative film may be presenting us with questions that many Americans don’t want to address. In fact, one of the unforgettable elements of Gibney’s film was the uncertain status of the “we” in Bush and Cheney’s comments above, both of which were cited in the film. What is the nature of the “American justice” we are presenting to the rest of the world? And what, precisely, is lurking in the “shadows” described by the Vice President?

Gibney’s film opens, powerfuly, with the story of Dilawar, a young Afghani taxi cab driver (hence the title) who was swept up when an informant fingered him as a participant in a rocket launch against an American base in Afghanistan. Gibney is careful to humanize Dilawar, to introduce us to his grieving family and to help us understand his essentially gentle nature. We then learn that Dilawar was subjected to incredible violence by his captors, his legs punched and battered so repeatedly that had he lived, both of his legs would have to be amputated. We also learn that Dilawar was entirely innocent of the charges levied against him. In fact, the guilty party was the very person who accused him in the first place.

Dilawar’s story comes from several sources, including his family of course, but we also learn from two New York Times reporters, Carlotta Gall and Tim Golden, that although official reports stated that Dilawar died of “natural causes,” his autopsy listed his death as a homicide (Times critic A.O. Scott offers some useful background here). These inconsistencies–and reports that photographs of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib–prompted some discussion in the mainstream media and before Congress about what constitutes torture, and it is in this context that Dilawar’s story begins to stand against the larger justification of torture offered by Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, whom Gibney interviews long enough for Yoo to reassert his position that it’s only torture if the actions are “equivalent in intensity to…organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

We also learn about Dilawar’s story from some of his interrogators, many of whom now seem deeply haunted by their actions, troubled by the fact that they allowed themselves to see someone like Dilawar as less than human and angered by the fact that the understanding of appropriate interrogation techniques had become so clouded, with many Bush administration officials offering rationalizations for why the Geneva Conventions are “outdated” in a war on terror that is potentially without end. These rationalizations are, perhaps, best illustrated by Donald Rumsfeld’s glib note that if he, as 70-year old, spends several hours per day on his feet, then forcing prisoners to stand couldn’t be torture could it? While Rumsfeld later characterized the note as a poor attempt at humor, the incident raises important questions about the seriousness he was bringing to the issue.

These guards and interrogators are filmed in heavy shadows, perhaps evoking the dark “shadows” in which Cheney explained “we” would now be operating. At the very least, they are a sober reminder of what the interrogators themselves have lost, and Gibney reminds us that while many of these guards have been punished severely for what they have done, the consequences for Bush administration officials have been minimal at best. I don’t think that Gibeny is excusing the guards for their actions, but he is certainly making a larger political point about how the depiction of the guards as a few “bad apples” misses the point entirely.

Finally, Gibney’s film reminds us that torture rarely if ever works as a means of getting information. In fact, even though we are often presented with ticking time-bomb scenarios on shows such as 24, torture often yields false information, as the victim tells the torturer what he or she wants to hear. Gibney doesn’t seem to say so explicitly in the film, but I’m not fully convinced that “information” is even the goal of torture in all cases. Instead, I wonder if it isn’t actually an expression of power, of dominance, as the torturers play to the detainees’ fears (there are extended segments where people discuss all kinds of psychological torture), or in some cases, enact physical harm.

And this is where one of the chief moral and logical centers of the film comes into play. During the closing credits, Gibney’s late father, Frank, who was an interrogator in the Japanese internment camps during World War II, removes his oxygen mask long enough to denounce the use of torture, both because it doesn’t provide effective information and because it doesn’t–or shouldn’t–represent American values. More crucially, this is where I think Roger Ebert is correct to challenge the argument, offered by Kenji Fujishima, among others, that Gibney should have been fairer to “the other side.” Even if Taxi to the Dark Side fails to revive a discussion of the effects of torture now, it is important, as we move into a new presidential election season that offers us a chance to choose new leaders and to redefine our image at home and abroad, that we find new narratives and new ways of talking about the war on terrorism.

As I mentioned in my original, somewhat rushed review, I was taken by the degree to which the songs seemed to arise organically out of the story itself, out of this shared passion for music and of the emotions it expresses. I didn’t say so at the time, but the grainy cinematography also serves the film beautifully, capturing the grubby Dublin streets where The Guy and The Girl meet, and where The Guy also works as a vacuum repairman in his father’s shop while massaging a broken heart after his girlfriend left for London. But, as Rebecca Weiss and others have pointed out, the soundtrack is what gives the film its life, and Hansard and Irglova’s music remind us “what it’s like to feel” without ever sounding whiny like so many other indie musicians. And even a throwaway song like Hansard’s playful “Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy,” fits perfectly within what she calls the soundtrack to The Guy’s life. But to talk about the movie in these terms might be to miss what A.O. Scott calls its “low-key affect and decidedly human scale.” It’s a modest film, beautifully told, with a soundtrack that continually reminds me, at least, of the power of music.

I realize that my contribution to this theme seems incredibly unfocused, but I’ve been circling around what I like so much about Once that I don’t think I’ll quite be able to get it right, which is probably a good indication that it is, in fact, the “bit of media” that mattered most to me over the last year. And now that David Carr has confirmed that the song’s nomination will stand, here’s hoping that Hansard and Irglova score a well-deserved victory in the best song category at this year’s Oscars.

As I have suggested, one of the strengths of the book is its meshing of the historical narrative approach suggested in Erik Barnouw’s indispensable Documentary and the analytic problems raised by documentary scholars such as Bill Nichols and Michael Renov (my review: $). Quite obviously, this approach leads to both the historical and analytical approaches feeling incredibly condensed, but Aufderheide’s history of documentary’s foundational figures (Grierson, Flaherty, Vertov) and movements (cinema verite) provides a useful backdrop for contextualizing how certain practices begin to emerge, the ethical implications of those practices, and how those forms fit into larger institutional frameworks, including the subsidizing of documentary films by public television and the role of governments is producing propaganda. These sections may be especially useful in helping to differentiate between government-supported propaganda, such as Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will or the Frank Capra Why We Fight series and documentaries that advocate for a specific cause (such as the Michael Moore films). Here, Aufderheide is also careful to remind readers that media effects theorists have rightfully challenged simplistic notions of manipulation (in fact, Triumph of the Will was far from a box office success in Germany, to name one significant example).

It is in this second major section of Documentary Film, which focuses on documentary “sub-genres,” such as propaganda and advocacy films, that I became increasingly intrigued with the book’s thoughtful engagement with the contemporary politics of images. Aufderheide focuses on six subgenres (public affairs, government propaganda, advocacy, historical, ethnographic, and nature). Given the popularity of documentaries on the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, and even VH1 (Behind the Music) and the critical acclaim given to Ken Burns’ PBS docs, it is crucial to consider how these movies frame, shape, and often distort historical events, social relationships, or even our relationship with nature. Documentaries such as Winged Migration seem to offer us unmediated access to “nature,” but as Aufderheide points out (and as I was aware, despite my glowing review), the birds depicted in the film were trained by the filmmakers to accept the presence of the camera. Aufderheide addresses these issues while toggling back and forth between relatively mainstream documentaries and others that may be unfamiliar even for those of us who study documentary for a living, fulfilling the important goal of introducing virtually unseen films to a potentially wider audience.

There were, of course, some enticing leads that I wish had been developed further. A more explicit exploration of the lineage that followed from Vertov’s experimentalism (Marker, etc) could have been useful. And I was compelled by the idea of treating An Inconvenient Truth as a “nature documentary” and would have loved to follow out the implications of that argument in much further detail (though, obviously, that’s not the goal of a “very short introduction”). Also, the list of “great documentaries” in the appendix seems to place more emphasis on contemporary films, with nearly two-thirds of the listed films being made after 1980, although that could be attributed to the flourishing of documentary as a medium and not a presentist bias.

But what will make me return to Aufderheide’s book, no doubt, is the conclusion, where questions about the “future” of documentary are addressed. As I have often argued on this blog, internet video is radically altering the possibilities available to documentary and, quite possibly, introducing a whole host of ethical challenges that will be important to address. As Aufderheide asks,

New technologies vastly increase the volume of production under the rubric of documentary. This volume may create new subgenres or may eventually force rethinking. When political operatives, fourth graders, and product marketers all make downloadable documentaries, will we redraw parameters around what we mean by “documentary?” (127)

This will, I believe, be a crucial question for documentary filmmakers and documentary scholars to address in the years ahead, especially as websites such as YouTube continue to expand the possibilities for “documentary” production.

Finally, Aufderheide also introduces some areas where documentary scholars might engage in further research. She is correct to emphasize that cinema studies scholars are not always attentive to “the business of documentary distribution,” noting that there is too little communication between documentary scholars and practitioners, a gap I have (however modestly) sought to bridge with my blog (134). Here, however, more discussion of how the documentary business operates (including at least some mention of festivals such as Full Frame and Silverdocs) might have been helpful. In addition, Aufderheide calls for further scholarship on “sponsored” and “formulaic” documentaries, subgenres that may not be as enticing but that often represent a crucial point of access for both documentary filmmakers, who often pay their bills with sponsored docs, and media audiences, who often first encounter documentary through television broadcasts or DVD extras. In short, Documentary Film is a useful introduction to one of the most important and most difficult to define genres of contemporary film. You might even loan a copy to that annoying partygoer who corners you next to the fridge and asks you to defend Sicko.

Cross-posted at The Chutry Experiment.

My Kid Could Paint That (IMDB), Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary focuses on Marla Olmstead, a four-year old child painter who took the art world by storm with her abstract paintings, and the subsequent controversy about whether (or how) her father, who had also been an amateur painter, might have contributed to some or all of the paintings. The film almost demands that we as viewers make a choice about whether Marla, who is now six, did all of the work on her paintings. In fact, the film is so adamant about introducing this controversy that I found myself resisting the particular question of whether Marla’s parents might be conning art world dupes, as the film implies, and wanting instead to ask larger questions about art and authorship, about abstract art and meaning, and about art and capital. While the film touches lightly on some of these questions, Bar-Lev’s stubborn insistence on selling the controversy rather than exploring what the controversy means left a number of important questions unanswered and, in some cases, unaddressed.

For what it’s worth, I saw no specific evidence that led me to believe, with any certainty, that Marla’s parents are guilty of the charges levied against them, although I’m not terribly interested in resolving that question. But I think it’s worth addressing the basics of the controversy in order to address some of the larger questions the film glosses. Bar-Lev hinges his own “crisis of faith” almost entirely on Charlie Rose’s hatchet job 60 Minutes interview with a child psychologist, Ellen Winner, who indicated that she regarded Marla as a “normal” child who could not have produced the paintings in question and that one of the paintings we see her produce is “less polished” than other works purportedly authored by Marla. Bar-Lev also seems to make much hay out of the fact that Marla doesn’t–and cannot–talk about her paintings in the language of the art world that voraciously consumes them, but he does little to explore how those meanings are constructed (although Bar-Lev’s comic depiction of a collector who claims to see figures standing next to a “blue door” in one of Marla’s paintings is treated with the right comic touch). Similarly, Roger Ebert has flatly insisted, without offering specific evidence, that Marla could not have produced some of the paintings attributed to her, speculating that Marla’s father is using her as a gimmick to introduce his own paintings into teh art world. In response to the authorship controversy, the Olmsteads have since recorded videos of Marla working on paintings from beginning to end, with some of them running about five hours (making them into cinema verite filmmakers themselves, although whether these videos are evidence that Marla has independently produced all of her paintings remains an open, unanswerable question).

But instead of taking the controversy at face value, I kept wanting to ask the question about why it matters that Marla is the sole author of her paintings and, perhaps more importantly, how that notion of authorship supports the incredible investments of capital in the art world (or, more precisely in the works of specific painters). As I watched the film, I found myself thinking about how authorship is constructed in other media, including film and literature. For example, no one would argue that T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” is a lesser poem because he received help from Ezra Pound. There is no crisis of faith when we realize that a film crew assisted a director in the making of a movie. To be sure, the high finance of the art world is at least partially contingent upon what Walter Benjamin referred to as the “aura,” the uniqueness of the original object itself, but it seems as if this controversy almost depends on a Romantic notion of authorship that needed to be complicated.

The controversy over Marla’s art also depends in part on a stubborn refusal to acknowledge how abstract artists are engaging with thorny philosophical and formal issues. While Bar-Lev does interview Michael Kimmelman, an art critic from The New York Times, providing more context for how abstract art fits within historical and political contexts could have helped. Instead, we are generally presented with art collectors with too much money to spend projecting their own meanings into Marla’s paintings. Abstract art essentially becomes decorative, its meanings left up to the subjective appraisal of the viewer. Certainly, Marla’s family has benefited from this perception of abstract art, but the film does little to explain, as Doug Harvey points out, how “expertise” is constructed in the art world. By relying almost solely on Kimmelman as a representative of art criticism, we get a limited understanding of how professional critics read abstract art.

These questions about the degree to which abstract art might itself be a fraud become intertwined with the Binghamton, New York, art gallery owner, Anthony Brunelli, who has been one of the most enthusiastic promoters of Marla’s work. We learn at one point that Brunelli is a hyperrealist painter who may spend months working on a single painting. While he has sold painting for thousands of dollars, it’s clear that he resents the art world’s clamoring over an abstract painting that could be completed in a few hours. Again, I’m not willing to play into the film’s insinuations of a specific hoax (someone is altering Marla’s paintings), but it is clear that Brunelli is fairly cynically manipulating a pliant art market in selling the narrative of Marla as a child prodigy (as a side note, the film does briefly address our need for child prodigies, but I’m not sure it takes this point far enough).

As my comments here certainly imply, there is a lot of interesting material here. I’m not quite convinced that Bar-Lev has handled these questions adequately, however. By focusing solely on his “crisis of faith” over Marla’s authorship, Bar-Lev seems to dodge the thornier questions about the degree to which concepts of authorship, value, and meaning in the art world are themselves contingent in the first place.

Ross McElwee explores this idea in his brilliant documentary, Bright Leaves, in which he postulates that the Gary Cooper movie, Bright Leaf, may have been about a distant relative. But one of the more compelling examples of this blurring between fiction and documentary is Haskell Wexler’s underrated film, Medium Cool, which focuses on TV news reporter John Cassellis (Robert Forster) as he awakens to the ways in which television news broadcasts numb their audiences to the violence and conflict taking place in the world. But the film’s relatively loose plot is primarily a vehicle through which Wexler was able to document and place in a social and historical context the protests that took place outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Medium Cool was, somewhat famously, buried by Paramount when it was released in 1969, in large part because of the film’s controversial politics and its challenging narrative structure. The film’s most powerful sequence takes place near the end of the film when John and his girlfriend, Eileen (Verna Bloom), an Appalachian woman who has moved to Chicago for work, search for Verna’s son while the protests take place around them. As they wander through the crowds, looking for the son, history unfolds around them, and Wexler takes us away from our identification with characters and narrative, in part through the soundtrack that emphasizes news reporting over the “personal” storyline (for a great reading of the film that covers these points in greater detail, see Michael Renov’s The Subject of Documentary).

I’ve been thinking about Medium Cool a lot lately, in part because I’m teaching it, but also because the film’s treatment of history and documentary would seem to inform the debates about Brian DePalma’s Redacted and the decision to remove some documentary photographs from the film’s final montage (see, for example, the Siren’s post and my own). I haven’t been able to see the movie yet, and probably won’t be able to see it as DePalma intended, but the debates about DePalma’s use of Iraq War photographs seem to be less about copyright and more about how these images function culturally.

Certainly, there are ownership issues, but as Jim Emerson suggests, in a compelling post on this issue, “ownership” when it comes to certain photographs, becomes an incredibly sticky issue, especially when those photographs are as politically charged as the Abu Ghraib photographs or other famous Vietnam War photographs. Do the photos belong to the photographer? To the news service? To all of us? I realize that in a legal sense, there may well be an easy answer to some of these questions, but it seems clear that Redacted, and in a slightly different way, Medium Cool, complicate that issue in some way.

I mention Emerson not only because his comments speak to the issues raised by Redacted but also because the example that he raises, Woody Allen’s use of Eddie Adams’ famous Vietnam era photo, “General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon” in Stardust Memories, which prompts his question about ownership. While watching Medium Cool the other night, I was surprised to discover that Wexler, too, had used the same photograph, the image displayed briefly on the wall of Cassellis’s loft apartment. Other photographs circulate in a similar way in the film: a shot of a Beatle with a peace dove on his shoulder, a photo of Martin Luther King and another of Bobby Kennedy. While all of these photos initially appear in the background, they seem to set the stage for the film’s penultimate scene as we watch history unfold, engulfing John and Eileen in its stream.

Ehrlichman: I had Edgar Kaiser come in…talk to me about this and I went into it in some depth. All the incentives are toward less medical care, because the less care they give them, the more money they make.

Ehrlichman’s comments, which starkly show that HMOs seem to privilege profit over the health of their patients, frame Moore’s interviews with several people who received inadequate coverage, at best, from their HMOs (while also reminding us that many people in the US don’t have any health coverage at all, including most famously, a guy who was forced to choose between paying $12,000 to save his ring finger or $60,000 to save his middle finger).

We also see (or hear) Ronald Reagan, then a B-movie star best known for playing the Gipper, delivering a public relations talk on behalf of the American Medical Assoication against the evils of “socialized medicine.” As Christopher Hayes points out, Reagan’s career as a PR spokesperson (he also recorded several anti-union talks) has been more or less forgotten, but Moore does a valuable service in providing this history lesson and reminding us how we got here, and it is unsurprising to hear many of the same arguments that continue to be used in persuading the American public that universal health care is bad (long lines, bad service, no choice, etc). And as Hayes implies, the documentary–and much of Moore’s work–can be seen in terms of its efforts to roll back Reagan’s destructive policies and to restore something closer to the New Deal. In fact, Moore’s trip to Cuba with the 9/11 workers can even be read in terms of a critique of our hardline policies against Castro’s Cuba.

Moore further deconstucts this narrative by visiting countries where universal health care exists. He talks to “typical” middle-class families in Canada, the UK, and in France, showing them visiting the doctor or talking about their health care policies. This approach is perhaps best illustrated by a scene in which Moore dines with a group of US expatriates who discuss the benefits of the French system, where they also highlight France’s laws that stipulate that everyone is entitled to five weeks of vacation, for example. The scene is certainly persuasive on a number of levels, even if it obscures the fact that France is not the utopian country that Moore depicts in the film. But what I like about these scenes is that they remind us that the current model of health care and that our current labor practices are not inevitable, but that a more egalitarian model is possible. They also do quite a bit to challenge the idea that France’s taxes are a huge burden for this family (including a similar scene with a working-class French family might have made this point stronger).

In short, I think Moore works best when he is challenging dominant discourses, pointing out the ways in which our access to information is shaped by power, in this case, the power of the health care industries to “lobby” politicians and public figures. It is worth emphasizing that Moore’s films are inseparable from the publicity they generate, and Sicko is no exception. And I think that’s a significant aspect of Wolf Blitzer’s interview of Michael Moore on CNN tonight, in which Moore and CNN-doctor-journalist Sanjay Gupta accuse Moore of fudging the facts. Moore points out that CNN itself is heavily subsidized by ads paid for by drug companies and HMOs, raising important questions about whose interests are being served in CNN’s interview. I write these comments with some caution because I am aware that Moore himself has manipulated chronology in at least one of his films, but I do think that Sicko does offer a compelling alternative to our current health and labor system.

Edward Copeland has the full Top 100 plus the original list and even tracks some of the biggest movers, and here on the Newcritics blog, M.A. Peel has a close analysis of the Top 10. A few observations about the lists (and the commentary about the lists) in no particular order:

• Both Copeland and Ms. Peel point out the re-evaluation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which climbed from #61 in the original poll, all the way into the top 10. It’s not surprising to see several Hitchcock films on the list, but the re-evaluation of certain films is interesting. After teaching North by Northwest for so many years, I’ve grown to like it more than Vertigo, but both films certainly belong on the list. One guess as to why Vertigo made such a huge climb: the restored print of Vertigo that was produced in the mid-1990s.
• Jim Emerson points out that Birth of a Nation completely dropped out of the Top 100 list (from #44). Good riddance. Films that endorse the Klan don’t belong on this kind of list, no matter how innovative narratively or technically. I can’t believe that the film was that highly ranked just ten years ago. Emerson also points out that The Searchers climbed from #96 all the way to #12, which appears to be the biggest leap of any film. On the Waterfront also tumbled pretty far. Could that be related to the renewed attention to Elia Kazan’s HUAC testimony?
• Like Emerson, I would have liked seeing Lone Star among the top 100, but I have to disagree with him about Inland Empire, a film I’ve come to like less and less as I get distance from it. If any Lynch film belongs in the Top 100, it’s probably Mulholland Drive.
• A few of my favorites are starting to climb into the top 100. Do the Right Thing finally made the list, albeit at #96, and Blade Runner squeezed in at #97. I think that both of these films will continue to look better with time, especially Do the Right Thing, which suffered early on because it was regarded as too controversial or confrontational or something (Joe Klein and Terence McNally famously feared that the film would spark riots).
• I’m happy to see that Roger Ebert joined in the conversation, praising the list for including Buster Keaton this time around, while criticizing it for omitting Fargo (Emerson has the same complaint). I have to admit that I don’t have strong feelings either way for Fargo. It’s a well-made film, but most Coen brothers films feel a bit like an exercise to me.
• I’ve skimmed the top 100 list several times, and unless I missed something, there’s not a single film directed by a woman listed. That’s probably not a big surprise given that only 4.5 of the 400 finalists were directed by women, but I’m looking forward to seeing the list complied by the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, which should come out in a few days. This observation is, of course, partially a critique of the tastemakers who make these lists, but I think it also says something about Hollywood’s history of hiring primarily male directors.
• My list of snubs: The Conversation, His Girl Friday, 25th Hour, Dark City, Groundhog Day (I think Andy will agree with me on that one), and Medium Cool. I’d consider adding either Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused and I’d substitute Robert Altman’s Short Cuts for Nashville.

The videos feature interviews with prominent members of the D.C. punk scene, including Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye, Brendan Canty, Joe Lally, and Dante Ferrando, and included footage from Jem Cohen’s Fugazi documentary, Instrument, as well as photographs and other documents from the early moments of the harDCore scene, and there are some great anecdotes about concerts, innovative political protests, and friendships within the community. But what I found most compelling about the videos was their ability to provide microhistories of many of D.C.’s neighborhoods, including many neighborhoods that have changed radically due to the economic shifts associated with gentrification (at one point, MacKaye even acknowledges the punk scene’s, perhaps unintentional, complicity with gentrification, describing live music venues and art spaces as “transitional businesses”).

Because I spent last year, many of the locations were familiar, and I found myself wishing I could have taken this virtual tour when I was still living in D.C, and in fact made me feel incredibly nostalgic for a city where I’ve spent much of my life. But the videos did remind me of the ways in which the city is a walkable, pedestrian friendly place. I remember, for example walking past the old 9:30 Club, depicted in this concert footage of Embrace, on my way to the E Street Theater (coincidentally right around the corner from Ford’s Theater and, unfortunately, a Hard Rock Cafe). And, of course, I spent quite a bit of time exploring the Adams Morgan and U Street neighborhoods, both of which have changed considerably since they were centers for the city’s music scene.

My sense of nostalgia is probably not accidental in that the interviews themselves take on a nostalgic tone as MacKaye and others describe their memories of Washington in the 1970s and ’80s. This is not to suggest that the people who were being interviewed were stuck in the past or that they were uncritically looking at that era as a golden age without also recognizing its flaws, but there seems to be something inherently nostalgic about many of the punk documentaries I’ve encountered (including the very interesting Punk’s Not Dead, which I caught at Silverdocs last year). But what I found interesting about the documentary clips–and how they framed the past–was that they explored the conditions that made D.C.’s punk scene possible. MacKaye credits former mayor Marion Barry–and, yes, I’m well aware of Barry’s complicated tenure as mayor–for supporting the arts and providing opportunities for teenagers to develop their music and artistic skills as instrumental to the music scene, while MacKaye, Barry, and others describe the devastating riots that took place on U Street after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and the slow process of rebuilding that began when Barry commissioned the building of the Reeves Center, a major municipal building at 14th and U.

I’m probably the ultimate target audience for this kind of documentary project–I loved living in Washington, D.C., have a fondness for harDCore punk, and miss walking the city’s streets–but I would love to see more work like Capital of Punk that uses video podcasts to provide these tiny histories of specific places.

Cross-posted at my new place. If you’re linked to my old blog or have been reading it through an RSS reader, you may not be getting updates, so please join the fun at my spiffy new digs.

In his discussion of the cancellation of The Gilmore Girls, Michael Newman cites Jason Mittell’s concept of “the infinity model” of television storytelling, the idea that “fans want their favorite shows to be love affairs that last forever and a day.” As Jason and Michael explain, series are increasingly operating under models of a limited series that provide fans with a clearer sense of a general narrative arc, an approach modeled in Ronald Moore’s announcement that Battlestar has reached its final act. In a similar sense, fans have been able to watch the final season of The Sopranos with the knowledge that the series will soon reach a conclusion, a sense of anticipation that was only amplified by the number of discussion boards, spoiler sites, and other fan videos–most famously the Seven Minute Sopranos vid–devoted to the series. In my case, I stumbled across a video recording of the filming of the final scene outside Holsten’s when Meadow is parking her car, and part of my anticipation for the finale was whether this scene made the final cut of the show.

And I think those questions about series closure make the final episode of The Sopranos all the more compelling. During the final scene, in which Tony and his (nuclear) family meet for dinner in Holsten’s, Chase beautifully uses suspense cues to play with our anticipation of the ending of the show–and possibly of Tony’s career (or more). Most of the people on the discussion boards I’ve skimmed have expressed disappointment at what has been described as the show’s “life goes on” final scene, but I think the ending is fitting, not simply because life goes on–that’s obvious–but because of the life that Tony finds himself living during that final scene. Because of all of the suspense cues–Meadow can’t parallel park her car, the mysterious guy at the counter in the diner–we become acutely aware of Tony’s situation, the fact that he’s constantly aware of potential threats. But also the scene suggests that everything he’s done to provide for his nuclear family has also potentially put them at risk. The denial of closure during that final sequence–I believe–worked really well. In fact, any other form of artificial closure–Tony getting arrested or killed, a family member getting killed–would have rung false.

Like Dennis, I loved the decision to cut to a black screen, the fact that countless audience members thought, for a split second, that their cable had gone out at precisely the end moment of the show. The series has often explored the degree to which audience members are implicated in Tony’s violence, passive viewers of Tony’s actions, often accepting his crimes in ways that might have been unimaginable only a few decades ago, and I even think that A.J.’s brief flirtation with joining the military, the scenes featuring him watching Iraq War news on television, might also be commenting on what audiences have come to accept on their television sets (and while A.J.’s politics are completely incoherent, his brief recognition that his comfortable life depends on the exploitation of others was compelling).

I typically resist handing out superlatives (Best Show Ever!), but I think a careful examination of the final episode will reveal that the final episode comments not only on Tony’s extreme realization of the American Dream, especially as it is realized in his desire to provide for his nuclear family, but also on our investment in that Dream. At the same time, the ending left us wanting more, wanting to invest further in Tony’s story. Dennis and others have mentioned rumors of a feature film, and I’m ambivalent about that. Obviously, studios could have an economic motivation for revisiting these characters while fans might be able to gain the narrative closure that a feature film offers. But while I’d love to follow these characters, I feel like David Chase has taken them about as far as he can, and that scene in Holsten’s depicts the precariousness of Tony’s version of the Dream as well as anything I’ve seen.

Note: I wrote a draft version of this entry on my personal blog, The Chutry Experiment.

Note: here’s the ending:

First, I think Kevin Drum is right to say that Rich’s article hardly depicts any kind of “blogger triumphalism” at crashing the gates of the hallowed halls review writing. In fact, co-Newcritic Maud Newton expresses some ambivalence about the decline in book review pages, and I’ve said something similar about the firings of a number of film reviewers I appreciate, including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Eleanor Ringel.

But what bothers me most about Schickel’s article is the smug elitism he displays towards bloggers, whom he characterizes as inadequately qualified to offer informed commentary on the latest books or films. Schickel writes:

Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.

Of course, those of us who read and write blog reviews know that many of the best bloggers are in fact quite knowledgeable about the field they discuss.
Most of the film bloggers I read have, in fact, studied film either as undergraduates or, quite often, as graduate students. Many others work or have worked in the film industry. While there are certainly a number of bloggers who write their “hasty, instinctive opinions,” there are doubtless many others who have done their homework. To be fair, Schickel’s comments about bloggers echo a common misconception about blogging, one that takes a characteristic of blogging software–immediate publication–and uses that to define all blog writing as the immediate and spontaneous outpouring of unfiltered opinion. He later characterizes blogging as lacking permanence, as a form of “speech” rather than “writing,” which I find an odd distinction. While many bloggers write with the present moment in mind–after all posts appear on-screen in reverse chronological order–most of us are acutely aware of our archives.

But an even odder aspect of Schickel’s article–at least in my read–is his characterization of what film bloggers are doing, how we are reviewing or commenting on the films we discuss. He writes,

Opinion — thumbs up, thumbs down — is the least important aspect of reviewing. Very often, in the best reviews, opinion is conveyed without a judgmental word being spoken, because the review’s highest business is to initiate intelligent dialogue about the work in question, beginning a discussion that, in some cases, will persist down the years, even down the centuries.

Again, I hope it’s clear from my film reviews that my goal is intelligent discussion of the films I’m watching. I don’t give stars, thumbs, or grades to any of the films I watch (the same goes form most, if not all, of the film bloggers I read), which is something that cannot be said about many of the professional critics that Schickel seems to be defending. In fact the “thumbs up, thumbs down” model didn’t come from some online film bloggers but from two of the most prominent professional critics of the last thirty years (two critics I happen to like, but that’s another matter).

More than anything, Schickel’s elitism, his stuffy anti-democratic definition of reviewing rubs me the wrong way. Certainly not all bloggers measure up to the titans of criticism–Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Edmund Wilson, and George Orwell–he mentions, but that’s true of professional critics as well. Thus far, I’ve been a little restrained in this discussion because I know that the cutbacks on professional critics in the pages of major newspapers have financial consequences, but Schickel’s undemocratic defense of some obscure standards struck me as especially problematic.

Like Dennis, I’m a new contributor to Newcritics, and I’m pleased to be joining an impressive list of authors, although now that I’m writing for a new blog, I’m suddenly confronted with a variation of writer’s block. So maybe I’ll start by acknowledging my double addictions to classical Hollywood films and to viral videos–an addiction I’m guessing a few other people share–and by pointing to my new favorite YouTube video, 100 Movies 100 Quotes 100 Numbers (via Michael at Zigzigger).

100 Movies is a montage video that counts down from 100 using quotes from Hollywood films, and while it serves as a gentle parody of the AFI countdown videos, it also wears its fannish enjoyment of movies on its sleeve, relishing in both classical and contemporary Hollywood films, citing actors from Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis to Emilio Estevez and Charles Grodin. It’s also one of the more interesting I’ve seen of the changes in movie watching culture over the last few decades, especially as those changes are discussed in Barbara Klinger’s insightful book, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home. In the book, Klinger links home theater systems, DVD libraries, repeat screenings (what I’ve called “comfort film” viewing), and internet film parodies to address many of these changes.

And while this montage certainly seems tied to both the impulses of “collecting” videos and to the pleasures of repeat viewings, I’m intrigued, in particular, by the degree of nostalgia I felt while watching the “100 Movies 100 Quotes 100 Numbers” montage. Klinger links the practices of film collecting and repeated screenings to a “nostalgic historicization of film that is embedded ultimately in the presentism of the digital aesthetic” (87). The montage clip certainly evokes nostalgia for the original source, but I think there’s something slightly more complicated going on in this video, in its playful use of quotes that contain numbers and in the jarring juxtaposition of films ranging from The Breakfast Club and North by Northwest with Midnight Run and The Maltese Falcon.