Notes on Film Criticism (V): A Free Replay

There was a time when Marker's essay was the latent theory behind everything I wrote. I don't think 'Vertigo' would mean for me what it means today if it weren't for Marker. To my knowledge, I've properly quoted 'A Free Replay' only once before; but its sentences return to me again and again, claiming their place in my heart and mind—sometimes in the form of ideas, images, or literal expressions that inscribe themselves quite naturally in my writings. These disguised quotes become signposts conjuring a world full of meaning, but mysterious and elusive...

Notes on Film Criticism (IV): Singing With

In written film criticism, it is quite common to refer, too, to the critic’s voice. But what is understood to constitute that voice? Is it that the critic likes to embed sentences within sentences within sentences? That he tends to start paragraphs with a question and tends to end them with a blow? Is it his preference for using three adjectives in a row, for turning nouns into verbs, for certain rhetorical devices? Is a chosen vocabulary – an attachment to certain words – part of the critic’s voice?...

Notes on Film Criticism (III): Prematurely Hostage to Our Coming Biographies

This is going to be about film criticism, I promise. But I have to begin where I have to begin. That is: with a homework assignment I got when I was 9 years old. As soon as the teacher tells the class that we have to write about the most important day of our lives, I'm elated. I know what the most important day of my life is, and I enjoy these writing exercises very much. I wish I could present you here what I wrote that day. But this particular piece of paper disappeared, with many others, somewhere around 2001 – after my parents got divorced...

Notes on Film Criticism (II): A Small Plot of Land

There are film critics who like to move across wide extensions. They are cartographers; they map territories. Their writing is not earthbound, but enlivened by everything aerial: winds, leaps, flights. I sometimes enjoy reading these writers, provided their pirouettes are beautiful and their landscapes are imaginative. I enjoy reading them if the lines they trace and the connections they make trigger enough vibrations and resonances. But this is not how I write. I'm happier on a small plot of land...

Notes on Film Criticism (I): Reading and Writing

"Has making audiovisual essays changed the way you write film criticism?" Interesting as it is, this question gently pushes towards a yes answer – if only because it is natural, or naturally expected, that your practice in one field will transform your practice in the other (or, at least, I would expect so). But, then, this question also bears a counter-question that is equally intriguing yet, interestingly enough, seldom formulated: "Has your writing affected the way you make audiovisual essays?"...