Anybody need a professional hater?
I would want to be film critic if I could do nothing but write these. Reverse Shot have published their 2nd year-in-review page of sniping directed at films, film critics and audiences (see the 2003 entry). I'm much more enthusiastic trashing stuff than praising it, so this type of thing appeals to me.
Several of their attitudes are spot-on, including the opening shot at Armond White, who writes the most readable gibberish I've ever seen in film criticism. Of course, as often as I slap my forehead at the nonsense that appears regularly in White's pieces, I also share his reactions to certain movies on occasion and sometimes find myself actually sounding like him in agitated moments. When I say that White writes nonsense, I don't mean things that I disagree with. I'm talking about sentences that don't mean anything specifically. Few people can reduce words to epithets or exclamations as Armond White can. He tends to use words more for the forcefulness of their impression than for their referential value, which is why the Reverse Shot award is so aptly named.
Of course, one person's "wrong-headed hyperbole" is another person's cogently incisive observation. Last year, Reverse Shot published a best film of the year writeup of Kill Bill, Vol. 1 that includes the sentence: "Kill Bill: Volume 1, more than any film released in 2003 screams 'now.'"
posted by Mr. Arkadin at 7:08 PM
5 Comments:
"When I say that White writes nonsense, I don't mean things that I disagree with. I'm talking about sentences that don't mean anything specifically."
Would you care to provide an example?
I have to apologize, I haven't been paying as much attention as I should be to comments since I set it to "moderate" so this has been sitting for awhile.
In response, sure, I’m game. Taken from the last White review I read, his treatment of Jonathan Demme’s new Neil Young concert movie. Here’s the first sentence of the second paragraph:
"Proving that pop art cannot conscientiously be made the way it used to be, Neil Young: Heart of Gold innovates a personal/theatrical presentation that supercedes the conventional recording of a live performance."
Continued in next comment...
This sentence means nothing in particular except that White liked the movie. The first clause is all force and no substance. So, pop art can’t "conscientiously" (but perhaps unconscientiously?) be made "the way it used to be," but we don't know what that is, because it's just some undisclosed concept in White's mind. Certainly Demme's movie doesn't change everything about how pop art can be made, but the differences between now and then aren't even hinted at. I won't spend much time on the idea that one film can "prove" how pop art can't be made by not making it that way. It's sort of like saying that you can prove that you can't make a good pizza with green peppers by making a good pizza with pepperoni.
continued again...
The second clause is probably worse. Demme's movie creates a new presentation that "supercedes (sic) the conventional recording of a live performance." Not only does White not know how to spell "supersede," he doesn’t know what it means either. Read literally, this clause says that Demme's new presentation takes the place of "the conventional recording of a live performance" but that can’t be what he means. If recorded live performances hereafter tend to take the "personal/theatrical presentation" form that Demme "innovates" in this movie, then maybe we can say it superseded the conventional form. That's a prediction, but White phrases it as if it happened. It only happened in White's mind, however. Or did it? Does White now think of Demme’s approach as "the conventional recording of a live performance"? He seems to think it quite unconventional, but this "supercedes" language suggests otherwise.
continued one last time...
If you want, you can get some meaning out of that sentence, but it would mostly be the meaning you (the reader) bring to it.
This doesn't mean I disagree with White about whether or not Demme's new movie is good. I haven't seen it yet, but am anxious to do so as a Demme and Young fan. It's just that White writes at a level of abstraction that often abandons the goal of conveying a discrete idea with language. Often, it's hard to tell what White really thinks about a movie from his reviews except whether he hated it or loved it. Semioticians would fault him for using language that lacks referents.
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