It’s more difficult than it’s ever been to get a film distributed and into actual brick-and-mortar movie theaters, but here comes Alexandre O. Philippe’s ruminative crit-essay Lynch/Oz, a documentary, it seems, only a film critic could love. And who cares about them? Can precious screen space suffer the indulgence of a speculative non-narrative film about film, not to mention a deep-reading geekfest about David Lynch, America’s most recalcitrant niche auteur?
But wait, haven’t we already been served plenty of ripe plates of critical-theoretical exegesis, like Philippe’s 2017 78/52 (a 91-minute exploration of Psycho’s shower scene) and 2019 Memory: The Origins of Alien; Nina Menkes’s Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (2022); Kent Jones’s Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015); Ross Lipman’s NotFilm (2015); Rodney Ascher’s pro-am doc on The Shining, Room 237 (2012); Mark Cousins’s 15-hour The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011); etc.? Are the movie geeks on the rise? Is everyone a film critic now — even filmmakers themselves?
If only. I’m partial, predictably, but worse things could happen to a groaning art form besieged by Internet-enabled new-media distractionism than to double down and let the cinemaniacs run the asylum. Though it seems an odd nonfiction subgenre. We’re not talking about filmmaker interview-bio-docs, which have always been a thing (going back at least to Peter Bogdanovich’s Directed by John Ford, in 1971), or making-of exposés, or self-fellating promo features like That’s Entertainment! (1974). Moviedom has always enjoyed inserting camera lenses up its own colon. But films that critically and/or scholarlily interpret and explore other films? We could, marinating in our geekiness, think that maybe Jean-Luc Godard is finally beginning to get things his way, in which cinema’s proper subject is cinema, and that writing criticism about movies, instead of making movies about movies, is akin to, as they say, dancing about…
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