3.1 Writing notices

I recently decided I ought to try my hand at movie reviewing—after all, i’ve spent so much time working on a broad, all-inclusive aesthetic theory, writing a quick film review ought to be a snap, right?

Well, much to my shock, writing criticism requires lots of concrete knowledge about the subject. Nobody told me I couldn’t just deduce my reviews from first principles. So I tried writing a review (just as an experiment) about the 1998 Godzilla movie, simply because my girlfriend happened to rent it that night. I started, found I had to do a lot of research and ended up getting into a kind of essay about what’s wrong with the writing of Ronald Emmerich, the man who wrote and directed Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, and Independence Day. Needless to say, such ballooning of one’s subject is probably bad for a newspaper movie notice.

Soon after, we rented Alphaville, which was not only terrible, but turns out to be one of the most influential and important films of the ’60s done by the most important director of the French New Wave. So I ended up spending hours reading about film, the French New Wave, surrealism, absurdism, existentialism, Maoism, etc., etc. All this so I could write a 300 word review with something like authority. I’m not sure if that’s the right approach. I mean, on one level it’s valid to just say: "It’s boring." And leave it at that. That’s both the essential issue, and ultimately, it’s the most objective thing to say. But at the same time if you are actually going to write a review, oughtn’t it be informative or instructive or interesting or at least entertaining? The best reviews (I’ve read many books of reviews by Virgil Thompson, Schumann, Ned Rorem, Bernard Shaw, etc—mostly music reviews) always takes the form of mini-aesthetics essays with the specific subject as a mere example of something bigger, something broader.

If you ever run into one of his books, read a little of Virgil Thompson’s critical writing from the New York Herald. They’re all anthologized now. The great thing about what he does is that he—well, he does just what the Ayn Rand folks advocate: he ‘dances lightly from concretes to principles’ and shows how they relate. Basically he is a news reporter—there are people who are interested in what’s going on in music, and he is the one who fills that need, covering the classical music beat; and so what you have is concretely short (usually no more than two to four paperback pages) reviews of specific concerts and so on, but the great thing he does is to always figure out what is most interesting or important about the performance and uses the review as a springboard to write a kind of mini-essay about that subject. So, it’s news—it has all the needed concrete information to make a news story: Joe played this piece and that piece on this date at this location, and these things occurred—but it’s also an essay on aesthetics. He’s the best I have ever read at that. After reading any of his reviews you know 1) what happened, 2) his opinion of it and 3) why he has that opinion and how it fits in with his wider sense of things. Which means that even though they are totally topical, they are still fun and interesting reading fifty years later for their own sake.

But he couldn’t do it without an encyclopedic knowledge of his field—not just ideas and theories, but names and dates and facts.

Which brings me back to my attempts at writing reviews. First, I don’t know that much about art history, really. A little, but not enough—not enough to write authoritative reviews, and certainly not enough to pen an all-inclusive theory of art. After all, if the concretes of art history aren’t the concretes from which to induce an all-knowing, all-seeing (and of course, all-dancing) theory of art, then what are?

The other thing I found out is that art history is really pretty damned interesting, so my way forward is obvious.

Based on emails to Steve Clarian
2004.12.6 and 2005