"Exile," cunning, no silence

The above shot is from the bust­ling scene at Manhattan’s KGB com­plex (it’s an arts/reading space with an iron­ic Soviet nos­tal­gia theme—no, Martin Amis would not approve, but it’s still a hap­pen­ing joint) in the after­math of a cel­eb­ra­tion of/reading from Exile Cinema: Filmmakers At Work Beyond Hollywood, a col­lec­tion of film writ­ings edited by Michael Atkinson, that, Atkinson says, has been await­ing pub­lic­a­tion for three years. Among the luminar­ies in the audi­ence were such thor­oughly engaged and enga­ging films writers as Aaron Hillis, Karina Longworth, Craig Keller, Kevin Lee, Allison Willmore, and David Fear; among the luminar­ies read­ing their con­tri­bu­tions to the book were Ed Halter, the par­tic­u­larly delight­ful Stuart Klawans (whose essay is a Talmudically-informed con­sid­er­a­tion of Chantal Akerman) , and Atkinson him­self, who read from both his intro­duc­tion and from film­maker Guy Maddin’s appre­ci­ation of Jose Mojica Marins. 

Yes, this is the same Michael Atkinson with whom I picked a fight just a couple of days ago. How could it not be? As I’ve said before, I think he’s a pro­voc­at­ive and often astute crit­ic, and I think the book’s a worthy pro­ject (and most of the read­ings I heard sug­gest I’m going to enjoy the whole thing almost unre­servedly). But I’ll admit that anoth­er reas­on I turned up was in the hope of unruff­ling some feath­ers. While I take pas­sion­ate excep­tion with some of the spe­cif­ics of the argu­ments Atkinson’s put out there, the fact of the mat­ter is that we abso­lutely agree on cer­tain essen­tials, the biggest one being on the need for an informed, lit­er­ate, non-market-oriented film cri­ti­cism with an engaged inter­na­tion­al per­spect­ive. Whether it comes from main­stream media out­lets (which seems less and less likely) or a loose affil­i­ation of internet-based writers, or some where/thing else. As much as the essays I heard last night, the con­ver­sa­tions I had with the above-mentioned folk sug­gest to me that there’s more than a little hope for that. Although I get the feel­ing that Atkinson is more pess­im­ist­ic on this front than I am. But in any case, let me give him the last word here—this is from the intro­duc­tion to Exile Cinema:

It is the crit­ic’s job, per­formed well or not or not at all, to embrace the visu­al text in ques­tion as a totality—as an expres­sion, a cre­ation, a con­sum­mable product, a mar­ket agent, a social symptom—but as a total­ity with intent. That intent is to be viewed, by people, for enjoy­ment, stim­u­la­tion, and/or sat­is­fac­tion, and so the crit­ic is the cul­tur­al point­man, the recon­noiter­er for his fel­low cit­izens for whom a movie is an exper­i­ence to be had, enjoyed, con­tem­plated, and argued over, noth­ing less and often little more. Their respons­ib­il­it­ies begin and end in the seat, in the dark, watch­ing, with their readers.