George wrote:
> I realize that the tone of this posting is a bit more colloquial than is
> usual for this list. Somehow the subject seemed to demand it.
No, George, please, please, don't apologize for writing in clear, readable
English!! You don't know how appreciated that is, especially in this forum,
which can sometimes make a fetish of obfuscation and muddy prose. Not
always, but sometimes. In fact, your comments, coming from your non-academic
experience, are telling in how clear they were. They communicated precisely
because they were grounded in personal experience, processed by analysis,
but anchored so they didn't drift into the muddy waters of prose-play. This
also relates back to the question raised earlier about the need for
criticism. I think that new criticism needs to be informed with as personal
a touch as possible, even to the extent of criticism as a form of
autobiography. This is a practice carried on by a hardy few critics, most
exultantly by the Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum. Read Rosenbaum,
alone, and you'll see why we need film criticism, now more than ever. Also
Adrian Martin, Jim Hoberman, the late Serge Daney, Chris Darke and, from
time to time, Manohla Dargis. There are others, whom we'll come back to at a
later posting.
Robert Koehler
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