Oiga, Vea!

on Top 10 lists, alternate film histories/canons and Chantal Akerman's 𝘏𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘯' 𝘖𝘶𝘵 𝘠𝘰𝘯𝘬𝘦𝘳𝘴...

from Hangin’ Out Yonkers (1973) courtesy Fondation Akerman

THE CLICKBAIT VERSION OF THIS would have been called “Lists Are Bad.” (Maybe with the subhed “Here’s Why You Should Stop Making Them.”) And explaining why lists are bad seemed like a pretty simple task back when it was supposed to run, December 2022 (for reasons which will reveal themselves in short order.) I missed that window of opportunity, but managed to rationalize February, given the run-up to the Oscars. After that came March (the actual Oscars) and still nothing. My young coworker, dangerously privy to the breaking-down of these production timelines, started asking me: “Where’s the Substack?” Deadlines blown, brains ground to a fine dust, subscribers jumped ship, spring sprung; I even contemplated pulling the plug myself, putting my ideas into palliative care. Technically, right now is the worst time to publish, because the gap between the Oscars and Cannes - arguably the only interregnum separating the official end and unofficial beginning of “Awards Season” - just closed.

But I couldn’t bring myself to not-finish this volume of Element X. The process of wrangling these thoughts has taken not just months or years but, I realized, decades. The question of artistic “merit” haunts movie-maniac culture in ways large and small, some impossible to ignore, others invisible to the naked eye. I realized my problem isn’t with lists - which are, unto themselves, a film programmer’s best friend, the brainstorming being the most fun stage of almost any curatorial project - but rather with ranking. The rating and ranking of movies, the cataloguing of opinions, the sifting of taste: it’s ballooned into a… “industry” isn’t the word, but the rise of Letterboxd proves there’s data (and therefore money) to be mined from people’s - dependency? obsession? habit? - on chronicling their movie diets, breaking their responses to films down into numbers, stapling their kneejerk reactions upon the telephone poles of the much-ballyhooed “digital town square”. A lifetime ago, I tried participating in this kind of opinion-gathering on IMDB, then on a website called Flixster circa 2006/2007 and finally, briefly, on The Auteurs (now known as MUBI) before losing interest once and for all. Maybe these are the circumstances that pushed me into criticism: it sounds comically high-minded in retrospect, but I wanted my writing about movies to speak for itself.

I hated the idea of “objectivity” among critics: it was impossible not to grade on a curve, and therefore I saw my task as a critic to “describe the curve.” By far, my most prolific period reviewing movies was for the website Slant¹, cofounded by Ed Gonzalez and Sal Cinquemani, notorious for their exacting rating system and hell-or-high-water rigorousness in the edit. Writing for Slant meant giving star ratings. So we would argue, email after email, over why I should award a film 2.5 stars when my review read more like a 3, or why it should receive a 3.5 when so many flaws were openly dragged into my assessment, et cetera². A couple times, Rotten Tomatoes even reached out to clarify if one of my reviews had in fact been Fresh or Rotten. I wanted to do whatever I could to gum up their machinery: how could a subjective art experience be boiled down to one of these two ludicrous categories, to say nothing of a dumb number rating?

Anyway: this bygone winter I held my nose and joined Letterboxd, because the tea leaves said Twitter - my preferred means of arguing about movies online, at least when I signed up 10+ years ago - was going up in a puff of smoke. (Wishful thinking, as right now it’s looking more like a long, slow, weird, janky decline.) But I also joined Letterboxd because I wanted to see what, if anything, people were saying about movies I programmed. I had regarded the site with skepticism, and still do: it feels like the breeding ground for a certain cinephilia which could only have come around thanks to the angel/devil possibilities opened up by streaming and torrenting. The most zealous users are probably the same type who use (and, in some cases, post freely about using) semisecret torrent websites and thus, for whom, only a select few movies are truly impossible to see. Their level of access is neither fully privileged nor proletarian in effect; those who know, know, but that number remains relatively small in proportion to the world’s corpus of movie watchers, even as piracy grows more sophisticated all the time³.

So let’s say you’re a programmer, or work for a distributor: tracking a film’s activity via Letterboxd will help determine if a file has become suddenly available to a large number of people who, probably, do not live in the town where the film last screened. (In other words, the site encourages narc and pirate tendencies alike.) Or let’s say you’re a director: For all the shock I’ve feigned at filmmakers monitoring the responses to their movies on Letterboxd - don’t they have more important shit to do? - I’m not above admitting I have checked the site immediately after screenings I organized, and sometimes find the reviews, like this one of Ileana Pietrobruno’s Girl King (2002) published by “lex” after a screening I organized around this time a year ago, deeply moving.

Multiple friends warned me before I signed up: Letterboxd was a great place to broaden my horizons, stalk my audiences and, if I felt like it, to taxonomize my reactions - but horrible as a social media network. And indeed, more often than not, I’m finding that the top review of a movie on Letterboxd is the kind of pithy one-liner jerry-rigged to “do numbers” on Twitter during a major film festival. I’m complicit in this economy; I too have had the experience of sitting through a world premiere screening and spending the last seven-to-fifteen minutes of the movie concocting a glib 140-character verdict, aiming to splash as loudly among the peanut gallery before being forgotten forever. If I’m lucky. Did these experiences make me a better, or at least more a concise, writer? Maybe. Probably not. I can’t imagine they actually helped my thinking about cinema.

These are the wages of sin. Many things have happened to deprivilege the film critic-as-tastemaker; at the top of my personal list (ha) would be the explosion of unpaid writing about movies online, which has been a boon for self-expression and a blessing for formalist critical discourse… and/but a disaster for the idea, now quaint but totally reasonable less than twenty years ago, that writing about movies could be a viable way to eke out a living. On the “business” side, we’re living in a golden era of whatever results in quick and easy web traffic: lists and listicles, bogus headlines engineered to raise eyebrows, and the kind of kneejerk “hot take” I just described - the opposite of rigorous, but often successful inciting an afternoon’s worth of ersatz controversy on social media. (Just as it’s impossible to watch a film “ironically”, hate-clicks are still clicks.) In the last several years I have had an easier time trusting individual writers than outlets - knowing they are susceptible to the problems cited above if not to “restructuring”, “pivoting to video”, “pivoting to AI” (all bywords for layoffs) or just folding entirely.

Thus far, my use of the site has been touch-and-go, bracketed by weeks if not months of inactivity (imagine that!) But it only took about 90 seconds after logging on to realize Letterboxd is, of course, far more than a “film ranking website.” Users publish lists (numbered and otherwise) that help draw visibility to movies far afield of “the conversation”; the ease of self-publishing yields a bustling marketplace of takes, making the site an essential platform for criticism outside the norm. Letterboxd caters to an audience of obsessives and completists. Either term could describe a young cinephile ca. 2023, and Letterboxd genuinely seems like a great place to learn about new-to-you films. There is definitely a “Letterboxd mentality” which asserts itself in this abstracted digital space, where a film’s archival status or history of distribution/exhibition are immaterial (if not irrelevant) as long as the file can be downloaded, Dropboxed, WeTransferred, whatever. Infinite options provide for an ever-finer gradient of opinions; hence, the time these screen addicts spend watching movies is even more precious, and the stakes are paradoxically higher and lower. Some can catch a flick and appreciate its contours of imperfection, the roughshod humanity of the nonprofessional performances, the precariousness of the camerawork and the political reasons why it may have been impossible to see for decades; others will see little more than “acting could have been better; story dragged in the middle; solid 2 out of 5.” On to the next one.

So while the leveling of the playing field for thoughtful criticism continues apace, wishing in kind for a different Letterboxd would be not just naïve but ahistorical; counterproductive. It’s hard to tell if the issue is that these extremely online cinephiles are uninformed or too informed. Running these drills takes my mind in weird directions, like: who is the ideal “virgin” watcher of a movie I’m programming? How do I sell an obscure film to people without burying them in historical/cultural/aesthetic context? Or without bastardizing/obfuscating the actual experience of watching it? How will I attract the attention of people who aren’t already lost in the cinephile/Letterboxd sauce? Hopefully the movie argues for itself well enough, but you still need someone plopped down in front of it before hitting the Play button. These questions aren’t a side nuisance of programming, exhibition or distribution; answering them is the job.