Alejandro Adams

Two days ago, The Rain People screened at the Castro in San Francisco. Francis Coppola was there to receive an award. Walter Murch was also there.

Last night, Kazuo Hara was at PFA with The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On.

I did not attend either event.

The Rain People and The Emperor's Naked Army are among the most important films in my life--not least of all because I had to stalk each before obtaining it (now both are available on DVD).

Having missed these events, I've overburdened the machinery of cognitive dissonance.

It's better that I didn't go.

And I'd like to try to examine my reasoning, backward and incendiary though it may be. Keep in mind that these are not definitive proscriptions but suspicions and estimations.

It never hurts to toss out some epigraphs:

Carson McCullers: "While the European artists tend to form groups or aesthetic schools, the American artist is the eternal maverick--not only from society in the way of all creative minds, but within the orbit of his own art...We wander, we question. But the answer waits in each separate heart, the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness..."

And, less elaborately and possibly less tenably, Orson Welles: "A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong."

Maybe we should propose a distinction between the priorities--even "needs"--of a filmmaker and those of a cinephile or critic.

The preceding remark would have been erroneous (or simply nonsensical) prior to the apotheosis of the Cahiers brotherhood, who handed down a ready-made identity to the contemporary Western filmmaker. Sure, there had been isolated instances of critics becoming screenwriters becoming filmmakers (Antonioni) but the Cahiers gang made this progression a program--well, hell, a reflex. In short, those Cahiers goons destroyed the precisely individuated vocations of critic and filmmaker. And toward this aspect of their legacy I'm particularly resentful and suspicious.

On the other hand, we have a few gory examples of preeminent critics proving unable to make one of the very things they had trained themselves to critique. I can dispense with this paragraph in no time at all just by bringing up the god-awfulness of Edmund Wilson's fiction or Pauline Kael's unambiguous failure in Hollywood.

There. Now get up and brush off your pants.

But the question of whether I would prefer to hang out with Pauline Kael or Sam Peckinpah is a tough one, and that indecisiveness perfectly illustrates the duality of the post-Cahiers filmmaker identity. We don't know whether to talk about making films or talk about watching them.

Wes Anderson wrote about jumping through various hoops in order to screen his second film privately for Kael. I sympathize with this cloying and misguided and necessarily unreciprocated sentimentality. We should be glad that Kael was unreceptive--the alternative is unthinkable. Instinct tells me that critics should be personally inhospitable to filmmakers and filmmakers should not pitch woo to critics. But there is no need for antagonism, no need to steal Kael's scarf at a screening and then pretend not to be home when she calls for it the following day. (You know damn well who did this, and I'm tired of celebrating his superannuated adolescence and, by extension, the misanthropic mania of his most vocal acolyte.)

Yet I do woo critics. Compulsively. Though I'm convinced it's a bad idea. The problem is that I actually like them--more than I like filmmakers, actually. And maybe this is good place for a side-injunction to filmmakers: I'm weary of the whining and backbiting. Filmmakers on my echelon--that is, the ambitious nobodies--spend more time looking for a gatekeeper to blame, an establishment to condemn or another filmmaker to resent than they do making films. Why wouldn't I prefer the company of critics who are tearing those very filmmakers limb from limb?

And this takes me back to the original question: is it somehow beneficial for me to exempt myself from events featuring the likes of Coppola and Hara? If I socialize with critics and cinephiles, who swarm to such events and whose company I crave, do I complicate the matter of my identity? And if I socialize with "fellow" filmmakers by attending a half-dozen festivals, am I in danger of losing the edge that McCullers and Welles deem so necessary?

I think so.

And I fully expect you to howl at that sort of atavistic ardor.

Look: the critic and the filmmaker are an ecosystem unto themselves--by feeding on each other they also feed each other. (I'm obsessed with the image of the thirteen-foot Burmese Python which swallowed a six-foot alligator in the Everglades a few years ago. By the time the python burst, the gator was dead. Internecine, fig. 1A.)

Some have read CANARY as a cinema metaphor--not much of a stretch. In the event that you take CANARY as some sort of treatise on cinema itself, surely all doubt is erased as to the nature of our mute protagonist's metaphorical vocation: film criticism.

Ouch, you say.

Again: I have no ill will toward critics. What I do take from this reading, though, is that the one who removes the organs cannot simultaneously be the one from whom the organs are removed.

I recently had the pleasure of encountering A.A. Dowd and Josh Avram on Twitter. These guys are amateur critics with incredibly contrary opinions. But what do I really admire in an Avram or a Dowd? Prose? Taste? Character? A sui generis online persona? Or the fact that they are patently not aspiring filmmakers dabbling in criticism to pass the time?

Okay, that was a needlessly dismissive phrasing. I write about films on this here blawg, after all. Peeping Tom, Tuya's Marriage, Lovers on the Bridge. Do those posts qualify as criticism? I don't know. I feel that I've explicitly avoided what I consider to be criticism and have tried instead to forge a subordinate language of consideration through which I siphon what seems most incommunicable about a given work. Rather than incisively critiquing these films, or offering instruction to a third party, I'm trying to open my own filmmaking process to them. It's an unlikely bit of alchemy but I feel compelled to stick with it, which probably speaks to its efficacy.

I have no stake in the stand-off between blogs and print media--a critic here is a critic there. But I do think taxonomic designations such as "filmmaker," "critic" and "cinephile" should be policed, should in fact matter. Is it too late? Or am I simply a fool to care?