The Decade In Pop

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

My enormous Pitchfork piece on "The Decade In Pop" is up: http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/7703-the-decade-in-pop/

Spotify playlist to go with it here: http://open.spotify.com/user/freakytrigger/playlist/6cudPLlniOyOrpX5M5Dnnz

Comments

[koganbot]

Well, if you remember this convo early during my time on ilX - What! You don't remember every convo that took place on ilX - er, actually, now that I look at it, I thought it contained something it didn't, but anyway, search for "Bazin" and see what I say. But what I'd thought I'd said and didn't was that Bazin the headwaters of one kind of auteurism and Ferguson the headwaters of another. Bazin didn't consider himself an auteurist and Ferguson died before the term was appropriated for film criticism, but that doesn't matter at all. Bazin leaned towards analyzing a film for the filmmakers' vision of the world, while Ferguson leaned towards analyzing what the filmmakers are doing in the world. The two tendencies are hardly exclusive, of course. "Filmmakers' vision of the world" can be shortened to "filmmakers' vision" without pegging it to Bazin's plumping for realism (that is, the world on screen doesn't have to be the one we live in, it can be a world with its own character, a world with conflicting characters), whereas the world of doing is our world, though some of what the filmmakers are doing is getting you into their world. But there's nothing in any of this that requires films to be unities, an artist's work to be a unity, only one vision per film, only one way of doing things per film, only one vision per artist, only one way of doing things per artist, only one artist per film, the artist be a single person (as opposed to a collective, a studio, a social set, a culture, a zeitgeist). All that's needed are choices, a setting for the choices, and some smarts as to what the choices tell us about the choosers and the setting - which of course can be thought of as an interaction between the choosers and the setting, the setting including, you know, people (who themselves behave in the world...).

I've got the Hillstone ppbk. of Negative Space, called Movies, w/ Bogart, Sheridan, Raft on the cover. Lots of blurbs on the thing, including Jonas Mekas saying Farber was the first person, before Bazin, who brought him to consciousness of the auteur theory, and someone named Maurice Peterson, writing in Metropolitan Review, saying that Farber originated the auteur theory.

Perhaps my favorite Manny Farber line: "Siegal's movies are spiritually as opportunist and crafty as the grafting cops, cheating wives, and winged hoods who make up the personnel." So Siegal's movies are doing to us what the characters are doing to each other.