‘‘Since 2001,’’ claims J. Hoberman, ‘‘the nature and development of the motion picture medium has become irrevocably altered’’ (viii). One reason for this alteration ‘‘arises from a technological shift,’’ one that David Thomson’s The Big Screen also anatomizes, ‘‘from the photographic to the digital’’ (Hoberman, vii). The ‘‘second, more unexpected and less rational reason for the new situation . . .was the events of September 11, 2001’’ (Hoberman, vii). These amounted to ‘‘a cataclysmic jolt out of a clear blue sky that, for the vast majority of the world’s population, was apprehended as a manmade cinematic event’’ (viii). If indeed Zhang Yimou’s opening ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympiad were as sportscaster Bob Costas described them, ‘‘a cinematic blockbuster in real time’’ (Hoberman, 263), they were the first such blockbuster since 9/11 itself. In Hoberman’s words, ‘‘the events of September 11, 2001, provided the ultimate movie experience—spectacular destruction predicated on fantastic conspiracy, broadcast live, as well as repeatedly (and even recorded by some participants on their cell phones), and watched by an audience, more or less simultaneously, of billions. This is surely what the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen meant when . . . he undiplomatically [referred] to the events of 9/11 as ‘the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos’’’ (27). Although 9/11 may thus have been as ‘‘highconcept’’ as Neal Gabler thought it was at the time, and although Hoberman thinks Steven Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds might well ‘‘(reference) 9/11 in every instance’’ (29), 9/11’s real resonance consists in all those cell phones, in what they saw, and in how they saw it. Thomson is under no illusions about this. We are seeing fewer movies, but we are also watching more screens, some of them very small screens indeed. ‘‘(W)e are watching images almost too small to see, in an isolation bordering on secrecy’’ (Thomson, 256). Everywhere you look, people are gazing at and manipulating tiny electronic devices (those prayerwheels of our supposedly secularized age). Some of the time, they are communicating. But how one self-enclosed cocoon can bond with another self-enclosed cocoon is not altogether clear. Hoberman’s Film After Film falls into three parts, the first of which, ‘‘A Post-Photographic Cinema,’’ ‘‘attempts to characterize, theorize and historicize’’ the newfound fusion of the digital and the photographic. The second part, ‘‘A Chronicle of the Bush Years,’’ culls the ‘‘four hundred or so weekly reports published in The Village Voice’’ that were written by Hoberman ‘‘between September 2001 [and] November 2008,’’ each of these being 750-odd words in length. When put together and arrayed alongside one another, these selected reports amount to a chronicle of the George W. Bush presidency, ‘‘a reign defined not only by 9/11, but by continuous foreign wars, the much-publicized threat of additional terror attacks, and further disasters—both natural and manmade . . . as seen from the screening room.’’ Unhappily, as Hoberman proceeds to admit, ‘‘these journalistic reports have been somewhat edited but never updated’’ for Film After Film. ‘‘Rather than rewrite them . . . thus contaminating the spontaneity of an original impression, I have chosen to annotate and historically contextualize my original in bold type’’(viii–ix). Taken separately, Hoberman’s ‘‘reports’’ maintain the high quality they exhibited throughout his long stay (which ended in January 2012) at the Voice, a paper I subscribed to back in the day largely to read them. Yet as presented here, in Film After Film (with long, discursive footnotes and introductory, stage-setting paragraphs), Hoberman’s essays for once do not make for easy reading. Nor is this all. Hoberman’s third part, various lectures on various, mainly non-American films, few of which have any bearing either on digitalization or on 9/11, seems tacked on, and leads nowhere in particular. It is Hoberman’s first part that best complements and overlaps with the arguments of David Thomson’s The Big Screen. Indeed, Thomson’s words echo Hoberman’s: ‘‘What troubles me, and what seems to have frightened away so many moviegoers in the last twenty years or so, is the way photography and its attempt to record life have yielded to a range of special effects, building toward computer generated imagery, and the depiction of people who
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Feb 1, 2015
Wing-Wah Law + 1
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