Roger Ebert and [The Death of the Film]

Film critiques and pundits have come out of the woodworks in this latest century; we must attribute this to the average film connoisseur believing they are entitled to an opinion. On the contrary, if one is to look into their own biographies, we'll find that none have created any successful work of filmography themselves...

This is where Roger Ebert stood alone, the greatest film pundit perhaps to ever walk this earth.

Ebert had a way with film, as though film spoke to him immediately upon viewing, and in so doing, he find their flaws as one does psychoanalyzing the human personality. He was meticulous, his eye was a third, his methodology and dedication to film itself was of a gargantuan measure. If film evolved at all, it was not due to the creativity or the auteur's exploration of unorthodox measure and truth, it was in fear of Ebert's critique, one that alone, could make or break a film, become a ladder to a filmmaker's career or the precipice they'd plummet from.

In my perspective, film critiques are separated in 4 distinct genres;

1. The Preference: Filmmakers, as most humans, take into the likeness of certain genres, be it, horror, drama, comedy, action, so much so, they lose perspective in the critique outside of their chosen genre. The door is closed when one adhere fanatically to standards and preference, disallowing their capabilities to see anything outside of their desired view.

2. The Comparable: This is the erroneous form of judgment where one film (namely the film under review) is judged in comparison with another. This is commonplace when judging an original with a sequel or trilogy but a film cannot be judged on its own merits if it is compared to the work of another filmmaker. As Antonin Artaud once said "Masterpieces of the past are only good for the past." The budding filmmaker garners experience as they grow, as they produce, as opposed to an experienced filmmaker who has gained world renown recognition for their work; there comparison is an unrealistic practice and one that needs to be dealt away with if film is to ever receive its due in proper.

3. The Incapable: As success is well-pursued and well-desired, there are some in this world who are not driven and thus receive no accolades to their loiter. It is easier to break down a film, tear it apart from its foundation and axis, then to start at that very axis and foundation and creat a film. The failed filmmaker who has lost their momentum can easily become competitive only in the nature of destroying films in reviews. For those who are familiar with Francois Truffant, film director of the French New Wave, known as "The Gravedigger of French Cinema." Unforgiving in critique, his every notion was to push filmmakers into a direction of forward and remove them from complacency. With the 1959 release of "The 400 Blows," it is clear that Truffant wasn't an incapable, but the 4th genre of the film critique.....

4. The Capable: This is the filmmaker who has accomplished a solid, legendary film that lives one and rival those of the "modern." His Pulitzer prize for criticism aside, his near four decades of the most notorious pundit in perhaps all history of film remarks him in a hallmark of nothing but, nothing less than brilliant and genius. The 1970 screenplay to Ross Meyer's "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, co-written by Ebert himself was slowly recei
ved by the public, now hailed as a cult classic of the crest. 1999 saw Ebert lose his colleague Gene Siskel; modern film critic great Richard Roeper, admixing a different taste to Ebert's dispassionate reviews, joined him in transforming the method that had begun to take film a step back rather a step forward into transcendence.

As the loss of Buddy Holly was known to Don McLean as the "Death of the music," the loss of Roger Ebert has come to be known as "The Death of the Film." No one is left to drive filmmakers into their desire, into transcendence; we are now burdened in the realm of art to lose our dreams, borrow those from the past, and recreate them in a petulant complacency.

[Composites] On the Documentary & Documentarian

Nothing in history escapes memory; misadventure, happenstance, mirrored-images, bliss- this is the stain upon memory in which we want to escape, or savor. But the human brain, as effective as it is in its 10% functional capacity, it is fragile, plagued by degenerative disease, fractured by communicable disease, compromised by retrograte amnesia. So we photograph every inch or moments that are memorable to us, those we know we may never forget and those we know we may and in someday, be in need of a reminder. The Documentarian is the photographer evolved....and their art,doomed star-crossed lovers, destined to wonder for eternity.


....this evolved artist has gone from the still images formed in our minds far before the camera has capture an instance and transmorgified the stillness into motion, transgressed the black and white to color and regressed once again to black and white. As an adult in stress of their lives, regression is pertinent to the origin as the origin is the axis of the celestial sphere of art itself.

Subtle art demands only subtle attention; art must become radical if its demands is to be the same. With the documentarian, everything exists around memory, around what happens in our human history that needs to be remembered and brought to light. Figurative or abstract, it painstakes its claim to the documentarian in a haunting manner, until no longer they can ignore that the dream demands to be born from idea, from ideal.

We confront time as we do the object, and the independent , intervening distances flowing from event into lens is not missed; every moment capture is captured intentionally, as in the dream, nothing is a mishap. If the documentary is to capture what the dream has, then both the composition and the documentarian must become a double of it, the devout agent who carries out a task and analyzes and asks not why it must be undertaken. In one form or another, silence comes over the auteur, a disquieted spell that removes them from actual time. The dream then is no longer the dream, there is no more dream. It has now become, stained itself in motion for the next thousands years. If it is not dreamed then it is no recorded, if it happens in the dream, then it is from an authentic, aesthetic stance that it must become, upright past the crawl, an embryo develops without chromosomes. The documentarian who lives in art is privy to the beginning and end of a dream, a specific dream, as one who lives in art becomes aware of their own demise.

It is not clear whether the documentarian can explain the dream or the documetary can fully capture the dream as it becomes reality; what is clear is that the documentary is savors the integrity lost upon the major motions film. And slowly, a cult audience is eroding the mainstream zealous, bringing limelight
to a truth that some embrace while most deny and prefer their complacency in denial.

[The Integrity Cell] On the Decadence of the Short Film

The short film has long been the most transparent form of film in America; neither major production nor aphorism, it projects the most potent apex that is diluted over a longer time extent than the major motion picture. Lost in its own resplendence, reduced by its own significance, fed only by a metaphysical hunger, it is a body that must empty itself of the most mainstream cliches and rediscover the origins the moment the reel begin to turn. Man has long dwelled in its own reduction, in its own illusion of grandeur; it is in film, namely the short, that imperfection isn't hidden in a slow anticipation to something predicted, but a truth willing to come out of thin air to risk everything.

The film can bring the sun into a focal and reduce it in the same manner, create a deep chasm of deceit, cleverly hoist darkness from its association and disassociate it. More often than not, the footage will fail, and if it does not, it will do no more than to create the shell of its own disquiet. Because the mainstream film is littered with brand and popular names, it prevents the perspective of one seeing it as the dismemberment, as unoriginal, a stolen thing from the past which Artaud believe masterpieces must remain. To resurect these masterpieces are not a stroke of genius, but a retreat of the auteurs into the darker corners of themselves. Truffant believed that the filmmaker is the author of the film and thus exposes their own perceptions. The perception is major motion picture has been compromised, an impossible compromise tainted with incapability, borrowed visions from bygone greats, brought into modern, is inane when it has not become from a dream in utero.

If there is no risk, no outrage, no shock or awh, then there is no need to compose. Silence will claim us as a vast mist descending from the nothingness that has become. In the short film, there is an opportunity to reclaim the light we've lost in film today, reconcile with what was, bury it, say our peace and never again feel the need to exhume it. Exhumation means that art as we know it has not evolve but devolved. Embarking on a journey means to decimate even the ideal of the loiter, not to declare who we are because we do not know until the reel stops once and for all. In our mind is the draft, the unseen, to create, the instrument of the seen is then projected, and not only on us to meet the dream we once dream, but onto the whole of the audience, who is the dreaming world awaiting movement, awaiting the initial reason to be moved.

Perhaps Chapman knew this dream, perhaps Bunuel, perhaps Truffant in bed with all whom he fancied and fetished; it is impossible to doubt the world that has plunged into mimicry and mockery, into the pseudo-placental depth that all artist must plummet into if their art is to ever become. The events of a film must speak for themselves, as Samuel Beckett's art, introducing nothing, giving nothing; and from that nothingness, everything is translated, transferable, transmuted and transmutated. These events must not be manipulated but nutured, as a child who first begins to walk, and from this walk, this child must fall, as man must first fall, to know that he is able to stay upright. The human perspective, the human walk, has thus nowadays been narrowed, its path narrowed, rudimentary thought suspended by capital and advertisement to cajole artist and hypnotize a somnambulate public.

Think of the scientific method in which scientist use to test disease. First, they begin with a lesser life form, rodents, then an advancement to larger mammals and then, the human cell is brought into a petri-dish. With film, the disease is taken directly into the human cell via historyonics, in a myopic manner where the moral and the box office is the true means to an end. Though man makes films, it cannot be in the image of him, for man is awaiting death and the film is made to be immortal.

The desperate straights taken in a flawed thesis is now showing its arrogance, its fits of sequels, borrowings from the posthumous. There then is a scorn in the discourse for all interest other than self-interest, a waltz around the subcultural and subterranean, self-reassurance via acknowledgement and annual award validation. Film has found itself in a perilous, revolving vanity, a mirror of said and stymied petulance, the lack of a visceral and cerebral capability, adrenal possibility. If it continues on its present course, it will again be a twofold image of man, headed for an inevitable doomsday plague.

A short film is a pretext to evolution from revolution, filmmakers unknown to the mainstream, ignored, blacklisted and ousted motion artists. As a cell splits and reproduces, the body, which is it represented shell, too reproduces, its function a reproduction of that splice, its genetics nonethesame. What can be altered must be manipulated, what can be changed only can undergo a gradual shape-shift, though it too, as the human personality, remains constant. The body as we know it is intricate and diverse but the cell always is true, functions to its own truth, cadence and tandem flow. In this, its integrity maintains. If film is to ever rediscover its integrity, it will be through the short film, the first cell before its split, that growth must begin, be nutured with a mirrored truth, until such time it divides and meets its double.