Thomas McEvilley, the critic, novelist, and former Artforum contributor, said in 1997 in The New York Times: “It seems pretty clear by now that more or less anything can be designated as art. The question is, Has it been called art by the so-called ''art system?'' In our century, that's all that makes it art.’’’
The same is true for movies in a moment like this where countless are manufactured by the algorithm of Netflix or Disney for the mere purpose of capital accumulation. And yet, because of insomnia, internet addiction, or changing “tastes and preferences,” we eat them up. While the critics of our time (entertainment reporters), usher in such a wave of streaming failures and blockbuster flops, there are critics out there interested in actually criticizing things.
“What's hard for people to accept is that issues of art are just as difficult as issues of molecular biology; you cannot expect to open up a page on molecular biology and understand it. This is the hard news about art that irritates the public,” McEvilley went on to say.
A. S. Hamrah is a critic that understands that difficulty, or “moral stakes,” as he put it in our conversation. From 2008 to 2019, he was n+1’s film critic, and those critiques make up, in part, his collection, “The Earth Dies Streaming.” In it, Hamrah writes: “Trying to find the good in everything in this best of all possible subcultures, however, does little to improve an art form dominated by blockbusters and streaming television.”
I spoke with A. S. Hamrah about his latest round-up for The Baffler (in which he writes about over 20 movies), my favorite director Pedro Almodóvar, and the state of film criticism today.
Harrison Malkin: How many times do you watch a movie before writing about it? What are you looking for upon a second or third pass?
A. S. Hamrah: Depends on the nature of what I’m writing – if it’s just a round-up of films, in which I review maybe six to thirty, for most of those I’ll just watch them once. If I really like the film, or if I’m troubled by the film in some way, I’ll watch it twice – which I did with Annette. If I’m writing a more substantial piece, I’ll watch the film three times.
And, of course, it changes a lot with each viewing. A film like Annette seems confused and excessive, and it was hard to understand what it was really about, or what Leos Carax was trying to do. But seeing it a second time changes it so much. It becomes a deeper film, its point becomes more clear, and it becomes more terrifying – and less a criticism of the media. A lot of films are not worth watching more than once. No one’s going to watch Spencer twice.
HM: Do you find yourself having a clearer or more honest reaction when you watch something a second time? I guess this speaks to the responsibility of the viewer.
AH: Well, things that are good are great. They become better when you watch them again. And that happens over time. So you watch them at different points in your life and you see new or different things about them that you now appreciate or love. That’s the nature of works of art that are successful. But also, if you watch something that’s bad enough times, you’ll come to see things that will fascinate you. There are films I hate that are objects of fascination.
HM: Which ones?
AH: One is the movie Vanilla Sky, the Cameron Crowe film with Tom Cruise and Penélope Cruz. The more you watch things, the more you understand them. But I don’t think you have any responsibility to watch things more than once, or even watch the whole thing if you don’t want to. Your time is valuable and filmmakers or any kinds of artists have to understand that.
That’s the great thing I learned while working in television brand analysis. In television, it’s really obvious that the competition for your time is based on really anything else you could be doing. You could be sitting in the park with someone instead of watching T.V.
Other kinds of cultural production aren’t that stark. You go to the theater, you meet someone, pay money, pick out your seat on the stupid computer screen, and you’re sitting in a dark room for a couple of hours.
HM: What causes you to write a movie off quickly? And what do movies that you hate have in common?
AH: Either they have a very low level of ambition or they’re too ambitious, so that they become pretentious or overwrought. Or the director doesn’t have a grasp on filmmaking. Or I think the most common issue with movies now is that the screenplays don’t seem finished or fully thought out.
HM: They’re rushed in some way?
AH: They seem like they rushed in production, or they went with a draft. Maybe the filmmaker is the kind of person who writes the film by him or herself, without the input of a co-writer and then can’t be questioned. Or, conversely, there’s too many people working on it. Some screenplays seemed too stuffed with plot now. I think screenwriting has really suffered in the 21st century on a basic level.
HM: That reminds me of your description of The French Dispatch: “Anderson’s movies often credit multiple screenwriters. I don’t get how it takes four people to come up with those chase scenes, and not one writer points out that they don’t work. Maybe that person is always outvoted.”
AH: He always has these chase scenes. To me, they’re like dead spots in the movie that aren’t doing anything. I don’t know why he insists on those. Someone in an online comment told me they are there to bring “joy.” Wes Anderson is obviously the auteur of his films. He’s totally in charge of every detail. I don’t understand why there’s three or four screenwriters. I don’t know what they’re doing, because the films are essentially the same each time. The things that are good about them are the same, the flaws are the same. And it does seem like the kind of situation where he can’t be criticized. I mean I have no idea, of course. There’s just a lot of gaps in his screenwriting. I guess what’s really great about him to people that love him isn't his screenwriting.
HM: It’s the detail. But to sidetrack here: I’ve seen a lot of interviewers describe you as a “moralist.”
AH: A moralist?
HM: Bookforum, for one. What does that mean? Is that something you identify with?
AH: I think now it just means that you criticize things. A lot of critics aren’t critical. You know, you’re not a cheerleader. The moral stakes of any work of art are important and that’s something that you have to consider. I think people are so used to reading anodyne criticism, and when anyone says anything that seems harsh they consider it moralistic. But if someone is too moralistic, that’s not a good thing. That means they’re being too judgmental in the wrong way. So I don’t want to do that.
HM: Why are certain critics so cynical about the general cinematic landscape? It feels like nostalgia.
AH: People are always putting down nostalgia. But we live in a terrible time. So, of course, things from the past seem better. And it should be the job of critics to be skeptical of the entertainment industry. If you examine the film industry, it just seems terrible in a lot of ways. It’s controlled by a couple of corporations that don’t care about the art of the cinema at all. Any normal person would look at how Netflix or Disney is run and be critical or skeptical about these things. Because it’s just about making money for a small group of people, who can then lead lives of immense wealth.
And the desire for films to be good isn’t nostalgic, it’s the role of the critic. I want every film I see to be good. I don’t want to waste my time seeing something that’s terrible. A certain amount of cynicism is necessary in judging films and thinking about them. If you don’t have that, what are you doing? You’re just a cheerleader. There’s a lot of people that are entertainment reporters that cover the industry and their job isn’t to judge films or to evaluate them in any way. That kind of reporting has taken over. The cinema is mostly covered by business reporters.
Nostalgia is built into all forms of criticism in some ways. There’s always a sense that things from previous years seem better. In a given year, you have to wade through stuff that isn’t good to find things that are good. Only in retrospect do the things that aren’t good fade away.
HM: So many mainstream critics value American movies over films from other countries. Is that changing now? Do you see your work as resisting that impulse?
AH: What’s resistant to that impulse is the film industry in the U.S, not any particular critic. After WWII and through the 70s, foreign films were a real competition to Hollywood. And, you know, that was a period in which average filmgoers went to foreign movies. So that was a threat to Hollywood. The blockbuster existed to get rid of that threat, so Hollywood could dominate the screens again. It’s about the rise of the blockbuster and the cineplex.
HM: Was it a choice by the theaters and executives to simply not list foreign films anymore?
AH: Well, it’s a complicated business history. Foreign films have traditionally played in certain theaters, like independent theaters, but the large theatrical exhibitors were coerced, largely for economic reasons, into showing only Hollywood movies – even though theaters were not supposed to be a part of the studio system. A new system came up where they only showed blockbuster movies.
Now they can only have one successful film at a time, which is Spider-Man: No Way Home. It’s not that critics or audiences didn’t want to see foreign films, it’s that foreign films were squeezed out of the marketplace – except in some big cities or college towns. But even that is ending.
I’ll see any movie. But I don’t really want to see animated movies. And then amongst all the stuff I see, I write about a certain percentage of it. So I’m not specifically trying to correct anything. I’m just writing about the things I’m interested in writing about. I think all films start equal in a sense before I see them, and I don’t write about them because of the hype.
HM: I think a film that’s been very hyped up recently is Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers.
AH: Well, Penélope Cruz is winning Best Actress awards for it. Parallel Mothers is an excellent movie. Did you see it?
HM: I was at the North American premiere in November, and I thought it was good, but not my favorite Almodóvar film by any stretch. I think I do need to watch it again. I’m curious why you thought it was excellent.
AH: Filmmakers change over time, you know. He’s a more mellow filmmaker and a more serious one in some ways now. That film deals with Spanish history in a way that his other films don’t, so there’s something more serious about it. And I think it’s true for that film with Antonio Banderas in 2019.
HM: Yes, Pain and Glory.
AH: His earlier films have a crazier quality in which the melodrama is more pronounced. He’s kind of normalized that to this world that he’s created. We know to some extent what we’re going to get, so he doesn’t have to push anything to an extreme anymore; he doesn’t have to explain. I hate to see it as “world building.” That’s not the best phrase. He has a style, concerns, obsessions that he’s returned to again and again since his first film came out in 1980.
So in order to avoid repeating himself and still be interested in the world, he’s had to deepen his approach. If you’re a writer-director, you have to make films that are of the age that you are. So he’s not going to make a film like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Matador, or Labyrinth of Passion now – films from the 80s are not going to be films he makes in the 2020s.
HM: That’s true.
AH: And so a film, like Julieta, which I didn’t think was one of his best films, had an acknowledgment of that. The first half of the film takes place in the 80s and has this great New Wave style, but the second half takes place in the present. That’s the one that’s based on Alice Munro’s short stories. You know, he’s one of the great living filmmakers, and his movies are kind of underappreciated because they’re entertaining. They’re colorful and beautiful. He’s the opposite of Béla Tarr, who I love, but you can see why Sátántangó was paid more serious attention to than, say, Volver.
HM: I think I was upset that it didn’t have these hallmark Almodóvar qualities: double-shock and extreme moral ambiguity.
AH: I think it does have those things and the story is not predictable. It’s a melodrama about motherhood and it's set against the backdrop of fascist history in Spain. Motherhood is one of the great themes of Almodóvar’s films. Even in Pain and Glory that’s a very important part of the movie. Of course, there’s going to be a lot of hype with Parallel Mothers. Sony is distributing it in the U.S. and they knew that Penélope Cruz would be recognized for it. That’s why Drive My Car and The Worst Person in the World are getting this push, too.
HM: You wrote that Drive My Car was unsatisfying. Why?
AH: Did you see it?
HM: Yeah, I saw it at Film Forum.
AH: I liked it. I just liked his other film, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, better. Drive My Car was too long. And I have nothing against long films, by the way. It did seem kind of like a film, where you need to know the Murakami story on which it’s based to understand it. I didn’t really understand the characters that well and I do think it’s a cold film. I even think that style of photography is cold. But I still like it and I think it’s an amazing film in some ways – especially the stuff about the Chekhov play and the listening to the tapes in the car. But by the end, it seemed to be struggling. I’ve only seen it once. I should see it again.
HM: Is Almodóvar the dialectician/Hegelian of contemporary cinema?
AH: Oh my god, what a question. I’d have to think about that. Melodrama is based on reversals. Someone who seems good turns out to be a villain. Someone you love is cheating on you. You’re unable to recognize what’s good for you and how the world is really functioning. Maybe Hegel and melodrama coexist on parallel tracks, which is specifically Almodóvarian. First of all, his movies are too funny and sexy to be Hegelian.
Melodrama is a low form, and at the same time, it’s the only place left in cinema where you can experience a catharsis that’s not trivial. There’s so many films now about trauma, which are trying to be deeply serious, but they end up being trivial and pointless. Because they’re not made by someone at the level of Almodóvar, who’s a serious artist but light in a way. Catharsis isn’t something people normally get from films anymore.
HM: I’ve found a lot of comfort in his movies, particularly Pain and Glory, which I watched like eight times.
AH: A lot of films in America, especially Hollywood films, that come out about trauma are cynical and just seem like products. Or conversely, they’re made by someone that just wants to make this one film.
HM: Have you read Parul Sehgal’s piece in The New Yorker, The Case Against The Trauma Plot. It’s about our current cultural trend, where films for example are not only trauma-focused, but contingent on the past and flashbacks.
AH: The constant resort to flashbacks is the worst aspect of this. You have to be working at a very high level for flashbacks to work. Flashbacks have even destroyed films by great filmmakers like Hitchcock. That was the problem with The Lost Daughter. Have you seen it?
HM: I did.
AH: The whole thing was predicated on these flashbacks that interrupted and stopped the movie and it contained a performance that wasn’t as good as the lead performance. So there’s something uncinematic about that. Films have a forward drive, and movies that depend on flashbacks don’t do that, they keep pulling you back to something you feel you’ve already absorbed.
HM: Well, I wonder if this was because of the source material, Elena Ferrante’s book. Was the movie just true to text?
AH: Regardless, the responsibility of the filmmaker is to make that stuff work. Almodóvar has flashbacks in his movies, but you never feel bogged down. And the subject of his films is often the hold the past has on his characters. Like in Parallel Mothers. And in that case, the past is the past of an entire country. I think he’s aware of the pitfalls of the flashback because he understands it as a generic device. You have to interrogate the existence of the flashback.
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Editor’s Note: This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. You can and should buy Hamrah’s book “The Earth Dies Streaming” here.