Jonathan Rosenbaum introduces his 1997 compilation, “Movies as Poltiics,” with an essay entitled “How to Live in Air Conditioning.” While a constant of Rosenbaum’s writing is the assertion that American business conspires against the distribution of interesting films—”vividly reflected in the movies we see and the ways that we see them”—he was one of the first critics to consider what the growth of film on video might mean. “Whatever name or interpretation we give to this climate,” he wrote over 20 years ago, “we all feel that something is in the process of ending—unlesss we feel that it has ended already… I don’t think we can call it cinema in the old sense.” In 1999, Godfrey Cheshire did a surmise in his epic “The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema”: “[T]he overthrow of film by television–which is what this amounts to–will be related to a dissolution of cinema esthetics and the enforced close of cinema’s era in the history of technological arts.” Cheshire updates at The House Next Door, in conversation with Jeremiah Kipp: “DVDs have been in some ways very positive in the sense that people have an idea of film culture with the kind of presence and precedence that literature has. They can look at Carl Theodor Dreyer as a great artist; they can purchase the Dreyer box set and have it on their library walls, so maybe even their kids will watch it with that idea in mind. There’s a way film history is being packaged now that definitely has a positive educational value.” James Wolcott‘s posted an intriguing contemporary anecdote that extends Cheshire’s point: “Saturday I was standing in the checkout line at the Barnes & Noble across from Lincoln Center, which was lined with DVDs for last-minute, late-decision purchase. But the DVDs weren’t the usual Blockbuster hits. One whole rack [contained] a cluster of Fassbinder movies. I have to admit I did a mild double take…” More Wolcott below, as well as links to similar reflections from Susan Sontag and Manohla Dargis.

“Even if I had been able to foresee DVDs and digital downloads back in the Seventies when Fassbinder was pumping out films as fast as Joyce Carol Oates novels, I never would have reckoned that someday they would be handy checkout items—collectibles. Even then Fassbinder movies were relative rarities on the art circuit until the breakthrough hit The Marriage of Maria Braun, and these B&N items weren’t even the best-known…–we’re talking Satan’s Brew and Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven… What it italicized for me is how much of what’s considered underground/fringe/outre/rarified migrates… into the mainstream until it’s part of the cultural ecology… The other thing that struck me about the Fassbinder checkout films is how well I remember them even though I haven’t seen most of them since they were originally released, including lesser-known titles that… are seldom reshown, such as Chinese Roulette, Beware of a Holy Whore, and Fox and His Friends.”Picking one of the most memorable scenes in Fassbinder’s many movies, Wolcott quotes Manny Farber: “The final scene—Fox lying dead in a garishly lit subway, his pockets being rifled by a pair of twelve-year olds—is appallingly unremarked. Two of his ex-lovers passing by trying not to notice, the cobalt-blue tiled station, combine to stamp Fox’s unimportance.” … Also in the checkout rack was The Bitter of Tears of Petra Von Kant, another movie I’ve seen in its entirety only once and yet three decades later can still hear and picture Petra’s calling her lover’s name like a crying refrain (“Karin… Karin!”), the mute servant out of Genet, the drag-queen bad-taste dream of a boudoir with silent mannequins functioning as an ironic chorus as the lovelorn lesbian drama pouts and frets its hour across the stage until the figurative curtain is brought down to the croon of “The Great Pretender,” a tableau as newsprinted in my memory as the scratchy-opera-record languorous-cigarette interlude in [Jean Eustache’s] miserabilist masterpiece The Mother and the Whore. I picked a copy of Petra out of the rack… and slow-footed it to the cash register, making my own impulse buy… I’m also piqued by the mystery of why some movies that didn’t mean that much to me at the time… have shown more staying power in the mental attic than many movies that did. Or is the sloven force of the mid-Seventies itself that won’t let go? I don’t feel nostalgic about Fassbinder, but I feel nostalgic about the juicy-rotten period that made a Fassbinder possible—and a CBGB’s too.” And don’t forget Susan Sontag‘s 1996 “The Decay of Cinema”; the link here is to the text of the New York Times version, which edited out many of her cross-references. A slightly more timely 2004 essay by Manohla Dargis, commenting in part on Sontag’s ruminations, is here.

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