By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Jump count: every issue of JUMP CUT online
Over at GreenCine, David Hudson alerts that every essay ever published by “JUMP CUT: A Review of Contemporary Cinema” is now online, including the Winter 2006 issue, with 31 pieces, including “new worlds of documentary. Crouching Tiger. “Buffy,” “Smallville,” The Woodsman, Que Viva Mexico! and Terri Schiavo videos.” From the editors’ note in the first issue, in 1974: “As you see from what you hold, we are using an extremely inexpensive format. 
Quite simply we are subsidizing it ourselves because we believe JUMP CUT should exist, and that what our writers have to say needs saying. By using this format we gain the opportunity to publish frequently enough to live up to our claim of being a review of contemporary cinema, freedom from the problems of institutional and patron interference and capitalist intent, and a low subscription cost that will allow our readers to subscribe for the price of a first run feature in a large city.” Writing 32 years ago, the editors assert in their non-manifesto, “It becomes increasingly obvious that film criticism in the U.S. is operating in a void that grows larger and larger and that this most modern of art forms relies on a particularly inadequate aesthetics. This is especially objectionable now that film has become so popular on and off campus. There is little satisfaction in seeing this booming interest in film when one surveys the new parade of coffee table books, plot summary analyses, vacuous interviews with this or that director, and so forth that passes for film criticism and scholarship… We want to learn to see film in a social and political context—its practical and political uses, the economics of film making and distribution, and the functions of film in America today. We also want to expand the usual realm of film criticism to include video which is more and more often being considered as a screen art.
Finally, we want to develop a political film criticism; that is, a film criticism which does not accept as binding the bourgeois idea that art is somehow separate and detached from the social life of women and men. Films often entertain, but, more importantly, they manipulate our image of people, of our society, of our world. We feel that it is important to reveal this manipulation in our most popular and successful films. We stand for a political film criticism because understanding film has meaning only when we are also trying to change the world.
