By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Pantheon's labyrinth: Adrian Martin on responsiblity and the cricket
“[W]riting about film is always about capturing fugitive sensibilities as they form and die, at a very rapid rate, within the cultural sphere,” writes Aussie film cricket Adrian Martin in an email exchange on 
“Responsibility and Criticism” with Spanish magazine Mirades de cine as published by the Italian film mag Cinemascope. In the 14-page email exchange [PDF download], Martin also considers the future of film criticism as practiced on the internet, his own experiences with classical and contemporary cinephilia, musing on Abel Ferrara’s Mary, and a tidy but heartbreaking anecdote about seeing Rio Bravo in a movie palace in the suburbs of Melbourne when he was 20, “like a poignant scene from a Victor Erice film.” It’s the most lucid and bracing exploration I’ve read in some time about what ought to be going on before and after the lights go down on the professional film cricket. “[N]o film is truly old, or in the past! Every cinephile should have the experience of watching a silent film. I had this experience watching some Jean Epstein films recently—and suddenly feeling confronted with something that is still, today, newer and more modern than we ourselves are as spectators. There is a good, simple reason for this: the cinema is always a laboratory, a field of experimentation: experimentation with image, sound, performance, gesture, light, colour, music, rhythm, storytelling, etc. No experiment is ever exhausted, and no aesthetic or cultural problem is solved for all time. So, when we return to old films, we therefore see that they are completely contemporary to us and our concerns, if we are open to the traces of experimentation in them—there are always new ideas in old films. I do not regard the ‘cinema of the past’ as something neat, clean, classical, canonical. Cinema is always ‘at the crossroads’, at every moment of its existence, and so are we.
That is why the art of programming is important: placing the present and past cinema always into a fruitful encounter, or an Eisensteinian dialectical clash… [W]e must get further than just ‘personal tastes and preferences’! I deeply believe that 
taste is a kind of prison for oneself—when a critic finds himself or herself always rigidly repeating the same opinions, the same positions, the same likes and dislikes (that is the kind of bad posture which Pauline Kael bequeathed to criticism). Critics should feel free to bring in their own emotional reactions to films—it is hard to keep them out of writing—but the phenomenon known as the ‘gut feeling’ or gut reaction can become a terrible end in itself: ‘this film makes me angry or it makes me happy, so it’s a rotten film or a great film, and I’m not going to discuss it any further.’ The important thing is always argument, analysis, logic. I have an irrational side (critics need it), but my rational side believes in logical demonstration: if you can prove to me that what are saying about a film makes internal sense, if you can. marshal the evidence from the film itself to back up what you say, then I too can be persuaded to disregard my own first gut reaction and explore that film again in a new, more open way.” [Soooooo much more at the link.]
