Inside NYC's thriving cinephile underground

31:52And you do come to feeling a certain deep affiliation with everything. But for me, some of the very fun stuff to dig into are the pieces that are covering areas I don't really know a hell of a lot. I would say Miss Weston's piece on the black kind of haute couture designer Zelda Wynne Valdez is really special, particularly as somebody who just doesn't know a single fucking thing about high fashion. And I would also say the conversation between Dean Hurley, who was a close collaborator with David Lynch in the last 15 years of his life as a sound designer, and Dean talks at length with Ben Burtt, who is the LucasArts sound guru.

32:48And it's this very curious, you know, somebody coming from a sort of experimental background sound working with Lynch. And then Bert, who has created the soundscapes of some of the most popular films that have ever existed, these absolutely sort of titanic popular culture monuments. And they just get on like a house on fire. And it's just great to kind of be able to sit back and kind of listen to these guys talk shop together. And, you know, it's a very, unfortunately so often an overlooked aspect of filmmaking i mean read reams upon reams of film criticism how fucking often does sound design come up almost never so to be able to give space to people who are so articulate about their craft and to hopefully allow people who maybe haven't given a great deal of thought to what perhaps subconsciously the sonic, the oral aspect of a movie, what it does and how it affects the product in ways that maybe you don't actively register.

34:01I'm very happy to have been able to do that. If you like what you're hearing on this episode, there's a place where you can join the conversation. It's called Cujoplex, and it's a private online hangout zone on Discord where smart, cool weirdos just like you. You know, people who like talking about the evolving state of independent culture can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day. We've had some great conversations lately about creative economies, media theory, AI, politics, the future of journalism, and even the records and TV shows we've been obsessing over this year. Some of our chats have even inspired episode ideas.

34:43You can get access to Cujoplex along along with our monthly bonus episodes, by signing up for a paid subscription over at our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. On this pod, we talk a lot about the evolving state of music criticism, because as Emily mentioned, we both got our start as music critics, and specifically we get into a lot about how the economic models that undergird both music and writing about music impact the form that music journalism takes. I'm curious to hear more from you about what that trajectory has looked like on the film side of things. We're both pretty struck by the fact that you both have been talking about this actually kind of maybe being a flourishing time for that.

35:26And hearing you talk about how a lot of younger people seem to be really excited about film and the type of stuff that you're doing. You know, wondering, like, why do you think that is? I wouldn't say flourishing, certainly in terms of as a possible vocation. It's probably never been a worse time for film criticism in that regard. Just like any kind of journals. Yeah. But in terms of what that means for quality, it becomes a practice of enthusiasms, you know? Right. There's very little that's completely like serviceable, functional about it. It's more like you really got to do this. You really want to do this if you're going to do it because it's not like a vocational.

36:10Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'll give one example. There's a new collectively run in so far as I can tell magazine. It's I mean, it's more of a newspaper after the fashion of the old La Gazette du Cinema called Narrow Margins, who put on a small series at Anthology Film Archives when Luc Mollet, the great French filmmaker Luc Mollet, was in town. Boulay came out and introduced a film in connection with it, and they were hawking it out in the lobby. And their first issue is devoted to Boulay and Vittorio Carrafabi, the Italian filmmaker. And nobody, I can assure you, is going to make a fucking cent from making this thing.

36:55But it's awesome that it exists. And honestly, I value the existence of a narrow margins infinitely more than I value the output of the staff film critic of, let's say, the Sacramento Bee from the 1990s. you know, a lot of the like legacy media positions that have ceased to exist. I mean, I'm sorry for the people who lost their livelihood. But in terms of what I value in criticism, I don't feel like it's been a unendurable loss. So, you know, I think what is almost certainly the case is that today criticism means less in terms of affecting the overall financial success or failure of a film, not across the board.

37:46I think with independent films, with import films at the festival level, certainly a critic can still move the needle, but you know, a thumbs up or a thumbs down is not a death sentence any longer. Most trailers, posters for multiplex movies. As often as not, it'll be a tomatometer, the Rotten Tomatoes tomatometer, as I like to call it. It'll be a Rotten Tomatoes certified fresh, or it will be some like pull quotes taken from social media. And it is what it is from my own part. The influencer thing has never been what attracted me to the vocation. It was an opportunity to look closer at a art form that interested me greatly and to get under the hood of works that I responded to strongly, either positively or negatively, or perhaps not entirely understanding how I was responding to them.

38:55So I don't really like mourn the loss of the critic wielding some enormous amount of influence because I've never particularly mattered as a critic. I don't think that's true. I mean, you know, to a very small cadre of readers, maybe that's nice. That's wonderful. Of course, you know, I don't want to be like shouting into the void, but it's not a tragedy to me. It's like, oh, you know, the incredible power that I once wielded is slipping away. It's like, never had it never will whatever i think nick and i have slightly different perspectives on this because he's more lived the experience as a working day critic and it's true that most of the people that we see these days we highly respect but that managed to maintain that position it's still very much a sort of hamster wheel freelance occupation where they're often traveling all the time for festivals because that's you know most of the place where you can actually get good paid work.

39:52But even then you're forced to review and file copies so fast because of the demands of the news cycle. And it's not a particularly appealing lifestyle model for a lot of people anymore. I think the sort of version of the critic is, you know, someone who could live in their hometown and engage with movies as they came out and play a role in cultural criticism, but, you know, still like have a life has kind of disappeared. But from an editor perspective, because that's more what I've worked on. I find it harder and harder to discover new writers because the spaces in which they were coming up are sort of disappearing.

40:28And I also just have a sort of personal sadness of a lot of my favorite writers are just writing less. A lot of them have dropped their output because they're simply turning to other work. And there's a few people, you know, Nick has been maintaining a substack for some time, but... Hitfully at best. Well, you know, still, there's many others who just sort of say, you know what, this is too hard now. And I think that's actually a great loss. yeah I really feel you on that too and I think there's there's so many analogs to everything you guys have both just said to I think the music space as well especially when it comes to you know not I don't think a lot of people mourn the loss of the aspect of criticism that kind of served as a function of whether should you go buy this album or not that's never been interesting to me hating on a record has never been interesting to me unless it serves the some broader like contextualization of like why it's you know talking about why something is bad you know although kella fasana just wrote that thing about how critics aren't mean anymore lamenting that critics aren't mean anymore right yeah and it's you know it's it's true because i think a lot of people still i'd say even more so like love to hate critics for that reason like as if any kind of arts critic still has the power to really make or break someone's career like the way they'll pile on to people for not liking an album like as if that's gonna like stop that album from being successful you know but I think the problem is a lot of people have then just thrown the baby out with the bath water and not seen the other functions that criticism can hold which is you know contextualizing engaging making you think about something differently maybe getting you interested in something you wouldn't have otherwise been interested in yeah I mean apropos the like music journalism has gone nice piece and it's addressed in the piece I believe but when opportunities particularly for paid work are fewer and fewer and i can certainly say this is the case for me like why the fuck am i going to spend time with something i have total disdain for like why why am i going to spend my free time telling you that fantastic four first steps or whatever it's called why am i going to spend time telling you that's not good if if the platforms are going to continue to become fewer and fewer.

42:42It's kind of only natural that you're going to see more a criticism of enthusiasms more than just like tear down jobs. And, you know, if somebody wanted to throw me a thousand bucks to say, you know, Fantastic Four first step sucks dick, I'd be happy to do that. But in my own time, with the limited hours I have left to me on this planet, that's not how I would opt to spend them. Exactly. but that that motivating factor of like where can you even find the opportunities what are the motivations for how those opportunities arise or don't arise you know I think resonates with me in terms of what you were saying Annabelle about just being ashamed that you're just not hearing quite as much in sort of a raw way from the people that you want to be hearing about and as frequently I mean I know that that's even true for just like myself like I just don't write or do that much criticism anymore not because I don't want to or don't have opinions but it's just like I gotta grind on other things so I can have health insurance, you know?

43:39Well, I mean, I think for myself, it's also just a matter of age. And I was, as Annabelle noted, a workaday critic for probably the better part of 15 years where I was writing both about things that I cared for or was moved by in some way and things that left me indifferent or disgusted. And I'm glad that I did that, I certainly think I'm a better critic for having done so. And it helped me to articulate things that I value and things that I don't value in films. But at a certain point, as one slides into middle age, it's like, yeah, I kind of know what I hate. I kind of know what I'm attracted to.

44:23And the surprises are going to be less and less with the passage of time. So I'm going to try to focus on the things that stir me in some way other than making me physically ill. And then the magazine is actually a beautiful like therapy outlet for us in that way. You know, it's like you get to create the little utopian space where we're not talking about some trash franchise that no one actually is interested in at all other than a committee. But actually, you know, some beautiful films that maybe were made 40 years ago in Hungary that are worth spending your afternoon watching. But in terms of like the community that still exists around film, I was interested in hearing that you said that like the younger and younger people are going to the cinema.

45:11It sort of like bucks what I've heard elsewhere. Well, first of all, I'm wondering, like, can you explain like why you think this is like a post-pandemic thing? Why are people actually, despite all of these factors we're discussing, kind of gravitating back to the cinema? Part of my suspicion is that every rising generation, consciously or unconsciously, gravitates toward things that the generation ahead of them have just roundly rejected. And I despise generational generalities, but I'm going to engage in one anyways. Please do. After, you know, after the fuck ass trash millennials, which purportedly I'm one of them.

45:54I'm not certain of that. The absolute most fuck ass trash garbage fucking trash bag fucking horrible generation ever. We fucking bitches who suck so fucking hard and who just like fucking mainline this garbage serial television and is completely fucking sold out the physical world, the brick and mortar world. rotted their fucking brains on their phones just completely spazzed out we're just such shit i think the like rising generation takes a look at this complete pile of fucking trash and it's like you know what these people had such disdain for like the world they were born into they had such disdain for among many other things the cinema like you know what maybe movies are fucking cool actually because if these fucking absolute losers turn their back on this art form like maybe there's something there god knows i do not want to be one of these brain rot fucking trash bags like watching succession which is a good show but like watching succession while cooking dinner from blue apron yeah yeah also like like scrolling twitter generation yeah just fucking kickball and mccarran park in 2004 most playpen ass fucking small bean fucking bitches and i yeah i include myself in this designation i i've fucked up somehow i fucked up just tell us how you really feel nick clap your hands say yeah man no stomp clap hey for you i mean yeah it's like honestly like this 20 revival looks cool retrospectively third wave ska looks cool we are getting i don't know if they're getting into ska but i think they are getting into like woodstock woodstock 99 style fair well i am a little younger than nick and so i think i'm not so personally invested in his particular diagnosis maybe um well you're actually you're the worst i'm ex-millennial cusp which has produced some people of value you are you're absolutely the worst well as the culprit of everything that has come where where where are you on the millennial spectrum annabelle uh am i a millennial i'm i'm born in 1988 so does that make me millennial oh yeah well you're prime girl you're prime time you're prime time like Again, the Lugani.

48:26Crime cut. That's for Les Mignons. Yeah, we're the perpetrators. Yeah, I'm more kind of, I'm on some diplo. As the voice of my generation, I would say that there is also, I would like to think, a feeling of sort of scarcity, a sense of everything that is really at risk and under threat because we have seen so much fall apart for our eyes. I think like we have a conscious memory of things that were there that were no longer there. And that's quite both like upsetting, but also motivating so that when there is actually something cool going on, you get excited and you get energized. And so, for example, when if you're grown up and you've just been streaming crap or you try to go the multiplex and you respond to absolutely nothing you see on screen.

49:16and then you go to say Metrograph or some other beautiful rep theater in New York and we see a beautiful old classic film and and you feel all the feelings that people feel and have for centuries and why cinema is just so great then it actually feels really special and I think also a lot of theaters at least in New York are putting energy into even like ramping up that experience you know not like sort of for RX things but they have a lot of guests doing introductions doing Q &As you know at Metrograph there's a bar so you can come and have a drink afterwards with your friends and the whole thing is just actually a very pleasurable experience which is the complete opposite of sitting alone in your bed streaming something at 1.4 times speed for eight hours you know like it's actually just nice just that I have a little bit of faith in humanity that they're responding to that and being like this is a cool thing that we should do and protect so.

50:07I think back to you know nick and i first met an insanely long time ago at kim's video but how you know when i was young and growing up in new york if you were a teen who liked weird shit you went tost mark's place and that was where kim's video was well initially i think the internet sort of felt like a place where you could easily connect with as much esoteric stuff as existed in the entire world it's just become so diffuse and difficult to sort of situate yourself. And I wonder if that's sort of part of it, too. Like, you want to be able to have these like physical places where you go straight to the source.

50:44And like cinema is kind of a nice rallying point for that. But I'm kind of curious, like, what does building community around film look like now? Is it places like Metrograph? Do you feel like you have that community in the same way that you might have in the past? Yeah, I mean, to me, you know, the world of 20 years ago that you're talking about, the world of the video store, the brick and mortar world, that remains to me a really usable past. And obviously, you know, the way we exist in the world has changed vastly over the last two decades. But I still think that any community building that's going to have lasting value is going to have to, in no small way, take part in the physical world.

51:37I mean, and I think you can see this more and more with the ongoing, as they call it in shittification of every aspect of online. We can certainly make use of the internet and it has manifold uses. God knows I'm on it very often. But if one doesn't have that person to person kind of relationship, that to me is not a community. And I think even though so many of these spaces have disappeared, you're starting to see a active pushback, either places that have weathered the storm and kind of have found a second life or new places that are cropping up like mushrooms. When the movie that I wrote, The Sweet East, came out stateside, the director, Sean Price Williams, and myself toured with it very extensively because we had a dinky little distributor.

52:39God bless them. Utopia did a great job. But the only way we felt that we could optimize our possibilities was to really like tour it like Black Flag. And in the course of that, you know, got to connect with people and with institutions all around the US. And the future is in some ways, to my mind, not wholly dissimilar from the world of yesterday. I mean, this is my shout out monologue. I would just like the Videodrome Video Store in Atlanta and Matt Booth, Beyond Video in Baltimore, Eric Allen Hatch, their theaters in, you know, not necessarily, let's say, first tier cities in terms of population, some with institutional backing, Speed Museum in Louisville, shout out to the Cleveland Cinematheque, some that are kind of more on a micro cinema model, many of which have just cropped up in the last decade or so, Sun Cinema in D.C., Beacon in Seattle, Nightlight in Akron, Ohio, the Peripatetic Chicago Film Society.

53:45And they're thinking, you know, this is not a phenomenon limited to the United States by any stretch of the imagination. Shout out to Static Vision in Australia. Yeah, Static Vision. Shout out to my boys at Movie Juice in Adelaide, where we had a great screening. Cinéma Le Clef in Paris, Potemkin in Revoir, Videodrome 2 in Marseille, Badlands Collective in London. And, you know, there's large swaths of the world that I just haven't really had an opportunity to go to. But there's a thing happening and it's a heartening thing for all of the absolutely dismal news that comes to us. And certainly it's not limited to the cultural sphere every day.

54:27This is a thing that I feel is very, like, cool and exciting. And I think it's going to continue to flourish. So again, the Internet, it's great as a tool for organizing and for people in like widely disparate places to keep in contact and to, you know, collaborate and work together. But it's not a replacement, finally, for, you know, actual human interaction. And also, if you have the opportunity to actually be in a room with people, they act less fucking weird. that they do. Yeah, I totally agree. I'm really seeing it here in LA. Shout out vidiots. Yeah, hell yeah. Yeah, when you talk about Second Life, I mean, that's just been totally beautiful story to see them come back as a, they were a video rental store that came back a few years ago as a nonprofit foundation and it's a cinema, but it's also still a video rental store and there's events and there's a micro cinema and they're always playing Stop Making Sense, which I feel like kind of captures the whole spirit of the movement, which is because that's a movie you want to see in person.

55:35You dance. It's a great movie to see at any time because you see it with people and you're up and you're moving and you're participating in it. And I think that's like, that's everything that we're talking about. And they got a bar and I like always run into people there. I've had friends host birthday parties there. And now it's like on the weekend, like the top thing I check to do, I'm like, what's going on at Viddyots? You know, who do I want to go with? Like it's exciting. It's greater than the sum of its parts. It's not like just going to a movie theater to see a movie anymore. Yeah, I think if you've lived through the last 20 years, I don't want to be a total Luddite about this, but you really think the internet is going to preserve the aspects of culture that we hold dear?

56:16If you think that at this point, you've had a fucking lobotomy. I mean, it's been so completely infested by corporate MBA fucking just like disgusting, like hyper drive capitalist mentality at this point. And it's not to say that any of the things we're talking about are completely outside that, but it's an underground economy. And like a robust underground economy to me is the only way in which we have any kind of useful future. It's in the streets, man. To paraphrase the opening of Mean Streets, you don't make up for your sins online. You do it in the streets, you do it at home. Rest is bullshit and you know it.

56:57And the other cool thing about it is, speaking generalizations, but cinema culture is not wildly elitist or selective in any way. If you just show up to a number of screenings enough times, in the same way I'm sure as if you went in to rent videos enough times at Kim's, people will just start to recognize you. They'll give you a little nod. And after a period of time, you're probably old buddies, like because you're all, you know, just hanging out at the same movies all the time. It is a very sort of natural community that pops up and fosters itself. And it's really heartening. This is one of the bigger questions I was thinking about since I got the copy of the magazine, which is that, you know, launching a print only magazine under the umbrella of a larger institution like Metrograph is, I feel like, perhaps part of a new model that we're seeing emerge around arts journalism.

57:47and criticism in general. Another example that comes to mind for me is Maggot Brain magazine, which is published by Jack White's Third Man Records. And that's also like print only and, you know, very well curated, a really nice mix of like high and low, really interesting. It's kind of incredible to me that in this day and age, to be able to hear about an organization that, you know, invests in an independent film magazine or invests in an independent music magazine. I'm wondering, has Metrograph cracked a formula maybe for supporting independent film and independent film criticism in an age where, you know, both of those things feel actively endangered?

58:25And we're also wondering, are there other institutions that you've been involved with that have maybe played a similar role? Or like, is there a formula for like, what could work? Yeah, like, is this the new model? Like, instead of like a publishing company or a parent company, is it maybe now the like cultural institution that handles this arm of it? I mean, we're two issues in, so I'm very far from feeling confident that we've cracked any formula. But what I will say is that we're incredibly fortunate that we have the backing that we do and that Metrograph has put the resources that they've put in to this, which have allowed us to put out what we hope is a first rate product and to like pay people a more than competitive rate.

59:13And, you know, we hope this doesn't grind to a halt anytime in the near future. But, you know, the fact of the matter is the track record isn't awesome. We're trying to buck trends a little bit. And, you know, I think that is kind of in the spirit that the theater was opened in, which was 2016 now, which was a period when there was so much doom and gloom prognostication about the future of the cinema as a physical space. and like honest to god you won't believe this but it really was happening there's uh you know the same fucking jerk offs who were uh proselytizing for ai like 10 years ago everything's gonna be a vr arcade in like five years everything will be vr everybody will be wearing heads all the movie theaters will be vr fucking surprise surprise that didn't happen augmented reality the kind of collective wisdom at the time is that you know the movie theater and it still is to some degree with that you know that was going to be something that was going to go the way of the dodo and the theater opened and it's still there and certainly nobody when we announced the first issue of the magazine the sort of broad consensus wasn't like you know how to make a ton of money put out a biannual film magazine that's kind of has a really esoteric slant oftentimes.

1:00:54So I don't know. Here's hoping. Yeah, I would add as a model, it's also been really interesting to sort of watch it evolve over these two issues. Partly Nick and I myself have both previously started our own little some degree scrappy, you know, DIY publications in the past. And we both know from, you know, starting something from absolute scratch that you reach out to people and, you know, maybe you have a certain reputation or things that you can show. But it's really it's a lot harder to bring people in and get them even to sort of understand what you're trying to do. One of the things about this publication being under the helm of Metrograph is that filmmakers, artists, people, many of them who already have pre-existing relationships with the theater.

1:01:38The moment we write to them, they're like, oh, I absolutely understand this. I want to be involved. I'm, you know, I'm so glad this exists, which is great for us because a lot of that sort of work of establishing ourselves, our identity has kind of been done for us while we're obviously, you know, very much trying to hone a curatorial voice. But yeah, it's been really curious to see that work. And yeah, quite heartening. I think like other sort of institutions, you know, the closest things you really have are more historic of, like with film, at least you have, you know, film comment, which no longer is a print publication.

1:02:13Now it's just a digital newsletter. That's under the auspices of the film at Lincoln Center. And in the UK, Sight and Sound magazine is under the BFI. But both of those, you know, that comes with a sort of, yeah, institutional bent that I think brackets a bit what they can and can't do, where we've been given a bit more freedom.

1:02:49in about you previously worked as a co-founder of fireflies press just i believe on more contemporary cinema. And it coincidentally put out a series of books on the cinema of the 2000s, which Nick contributed to with his long essay on Goodbye Dragon Inn. After putting together that series and sort of in the spirit of everything we've been talking about, which is like the world as it was 20 years ago, what made the art such an interesting decade in cinema? Well, one of the interesting things about that series, it's sort of the way it's played out actually touches into so much stuff we've already discussed today but basically it was commissioned we came up with the idea my co-editor giovanni makini camia and i came up with this concept for a series of 10 books each would be approximately 20 25 000 words yeah a long essay bordering on a certain novella size each would be by a different writer about one film and together there would be a film released in the year 2000, the year 2001, the year 2002, 2003, so that when you had all 10 books together, it covered the decade.

1:04:02And it was therefore called the decadent editions. And we commissioned this series pre-COVID. And we had a little bit of money from some grants in Australia, where I'm from, to get it off the ground. And Nick was actually the first book that we published in this on the 2003 film Goodbye Dragon Inn. But as many things that people plan to do before COVID, life kind of got in the way for a lot of writers. And so despite that period of time, like being many, many years now, we were actually only five of the 10 books have so far been published. And that is partly because, you know, while the series, we basically went out to just our favorite critics, people we really admire, we really wanted to work with.

1:04:52We offered them a tiny, tiny advance, as Nick can attest. And, I mean, lucky for us, but sort of sad reality for film criticism is that a lot of them said yes, because at least as it's been communicated to me, they were also grateful to sort of have the chance to go long, to explore criticism in a sort of more creative, conceptual way. And just at a particular time when really spaces, publications online, and imprint were sort of disappearing for any little extra room for creativity, let's say. So to actually have this opportunity, and we just said, you know, do whatever you want. Obviously, we're going to edit thoroughly and things like this, but we're giving you the freedom here to explore this one film in however you choose.

1:05:32And so, yeah, a lot of our favorite, favorite writers all said yes. Melissa Anderson, who's head critic of Four Columns, Dennis Lim, who's the director of film at the Lincoln Center. The last title published was by Christine Smallwood. who many will know is now works at Harper's as the reviews editor, is a great novelist. And so we're incredibly grateful to like work with these writers in that way. But I think the series itself is sort of a product of everything that has been happening in criticism. And then, yeah, to go back to your question about the 2000s itself, I think it is that that very basic thing of it's still at that time, the 2000s felt like fresh and contemporary and, you know, know, a little bit like fun and flashy, but was just far back enough that writers could consider the film that they were discussing, like with a level of critical distance.

1:06:21They could re-evaluate it or platform films that, you know, this number of years having passed, they felt maybe hadn't got the attention they deserved, which is just sort of a nice space to be working in. And then to be honest, we didn't really plan it out that much. It was just quite fortuitous, but the 2000s as a decade as it happens is a pretty fascinating time for cinema you have a lot happening and nick particularly explores this in his book but you you cover the arc of digital cinema transforming from being a sort of fun thing that some filmmakers were like experimenting with at the start of the decade to basically like by decades end and you have in success i don't know like a film like avatar it's 2009 where digital is basically supreme and analog cinema starts being really seen as it's almost like a luxurious or indulgent thing and then the films themselves that are made in this time are often sort of responding to that transition moment whether it's filmmakers feeling like liberated to explore new technologies or as in the film that nick writes about by dragon in you have them the actual film is like nostalgic for a world that it feels is like disappearing before their eyes so it's yeah just super fun but i think also taps back into the stuff we were speaking about before of you know being of a certain age having experienced the world having experienced art in a certain form just that gap in time is yeah really interesting to jump into but yes hopefully the forthcoming five books still to come in the series will further this conversation yeah there is there is a like old world is dying new world struggles to be born aspect of that decade in cinema that in retrospect becomes clearer and clearer and and nick your book was especially kind of focused on that sentiment, right?

1:08:05Yeah, yeah, very much so. Yeah, and that is in fact how I first met Annabelle. And when I took a slightly enlarged role on at Metrograph dealing with editorial, she had done such a fine job, unexceeded in her field. I think anybody who's worked with her would agree. I was very, very happy to have the opportunity to import her from the Antipodes. That's how I got to be in America. Oh, I love that. It's great. Where the party never stops. But I think it also then kind of connects a bit about what Nick was saying earlier about the sense of film criticism becoming a practice of enthusiasms. While both the work that Nick did on that book and that I did on editing it was largely unrenumerated, a completely pleasurable experience and one that has now brought me here and created all these other opportunities, allowed me to connect with all of these communities and work with incredible writers.

1:09:07So, you know, the dividends are just, they play out differently. So Nick, it was super fun for me as a former coworker of both yours and Sean Price-Williams to sit down and watch The Sweet East. Can you tell us a little bit about how that project came together and what it was like to make the jump from critic to screenwriter? I didn't know if you had always wanted to be a screenwriter or you just sort of fell into it. I mean, that's, I went to a production program, an undergraduate at Wright State University in Fairbourn, Ohio. and I think I had wanted to make movies before writing about them.

1:09:50And the way to get from point A to point B, coming from southwestern Ohio, without anything in the way of industry connections, I just didn't know how to do it. And I think Sean's story is not totally dissimilar. He didn't start out wanting to be a cinematographer. He wanted to be a director, of course. sexier in some regards, but also didn't have the most prestigious of academic pedigrees. So we both wound up doing other things for 20 years, which in both cases, I think we're really happy that we did. It's not like this was some sour grapes, like, you know, shitty life that either of us led. And incidentally, I'd forgotten you made the move to Mondo and that you would have worked with Sean as well.

1:10:39I worked with, yeah, I probably worked at Mondo more than anywhere else. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Incidentally, did you see the stupid caught stealing movie? I did not, but I saw it in the trailer that there's the Avenue A Kim's video. Now, I watched it, let's see, Night Before Last, and I want you to watch it only for that shot, because I think they moved it to the next building, because the Juicy Lucy's awning is on the left side which was not the case and i need you to confirm this for me okay on the left when you're facing when you're seeing image exactly anyways as as to making the transition you know it's as simple as sean had gotten to a point where he really wanted to try to direct again he co-directed a short feature some 10 years previously but he really wanted to try to do that and on the basis of our having known each other for a goodly long time.

1:11:41And knowing that we had a kind of shared sensibility regarding certain things, he kind of came to the conclusion that maybe I would be able to write something that he would be enthusiastic about directing. And he asked me to. And after a little trial and error, I finally came up with something that hit the spot. And I think also just knowing that Sean had a certain track record gave me the confidence that maybe now 20 years on, it would be possible to do this. And I just it felt so, so far away. You know, when I was when we first met when I was in my early 20s, like the thing I certainly wanted to do.

1:12:23But criticism seemed accessible in a way that filmmaking wasn't. wasn't but you know well into uh the cusp of 40 suddenly seemed like okay i kind of feel like i have sufficient proximity where you know this isn't something that'll just sit in a drawer forever so yeah it's simple as that did you feel like your critic brain was dictating what the film should look like or enacting ideas of what you value as a critic or did you guys just have like something to say about it's a very like topical film was it more about like were you both interested in exploring certain ideas about the present i mean i think before my being a critic or before sean being a cinematographer we were both people you know young people who just had a very deep attachment to films to this art form and we wanted to make a movie that both of us wanted to see of course, and something that featured certain things that we hadn't been seeing in a lot of recent films, or in some cases that we just hadn't seen in films.

1:13:31And some of that was thematic, or structural, or aesthetic, or tonal. And some of it was just a matter of kind of characters, people, and especially like places. Like, you know, it was important to us to shoot on the mall in Washington, D.C. where both people had spent a fair amount of time in D.C. when we were younger. And the mall, the Hirshhorn Museum, these were really important places to us. And just like, why don't you ever see the mall in a movie? Or shooting at Tarantula Hill, Twig Harper's place in Baltimore, where I imagine you may have had some occasion to go in your storied career as a music journalist.

1:14:13Yeah. And part of it was just the excitement of being able to put these things into a film and i think especially you know as cinema becomes more and more a digital medium and concomitantly more and more untethered from the old-fashioned bazanian indexical recording of the physical world thing i i find myself just drawn more and more to getting certain aspects of the world that that we live in i'm not that interested i find in like world building out of the like pixel ether um you know the world that we live in is pretty interesting it's kind of enough for me and uh so i mean i think that that was a big part of the impetus and were there any films that you guys were taking inspiration from that go back to like what would have been on the employee picks shelf at the store or something.

1:15:13I mean, it's like a lot of the writing that exists about the movie because we're American dudes and because it's shot on film tends to gravitate toward this like, oh, yeah, it's a throwback to the 70s American Road movie and that just couldn't have less been of interest to either of us. But I don't think there was any specific model or if there were models, they tended to be literary rather than cinematic for me. And the rest is like, obviously, we're both compulsive film viewers and have, in the course of our lives, picked up a lot of unusual vocabulary from this. And certainly that stuff works its way in.

1:16:03And I was really gratified when we played the movie in Cincinnati, where I'm from, at the Woodworth Theater, where my oldest friends, my buddy Adam Williams, who's also one of the great cinephiles, came out to watch it. And after the screening was like, it felt like a Czechoslovakian movie or something. And I'm like, yes, fucking thank you. Exactly. This has nothing to do with Easy Rider. like we're on we're on some Jan Nimitz shit so yeah I it's it's a real mulligan stew of a movie it's great no I really really enjoyed it thank you so we've talked about how you know now is kind of actually a pretty exciting time for independent filmmaking and film culture in New York who are some players that we who do not live in new york should be paying attention to or are there some films that we should see now's your time to plug your friends or yeah yeah i mean michael michael michael imbalandic has already been mentioned uh jason j gianpietro i know annabelle was very enthusiastic about joanna arno's last movie right yeah the feeling that the time for doing something has passed i believe yeah yeah and i i haven't seen louise weird's castration movie part one but i'm going to recommend it sight unseen hearing great things about that because of a our friend elizabeth perchall's involvement with it and b because making a four and a half hour movie and calling it part one is just very funny um yeah and i mean i think i think the interesting thing is a lot of, particularly stateside, the coolest work really exists off the radar of your Sundances and your South by Southwest.

1:18:02You know, this is not to be like Mr. Too Cool for School or anything like that, but it is just a plain fact that a lot of the more compelling work being done tends not to be really recognized by the mandarins of American independent cinema. And it's, you know, it's hardly a phenomenon limited to New York. I think, you know, Eugene Kotlerenko hasn't lived in New York for years, but he's from here. So I mean, he's still a New York filmmaker. It's like Abel Ferrara has been in Rome for a decade. He's still a New York filmmaker. and I'm sure there are dozens upon dozens of people that I'm forgetting but you know this kind of goes back to the sort of micro cinema mini boom as much as I find cause for feeling suicidal about the state of things there is like I'm like I'm more like excited about the potential that exists now than I would have been 10 years ago.

1:19:15And that's in filmmaking, that's in exhibition, really in every aspect. So, you know, it'll probably all go to shit, but I do feel like we'll have like a nice final spree, perhaps. So it's better than 2015. I can see that. Yeah, fuck, 2015. That was a terrible year. I would throw in one of the James N. Kynitz-Wilkins. Oh, of course, yeah. films I've managed to see at the New York theaters light industry and also at Metrograph. But yeah, I think to Nick's point, it's almost like in a way now, it's maybe easier to be a filmmaker than a film critic. I think there is maybe, maybe. But you need more money to be a filmmaker, right?

1:19:57Or not always. I mean, I think you can do very cool stuff for very little. I think also the possibility of that reaching a substantive audience is pretty small, but, you know, still things manage to creep through. I mean, the KGB Crane Theater screening of The Pee-Pee Poo-Poo Man by Braden Sitter Sr. was just packed to the rafters. I should give a shout out to Bleeding Edge in Toronto, by the way. And there's still an enormous amount of work to be done. You know, as I was saying regarding the viability of a biannual print film digest, it's unproven. But, you know, we're not going to go gently into the good night.

1:20:52No. And I mean, I think like, as pertains to the corporate dismantling of cinephile culture, you have to remember, like, cinephiles are really sick, fucked up people. and I think there's an assumption that we can be exterminated with like just a flood of AI content and just you know we'll finally just bow down to the almighty algorithm but what they don't understand like we buried movie paths and they can come at us and come at us we are so depraved We are such cockroach-like beings that they can never, ever exterminate us. Like the cockroaches on the floor of Kim's video. Do you guys have anything to add before we wrap?

1:21:48That was amazing. Free Palestine. Agreed. Free Palestine. I would maybe just add a wrap my regional region of the world. I recently saw at the Lincoln Center a not a New York filmmaker at all a Brisbane filmmakers Sam Dixon and Adam Briggs their film A Grand Mockery which is similarly in the same spirit of no one asked for this movie at all and I'm so so glad that it exists yeah I mean you know the thing is if you make a movie that's cool and interesting in the English language you're a New York filmmaker if you make some fucking garbage you're a Hollywood phony. So even if you're in Brisbane, you're a New York phony.

1:22:33All right. Well, thank you both Annabelle and Nick for coming on. Can you tell us how people can follow your work and also how they can get their hands on a copy of this issue of Metrograph? The magazine should now be in every cool bookstore that exists across the entire world. our launch date has happened if you go into your favorite bookstore and it's not there please ask for it and us you know only being at issue two maybe that can be the start of a beautiful relationship but failing that you can go to the metrograph website www.metrograph.com and order it if you feel like even becoming a metrograph member you will get free shipping just to sweeten the deal or you can come by the theater itself and it's on shelf in the wonderful bookstore there And then beyond that, you know, we are a biannual publication, but we have an online journal where we publish articles, interviews, essays frequently.

1:23:34And if you sign up to follow that, you can get our mailing newsletter invitations, which will keep you abreast of any forthcoming publications. Yeah, it's http colon forward slash forward slash www.metrograph.com. And for my various other endeavors, follow me on X, the everything platform. At Nick Pinkerton. Yeah, at Nick Pinkerton. I got to that bone address. Or you can just find us probably at a cinema most nights. That is correct. We have nothing else going on.

1:24:18This episode of The Culture Journalist was produced and edited by Emily Friedlander and me, Andrea Dominic. Our theme music is by Mark Donica. To check out more, head to our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. And if you like what you're hearing, leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or share us with friends to help support independent journalism.