n+1 magazine has periodically published the kind of film criticism that meets the catchy, thoughtful standard of the magazine. (Such as this excellent review of two recent books on Cahiers du Cinema/the French New Wave.) It looks like they will now be publishing a section dedicated to film criticism on a more regular basis. They are offering a special print edition of N1FR 1, apparently supported by IFC.

Otherwise, it looks like we can tune into the website for frequent updates to the section. If this first installment is any indication of the content they will be sharing, count me in.

From an essay on Denis:

Fujiwara has praised cinematic boredom. But boredom can be oppressive or dominating. It tends to be about endurance and submission—the brutally long take, the exhausting slow pan, the excruciatingly slow zoom. When a film is boring it bores with its whole soul. The only Denis film that is properly boring—and this is no condemnation, but simple phenomenological fact—is The Intruder (2005). It is no coincidence that The Intruder is her most difficult film to follow. One is bored when one does not know what is happening. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes of a child who remarked that his mother did not permit him to be bored. When Phillips asked what would happen if he were to become bored, he replied, “panic-stricken” at the thought, “I wouldn’t know what I was looking forward to.” Boredom threatens the self by eroding its ability to make sense of nonsense.

It’s a feeling adjacent to terror. Which is why the right word to describe Denis’ effect, and technique, is not boredom—it’s reverie. Reverie is not at all related to panic. It has no anxiety. It’s imagination, distraction. When Kracauer wrote on the distraction of German film palaces of the 1920s and ‘30s, the word he used was Zerstreuung, which has connotations of fragmentation, decay, vaporization. Denis is not interested in distraction as decay. Her films induce a private experience, an ongoing, associative process of identification and reflection.

Or this intriguing assessment of the contemporary cinema “scene” from the perspective of a journalist:

The real crisis of cinema, its contemporary crisis, which Godard and Wenders foresaw well, is that the cinema no longer circulates within a common space and time but has withdrawn into that state of inaccessibility that, for Agamben, defines the contemporary and which he likens to a museum. “The museification of the world is today an accomplished fact…. Everything today can become a Museum, because this term simply designates the exhibition of an impossibility of using, of dwelling, of experiencing” (Profanations). It’s not accidental that museums have moved into film sponsorship with the involvement of the Musée d’Orsay in Hou’s Flight of the Red Balloon, Hong Sang-soo’s Night and Day, and Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours and of the Louvre in Tsai Ming-liang’s Face, or that museums figure as locations not only in those films but in other recent films from Costa’s Colossal Youth to Jarmusch’s Limits of Control.

The flip side of this museification is the impossibility of ignoring anything. The journalist exemplifies this condition, whose realm is the internet. The journalist is doomed to say yes to things, even in trying to say no, just by acknowledging them. And the internet is a desert of affirmation, where users, turned into private librarians, are almost forced to conserve everything out of fear that something might turn out someday to have value for somebody. (Just as the festival programmer and the critic, knowing they may be wrong, hold on to DVDs of films they didn’t like.)