Letter to the Editor (Alan Berliner, 2019) (Patreon)

In his characteristic essay-film way, Berliner uses a framing device -- his personal relationship to the New York Times -- to consider a range of broader issues. But much of the film really is about the problem of print journalism's twilight years, its replacement by the big scary Internet, and Trump's exacerbation of the popular distrust of the news media. Formally, LttE is more interesting in idea than conception, seeing as it is composed entirely from photographs Berliner has been clipping and saving from the Times since his twenties. But this juxtaposition method, while impressive if you don't think too hard about it, is really quite unsophisticated. He has a file on "sports," subdivided by the various sports, and then shows them all in rapid succession. He has a bunch of shots of war, and shows them, one after the other, only slightly slower, for a bit more gravity. Etc.

The upshot of all of this is that no single image really matters very much, even the ones that show death and destruction. They are all there to signify their place in a chain, a part of an overall category. What's more, Berliner's commentary is mostly exactly what you'd expect, the sort of liberal milquetoast observations your uncle would throw out around the table at Thanksgiving. The world is changing fast. Technology is outstripping our ability to deal with it. Photojournalism can help us empathize with people different from us. There's just something about holding a newspaper that's more satisfying that reading off a screen. And so on. Even Berliner's comments about being in Istanbul during the Gezi Park protests seem somehow inadequate. tear gas burns. The state can really turn ugly.

This is an HBO production, and in some ways I feel inclined to give it a pass. This is a perfectly inoffensive middlebrow item, a tribute to The Paper of Record that doesn't dig too deep but at the same time is too first-person to be sycophantic. It's the cinematic equivalent of a coffee table book. [shrug emoji]