The past and pending. (Patreon)

"Penelope Cruz in Elegy," reads the photo caption on that old Cineaste cover. Did you even remember the existence of a film called Elegy starring Ms. Cruz? I confess that I did not. (Directed by Isabel Coixet, whom I still haven't forgiven for Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, inexplicably selected for Competition at Cannes '09.)  

Anyway, I recently came upon my own copy of this issue, published in the fall of 2008. Kept it because I'm in it, as part of what you see at the top of its cover: "Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet: A Critical Symposium." Basically, they invited a bunch of critics, both professional and less so, print and online, to write short essays discussing how the web was and wasn't altering our vocation; in addition to myself, the symposium included such folks as Jim Hoberman, Michael Sicinski, Stephanie Zacharek, Adam Nayman, Karina Longworth (this was so long ago that she's identified as writing for SpoutBlog), Farran Smith Nehme (this is so long ago that she's not identified by her real name at all—just "The Self-Styled Siren," as she was then anonymously known), Jonathan Rosenbaum, Theo Panayides, Glenn Kenny, Dan Sallitt, Kent Jones, Amy Taubin, and a bunch of others. Makes for interesting reading 14 years later, and it occurred to me that very few of y'all have likely encountered it. I'm not gonna transcribe the whole freakin' thing, but I did transcribe what I wrote, which, if I say so myself, pretty accurately foresees where we (and specifically I) have ended up. Which is to say, right here, with you. Thanks, as always. And enjoy this ancient piece, if you've never seen it before (or feel like reading it again). 

(I'm afraid I've forgotten which critic I complain "wields a prose style so hilariously turgid that I can never make it past sentence number two." Don't imagine it's anyone who's still active. The site mentioned blind in paragraph three was Nerve.com, though, which paid surprisingly well—$250 per review, as I recall, asking for like 600 words—until suddenly they didn't anymore, because '08 crash. The extent of which I believe was still unclear when I wrote this.) 

Call me traitor. I was part of the initial wave of Internet film critics, way back

in 1995, when pretty much the only people online were college students and tech nerds. The site I created had (and still has) no ads, no graphics, and no agenda—just endless text. The thought of somehow parlaying this hobby into a career in print media literally never occurred to me. I had zero ambition—and yet I was writing a 1,500-word column every single week, generally reviewing three to six films (all of which I paid to see in commercial release), simply for the joy of writing, and to entertain a readership that couldn't have amounted to more than maybe five hundred to six hundred people. Looking back on that era now, after ten years in the print trenches, it seems very Shangri-la.

And yet that degree of purity is now the norm. For every print critic who gets the axe, another dozen bloggers appear, many of them arguably more passionate and knowledgeable than the professionals they threaten to supplant (or at least render irrelevant). Granted, not all of these cats can actually write—one noted online critic, who seems to have quite a respectful following, wields a prose style so hilariously turgid that I can never make it past sentence number two; you need a machete to hack your way through his thicket of synonymous adjectives. But, of course, the glory of the Internet is that a voice more to your liking is only a mouse click away. What matters is the sheer number of ardent cinephiles out there getting all "ars gratia artis" on our asses.

The problem here, for those of us who'd like to continue being paid a living wage in the field, is that people willing to devote so much time and energy sans recompense are even more willing to accept any old pittance somebody might offer them. I was fortunate enough, when print media stumbled onto my site (which happened fairly quickly), to land ridiculously lucrative freelance work—my first regular gig, for Entertainment Weekly, paid two dollars per word. A decade later, one of my employers—a strictly online venture, significantly—decided they could no longer afford my (admittedly sizable) fee more than once a month, and shifted from a review format to a daily blog. I know and respect several of the folks who contribute to said blog, but I also know that they're being paid something on the order of one cent per word. (Literally.) And if talented writers are prepared to accept assignments for what's basically ramen money, clearly there’s no earthly reason for anyone to shell out premium wages, much less a medical plan.

Yeah, I know, boo hoo. And there's no question that the recession we're all desperately pretending not to be mired in has been more responsible for the various layoffs and buyouts than has the Imminent Heat Death of Newsprint. Still, I do foresee a future in which the most gifted critics will wind up preaching primarily to a small, self-selected choir, while the average filmgoer—to the extent that he or she consults criticism at all—will simply check the aggregate results available on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. It’s inevitable that the more voices there are competing for your attention, the less valuable each individual voice becomes. And so a paradox: the advent of online criticism has simultaneously fostered greater diversity and greater homogeneity. Just like the expanding universe as a whole, if you think about it.

What I miss about writing online—and the reason I eventually started my own blog, though it's only updated approximately three times per annum—is the freedom to define your own audience, both in terms of what you choose to address and how you go about addressing it. If you have no editor, maybe nobody's catching your occasional lapse into self-indulgence; at the same time, though, neither is anybody shooting down your prospective ideas on the grounds that readers don't give a damn about Guy Maddin or Hong Sang-soo. And you can just assume a fairly high degree of cine-literacy, if that's the way you prefer to write. "Rivals 10 on Ten as the longest DVD supplement ever projected in a theater to a paying audience," I wrote of Captain Mike Across America, Michael Moore's latest "effort" from Toronto last year—a comparison I simply could not make in print, because merely explaining who Kiarostami is would likely eat up all of my remaining word count. On the Net, even if a particular reference sails over your head, there's always Google.

Of course, on the Net, one needn't necessarily write at all. I'm sure I won't be the only one in these pages to single out the remarkable video essays of Kevin "alsolikelife" B. Lee, which permit a degree of shot-by-shot analysis that no amount of careful or dazzling prose could possibly convey. Perhaps the true issue here is that so many of us still insist upon "dancing about architecture" when such a blatant compromise is no longer necessary. But it's a struggle I continue to thoroughly enjoy, and one I can't imagine ever wholly abandoning. And as I began—writing primarily for myself and a tiny cadre of friends and fans—so I may well end.