Film Journey

Film critic, theorist, and writer Susan Sontag doing what Susan Sontag does best in the latest issue of New York Times Magazine, writing on the photographs from Abu Ghraib and what responses have said about deeper cultural and political truths:

Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies. Secrets

The Internet is often characterized as being an ethereal jumble of opinion and interaction without consensus. And while this can be true–particularly in chat rooms or Usenet free-for-alls–I’ve enjoyed consistent interaction with people across the country and the globe over the past few years whose tastes in film are remarkably similar to my own, and who continue to suggest new films to discover with a genuine degree of certainty regarding shared cinematic values. Whether we all have similar tastes because we’ve spent so much time interacting online or whether we’ve spent so much time interacting online that our tastes have …

I don’t have cable TV, so I was surprised to discover an impressive collection of original trailers and movie clips provided by Turner Classic Movies on their website. Check out the tracking shots in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Robert Wise blithely justifying his recutting of Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (“people were laughing at the film”), Robert Mitchum pursuing the children in Night of the Hunter, the charming repartee in The Philadelphia Story, or a featurette on one of my supreme guilty pleasures, George Pal’s The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, among scores of other clips. (Real …