Contained in these pages is a selection of film criticism written by Godfrey Cheshire, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Armond White for the no-longer-with-us alternative weekly paper, New York Press. (I’ll cede discussion of this truly singular publication to Press columnist Jim Knipfel’s introduction). This book serves as much as an act of resurrection as anything else as, for the casual reader, the glories of the NYPress film section have been largely unavailable for many years. Some of the writing does remain online, albeit in fragments with problematic formatting and often incorrect bylines. While the more adventurous may choose to seek out the paper at a library, they will be frustrated to find that no complete archive of the NYPress exists anywhere. Thus, assembling this volume was a detective act in itself, and involved collecting pieces from all kinds of different sources: the Internet, writers’ own collections, fan clippings and library holdings. Although this book represents only a very small fraction of the total amount of words written, it is indeed of considerable length. Given the near-total unavailability of so much of it, I hope you will forgive my indulgence.
For anyone expecting some kind of house style or unified voice, the film section of the NYPress could be an invigorating experience. Writing the kind of long-form criticism that is unfortunately all too rare these days, Cheshire, Seitz, and White constituted three distinctly different voices, each with equally accomplished, yet notably individual, perspectives on cinema. There seemed to be little restrictions placed on them—certainly during what might be termed the paper’s glory years: roughly 1996 till 2004—and their distinctive tastes and approaches were often positioned in direct dialogue with each other, a constant critical conversation that frequently saw each writer directly challenging his colleagues. Dialogue is important in criticism, and here you can find a healthy example of it existing under one proverbial roof.
Picking up the NYPress each week you were never sure exactly what you were going to get: the film section’s weekly columns included polemics, reviews, interviews, festival reports and features. A far cry from what is often derisively termed the “consumer report” mode of criticism, these three writers were passionately engaged with the film culture of both their own time, and what had come before—New York’s vibrant repertory scene providing them ample opportunity to reckon with the cinema of the past.
In sequencing and compiling the book, I have tried as best as possible to recreate the feeling of reading these columns as they hit the press. Thus it seemed best to present them chronologically, and preserve the NYPress’ sense of variety, rather than divide the content up into thematic sections. Each writer had very different tenures at the paper and thus the book’s sections reflect this, with Part 3—covering 1997-2000, when Cheshire, Seitz and White all shared the paper’s pages—being easily the longest. The Press Gang is sequenced to form a narrative of sorts, providing a portrait not only of the development of these three critical voices, but also a crucial time in film culture that saw the rise of American independent cinema, the burgeoning of significant foreign film movements in Iran and Taiwan, Dogme 95 in Denmark, the switch from celluloid to digital (in both exhibition and production methods), the rise of Internet criticism, as well as the latter career stretches of the New Hollywood and Nouvelle Vague. This book is designed to be read from beginning to end, although I should perhaps say it is designed so it can be read from beginning to end—its hefty size will no doubt cause many to dip in. The writing has been kept as it was published, aside from some small occasional edits. What you read here are the opinions of these writers at the time of initial publication.
When deciding what to select for the book I took into account three criteria: firstly, the quality of the writing; secondly, the continued popularity/relevance of the film/films in question; thirdly, how the piece speaks to others also contained in this book. Spielberg, one of the few filmmakers all writers were in agreement on, is the most represented director (reviews of Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, The Terminal and Munich appear). This attests not only to the sheer amount of writing on the filmmaker—I could easily have included considerably more, a fact that won’t surprise anyone considering the frequency his name comes up in the following pages—but also its high quality. Other (then) working directors that are frequently returned to are Terrence Malick, Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, the Coen brothers, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Oliver Stone, Abbas Kiarostami, and Jean-Luc Godard. Established auteurs such as Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Bresson are also touched on, as are (then) emerging filmmakers such as Paul Thomas Anderson, Lars von Trier, Todd Haynes, Steven Soderbegh, Christopher Nolan, and Quentin Tarantino. Not all of this coverage is praise, but often a negative assessment can say as much as a positive one, especially when defining a critical stance and approach. You will also find interviews with Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Crispin Glover, and Robert Drew; essays on digital projection, the New York Film Critics Circle, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and cinematic responses to the War on Terror; and festival reports from Cannes, Sundance, and Venice. As will be apparent from reading only a small sample of the writing, Cheshire, Seitz, and White certainly had their own individual preoccupations and passions. The one thing that seemingly united all of them was an unwavering passion for cinema, coupled with a true belief in both the role film criticism can play, and its validity as a discipline in and of itself.
It is not an accident this criticism appeared in an alternative weekly newspaper, perhaps the last refuge for this kind of writing in print. As Dave Kehr noted, during the twilight of the weeklies, in the introduction to his book When Movies Mattered: “the luxury of printing long pieces without an obvious demographic appeal is something the weeklies can no longer afford… As a result, the long-form journalistic has practically vanished from print publications.” This change was certainly felt during the latter years of the NYPress as the pieces became considerably shorter, the freedom and indulgence shown the writers seemingly waning.
I don’t want to get into a doom-laden depiction of the current state of cinephilia (from where I’m standing it seems alive and well), but I do think it’s true to say that not many outlets like NYPress exist anymore for film criticism, at least not as they used to. Surely not from the perspective of critics, especially when taking into account issues such as actually getting paid, a pretty important thing assuming you want to be able to eat and have the time to write the kind of considered and constant—aka weekly—criticism contained herein. And perhaps that is the key fact: criticism still exists, perhaps in a more voluminous state than ever before, but as a profession it is unquestionably on the decline. The Internet has provided people with considerably more ways to make their opinions heard but, for many, it progressively becomes a hobby, not a profession, and very few of us are able to devote all of our time to a hobby. The sheer volume of prose and level of engagement these three writers showed was made possible by the NYPress, and is ultimately one of the things that made the paper’s film section so special.
During the period this book covers, as the cinema was reaching its centenary, many in the critical community penned what might be termed early obituaries for film as an art form, or at least for cinephilia as a cultural force. Susan Sontag’s “The Decay of Cinema” is perhaps the most famous of these, but there were many others (you will read several spirited and direct rebuttals in the coming pages). I hope that this book shows that while some were bemoaning the death of an art form, others were looking elsewhere, finding vibrant signs of its life and continued relevance as we entered a new century; and writing about it with a befitting level of commitment, rigour and insight.
jim colvill
2019