Monthly Archives: June 2009

June 28, 2009 · 10:04 pm

Manhandling Manon

            When a ballerina sweeps her foot seductively past the nose of an old lecher in Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 Manon, brought to the Kennedy Center last weekend by The Royal Ballet, you sense a small revolution in dance. It’s not the motion, the dance step, the gesture that matters. With MacMillan, it’s all about the pretty little foot. Dance has been fundamentally changed, from an abstract representation of sexual beauty to a medium for its open display. When dancers look at each other it isn’t with the mask-like face of classical ballet; it is with passion, desire, lust, need, the full panoply of erotic expression. And when the lead dancer interrupts his routine to kiss his lover’s hand, it’s a powerful sign that the integrity of classical dance—as a language, a contained form for translating ideas about desire and beauty—is breaking down. Dance isn’t just more theatrical, it’s become inextricably bound up with the sexual beauty of the body.

            Thirty years ago, Arlene Croce described MacMillan’s “remarkable sex scenes” as a significant step into new territory: “they’re as far beyond the sex scenes in Tudor’s ballets as contemporary movies are beyond movies of the forties, yet they’re never inhuman or exploitative…” There’s a loss and a gain here, as Croce observed: “MacMillan pushes so insistently against the nature of his art and what it is equipped to express that now and then he achieves breakthroughs and returns a kind of strength to it which has long been absent.”

            It can be horrifying watching MacMillan’s work, the way the body, which was meant to be immaterial in an earlier era, becomes drastically physical. Manon is tossed around like a rag doll through this brutal retelling of the Abbé Prévost’s 1731 novel. As Sarah Kaufman wrote in The Washington Post, she is a “human mop, dragged around the stage by one man after another.” And MacMillan doesn’t stop there: “…we even see the ballerina on her knees performing fellatio flagrante.”

            Sarah reviewed Tamara Rojo in the title role, who, she wrote, “made you believe this pulp fiction was some kind of great art.” I saw Alina Cojocaru, and she too made me feel in the presence of something more than pulp fiction. Unlike Sarah, I have begrudging but real respect for MacMillan’s accomplishment in Manon. I think his treatment of Manon—a flighty courtesan—is a portrait of misogyny rather than a misogynistic work, though I admit that the sexuality has a very 1970s, leather-and-chains theatricality which is wearing thin. MacMillan, like other artists of his time, seemed to process feminist ideas in a heavy-handed and self-serving way: He too readily accepts the radical idea that all sex is aggression, then settles complacently into a voyeur’s appreciation of the brutal spectacle.

            But MacMillan got lucky with this work, a drama that serves his hyper-sexualized choreography very well. The original Manon, the novel that inspired not just MacMillan’s ballet, but operas by Auber, Massenet and Puccini, is about sexual desire that can’t be contained within an elaborate, hypocritical and powerful system of permission and restraint. The young lovers are easy prey. Des Grieux, the young nobleman who sacrifices everything for Manon, is overwhelmed with adolescent sexual desire and while he’s smart enough to see the hypocrisy of the rules that contain it, he isn’t wise enough to realize how much is at stake. Manon is easy pickings because she has no protector, she is easily spoiled by luxury, and she has what seems a basic cognitive defect: When introduced to new pleasures, she can’t remember old ones, so the world seems to start anew with each fresh enticement.

            So what MacMillan is doing in dance terms—breaking down its abstract, formal language—Prévost was doing in novelistic terms. The novelist is asking questions that threaten the refined and ritual system of sexual cheating—the taking of mistresses, the channeling of extra-marital love into courtesans, kept women and the pleasure of the demimondaine. Can real, burning, unquenchable passion be contained within this quasi-legal world of getting it on the side?  What would happen if a fine, good-looking, bright young man of qualities were suddenly consumed with more than extra-curricular love? Can the system contain that? And what would happen if women behaved exactly as this system defines them: as self-aware commodities, trading themselves for their own greatest gain?

            When Des Grieux runs off with Manon the first time, his father and brother rush to Paris, kidnap him, drag him home, and then joke about it at dinner:

 [My father] asked me first whether I had always been simple enough to believe I was loved by my mistress. I told him boldly that I was so sure of it that nothing could make me lose the least bit of my trust.

“Hah,ha,ha!” he exclaimed, laughing with all his might. “that’s excellent. You’re a fine dupe, and I like to see those sentiments in you. It’s a great pity, my poor Chevalier, to put you into the Order of Malta, since you have so much aptitude for making a patient and accommodating husband.”

He added a thousand mockeries of the same caliber…

 

            And near the end of the novel, when Des Grieux tries to explain himself to his father, he cites the very public nature of the system as part of his defense:

 “I am living with a mistress,” I said to him, “without being bound by the marriage ceremonies: The duke of … keeps two in the eyes of all Paris; Monsieur de … has had one for ten years whom he loves with a fidelity he never had for his wife; two-thirds of the gentlemen in France feel honored to have one…”

 

            Des Grieux can’t find his place within this world because he loves a woman who is equally unable to adapt to it. We never really know much about Manon—she is almost a cipher in the novel—but we do know that she loves Des Grieux, and she loves luxury and can’t make up her mind between the two. If Des Grieux had a simpler mistress, he’d be a happier man; and if Manon had a more fickle boyfriend, they’d both move on and do very well for themselves in this sordid system. The two, together, are the source of each other’s trouble and her tragedy.

            Massenet best captures the psychology of the two lovers. Puccini gets at the elemental tragedy of their passion. But MacMillan is brilliant at depicting the sexual economy of their story. It is a choreography of glances, of torn psychology, of dancers who change direction at unpredictable moments, erratically turning to look in new directions. He captures the powerful distraction of desires as well as its obsessive single mindedness. And he allows Manon to mature, to retain her independence and dignity right through to the very end, something that neither Massenet or Puccini could tolerate.

            He also takes up hints that Des Grieux is emasculated by love just as the ancients so often warned us about unregulated passion. At one point, Des Grieux is forced into the humiliating position of posing as Manon’s little brother (“‘I think he is much like Manon,’ the old man went on, raising my chin with his hand…”), at another, Manon spends the morning dressing Des Grieux’s hair, only to show him off to one of her would-be lovers with a contemptuous declaration: If I can sleep with this, why would I sleep with you? He is a pretty boy, not a hero.

            So MacMillan’s Des Grieux is not represented by athletic dance, but by long extensions of the body. He poses, he shows his fine line, his elegant carriage, his width and breadth and perfect proportions. Des Grieux is a bit like a black-and-white photograph from a perfume advertisement come to life, and Manon dances around him. When she’s on point, it isn’t the ethereal point of classical ballet, but a restless, precarious balancing of a body that is constantly inclining in new directions. She is tossed around plenty, to be sure. But when under her own locomotion, she moves among men like a pinball. And is she flighty? Literally. At one point, she makes a swan dive onto the lover’s ever-present, dishevelled bed. I don’t think this is any more or less misogynistic a story than the one that Prévost tells.

            MacMillan adds further sexual instability to Prévost’s drama by making Manon’s brother, Lescaut, a far more charismatic figure than he is the novel. He has the morals of a pimp and a pickpocket, but the superficial manners of a gentlemen (a tension very well captured by Ricardo Cervera’s brilliant performance with the Royal). And it is just possible that we’re supposed to sense erotic interest between the passively beautiful Des Grieux and the actively charming Lescaut, who seem to conduct some kind of affair with each other through Manon.

            It’s the ideal story for MacMillan, who does for ballet what Manon does for the love story: He reduces it to its essence, pure sexual need and passion. MacMillan also manages to retain a hint of Prévost’s moralizing, a dubious sort of moralizing from a Jesuit and priest who (very likely) knew the depths of squalid passion first-hand. Both Manon and her lover are punished, she more severely than Des Grieux. This is the weakest part of MacMillan’s ballet, the last scene of the last act, with its cheap phantasmagoria and dream sequence.

            Up to now, Prévost’s 18th-century characters have been thoroughly modern, but now they must die like 19th-century lovers. MacMillan can’t really believe this is how the story should end. People don’t leave Studio 54 and die romantic deaths in the wilderness. They use sex to torture each other and then move on. But this is his nod to Puccini and Massenet, to the aesthetics of opera, and you can forgive him the indulgence because he’s managed to compete, so well, on that turf for the previous two hours. By corrupting dance he’s managed to describe a corrupt world, which is an honest night’s work even if the last scene is an old-fashioned lie.    

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June 27, 2009 · 2:22 pm

Shopping List

Chocolate ravioli, some nasty, stanky French cheese and maybe something to make a mess of greens taste unhealthy. Eastern Market is open again. Here’s my take, in Sunday’s paper. And next, when we’re all done celebrating, we can talk about bringing some more diversity to the vendors, some real organic produce, and closing off 7th St. SE in front of the market for good.

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June 25, 2009 · 10:37 pm

Karita Mattila Comes to the NSO

            Yes, the scheduled conductor cancelled, and yes, with the sky still shimmering with light at 9 p.m., it feels rather late in the season to be going to the orchestra. But it was a surprise and a bit of a disappointment to find the Kennedy Center Concert Hall so empty last night. Mikko Frank may have bailed on the National Symphony Orchestra, but soprano Karita Mattila showed up and she came with the ever popular Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss.

            Granted, the original program was more interesting.  Frank, a Finnish conductor with a reputation for being both brilliant and erratic, had programmed Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Manhattan Trilogy. And rather than the Four Last Songs, Mattila was supposed to sing Strauss’s much more rarely heard Three Hymns, Op. 71. Both would have been first-time performances for the NSO. But when Andreas Delfs replaced Frank on the podium, the orchestra retrenched, substituting over-exposed for obscure Strauss, and music of Delius for Rautavaara.

            No matter.  A good, evening-long wallow in late romanticism is never to be sneered at. But it wasn’t that sort of evening. There was a palpable lack of chemistry between all three musical forces—conductor, soloist and orchestra—that played out in performances that were often approximate and generally formless.

            Delius’s “The Walk to the Paradise Garden” is warmed-over Wagner served in aspic on Wedgwood china, a polite, sedate, rather silly piece that serves as an interlude in the 1907 opera A Village Romeo and Juliet. Wagner, constantly referenced is also thoroughly tamed in the opera, and the music sets a mood without saying anything precise or memorable (stage direction: “Sali takes Vrenchen in his arms and kisses her long and tenderly. They rise and continue their way. The curtain falls…”)  Move along, nothing to see. And the opera is pretty much the same.

            It was, however, the best played music of the evening. Delfs doesn’t bother with big ideas, or forging an interpretation that spans an entire piece, though he gives lots of extraneous information, which makes him temperamentally suited to Delius. He also had the good sense to stay out of the way of the woodwinds, which are given quiet, gentle and forgettable melodies that filter through the soundscape like little rays of late afternoon sun coming through a forest canopy. The oboe playing was especially lovely.

            The Strauss, which included a performance of Also Sprach Zarathustra, didn’t fare so well—and the freedom Delfs gave in the Delius was retracted in the Strauss (especially in the violin solos), with regrettable results.

            The accompaniments to the Four Last Songs didn’t do Mattila any favors and there were moments of substantial disagreement about the pacing of the music. The horn melody that is supposed to carry the second song off in the arms of Morpheus was too loud, too assertive, and anything but a lullaby. More destructive to the cycle’s collective impact was the chord that accompanies the singer’s final note of  “In Abendrot,” a deliciously foreign harmony set to the word “death.” It should be a whisper but the orchestra responded with something bigger and blunter, which meant that any mystery Mattila hoped to muster with the poem’s enigmatic last question—“Can this perhaps be death?—was lost.

            But Mattila wasn’t really finding much to communicate in the poetry. This was a singer’s performance, not a textually driven one. And it wasn’t particularly well sung either. Mattila sounded dry, even  hoarse in the opening of the first song, and the voice, once warmed up, wasn’t consistent throughout its range. Top notes were clean, precise and very white or blank, in their tone. Lower in her range, it’s a different voice, and a more charismatic one. In the middle, she was frequently covered by the orchestra, with the blame mostly Delfs’s.

            Worse, Mattila’s phrases were so undifferentiated and generic that Strauss’s individual notes were lost in long, loose approximations of the general line. Was that a half step? Or a whole step? Or a minor third? It would be nice to hear Strauss’s thoughts—and Hesse’s and Eichendorff’s poems—for once, and not the all-purpose, sumptuous, voice-as-instrument version that has come down to us since Jessye Norman recorded her aberrant but gorgeous dramatic soprano remix of the piece. Mattila, unfortunately, approached the piece with a more lyric instrument, but without the sweetness, precision or clarity of a smaller, lighter, more incisive voice.  It was, perhaps, an off night.

            It was definitely an off-night for the Also Sprach Zarathustra. Delfs gesticulated frantically and bounced on the podium, but to little effect. The reading was a straight-through, just-the-facts account that sounded under rehearsed and disengaged. Strauss’s humorous self-deflations, the vulgar references, the disjointed waltzes, the sudden climaxes that serve like a magician’s  distraction to hide the wild and unexpected turns of the musical path, none of these registered.

            For all that, the NSO is sounding better, section by section, than I’ve heard it in a long time. The woodwinds have new strengths, the horns, though aggressive to a fault, were more accurate than I’ve heard before, and the strings were warmer, more even and cohesive. But the problems with the NSO have never been at the level of individual players. It’s a question of rehearsal, discipline and the all important presence (or absence) of a conductor who can forge this group into a real ensemble. They didn’t have that last night, and the results were as usual.

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June 24, 2009 · 5:59 pm

Byron Smyron

          I thought it might be interesting to read Byron’s The Corsair before attending the Bolshoi Ballet’s performance of Le Corsaire last weekend. The poem was wildly popular when it was published in 1814, selling some 10,000 copies when it first hit the streets. Written in three cantos, propelled by the poet’s obsessive and muscular heroic couplets, it’s a wild, 50-page performance. It tells the tale of the gloomy, independent minded, misanthropic pirate Conrad, whose sole redeeming virtue is his love for the desperately vulnerable Medora. Conrad is captured while raiding the stronghold of his enemy, Pasha Seyd; he is rescued by another beauty, the slave Gulnare, but his return to Medora is not a happy one:

 

It was enough – she died – what reck’d it how?

 The love of youth, the hope of better years,

The source of softest wishes, tenderest fears,

The only living thing he could not hate,

Was reft at once – and he deserved his fate…

 The poem opens with a magnificent description of the ocean, and man’s tenuous dominion over it, and it sets up a powerful dichotomy between adventure and life, and fear and decay. Which almost seems to extend to the couch potatoes reading Byron or sitting on their fat asses at a performance of opera or ballet based on it (Petipa’s Le Corsaire, Verdi’s Il Corsaro or Paisiello’s version of the same):

 Let him who crawls enamour’d of decay

 Cling to his couch, and sicken years away;

Heave his thick breath, and shake his palsied head;

Ours – the fresh turf, and not the feverish bed.

 

Of Byron’s poem, the ballet is faithful only to this general spirit. When the corsairs appear and dance together for the first time, you sense the ocean’s lusty power running in their veins (“The exulting sense – the pulse’s maddening play/That thrills the wanderer of that trackless way”). And you begin to think: Maybe I ought to be on a ship cruising the Aegean in stormy weather, rather than at the Kennedy Center on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. But expect no more of Byron, beyond character names and the general sense that this a ballet about pirates, slave girls and daring rescues. Pasha Seyd has no real menace, and his minions are ridiculous, Orientalist stereotypes. The slave girls are happy, larkish things, and there’s no sense of danger or exploitation.

Opera lovers with a proper respect for literature wince at the damage done to the classics by librettists and composers. It’s a fact of life. Gounod’s Faust is romantic fantasy with some woolly-headed religious sentiment thrown in; Goethe would be appalled. The list is endless.  But Le Corsaire  really is a travesty.

 Albeit, a tremendously enjoyable one. I was lucky to see Medora danced by Natalia Osipova, a ballerina with amazing plasticity, who never seems to strike the ground with muscles and flesh, but keeps it at bay, like a master can make a yo-yo hover in mid air with no sense there’s an end to the string. Much of Osipova’s charm is in her acting—which acknowledges the silliness, the cartoon-like quality of the role she must play, and yet registers all the necessary emotional distinctions as she is passed from hero to villain and back like chattel.

Verdi’s opera, far from his best and perhaps one of his worst, nevertheless takes the Byron a little more seriously. And it has a few wonderful arias and duets. Even lesser Verdi demonstrates the literary gulf between opera and ballet in the 19th century.  That raises a question: Did the story ballet fall into disrepute in part because it never really had any narrative seriousness? Discuss.

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· 10:45 am

Hobo Matters

I may be very late  to this, but I’ll share anway. One little discovery during my preparation for the SILVERDOCS film criticism panel last week is this dead-on parody of the Ken Burns documentary style, by comic John Hodgman. Enjoy Hobo Matters, which proves  that with a guitar, one grainy black-and-white photograph and some purple prose, you don’t need a huge budget to make a documentary. Truth is optional.

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June 22, 2009 · 10:02 pm

Woodwork

 Judith Leyster Self-portrait           The Judith Leyster exhibition at the National Gallery is small, just ten paintings by Leyster, and sixteen others by artists including Frans Hals and Leyster’s husband Jan Miense Molenaer. During a tour of the show for journalists, the question arose: Why the particular concentration on musical instruments in these paintings from the 1630s? Possible answers include the discovery of St. Cecilia’s body—supposedly “incorrupt” after more than a thousand years—in Rome, in 1599. Given Cecilia’s saintly associations with music and musicians, this may have sparked particular interest in music as a subject matter.

 

            I don’t think you have to go to such lengths to find an answer, at least on the visual level. The current exhibition features historic instruments side by side with the paintings, including a late 16thcentury lute with a beautiful carved rose, a transverse flute and a kit, a teensy-weensy fiddle small enough for a dancing master to carry with him to lessons. This is an invitation to make comparisons between the iconographic evidence about the instruments in the paintings (always a tricky business), and the real thing. But it also suggests an obvious and vital reason for painting instruments: The pure craftsmanship and visual richness of them.

Jan Miense Molenaer, The Duet             Compare the rough wood floorboards in Molenaer’s The Duet, which depicts the artist and his wife playing, respectively, the lute and cittern, with the instruments in the painting. Or in the cases near the painting. Underfoot, wood is seen rough and raw; in the hand, it is fine and finished, and that suggests multiple metaphors for human existence. We refine the world even as we must refine ourselves. Both instruments are particularly associated with middle-class music making, as opposed to the lower-class fiddle, which appears in Leyster’s Merry Company and in the allusion to Merry Company in the famous self-portrait of 1632-33.

            Painting an instrument can serve many purposes: To animate the face and figure of the instrumentalist or suggest harmonies beyond the merely musical. But instruments are also purely and sensuously objects, and in this case, objects that demonstrate not only the wealth and cultivation of the user, but the power of painting, as a profession, to fix images on canvass, and propel the painter into the ranks of the prosperous.

Images provided by the National Gallery of Art. Top: Judith Leyster, Self-Portrait. Bottom: Jan Miense Molenaer, The Duet, collection of Mr. Eric Noah.

 

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June 21, 2009 · 6:50 pm

Less is more

Security madness is destroying Washington, warping our democratic republic and making us into Man, the Beast who Cowers. Security–a compromise between freedom and danger–is too important to be left to bureaucrats or specialists, which is why I argue, here, that the best response to the tragic and idiotic act of hate at the Holocaust Museum on June 10 is to do nothing. At least, nothing architecturally. Unfortunately, the comments section after my piece has been taken over by the usual suspects.

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June 19, 2009 · 3:15 pm

Japanese Weepies

It’s tempting, and dangerous, when reviewing a film to make grand claims about the state of the art when you should be focused on the task at hand, in this case, the merits of a flick called of Departures, which won the 2009 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. For a review in today’s paper, I wrote, and then cut, the charge that, “sentimentality is endemic to Japanese film these days.” Based on the sample I’ve taken over the past few months, that certainly seems to be true. But why distract the reader when the critic’s purpose is more focused?

I enjoyed Departures, but it sure does ooze old-fashioned sappiness. As did all three of the Japanese films I reviewed for Filmfest DC earlier this Spring.  Yoji Yamada’s Kabei was syrupy and melodramatic (“For most of its more than two-hour length, this sentimental drama about a strong woman, loyal wife and loving mother is so sweet it makes your teeth hurt…”) as was Shunichi Nagasaki’s The Witch of the West is Dead (“At times, The Witch of the West is Dead feels a bit like a very long Marie Callender’s commercial set in a Thomas Kinkade painting…”) And yet I enjoyed both of them, despite the bathos.

Which leads to a claim I’ve made here before, and in my review of Departures: That the sentimentality of other cultures isn’t as offensive as our own homegrown variety. But is that a rational statement? Can it be defended as a principle when reviewing films? Or is sentimentality a failing in art, no matter where it comes from?

I guess I take the following position: That senitmentality isn’t per se a bad thing, but only bad when it is used to manipulate; and that art from other cultures is often arguing and manipulating on different ground, about different issues, in ways that may not be particularly dangerous in an American cultural context. The same thing should work in reverse: Thus, a Mel Gibson film may not be as ideologically disturbing when seen in China as it is here. And thus the emotional buttons it pushes can be pushed in China without doing any harm.

I don’t know if I believe this.

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June 18, 2009 · 10:37 am

Frederick Douglass Worked Here

    taken 4_2009        Frederick Douglass did indeed work here, though obviously not in the new glass pavilion that serves as a security atrium for the Old City Hall building. Rededicated on Wednesday, the building will now serve as the home for the District Court of Appeals. I wrote about it on Wednesday (with slideshow).

            Douglass, who served as Federal Marshall for the District, was among the famous occupants of the building, which was begun in 1820 and expanded several times over the years. It was a controversial appointment. In 1877, newly elected president Rutherford B. Hayes gave Douglass the job, despite vociferous objection from lawyers in the District, and racists everywhere. Their ire was raised by one of the job’s symbolic functions, as Douglass explains in his best and most florid style of suppressed rage:

             The apprehension doubtless was, that if appointed marshal, I would surround myself with colored deputies, colored bailiffs and colored messengers and pack the jury-box with colored jurors; in a word, Africanize the courts. But the most dreadful thing threatened, was a colored man at the Executive Mansion in white kid gloves, sparrow-tailed coat, patent-leather boots and alabaster cravat, performing the ceremony—a very empty one—of introducing the aristocratic citizens of the republic to the President of the United States. This was something entirely too much to be borne; and men asked themselves in view of it, To what is the world coming? And where will these things stop? Dreadful! Dreadful!

             I looked through the last of the three Douglass autobiographies for some little description of his office or time in the building. Unfortunately, the observation of place, so present in the first two of his narratives, is diminished in the last and most verbose of his memoirs. He becomes more preoccupied with psychology and slights to his dignity (there were many and they must have been tremendously galling to a man of his intelligence, erudition and irony). As politics and political maneuvering take a more prominent place in his life, we learn less about the material world around him. So unless I’ve missed some small reference to his time in the building, Douglass’s memory of it was clouded out by the fracas over his appointment. Too bad. I live in one of his old neighborhoods, and I’d love to hear his voice talk about places I know.

             As an aside, there were several reactions to my Post piece on the courthouse renovation.  Mid-Century Mike at Modern Capital linked to the article (he has a great website if you’re passionate about mid-century architecture) as did this website, which specializes in military justice (one of the Old City Hall’s flanking buildings, built much later, houses the U.S. Court of Appeals for Military Justice). Didn’t mean to slight it too much, but it’s a supporting cast member in the little drama of Judiciary Square. The fine folks at BeyondDC and GreaterGreaterWashington took issue with the modernist elements of the new glass addition (and my support of it), arguing (fairly enough) that modernism is now a  retro style. That’s one reason I think the addition works. No, it’s not cutting edge, but by reaching back to a very neutral style that is still in sharp contrast with the classicism of the original, I think architect Hany Hassan has added without subtracting. Your call: Just take the Red Line to Judiciary Square and make a 180 coming out of the Metro.

Photo Credit: Joseph Romeo Photography

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June 17, 2009 · 4:41 pm

Coming to SILVERDOCS

I’ll be moderating a panel about documentary film criticism on Friday at the Silverdocs Festival. Participants include David Edelstein, film critic for New York Magazine and NPR’s Fresh Air, Thom Powers, documentary programmer at the Toronto Film Festival, Lisa Schwarzbaum film critic for Entertainment Weekly and Amy Taubin, film critic and contributing editor for British Sight & Sound and American Film Comment. It’s an hour-long panel at 5:30 p.m., June 19 in the Discovery HD Theater.

 The critical issues peculiar to documentary fascinate me. On Tuesday I wrote a quick review of the new film Convention which premieres tonight (Wednesday, June 17) at Silverdocs. Perhaps because I was thinking about issues related to this panel, I was particularly struck by the chance documentary makers take when choosing a subject. It’s a huge investment of time and resources to cover an event such as last year’s Democratic National Convention in Denver. And what if you don’t get particularly interesting material? Do you just walk away? Or make something of what you have?

 Newspapers are very pragmatic about this sort of thing, though the stakes get higher the more they have invested in a story. If you spend a day following a profile subject and you come up with nothing, there’s pressure to pull the plug. Editors ask: What’s new here? One of the reasons we considered reviewing Convention was the hope that the filmmaker’s might have discovered some little tidbit of newsiness the general media missed. And it’s a hard sell, with this kind of documentary, to review it without that nugget of interest. You have to make the case that the film is worthwhile as film. In the daily crush of movie coverage, it’s not always easy to do that for documentaries.

 Call it the romance of content, and it’s a romance that confuses audiences as much as critics. How to distinguish a documentary with an important and compelling subject from a well-made, path-breaking documentary (that may or may not have a sexy topic)? Should the rules be different for a documentary about someone suffering from cancer and a fictional film about the same subject? If you lament the clichés of the former, you may seem callous to the suffering of the cancer patient who has offered up his or her privacy to the filmmaker. I reviewed IOUSA—a documentary about our national fiscal irresponsibility—a while back and found the mechanics and methods of the film rather wanting. Many people read my review as proof that I’m not interested in the powerful concerns raised by our ballooning national debt. It’s a problem that has dogged the way we think about photography: A photograph of something beautiful isn’t necessarily a beautiful photograph.

 I expect that we will spend some time discussing the parlous state of contemporary criticism and the future of it, too. Thom Powers wrote an insightful piece back in November asking the question: Where are the great documentary critics? Given the richness of the form, the flowering of creativity, the sheer number of new documentaries, how can we encourage more and better critical writing? The problem is made more pressing by the rapid decline in the traditional media—a decline which may, paradoxically, make the documentary world all the richer, and more essential, as fewer stories are covered in the old places. What are the possibilities for a new web-based criticism? I was about to say I’m skeptical, then I remembered I’m now writing a blog.

 This, and much more. If you can’t make it Friday (and even if you can) feel free to post ideas and questions for the panel here. And I’ll do my best to include them in Friday’s discussion.

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