With the exception of Godard's largely-unseen (on these shores) "Histoire(s) du Cinéma," Sophie Fiennes' and Slavoj Žižek's "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema" (2006) might be the greatest piece of film-criticism-on-film ever made. That's not saying a pantload, of course; despite the obvious potentialities and the seductive pleasure to be had in perusing film history in powerhouse visual swatches, it's not even a subgenre, beyond the boosterism of promotional docs and Todd McCarthy's "Visions of Light." The "video essays" by critic Kevin B. Lee constitute a pioneering version of the idea, despite the entire corpus being dropped for a while from YouTube thanks to copyright protests. Otherwise, the closest we have is the now ubiquitous audio commentary track that accompanies virtually every movie on DVD, the likes of which are sometimes sublime (when they're performed by spirited critics and scholars, mostly, like Žižek's on "Children of Men") and often...
- 3/10/2009
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
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