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I Want Aura
Blue Velvet (courtesy of the Criterion Collection) Filmmaker has always had a sideways relationship to film criticism, mostly commissioning various “Critic’s Notebooks” out of festivals. An exception has been the original, paradigm-shifting work of Nicholas Rombes, whose various Filmmaker columns over the years—“Time and Tempo,” “Into the Splice” and his magisterial magnum opus, “The Blue Velvet Project”—have found transformative new ways to animate the ways we experience feature films. As Rombes begins a new project—he’s the series editor of Bloomsbury’s new Timecodes book series—I asked him to consider the virtues of the edited publication in the age of websites and Substack. — Scott Macaulay
My first exposure to Filmmaker was sometime in 1997, a print issue I bought at the Borders flagship store in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a sprawling multistory space, a bricks-and-mortar wet dream still thriving with a deep and eclectic inventory of books, magazines, CDs and newspapers. There was only a hint of the cheap tchotchkes that would come to flood the store. I was a young assistant professor of English at the University of Detroit Mercy, in northwest Detroit, struggling a bit with my approach to teaching film studies, which, in the 1990s, was still all about deconstructing the ideologies that underlie the deceptively smooth, continuity-oriented surface of film. While this was an undoubtedly powerful—and sometimes thrilling—process to work through with students, I wanted to offer them something more than theory.
What I found unique about Filmmaker, as opposed to other film magazines I was familiar with, was its focus on the process of filmmaking without losing sight of the larger place of film as a dominant 20th-century narrative that was simultaneously art, entertainment, spectacle and propaganda—mostly propaganda, I thought. That was the main reason I became a professor: to deconstruct an ideological apparatus disguised as entertainment, to look—as Jeffrey does in Blue Velvet—beneath the white-picket veneer of things and into the secret engines that power the narratives that help shape our thought. In Filmmaker, I found the language and technical filmmaking vocabulary to help me do this. There was also a sense of play at work in the magazine: the recognition—captured in so many interviews, profiles and articles—that there is a joy, an exuberance, a daringness, a risking-it-all-ness—to the most memorable films, no matter what size the budget. This is why I was so delighted to have a partner in Scott Macaulay as he agreed to give my year-long Blue Velvet Project a go in 2012. It’s the one thing I’ve written that I’m proudest of, a project that would not exist without Filmmaker.
As discourse has migrated to the vast, dimensionless and printless space of the web, is it possible to lament the demise of print without succumbing to nostalgia? What, exactly, is print good for? What can it offer that digital can’t? One answer might lie in Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura, the existence of a singular work of art in its time and space. I read André Bazin’s “The Myth of Total Cinema” in a book or as a PDF, protected against and uncorrupted by the comments section; who really cares what some random commenter thinks about Bazin? Why should my thoughts be corrupted by someone whose ideas are practically elevated to the level of Bazin’s by dint of appearing on the same web page? I want to preserve the aura, the mystique around writers like him. Comments—which basically drive and make possible places like Substack—vaporize aura.
With the regular arrival of magazines like Filmmaker in my (physical) mailbox, I am assured a curated, carefully assembled set of ideas, free from the distraction of whatever trolling topics happen to be in vogue. In Postcapitalist Desire, Mark Fisher spoke about phones as a device whose primary function today is to “ensure that we’re tethered”—forced to be in conversation with each other, forced to be attentive to the often unworthy ideas of others. I want to reject this. My ideas about cinema are informed by pre-internet thinkers who were not encouraged, or obligated, to engage with strangers challenging their ideas. If there is a Bazin writing today—or a Susan Sontag or a Laura Mulvey—I want to absorb their ideas free from the chatter of commenters whose ideas I have not sought out.
I want the mystique of pure ideas.
I want aura.
