----------------------------- Begin Original Text ----------------------------- Struck me that there is some truth to what she's saying, that there is a decadence besetting the film business [big budgets crowding out inventiveness, and "art", etc.] Mostly, though, the peice seemed like it was written by someone who just doesn't like going to the movies anymore. And what are we doing here anyway, eating chopped liver? ----------------------------- End Original Text ----------------------------- What the 400 or so of us who read this list are doing is not eating chopped liver (tempting though that may be), but we are largely preaching to the converted. Anyone who has students in film classes, I am sure recognizes the truth of what Sontag says. There is plenty of lip service to "loving" films, but precious little demonstration of it. Although she doesn't mention it, Sontag has identified one of the culprits in another of her famous essays: camp. There is such reverence for films you can feel comfortably superior to in today's students, precisely because film is so powerful and seductive that many of today's students are terrified by it and choose as their models the tame and harmless or the trivial and vacuous. The cinema that dared to move beyond the mere production of adrenalin or the easy conspiratorial delight in camp has largely disappeared. Oh, yes, one can always point to exceptions, but the thrust of cinephilia today is depressingly degraded. Certainly Sontag is "Europhilic". She always has been. And one can understand her preference simply by looking at the sheer number of great films to emerge from non-American sources from WWII through the early sixties. However, that hardly seems like grounds for trashing her premise. Even admirers of American cinema must have noticed the degrading of the quality of thought in filmmaking today. The present crop of film enthusiasts prefer material steeped in "attitude" rather than rational thought. Commerciality (always a factor in films) has now swamped the few film artists (as opposed to craftsmen) working today. If Susan Sontag doesn't like going to the movies today, I submit she is not alone. There was a time, for instance, when you could go to the movies and actually see great films of the past. Now that the experience has been replaced by video, it has largely been taken for granted. Where is the passion involved in renting a copy of "Children of Paradise" or even "The Night of the Hunter"? For God's sakes, they're in black-and-white....and they have monaural tracks! It is depressingly like that legion of people who make tapes of everything they love -- and then never watch them. Gene Stavis, School of Visual Arts - NYC ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]