New York City’s Film Forum theater is hosting a four week film series of newspaper-themed movies, featuring “the faded world of news diggers, gossip mongers, scoop hounds, pipe artists, scandal chasers and sob sisters,” as Clyde Haberman has it in his NYC column in today’s New York Times.
Any time something or someone is recognized in a retrospective, or a roast, or a lifetime achievement award, the implication is that the zenith has been reached. It’s all downhill from here. So implies the film festival’s this-is-your-life walk down memory lane for newspapers. One day, the festival seems to tell us, when the print and ink paper is long gone and everyone gets their news from iProducts and eReaders and cable television aHoles, Jimmy Stewart in “Call Northside 777” and Humphrey Bogart in “Deadline U.S.A.” will be how future generations will remember a forgotten industry.
“I wanted to do this series before there were no newspapers to write about,” said the theater’s repertory programming director, Bruce Goldstein. He was joking. Sort of.
Times film critic, A.O. Scott, also devoted a review to the series, proving that journalists like nothing more than writing about journalism. (Disclaimer: As a media criticism publication, it is our job here at CJR to write about journalism.)
“Where are the crusty editors and fast-talking girl reporters of yesteryear?” Scott asks. “I’m peeking over the cubicle wall, and all I see are Web producers and videographers.”
Scott suggests a sequel series on the genre of the Television Picture, featuring films like “Wag The Dog.” And, he continues: “…Maybe 50 years from now there will be a retrospective devoted to the Web News Aggregator Picture. By then, thankfully, I’ll be as dead as dead-tree journalism.”
For more film retrospective of the historic, dinosaur moment of newspapers, don't forget the French New Wave. For example, Malle, Goddard, Truffaut often included cameos of classic, vintage newspaper-ness, often from the production side of the press room which is a lesser sung song. But Goddard's Breathless features newspapers almost as a supporting character and it's worth the look back from the internet future. I watched it recently and thought it was almost an argument in support of the practicality, usefulness of the print paper. Jean Paul Belmondo plays a thief and cop killer on the lam who steals everything he touches, except newspapers. They are the only objects he purchases throughout the day, keeping tabs on the manhunt. They even show a classic image of the fugitive racing beneath an electronic feed on the side of a building flashing updates. But even against that competition from "free", up-to-the-moment, electronic-based info, the penniless thief does not think twice about paying for the print version. Paper clearly wins over electronic. Hard to believe that a big city once supported so many editions of so many newspapers and so many street vendors in such architecturally notable newsstands. (awwe, I feel sad now....)
http://www.criterion.com/explore/4-french-new-wave
#1 Posted by MB, CJR on Fri 9 Apr 2010 at 05:46 PM