>Despite his prolific criticism on film, music, and pop culture, Armond White is perhaps known best as a provocateur. Thus is the fate of a man who champions critically snubbed movies like Spielberg’s A.I. and Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited while routinely bashing critics’ darlings like There Will Be Blood for what he calls their “nihilism.” That word played a large role in the email interview Splice conducted with White recently, and it gets to the heart of what he champions in cinema. In his weekly reviews for New York Press, White hammers home the idea that Hollywood and contemporary critics pile praise on movies that reject hope and don’t actively engage their characters’ lives and social conditions. White also rejects the cynicism with which most mainstream cinema approaches religion, and the directionless angst with which it addresses current events. These issues came to a head in his recent essay ”What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Movies,” which bemoaned the declining intellectual and aesthetic standards in film criticism.
>His seemingly contrarian tendencies are offset, however, by a deep love and encyclopedic knowledge of film. Of the many complaints in “What We Don’t Talk About,” the one I found most poignant was his claim that “Nowadays, reviewers almost never draw continuity between new films and movie history.” You can quibble with White’s taste on a film-by-film basis, but his respect for cinematic history—and his insistence that criticism serve as a platform for larger intellectual and societal consideration—make him one of the most valuable voices in his industry.
>SPLICE TODAY: How did you come to film criticism? What were the first movies you loved, and which were the first movies you felt compelled to parse critically?
>ARMOND WHITE: Writing about movies has always been a route towards understanding what I’ve seen—what I’ve just been through, you might say. So writing about film also includes writing about one’s own life and feelings at the time. I learned this is possible from reading reviews that were more knowledgeable and impassioned than most. You know, [Pauline] Kael, [Andrew] Sarris and the general-interest magazine critics of the 60s and 70s who were a more broad-minded, unsnarky bunch than today’s shills.
>ST: You’ve been labeled a Paulette [an acolyte of Kael’s distinctive criticism style], yet you also studied with Sarris at Columbia. Where do you see their critical meeting point? What did you take from them both?
>AW: Despite their rhetorical combat, both were auteurists. Really, that’s the best way to make sense of any art form. They were both sophisticated, informed and deeply passionate about movies. As Bertolucci once said, you can only argue with people with whom you basically agree. Renoir, Ophüls, Altman, Godard, Dreyer, Welles-these are basic issues that Pauline and Andrew share. I think of them as my film critic Mom and Pop.
Noah Gonzalez
It's long to read, what's the movie I have to hate now?
Gabriel Perez
>> >>His seemingly contrarian tendencies are offset, however, by a deep love and encyclopedic knowledge of film.
It's literally impossible to find a critic that knows more about film than he does. Say what you want about his reviews, he clearly is the smartest film critic alive, possibly ever.
Hunter King
>ST: Tell me about your moviegoing habits. You review two or three films a week for New York Press, but how much time of your life is spent in darkened theaters?
>AW: I see at least five new films every week in a screening room, often many more. And New York allows one to catch older films in numerous venues from museums to rep houses. I’m always watching movies somewhere.
>ST: One word that recurs constantly in your film writing is “emotion,” usually in regard to contemporary Hollywood’s inability to engage with audiences’ feelings in authentic ways. What are some movies, old or new, that you find emotionally engaging and honest? What’s the relationship between a film’s visuals and its emotional authenticity?
>AW: That question demands a huge answer but let’s start near the beginning: Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), which I always thought of as “the movie of movies” until Altman’s Nashville (1975) which wins that appellation for the sound era. Both are examples of rich storytelling, broad narratives that collapse-and-expand into intense, relatable, personal dramas. These epics are also emotionally engaging, no less so for always being visually spectacular. Griffith’s wondrous Babylonian steps scene compares to Altman’s shot where the widescreen is astonishingly filled with the faces of people watching Barbara Jean sing. And Griffith’s climactic courtroom/train montage has its parallel in Altman’s extraordinarily complex montage of feelings and rhythm during the “I’m Easy” number.
>Intolerance and Nashville can teach you how to watch movies, both grab your imagination by being true to the conflicts that humans go through. Their stories and images are recognizable and that is what art is supposed to be: crafted works that lead us to better understand the world, our selves and others. In fact, you can take that as a synopsis of both Intolerance and Nashville.
Jeremiah Taylor
He's a boring doublenigger who is the Ann Coulter of visual entertainment.
If you're not smart enough to just ignore him, you deserve your life.
Angel Moore
le conversative contrarian black guy
Matthew Hall
>Unfortunately, the recent celebration of directors like Gus Van Sant, David Cronenberg, David Fincher and Neil LaBute propose an unfeeling film culture. Those filmmakers are nihilistic and like affectless directors such as Hou Hsiao Hsien and Achitpong Weesakthel, they prize cynicism above feeling. They are icons for a film culture that disregards Griffith and Altman’s achievements of spectacular emotionalism.
>ST: You’ve mentioned the “nihilism” of Van Sant, Fincher, et al in your criticism before, yet I’m still unclear what’s meant by that term in this context. Taste aside, what disrespect do these directors show to the humanity of Griffith and Altman’s films? In your review of Zodiac, for instance, you make it clear that Fincher values technical accomplishment over character, but Griffith and Altman (and Bertolucci, Godard, and the whole gang you mentioned before) are hardly technical minimalists. So why “nihilism”?
>AW: Nihilism has nothing to do with “technical minimalists.” Neither does technical mastery ensure any kind of moral complexity. Plainly put, the films of Van Sant and Fincher show that they believe life has no purpose, also denying that people believe in God or search for meaning in life—and that is the fashion of the nihilistic age. It’s against humanism, the sensibility that links Griffith to Altman, Godard, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Dreyer, Terence Davies, Visconti, Buñuel, Mizoguchi, Julian Hernandez, Wes Anderson and the filmmakers whose work I most respond to.
Jeremiah Baker
>These days, nihilist filmmakers are routinely celebrated without an examination of what they stand for. Reviewers (many of whom are nihilists themselves) swallow this anti-humanism whole (thinking it excuses Van Sant and Fincher’s badly constructed, illogical “art”) and then willy-nilly spread the nihilistic philosophy throughout the culture. The end effect of praising There Will Be Blood, Paranoid Park, and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is to advance the idea that life is meaningless and that the world is wretched. Nihilists are hip; remember how the Coen brothers made fun of nihilists in The Big Lebowski?
>ST: You’re a professed admirer of widescreen Cinemascope for the “profound aesthetic experience” it provides. And yet, for the aspiring cineaste looking to brush up on his film history, we have little choice but to domesticate the movies and watch the classics on DVD. So what do you make of something like Netflix, which has given more people more access to classic films than ever before, yet which takes away the original context for which they were made. Speaking from my own experience, I watch movies like Barry Lyndon or Contempt or Hell’s Angels and while I enjoy them, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m getting a sort of bootleg version.
Aiden Martinez
>AW: Watching movies on TV is great fun and a necessary method of gaining cultural exposure. But it’s TV, not cinema. It’s like reading a play rather than seeing it performed. Then you get “literature” or “cinema” in quotation marks. Because, and this must be emphasized, THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO SUBSTITUTE FOR THE CONCENTRATION, IMMENSITY AND INTENSITY OF THE BIG-SCREEN MOVIE EXPERIENCE. When Picasso’s Guernica used to be at the Museum of Modern Art, it was a different, greater, experience than studying its reproduction in books. But that’s better than nothing. For many years I only knew Hitchcock’s The Birds from TV. I didn’t know what I was missing until I finally saw it on the big screen. I worry that new generations’ TV habits will prevent them from appreciating cinematic values—scale, composition, tempo—when they’re enjoying DVDs.
>ST: Regarding “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Movies”: You mark the debut of [Siskel and Ebert’s TV show] At the Movies as the end of serious intellectual criticism because Ebert’s method disconnected movie talk from “moral and social issues.” I can’t disagree, yet I’m curious where you stand on Ebert the written critic, who values film history and education more than most of his followers in the thumb-fumbling “Consumer Reports” style. I’m reminded of his Great Movies series, or his Overlooked Film Festival, both of which stress a personal, emotional relationship to film and film history, two things you claim to favor.
>AW: That TV show, and the superficial way it encourages people to talk about movies, are what really define Ebert’s work and it’s had a disastrous influence on media and the culture. Ebert’s “emotional relationship” to film seems to be primarily financial—otherwise, he wouldn’t simplify cinema the way he does.
Daniel Brown
>I don’t want to overstate this—I already laid out the issues in my essay—but only folly has resulted from Ebert-style film jabber becoming the well-known, widely-defended standard.
>ST: So what are the criteria for a professional critic? Is that title professorial, dependent on some quantifiable measurement like a degree? Where’s the point at which an enthusiast becomes a critic?
>AW: I don’t understand why an enthusiast also pretends to be a professional critic. That may just be a delusion proffered by the Internet where people can express their opinions without being required to demonstrate knowledge, experience or exercise intellectual rigor.
>Pick up any newspaper, magazine, or switch on the TV and you’ll see that professional journalistic standards have fallen; there are few good models for enthusiasts to follow. Professional journalists everywhere have abrogated their responsibilities to serving the power elite (Hollywood, Wall Street), which precludes any sense of aesthetic taste or cultural education being put in play. Non-thinking professionals might even be more dangerous than non-thinking amateurs.
Jaxson Jones
>There ought to be some station between amateur and professional where one can be caring, thoughtful, tasteful and in search of knowledge—to satisfy film lovers without them pretending to be critics. “Amateur” means love, as I point out in a chapter of my book The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World. That kind of love used to result in film clubs, rep houses and even film-school pursuits—things that are socially useful and culturally fertile. Ebert made it popular for everyone to want to get in on the Film Critic occupation.
>ST: Again, you’re merely stating that “amateurs” and “critics” are different, and that one pretending to be the other is insulting to the craft. Undoubtedly so, but I’m still curious (if only for my own professional interest) where the line is drawn. Is it a matter of being professionally published in print, as opposed to an Internet presence? Is it a matter of movies seen, or is it just an I-know-it-when-I-see-it kind of thing?
>AW: [I’m] not “merely” stating anything; the differences between amateurs and critics are there to be observed. Think about it: professional publication (getting paid for it) used to imply a standard of knowledge and training. Now everybody thinks they can be a movie critic simply because they have an opinion.
Wyatt Morris
>I’m simply questioning what drives people to be critics these days. Are they discovering themselves, exploring the art form, or just eager to join the hype machine? When so much writing on film (in print or the Internet) is all in lockstep, all the same, bandwagon opinions, you have to wonder why people bother to do it. Is it merely diary entries or merely opinions without a background of study, experience, self-examination?
>Strange that it’s only in regards to movies that publications don’t insist on education, knowledge, [and] training. Architecture, dance, classical music critics usually have an in-depth background. Thanks to the Internet, “film critics” pop up overnight. These “critics” then align themselves with the most fashionable, mainstream figureheads. (And I don’t mean Sarris and Kael—there are new gangleaders now.) It’s Fan Club-ism with intellectual arrogance.
>ST: Which contemporary filmmakers do you esteem? Do you have oppositional recommendations for those filmgoers who enjoy Cronenberg, Van Sant, and Fincher? You’ve recommended Jeff Nichols’ recent Shotgun Stories to those who thought There Will Be Blood was profound, for example.
>AW: I’m impressed by the films of Charles Stone III, Jared Hess, Chen Kaige and Julian Hernandez. As for recommendations, how’s this: Instead of Cronenberg, try Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow. Instead of Van Sant, try Borzage’s No Greater Glory. Instead of Fincher, try von Sternberg’s Dishonored.
>ST: Ironically enough in light of our earlier question, none of those are available on Netflix.
Jaxon Morgan
>likes Hitchcock thank god for that. Was waiting for him to find some excuse
Ryan Allen
>AW: Those plugs were just to mess with you, but I seriously esteem them, recommend them and consider them major works, let alone antidotes to Cronenberg, Van Sant and Fincher. And if not those exact titles, then any films by those directors will do. (Well, for Borzage you gotta be careful about the later films, but his 20s and 30s work is all great.)
>Netflix is not the world. I believe the three titles above are all available on VHS in the New York Public Library system (that’s where I periodically rent Dishonored); maybe [your city] is as lucky.
>ST: What was the impetus behind your magazine First of the Month? Is it a way for you (and the other writers) to bridge disparate interests in longer articles than traditional print media allow? Like your recent essay that brings in Spielberg and Morrissey to comment on the pop wistfulness of Springsteen’s new record—an article like that speaks to your insistence that criticism is a “a route towards understanding what I’ve seen,” even more so than your film reviews for the Press.
>AW: I’m fond of pop music, too. That’s why I was thrilled to write about Springsteen’s Magic for First of the Month, a publication started by friends and myself. There’s just less opportunity to write about music since New York City gets about 10 new movies a week. I want to get back to writing on music video and pop music more often—mix it in with movies the way I used to. First of the Month is intended to review culture and politics with more dedication, honesty and from imaginative points of view that you can’t find in the mainstream media.
yeah he doesn't like guardians of the galaxy, fuck this guy!
Kevin Watson
>As for recommendations, how’s this: Instead of Cronenberg, try Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow. Instead of Van Sant, try Borzage’s No Greater Glory. Instead of Fincher, try von Sternberg’s Dishonored. This is why I can't take this man seriously. I've watched The Merry Widow and Dishonored and I don't see any similarities between them and Fincher or Cronenberg's films.
Caleb Reed
He actually argues for his point pretty well
Elijah Sanders
didn't like Wonder Woman either
Leo Foster
film scholars > critics
Read some books about film. Armond is a meme man.
Thomas Torres
Armond White is the quintessential Sup Forums 'patrician' If he were a fa/tv/irgin, he'd be part of the upper echelon
Isaiah Morris
wtf I love sandler now
Thomas Nelson
>>Strange that it’s only in regards to movies that publications don’t insist on education, knowledge, [and] training. I wonder how he'd feel about video game critics. They seem to embody a lot of what he finds distasteful in contemporary film critics.
Luis Ramirez
>If he were a fa/tv/irgin, he'd be part of the upper echelon
what an insult. even armond 'meme contrarian' white deserves better.
Cooper Ross
he'd claim Sonic 06 was great.
Chase Stewart
>Plainly put, the films of Van Sant and Fincher show that they believe life has no purpose, also denying that people believe in God or search for meaning in life—and that is the fashion of the nihilistic age.
Yeah but we're talking about Zodiac, a movie about serial killings in the 1970s, isn't Fincher's approach to that movie thematically sound?
Camden White
wait he likes wes anderson?
Michael Rogers
>As Bertolucci once said, you can only argue with people with whom you basically agree. Fuck. I learn something relevant in every Armond thread.
Noah Campbell
Are you author or unironically enjoying those dull essay memes on YouTube by any chance?
Bentley Bailey
And he likes Dirty Grandpa so much he wrote two separate positive reviews of it, one of them for a gay website where Armond masturbates over Zac Efron.
Armond is literally an /ourguy/ of the highest order.
Ayden Nelson
>Youtube
There are better sources.
Jack Thomas
Yes but to Armonds autism these works are very similar
Christian Campbell
>Hates how films lack hope >Likes BvS >Hates Wonder Woman
This guy
Tyler Barnes
...
Asher Nelson
>Men are still good vs >Dis is vy ai turned my back on mankind
Also he didn't hated it, he just stated that WW is lower and thematically lighter then MoS or BvS. Which is right.
Justin Perez
>Adam Sandler’s comedies are not “dumb fun,” maybe that’s why they’re not in critics’ favor. Sandler’s hilarious new film Jack and Jill (in which he portrays both male and female fraternal twins), brings to mind the great line that Ernst Lubitsch’s classic 1946 female plumber comedy Cluny Brown “upset people who didn‘t like to admit they have plumbing.”
>In Jack and Jill, Sandler looks at sibling rivalry without that acrid love of dysfunction so popular on TV and Broadway. It’s obvious that Los Angeles ad exec Jack and his hefty, homely, still unmarried sister Jill who visits from New York will mend their rift but the fun is in watching the healing process. The film’s comedy (as in coach potato behavior) shows the depths of kinship–similarities siblings can’t help sharing but learn to accept in themselves. And Sandler’s always protective–as when Jack insults Jill but warns “I can say that because I’m her twin.”
>Jack and Jill reveals that Sandler’s best comedies (Grown Ups, Bedtime Stories, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and the great Spanglish) are really love stories. He explores affection without the class and gender guilt Judd Apatow hides behind (the distraction scuttled Apatow’s grandiose Funny People). Sandler’s willingness to appear “dumb” is what makes his films so cathartic. He thrives on being unembarrassed–the key to classic comedy going back to the Greeks.
Carson Harris
>Sandler, of course, always goes back to Jewishness. He may be the least ethnically abashed Jewish film comic outside the Borscht Belt which is Jack and Jill’s natural strength. Jack’s self-consciousness about Jill is rooted in Jewish comics’ proverbial self-deprecation (that’s why the twinship premise). Jill’s large features, gaucheness, petulance and unsophisticated ways are not anti-Jewish traits but the qualities that insecure, social-climbing ethnic groups usually evade.
>In Jill drag, Sandler looks like young women you see on the subway; she’s a homely archetype. (Eddie Murphy has mastered this comic pride, especially in The Klumps and Norbit.) Credit Sandler’s subtle feminine caricature–especially in dancing and athleticism–that avoids making Jill clownish like Tyler Perry’s grotesque Madea. Perry’s career is based in parodying ethnic shame then edging into pride. In Jack and Jill Sandler embraces rude, crude and earthy in ways that Tyler Perry wouldn’t dare. Or would he?
>Sandler’s real dare is to defend ethnicity–not piously but through comedy that has social and political effect: When Jack’s WASP assistant (Nick Swardson) boasts that he’s almost Jewish because “I’m an atheist,” Jack looks nonplussed. Yet, Sandler isn’t. His comic introspection has a moral core. Appreciation of roots and background is what gives the film’s overlong but uproarious Al Pacino subplot its basis–it’s both crazily romantic and a professional salute. That’s because Sandler knows how our plumbing works.
Hunter Green
He's so on the money with the state of "critics" today, it's so fucking depressing loved the interview now I'm depressed as fuck
Chase Nguyen
>BvS >lacking hope
I don't understand how people can be this stupid, bvs is not a difficult movie to grasp
Jaxson Smith
S P A N K B A N K A N K B A N K
Anthony Hernandez
Next sentence: >AW: Those plugs were just to mess with you, but I seriously esteem them, recommend them and consider them major works, let alone antidotes to Cronenberg, Van Sant and Fincher. And if not those exact titles, then any films by those directors will do. (Well, for Borzage you gotta be careful about the later films, but his 20s and 30s work is all great.)
Besides, the point isn't that they're similar films/directors, but that Cronenberg/Van Sant/Fincher are hollow and dead-ends as far as inquiries into the artform.
Alexander Lopez
A.I. is one of my favorite movies so brilliant minds and such...
Mason Gomez
Thank you for posting this interview. White likes to shake the reader with contrarian points of views. But under his provocative reviews and dubious tastes (His vindication of the worst Adam Sandler vehicles comes to mind) there is a coherent, interesting way of viewing film as an art medium and the implications of being an informed viewer. His work emanates a rare passion about the cinema history in the current cultural climate.
Jeremiah Cooper
yeah, the shitposters don't actually read reviews though they just look at the score and imagine their own version of a review
Josiah Miller
I need to find more podcasts with him, hearing him talk is pretty great, especially when it comes to music/musicals. It's no doubt this guy knows his shit, and even if you don't agree with his view, that's OK by him, he wants to be challenged, he WANTS that discourse.
I hate to admit but I wish I could see all the movies he mentions in his reviews to really get where he's coming from but at the same time he still does enough without that to get his point across.
>AW: Nihilism has nothing to do with “technical minimalists.” Neither does technical mastery ensure any kind of moral complexity. Plainly put, the films of Van Sant and Fincher show that they believe life has no purpose, also denying that people believe in God or search for meaning in life—and that is the fashion of the nihilistic age. It’s against humanism, the sensibility that links Griffith to Altman, Godard, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Dreyer, Terence Davies, Visconti, Buñuel, Mizoguchi, Julian Hernandez, Wes Anderson and the filmmakers whose work I most respond to.
that's the line that makes me doubt his credibility in subjects he's NOT an expert in.
Also, the issue I take with critics is how they nearly always assume that the final product is exactly how the writer/director wanted it. When he likes it - it's as close to perfection as possible; when he doesn't then they don't know what they're doing. But this doesn't take into account the constraints of budget, location, on set mishaps, happy accidents. I don't like people preaching to me about philosphical concepts without ever taking into account how things are relative to other things.
Something about him irks me, like points are being obfuscated along the way. I'd definitely love a long drawn out chat with him one-to-one that allows actual challenge.
David Fisher
Just read his Detroit review and more than anything it hits the point that I want Kathyrn Bigelow to go back to her roots at least ONCE instead of doing just more and more quasi-historical dramas, she made Near Dark and Strange Days FFS.
Jaxon Johnson
AI and The Darjeeling Ltd weren't "critically snubbed".
Luis Howard
>But this doesn't take into account the constraints of budget, location, on set mishaps, happy accidents. This is a laughable defense of mediocrity. When a surgeon botches the c-section birth of your son, you will never want to hear what mishaps the surgeon suffered on his hand on the way to the table. In art where the auteur's subject is expressed at you, it speaks poorly of both the auteur's subject and the techniques he uses to profess it if his message could so easily be derailed, no, eclipsed, by the everyday realities of production.
