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November 07, 2007

Bulletin: Amy Taubin, 68, does not like all low-budget American films with mumbling

In the November-December Film Comment, contributing editor Amy Taubin sets her rifle sight on movies by Andrew Bujalski, Aaron Katz, Joe Swanberg, and the Duplass Brothers. "In terms of performance, most of the actors favored by or simply available to these fledgling directors are nonprofessionals, who tend to swallow their words (particularly the ends of their sentences) because they are uncomfortable speaking on camera, whether their dialogue is scripted, improvised, or a combination of the two. In relation to meaning, these non-actors are perfect choices for these films because their insecurity and embarrassment about voicing their characters’ ideas, desires, and feelings is not merely symptomatic of their lack of technique, it dovetails with a defining characteristic of the particular cohort (white, middle-class, twenty-something) to which the filmmakers and their quasi-fictional characters belong. The mumblecore films literally speak in the voice of that cohort, and the best of them do so with remarkable and revealing precision. I once described Bujalski as a poet of demurral, hesitation, and noncommitment in whose films there are as many minute variations of meaning implied by the phrases “I don’t know” and “I mean” as there are said to be words for snow in the languages of the Inuit. Is that, however, a sufficient basis for a film movement? Obviously not in the grand sense of the French New Wave or the postwar American avant-garde. At most, one might think of [these movies] as an update of the “New Talkie,” the strand (not quite a genre) of no-budget indies that emerged in the early Nineties with such landmark films as Richard Linklater’s Slacker, Kevin Smith’s Clerks [of which Taubin was a major early and continuing supporter], and Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner’s Go Fish. Within a broader history, one might trace it back to Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls and his related Sixties talkies. So specific was the chatter in all these films that they could have served as illustrations in a course on anthropological linguistics." Several commenters, including SxSW's Matt Dentler, are responding, but for now, here's GreenCine's David Hudson: "she neglects to mention that there are just as many dicks flopping around in [Swanberg's] movies as boobs; that'd be a minor point if it weren't seemingly so important for Taubin." [Further diatribe at the link; pic: Aaron Katz's Dance Party USA.]

Posted by Ray Pride at November 7, 2007 01:15 PM

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