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| A PINEWOOD DIALOGUE WITH | ||
| J. HOBERMAN AND A. O. SCOTT | ||
| J. Hoberman is one of the world’s most erudite and perceptive film critics, with writings that combine deep historical knowledge with an expansive view of cinema. To celebrate his 30th anniversary as a film critic at The Village Voice, the Museum of the Moving Image presented a program including a conversation with Hoberman moderated by New York Times film critic A. O. Scott. David Schwartz, the Museum’s Chief Curator, introduced the evening with a Top-10 List of things to like about Hoberman, and the discussion was followed by a screening of Julia Loktev’s independent feature Day Night Day Night, one of Hoberman’s favorite films of 2007. | ||
| A Pinewood Dialogue with The Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman, preceding a screening of Day Night Day Night, moderated by The New York Times film critic A. O. Scott (January 5, 2008): | ||
| DAVID SCHWARTZ: Good evening and welcome. New York’s film culture is influential and vibrant. It is also a small, tight-knit world. You, tonight’s audience, are a prime example: a cross-section of the city’s best filmmakers, critics, editors, distributors, publicists, film programmers, and of course, the hippest and most sophisticated people, the Museum of the Museum Image members. (Applause) I knew it; the biggest applause so far. We’re here tonight to honor somebody who has played a vital role in film culture for the past thirty years. His tenure at The Village Voice is longer than any other critic in the paper’s history (including another kid who grew up in Queens, Andrew Sarris), and he is the most perceptive, informed, insightful film critic around, an articulate champion of neglected and overlooked films, as well as an incisive analyst who can dig deep beneath the surface of Hollywood glitz and view a blockbuster movie as a cultural artifact. He understands the link between politics and entertainment better than anyone since Ronald Regan and Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Laughter) He is, of course, the Village Voice Senior Film Critic, Jim Hoberman. (Applause) So to celebrate Jim, I wrote a Top Ten List for the year: The Top Ten Things That We Like About Jim Hoberman As A Film Critic. One: he does great Top Ten Lists. His lists have always been an interesting mix. They have included a Madonna music video, a Carl Stalling CD with music from Looney Toons cartoons, and my favorite, game six of the 1986 World Series. (Laughter) And famously, his lists have always been eclectic. In 1979, Vivian Dick’s Super-8 punk movie She Had Her Gun All Ready (1978) (Applause) was ranked just below”okay, just below… (Laughter) always a cheap applause line, the Vivian Dick reference”was ranked just below Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). A favorite Village Voice tradition was the annual letter of complaint to the Village Voice editor about how elitist and egg-headed Hoberman’s Top Ten List was... and of course, this letter always came from a Village Voice staff member. (Laughter) Number two: Jim has been the most important critical champion of avant-garde cinema. He’s a long-time champion of filmmakers like Ernie Gehr and Ken Jacobs, who have both been on the Top Ten Lists a number of times, and both are here tonight. (Applause) Three: Jim is a great film programmer. He has organized a number of retrospectives here at the Museum, including one on Vietnam-era westerns; a great series on the underground legend Jack Smith; and a series based on his book, The Dream Life. In fact, he often uses his space in The Village Voice as a form of programming, picking two or three films to analyze in a week that have interesting, sometimes unexpected, connections. Number four: Jim has great taste. Two words: David Cronenberg, who is one of the very few mainstream filmmakers as intelligent as Jim Hoberman. Number five: Jim is the rare film critic whose references are not primarily to other movies, but to a remarkable range of cultural sources. His recent review of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (2001) is a worthy companion to the film, an encyclopedic survey of the 1960s, with references to literature, photography, art, music and much more. Number six: Jim writes great books. Looking at his bibliography”Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds; The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism; The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties”it becomes clear that Jim’s subject is not just film, but like the Museum, I think, he treats the moving image as an artifact with which to explore the history of the twentieth-century and the present. Number seven: Jim doesn’t mind being an intellectual. There has been a long anti-intellectual streak in American culture”including film critics, who were dismissive of movies that asked the audience to think, as though emotion and intellect couldn’t co-exist, either on screen or in the mind of the reader. Jim is an anti-anti-intellectual. Number eight: Jim has complex responses to complex films. He’s able to point his thumb up and down in the same review, and sometimes that’s the right response. Number nine: Jim is funny. His humor can be as deadpan as Jim Jarmusch’s films, but he is the wittiest film writer around. And finally, number ten: is the J. His name is Jim, but he’s always gone by “J” in print. I think that when he wrote a piece defending the movie Shoah (1985) from Pauline Kael’s bashing in The New Yorker, an irate and probably anti-Semitic reader ominously wrote a letter to the editor stating, “We know what the J stands for.” (Laughter) Well, we know what the J really stands for: it stands for “genius.” (Applause) So now, before”I’m not going to be the one introducing Jim, I’m going to now introduce another critic who goes by his initials: A. O. Scott. I just want to say that he’s been a great critic since he joined The New York Times in 2000, just eight years ago. So he’s going to have to wait twenty-two years for his tribute here. (Laughter) But I think anybody who has been reading The New York Times knows that it’s a very vibrant time for that section; both with Tony and with Manohla Dargis, who was a student of Jim’s, the paper has incredibly lively writing. Anyhow, who would have thought that we’d have the day where we have the brash, young upstart critic from The New York Times in conversation with the establishment figure at The Village Voice? (Laughter) But here he is, A. O. Scott. (Applause) A. O. SCOTT: Thank you. I’m going to take my seat in just a minute. I’m not Jim Hoberman, although once in the press mailbox area at the Cannes Film Festival, Jim was mistaken for me”which I’ve always been very flattered by; I don’t know how Jim feels about it. (Laughs) But I know there are a lot of our fellow critics in the audience here tonight, and I know that I’m not alone and I can venture to speak for most, if not all of us, to say that we have… There’s perhaps no other active film critic who has taught as much by example and by precept about how to think seriously, clearly, coherently, and bravely about film, and how to write about film”week in, week out, and also at greater length, with such concision and intellectual command and wit”as Jim. So I will bring him up to the stage now, and we will talk about the last thirty years. I think we’ll take it year by year, so settle in. (Applause) J. HOBERMAN: I feel like I’m a very tough act to follow! (Laughter) SCOTT: If you don’t mind, I thought I would start by reading some of your own words to you (Laughter) and asking you to defend them; no. In preparation for this night, I was doing what I often do anyway, which was reading around in your work and the work of other critics I admire. I found what might be my favorite single essay of yours”and certainly the one that I come back to again and again, because I think there’s still a lot to be learned from it”an essay called “The Film Critic of Tomorrow, Today” (which is both looking back at and referring to an essay by Rudolf Arnheim called “The Film Critic of the Future” that was written in the 1930s) and that is responding, in the middle of the 1990s, to all kinds of then kind of current ideas about the death of cinema, the death of cinephilia, and so on. But I just wanted to read the very last passage from this essay, because I think it’s something that I come back to as a challenge, and a provocation, and an ideal, again and again. You begin quoting Jean-Luc Godard, “The greatest history is the history of the cinema.” And then you say, “That history will force those critics refusing the role of under-paid cheerleaders to themselves become historians, not to mention archivists, bricoleurs, spoilsports, pundits, entrepreneurs, anti-conglomerate guerilla fighters, and in general, masters of what is known in the Enchanted Palace as counter-programming.” So I wondered if we could start out, if you could talk a little bit about the idea of the critical dilemma, almost, that you describe here; of being either a cheerleader or all of these other things”and how you see, you know, from day to day, from week to week, these different roles pushing themselves on you? HOBERMAN: Okay… (Laughter) Well, I would say first of all, that there’s this thing called film culture. Not the magazine, but something that would be akin to literature, and without being unduly weighty about it, that that’s what I think that”that’s the entity that I feel that film critics and other interested parties serve. It’s making film culture. I think to do that, you have to be aware of what is coming at you”being propelled at you”by the studios and the market place; and also have a kind of context to counter that with and to make sense of it”which is the history of film and also to a degree, the potential, the possibilities of it. So this is why I like the idea of double bills and programming films: because that automatically puts something in context. SCOTT: I wonder if we could”I wanted to read that partly to begin by going backwards. I mean, we’re here celebrating thirty years of your writing for The Village Voice, and thirty years ago the state of film culture was, perhaps, rather different from what it is today”and it’s also, I think, that the moment that we’re talking about, the late seventies, is very much mythologized time. There’s the mythology of what was happening in the cinema itself, particularly the American cinema; that’s the moment (or perhaps the beginning of the ebb) of The New Hollywood, and of the American New Wave, or Hollywood auteurism, or whatever you could call it. Also, when you arrived on the scene, there were some very imposing figures on the critical landscape, which are also looked back on now with a lot of sort of nostalgia, and fear and trembling. (Laughter) So can you describe, you know, to come into the house of one of those giants” HOBERMAN: To sneak in. SCOTT: Yes, to sneak in! (Laughs) ”and how you found the world then? HOBERMAN: Well, I think that this was sort of the end, I would say”the tail end, maybe the bitter end”of this mythologized period that began in the late fifties, and then kind of… let’s say, petered out with the bicentennial, when so many things seemed to go wrong. So I came after that, and there were some things in the landscape that definitely were better. One, very simply, was that there were more venues (at least print venues) for people to write film criticism. And there also were in New York, more venues, I think, where movies could be shown; at least revival theaters and so on. But I also think, at that time, that there was (and I think that this is true today, although less so) that there were many things that were just not being written about. So I was very fortunate when I came to The Voice, in that I could do pretty much whatever I wanted, as long as the other two critics (that was Andrew Sarris and Tom Allen, who was quite an interesting critic in his own right) weren’t interested in it.... and that covered a lot of material. (Laughter) So I was able to put things together, and assemble a whole kind of beat. That was great, that was very liberating, in a way; I mean, there were many things.... I got to review, for just one example, Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), this legendary movie that drifted into New York. Didn’t even run a whole week; it got pulled out of the theater, I think maybe even before my review came out. (Laughter) But I consider that an amazing opportunity, to be able to write about something like that. SCOTT: You also wrote quite a bit about experimental films, and also about a phenomenon that I’m not sure exists anymore in film culture in quite the same way, which is the cult film. These sort of… I don’t even know how to describe them, quite (Laughs) but these sort of disreputable cinematic artifacts that would surface here and there. HOBERMAN: Yes, yes. Well, Jonathan Rosenbaum and I”Jonathan at that time was the critic for the SoHo Weekly News”we had the great good fortune to be approached by a publisher who sort of thought, “Oh, isn’t there something in these midnight movies?” and then given an opportunity to investigate that. What was apparent then was that it was just ending”which is always, from a historical point of view, the best time to write about it. So we saw the whole shape of how that was going. So there were a lot of things that changed, really, with the development of, as you know, the VCR. I’m not a Luddite. I teach, and we show stuff digitally or on tape all the time”so I don’t think that’s necessarily bad, but that did change film culture and the way that people looked at movies very dramatically in the early eighties. SCOTT: Can you talk a little bit more about that? Was it just a matter of how people were experiencing or receiving...? Was it just a matter of where the audience was in relation to what it was looking at? How did this correlate to changes in the kind of stuff that was being made? HOBERMAN: Well, I think that the most obvious one was the end of revival houses, for the most part; or the decline of revival houses. There are still some in New York. I mean, there’s Film Forum which is an incredible revival theater, in part; and there are the Museum of the Moving Image; and the Museum of Modern Art; and the Walter Reade”I mean, there are places that show old movies. But there was more of an ongoing commercial potential, to go to a movie theater and see a movie. Once things became available, it kind of… My feeling is that these theaters were themselves not huge moneymakers ever, you know; and were sort of marginal. But this meant the end of their economic viability; and the thing with those theaters is that they also constituted social environments. I remember there being a discussion around this time, somebody pointed out that (you’ll correct me if I’m wrong with this) didn’t Lenin say that the way to make a revolution”let’s make a newspaper, right? The way to make a revolution, you’ve got to make a newspaper? So there was, “Well, make a movie theater.” You know, that way you have people coming, like-minded people coming, seeing these things... That’s basically how I think the cult movies were made. I think it depended on this shared apprehension of a movie and a shared discovery. You know, just coincidentally”but it’s certainly a coincidence that I treasure, you know”the first movie I reviewed for The Voice was Eraserhead (1977), which was precisely in that situation: showing at midnight at the old Cinema Village before it was divided into a number of theaters. The Cinema Village had a sort of history; that’s where I think Pink Flamingos (1972) had developed as a cult film. Richard Goldstein, who was the Arts Editor at the time and who was the guy who hired me, said, “Oh, yes, there’s some movie or something that’s opening there, you know. Go there at midnight. Go write about it.” You know, because the whole purpose in a movie like that”it wasn’t open for review. It just showed up at midnight and depended on word of mouth, and that’s something that I think has to do, again, with the social; the fact that people would come out at midnight for this experience. SCOTT: Right; yes. Now I wonder how this is, Jim? I guess I’m young enough to have missed most of that and old enough to have caught the tail end of it, having seen Eraserhead in a midnight revival a few years later in the town that I was living in, at sort of the pot smokers’ theater with the couches and the broken espresso machine... which was a social situation of it’s own. But I’ve been thinking about this in terms of your own way of writing as a critic, which is as someone who writes with a great consciousness of history (both of film history and the social history) in which it’s embedded. But also, it’s always been partly that history”or at least the post-war history of American film criticism”involves discovering these things in the past that had been overlooked or rejected, and also, at the same time, the lifting up into aesthetic appreciation of things that had been disreputable (which goes all the way back to the discovery that the classic Hollywood was actually classic, not just junk). I guess my question is, what happens when these discoveries and these historical reclamation projects become something that’s institutionalized? You talk about Eraserhead, and you look at David Lynch; while still a very”in a way, one of the last”kind of cussedly independent filmmakers out there, [he] is a canonical figure for a lot of critics. Pink Flamingos is part of the 25th Anniversary Box Set”or the 40th Anniversary Box Set”that a lot of critics got from New Line Cinema along with Lord of the Rings (2001) and Wedding Crashers (2005). (Laughter) I think when people talk about the decline or obsolescence of a certain kind of film culture, it’s also it’s institutionalization. HOBERMAN: Yes; I think that there are many, many paths to take from this. First of all, I think that there’s a dynamic which existed from the very beginning, in which passé films were rediscovered, very often by artists or artistic types”you know, aesthetes”and were valued. The French… reorganization of American cinema, or let’s say the rationalization of it, you know”that the French engaged in in the fifties, and then which Andrew Sarris really brought to America in the sixties is part of an ongoing process. I mean, the Surrealists and other artists were championing [Louis] Feuillade in the twenties, when these movies were regarded as junk, and old-fashioned, and so on; and I just think that there’s a way in which the archaic can be turned into the avant-garde. I’m more concerned about, I would say, “academic filmmaking.” I’m a sort of an academic, so I don’t mean to make that sound like a pejorative term. (Laughter) But filmmaking formula, a certain kind of formulaic filmmaking, rather than people’s perception, becoming academic, because I think that as I said, a lot of stuff works in terms of context. You know, I was an undergraduate at probably the very moment when film studies were getting into the university. Again, I was very fortunate to study film at that time, with Ken Jacobs”at the State University of New York”and others. It was a very free-wheeling moment when all sorts of things were put together, but even before that, when I was in high school in New York, it was possible to go see, you know, The Birth of a Nation (1915) at the Museum of Modern Art; and then go and see the new Godard film the next day, or even that day”and all these things were, in a way, contemporary. So I think that there’s that, too. Finally, even though I’ll contradict what I said before, there still can be cult films, in a way; Donnie Darko (2001) is an example of that. That’s a movie that was not particularly well-received at Sundance, that got mixed and not all that enthusiastic reviews when it opened in New York, and then ran for two years or something at the Pioneer Theater at midnight. So it was made by the audience. SCOTT: You used the phrase “academic filmmaking” before, and I wonder if you could expand a little bit on what you mean by that? Because when I hear you say that, I think about… you know, [art] in the sense that you would talk about academic painting of the nineteenth century; that is, a work in a received style that is content to stay within its own parameters. I mean, where do you see that? HOBERMAN: Well, I think you see a lot of”Well, we don’t even need to talk about stuff that’s produced by the studios, because it’s a given that commercial films need formulas; and sometimes that can be great, depending on what people do with it. But you know, anything that made money once is just assumed to be able to be recycled to make money again, that’s sort of the principle of it. But a movie like”you know, it’s actually, I would say, one of the best received movies of the year”No Country for Old Men (2007), to me, is a very academic film that is constructed in such a way to bring the audience along, and deliver a certain amount of thrills and excitement and surprises on schedule, and has a very mechanical aspect. But I couldn’t deny that it’s an extremely well made movie, the way that French academic painting is expert. SCOTT: Right. Well, yes; that was sort of what I thought you meant. A lot of what goes out under the label of “independent” now (and that’s sort of lazily applied, which I tend to think of more as, you know, the studio specialty division Oscar movie) can be called an “academic” style. Although yes, there are examples of very good work within it. HOBERMAN: Atonement (2007) is another… SCOTT: Yes, yes. Although you know, just to play devil’s advocate, there is a sense in which you could apply that description to your favorite movie of this year, I’m Not There)”in that it’s a movie (that I admire very, very much too) which has, in a very specific sense, an academic pedigree: the Brown Semiotics department [where director Todd Haynes and producer Christine Vachon studied]; but also comes out of an engagement with other work and other texts. It is in a way”and I think this is what I like about it”it is, in a way, a work of commentary. HOBERMAN: Yes. I would say that’s academic in a good way. But I wouldn’t use that” SCOTT: Okay; fair enough. HOBERMAN: I see what you’re saying, but I would say that it’s more”it’s a scholarly work, essentially. And to me, one of the things that are interesting about that is I don’t know what people make of it, really, and I’m still puzzled that… I mean, the first time I saw it, I was completely taken with it”but you know, the material spoke to me; I was fascinated by what the filmmaker was doing; and it deals with a period when I was a kid, so it’s completely internalized for me; I don’t have to stretch to see what’s going on; and it reminded me of things that I’d forgotten and so on. Then I saw it again and I was impressed by how researched or how thought out it was, but I still don’t know who exactly this movie speaks to, what you have to bring to it. I mean, there was a guy writing about it in Film Comment who loved it and said something very hyperbolic: he compared it to Finnegans Wake. (Laughter) Yes, that’s a laughable thing to say, but I understand”we deal in hype sometimes”what he’s saying. I mean, there’s so much going on in this movie… but who reads Finnegans Wake? (Laughter) So, you know, it sounds great… SCOTT: (Laughs) Who, unless they’re taking a class in it? Who outside the academy reads Finnegans Wake? HOBERMAN: I think you could listen to it, and the music of it would come through. I think that’s probably”maybe that’s what works with I’m Not There also. I mean, it is a musical, after all. It is drawing on something very satisfying and rich. SCOTT: Right. Sort of picking up on that, one of the things that you’ve always done that I’ve always been kind of impressed and amazed by is your ability to write history by writing about movies. I think the example of your book on the sixties is a great one: which is a narrative of the decade, told through what is both very straightforward but also a very complex method, because you’re talking about the circumstances of the movies”making and distribution and reception by an audience; but you’re also talking about what’s in the movies and reading them as very complicated allegories of their moment. In a way, a very simple question of how (Laughs) you came to this way of considering movies? Also, how you apply it not only to the past”which is, you know, there as an interpretable text”but also to, in a way, the present”which is, for the audience, the future that we have to be writing about every week? HOBERMAN: Well, one of the… I’m glad you asked this question. SCOTT: (Laughs) Oh, good. HOBERMAN: One of the great things about movies, and one of the things that’s really fascinating”and in some ways new”about the motion picture medium is that, you know, movies are time capsules. Even the worst. Sometimes even the worst, best of all. This is something that actually we”and I say “we” [to mean] “me and fellow students””used to think about at Binghamton. I also think that there’s a great precedent for this in the case of Siegfried Krakauer. I mean, a lot of his formulations in From Caligari to Hitler may seem naïve in some respects (although not in all). But for me, this was like a blinding insight, to come across this as a teenager: to say that movies really did intersect in such a basic way with the life of their times and with the whole collectivity. I mean, that it was really a collective form, and even when you had individual artists creating, to a degree they were”particularly in commercial films”speaking for large groups of people. I think that to me, this is just intrinsic in the medium. It’s just a natural way to look at it, and I think that again, since Reagan”and David brought him up”I think that Reagan made this obvious to everybody, in a way. That we live in this kind of movie-structured world, which he so effortlessly could just reference and draw on… SCOTT: Do you find when you’re reviewing… The reviewer’s task, in some ways, is a very straightforward and simple one; and maybe for exactly that reason, one that is sometimes (I’m speaking for myself) just almost overwhelmingly contradictory”in the way that you describe, I think, in that essay. One of the tensions, it seems to me, and one that I’ve seen you deal with in very interesting ways, is precisely within the very confined space of a weekly newspaper column, to somehow gesture toward or get at those kinds of meanings”political, social, whatever that you’re talking about”but also evaluate the thing, the object itself, and come to some judgment on it. HOBERMAN: Well, thank you. A week is a lot of time, compared to what… I mean to have to turn something around overnight or in a couple of days is very arduous. You know, it’s a way of experiencing the film, the material. And for me, it’s different. I like to review all different kinds of things, and in a way, the beat that I had when I started is… you know, I’m nostalgic for. I don’t see as much stuff. I mean, actually, when I saw Ed Halter’s Ten Best list in The Voice, I said, “Oh, I’m really out of touch.” But different movies present themselves in different ways; some things demand a kind of historical response, and with other ones, it doesn’t come as easily. I mean a movie like There Will Be Blood (2007): when I saw it, I just was lost in the filmmaking of it. It just was great filmmaking, in my opinion, and so that was enough to think about. But there are plenty of other movies that don’t give you that, and so it’s easier for other considerations to present themselves. SCOTT: And I think there’s also, in the case of that movie, when the initial impact of it wears off, there’s an awful lot. I mean, it certainly is not irrelevant to a lot… HOBERMAN: Not at all. SCOTT: …that’s happening at the moment. That, I think, provides us with an interesting segue to say a little bit about the movie that we’re about to show, which was one of your Top Ten this year: Day Night Day Night (2007). It seems to me that this is a movie where exactly these two things are intersecting. There is an approach to filmmaking that is quite striking and very accomplished and very formally interesting, as those of you who haven’t seen it will see. There’s also a subject matter (if you want to put it that way) that could hardly be more acutely relevant to the lives of Americans, and New Yorkers, and everyone else. HOBERMAN: Yes, yes. Oh, I think that this is a great example of this. I mean first of all, Day Night Day Night”which, you may know, deals with a suicide bomber, a terrorist”was first shown in Cannes. I didn’t see it there. I would have had to go out of my way; I think it was shown in the Quinzaine [de Réalisateurs (Directors Fortnight) section], and you know, just the thought of it… [Sighs] You know, I didn’t… But then I did see it, and I was really knocked out by it. One of the reasons was because this was such”well, first of all it’s a fascinating film experience, as you know. It really engages you as a viewer, and the subject matter is part of it, but also it’s the way that the movie is made, and it’s the way that the movie is conceived. In this movie, this really what, to me, is the most remarkable aspect, because this is a movie with a very strong concept. I mean, you become aware of it”it’s almost like a structural film”you become aware of the concept very soon into the movie, but at the same time… So it’s heady. It’s an intellectual idea, but it’s a very visceral film. The filmmaking is very… you get very, very involved in it, and not on a cerebral level, I think. SCOTT: Not at all. In a very”not to say too much about it, because it is an experience that is best to have in a raw and immediate way”but your emotional connection to it is also very complicated, because you’re not quite sure what it is you want to happen. There’s this incredible suspense that’s created, and you don’t know which outcome is the bad one and which is the good one; and that is absolutely horrifying as it plays out. HOBERMAN: Exactly, right, yes. Yes, and you’ve got plenty of time to, like, become aware of this in yourself. That’s entirely true. I would say that there are two short movies before, one of which was kind of a surprise to me. I’m delighted that David showed it. It’s also thirty years old, as he pointed out. Then there’s a movie after which I asked to be shown with Day Night Day Night, and that’s Square Times, a movie by Rudy Burckhardt, a photographer and filmmaker in New York. It’s a very straightforward and almost artless document of Times Square forty years ago, 1967, which was a time that I used to go to the movies there quite a lot, and I would consider that part of my education, too. So, fun for me to see this. But also because I think that it… SCOTT: It’s exactly the same place that [Day Night Day Night is set]… HOBERMAN: It’s exactly. Yes, and it brings something; I wanted to bring something out about the place, because in addition to everything else, Day Night Day Night is a great New York movie. It was my favorite New York movie of the year, too. SCOTT: Oh, I think so. In a way, one of the most beautiful, and most authentic, and least sentimental. (Laughs) I mean it’s not Sex in the City. HOBERMAN: Ah, no. (Laughter) SCOTT: Well, thank you Jim, and I look forward to our future conversations. (Applause) | ||
| The Pinewood Dialogues, an ongoing series of discussions with key creative figures in film, television, and digital media, are made possible with a generous grant from the Pannonia Foundation. Museum of the Moving Image is grateful for the generous support of numerous corporations, foundations, and individuals. The Museum receives vital funding from the City of New York through the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Additional government support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Natural Heritage Trust (administered by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation). The Museum occupies a building owned by the City of New York, and wishes to acknowledge the leadership and assistance of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Queens Borough President Helen M. Marshall, and City Council Member Eric N. Gioia. Copyright © 2008, Museum of the Moving Image. |
