Letters to the Editor
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Raising your Film IQ?
As someone who went through film school in the early 80's these new issues are more than nostalgic, they provide material that simply wasn't available. Scorcese's documentary on the Neorealists is worth at least one semester. $25 bucks?! The criterion version of Hiroshima Mon Amor will boost your grade on the final, assuming you bother to look at the directors notes. Let's not stop with the films themselves, what about the anthologies of articles in Cahiers Du Cinema by Harvard Press? I still have the xerox copies of the handouts my profs gave me.
I can hardly contain my delight watching the Pasolini collection. Certainly some things are going to be less interesting than others, and your point about the oversaturation of current films, when taken against the lack of exposure many earlier pictures received, implies a period of adjustment, or how many times have you seen Fargo? Once things attain some balance, we might want to revisit the overviewed pictures, with new ideas.
My only hope is that film viewers don't simply take cinema for granted, like a packaged consumer product. There is a lot more to say about this, because film is a corporate art form, which disdains the same critical elitism that bothers literature. We should remain hopeful that the void will be filled, to the benefit of everyone.