Wednesday, September 02, 2009

The Full Quote

Blogger apparently only lets you have 500 characters with which to express yourself in the space below the title of your blog in the header. The quote I tried to put up there just now was closer to 600 characters, and I got a snooty little error message when I tried to save it. The full quote looks like this:

"[Paolo] Sorrentino seems to be essentially conceding that the days when there was a commercially viable audience for a cinema of civic conscience...are long gone, and that, in a new, highly competitive media and entertainment environment, today's primarily younger moviegoers will have to be enticed to see films dealing with their own political history or contemporary affairs by packaging them in a more compelling, tricked-out visual style, complemented by a generous helping of popular music." -Gary Crowdus, introduction to an interview with Paolo Sorrentino (Cineaste, vol. XXXIV, No.3)

Crowdus is the editor-in-chief of Cineaste magazine, a quarterly that deals with the politics involved in cinema nearly as much as it deals with cinema itself. I've lately discovered the joy of reading Film Comment, but that one only comes out every other month, so after I finished the latest issue, I started looking for other serious indie film magazines, and found Cineaste. Unfortunately, there is no link on their website to the interview with Sorrentino - and it looks like a new issue is out, so you might be out of luck at the newsstand, too. Maybe you can get a back issue! The issue with the Sorrentino interview also has two really good articles on the state of Palestinian cinema.

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