A Cinephile’s Universe Spanning ‘Wall-E’ to Warhol

‘Across the Movi-verse: Writing on Film 2011–2021’By J. HobermanFilm Desk Books, 369 pagesThe first essay included in a new book by J. Hoberman, “Across the Movi-verse: Writing on Film, 2011–2021,” strikes an elegiac tone: “There is, or once was, a movie universe — a quasi-autonomous realm of plotlines and personalities, coincidences and cross-references, quasars and black holes.” Mr. Hoberman writes about two specific events in which this universe was predicated on cinema less as a means of story-telling than as a form of collage: “The Movie Orgy” (1968) directed by Joe Dante and produced by Jon Davison, and Ken Jacobs “A Good Night for the Movies” (1972).Both projects are kaleidoscopic in nature and long in running time. “The Movie Orgy” began as a 7-hour epic that Mr. Dante has since winnowed down to 4-½ hours. Jacobs’ opus ran for 24 hours, employing multiple projectors that, in Mr. Hoberman’s words, “precipitated a form of celluloid primary-process thinking. Free association reigned, synchronicity ruled.” Mr. Dante went on to popular pursuits, helming fare like Steven Spielberg’s favorite “Jaws” knock-off, “Piranha” (1978), and the evergreen creature-feature, “Gremlins” (1984). Even when seen in small doses, “The Movie Orgy” is indicative of the Pop-wise japery at the heart of Mr. Dante’s aesthetic. The “world’s first found-footage megamix” makes plain its love for movies in all their varieties and qualities. “A Good Night” is harder to get a peg on because of its one of a kind performance piece status, but Jacobs did pursue a more obdurate filmmaking path. He spent his working life culling archival footage in the grand pursuit of “heretical heuristics.” A strain of cynicism runs throughout the director’s public statements, to wit: “It’s pathetic to be honest . . . you can really misinform the audience. Not that the audience is ‘informed’.” Here was a gadfly with little respect for the narrow audience he was content to cultivate.The two poles represented by Mr. Dante and Jacobs — that is to say, the mainstream and the marginal — tug at Mr. Hoberman’s critical faculties in tenuous and interesting ways. The author’s name should ring a bell for New Yorkers of a certain vintage. He was a regular columnist at The Village Voice for 33 years. In an introductory sketch clumsily titled “After My Di-Voice,” Mr. Hoberman speaks of having the rug pulled out from under him by the changing nature of journalism: “It took me possibly half a day to realize that I’d be writing for online publication — something I hitherto haughtily refused—for significantly less income.”The author’s byline has since appeared in venues like Artforum, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Tablet from which the majority of essays in “Across the Movi-verse” have been gathered. Mr. Hoberman is an omnivorous intellect with a deep knowledge of cinema and an unapologetic political bent. The showpiece here is from the summer 2012 edition of Film Comment, “Cine Obamarama: The Presiding-While-Black Scenario.” It is, let’s admit it, a tour de force: Mr. Hoberman manages to extend tendentious cant like “the Other” in speaking not only about “the most exotic personage” ever to be President of the United States, Barack Obama, but the “less threatening,” albeit resolutely Mormon, Mitt Romney. Mr. Hoberman takes the reader on a wildly encyclopedic ride through cinematic history finding harbingers for the Obama presidency like Roy Mack’s “Rufus Jones for President” (1933), a 20-minute short starring a 7-year old Sammy Davis Jr. He then muses if Andrew Stanton’s “Wall-E” (2008) led Mr. Obama to “identify with the weird little Waste Allocation Load Lifter — community organizer for an extinct community? Or did the American people make the connection themselves and animate Obama with their own yearning for an entity that might assume the custodial task of cleaning up the mess left by two wars, a natural disaster, and an economy teetering on the brink?”Mr. Hoberman is fluid enough as a prose stylist to make this kind of rabbit-holing consistently diverting. In “No Success Like Failure: A Natural History of the Film Maudit,” the author explains the French term as “cursed with an unhappy destiny . . . a film [that] is inevitably ruinous at the box office, at times a fiasco so absolute that it begs to be championed.” Mr. Hoberman will elaborate further at the Museum of the Moving Image on October 11 when he’ll be introducing two exemplars of the genre, Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales” (2006) and Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” (1960).But be warned. This double feature will likely prove torturous for moviegoers averse to, respectively, smug showbiz pieties and soulless technical flourishes. As for “Across the Movi-Verse,” it is an eminently readable tome that makes room for heartfelt paeans to spaghetti westerns and Elliott Gould even as it applauds the rank amateurism of Mike Kuchar and makes more of Andy Warhol’s vapid nihilism than Warhol himself would’ve claimed. There’s a young Turk bristling under these maundering reflections on the inequities of history and the frustrations of culture. It’s that prickliness that makes “Across the Movi-verse” a welcome, if often vexatious, addition to a cinephile’s library.

A Cinephile’s Universe Spanning ‘Wall-E’ to Warhol

A Cinephile’s Universe Spanning ‘Wall-E’ to Warhol

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