A.O. Scott is someone in The New York Times I enjoyed reading this long summer in North America. Recently, on a trans-Atlantic flight, I caught this article by him:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/movies/17scot.html?_r=1&ref=movies&oref=slogin
I've often thought Brian De Palma a cineaste worthy of auteur status - Femme Fatale was one of the best films of the last few years (its visual panache is lurid and Wellesian) and its non-release in UK cinemas was revelatory of the need for the director's status to be reconsidered. No one else does Vertigo-homage like he does, and no one else ever featured Frankie Goes To Hollywood so well. With the release of The Black Dahlia, which I have yet to see, now's as good a time as any for such a re-evaluation to begin.
So, I look forward to reading the articles at Slant, below:
http://slantmagazine.com/film/features/briandepalma.asp
As something of a post scriptum, let me note that Scott writes:
"[...] the movies that secured Mr. De Palma his critical following (which has not, it should be noted, been limited to Ms. Kael’s followers) exhibited many of the attributes of what people would eventually call postmodernism: a cool, ironic affect; the overt pastiche of work from the past; the insouciant mixture of high and low styles."
I note this definition of the postmodern with some pleasure, as it is the one I have long worked with, and the recognition is comforting. Indeed, critics of my own poetry collections would do well to consider it when reading my work in anything but the light of cinema and the postmodern period.
In the UK, such postmodern writing in poetry finds an uneasy audience, since it is neither part of the sublime-sincere manifold but nor is it necessarily accepted by the dominant new-modernist movement - the British schools currently at play, play less than they aim to possess the heights and limits of seriousness. I too dig seriousness, most especially when it is one of several layers at work.
UK poetry tends to cautiously police slippage between levels in tone, diction, theme and styles. Another reason for the indifferent reception of some aspects of the postmodern in British poetry is that recent tensions in poetics tend to emphasise language as the main source of drama, while, however, somewhat overlooking the image. Postmodern use of narrative and image (as in the work of Motion or Duffy) in contemporary British poetry is often sidelined by those who don't know much about film theory or how to read the visual - for them, there is a language of cinema, but no cinema of language.
A little-known UK critic-poet oddly-reviewed my collection Rue du Regard in Poetry London, last year, arguing I had no idea what the postmodern (or poetry) was, for instance, though the collection was informed by multiple references to postmodern film, and postmodern film theory.
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