To Have Done with the Contemporary Cinema

From Chris Fujiwara at n+1…

I used to mind being called a journalist. It seemed demeaning and beside the point of what I wanted to do and believed I was really doing, sometimes, which was criticism. Now I’m way up in my ivory tower (a flimsy one, which you access by a ladder that you have to remember to pull up after you) and am rarely asked for my opinion on anything that happened more recently than forty years ago, and I wish I were a journalist again. Journalists have lots of advantages. They get free stuff and invitations. Many people respect them even though they despise them. But the most important perk of all is that the journalist is free from a worry that haunts the rest of us: whether or not we are contemporary.

No one can challenge the journalist’s claim to be contemporary. Journalists work in the very factory of the contemporary, at its “heart machine” (a term from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a film that tried to beat the contemporary by anticipating it). They make the contemporary contemporary. That their labor has market value is their clear justification. Paid to write about what just happened or is about to happen, journalists are embedded—there, I’ve used a word with very contemporary overtones and it’s only the second paragraph—inside capitalism, deep inside. More…