Do you guys talk to each other or something
A silly late-Sundance musing
Today is the last day of Sundance, or perhaps “Sundance,” since I am at home and have been since it started ten days ago. The entire festival (as previously noted) pivoted to virtual in early January thanks to omicron. And while omicron has plummeted over the past two weeks in New York City, it’s still a big problem elsewhere. C’est la vie.
Anyhow, I have been watching an average of four movies per day, and when you add those to the pre-festival watching — I started on January 9 — I will watch well over double my usual number of films. I’m at 59 now, and by the end of the day, when they finally cut off access, I’ll probably be around 62 or 63. Normally I’m stretching it to get to 30, so this is the upside to not being on the ground in Utah: I don’t have to stand in lines, ride shuttle buses, or wait for a movie to start. One ends, I grab a snack, and then I can just press play on the next.
Why watch so many? It’s not about having some weird bragging right; it’s mainly because most of these movies will come out in theaters and on streaming services in the next year, or will show up at other festivals, and having seen them already means being able to spot stories in the making, or exercise editorial judgment in which are worth covering, and how. In my position, that’s the whole reason to go to festivals, really. I used to review movies more at the actual festival (and I really miss doing that; some of my best work comes in the kind of fugue state provoked by the pressure cooker) but shifts in editorial direction mean I’m approaching festivals with a different eye, and that’s just how it goes.
I say all that in order to set up something goofy. When you watch 60+ movies (or 20+) in the space of a couple of weeks, you start to see really strange little micro-trends and patterns throughout them. Most of them, you have to assume, are unconscious; some of them are not. I’ve just turned in a piece on a big trend in this year’s Sundance documentaries that I assume was conscious on the part of the programmers, who often tend to program along unspoken themes. But sometimes you just see weird stuff. I remember the moment at last fall’s Toronto Film Festival when I realized that every movie I saw — and I do mean every single movie — included some scene of a character vomiting. Cool. Cool cool cool.
So this year I started keeping a running list in the front of my notebook, and yesterday I took a picture of that list. Here it is:
Things that are missing from this list that popped up yesterday include “women who are aware they are in physical danger running alone after dark in the woods anyhow” and “Black women college faculty being tokenized by their ostensibly liberal colleagues during hiring and tenure review processes for other colleagues.” There are probably more!
Honestly, I think this is basically just a result of that phenomenon where you’ve never seen a yellow VW Beetle before and then you see one and then you start seeing them everywhere, or whatever. But it’s kind of hilarious that so many filmmakers, working independently, often wind up unwittingly employing the same devices or covering similar territory. Humans are so interesting.
Been writing
As noted in last week’s newsletter, I spent some time noodling around the virtual reality (VR) platform that Sundance calls “the Spaceship” this week, and then I called and Zoomed a handful of artists and technologists to talk to them about something I’ve often been skeptical about: VR art. I was actually really surprised by what I learned, and I wrote about it here!
I’ve written three other pieces from the festival, including best-of lists for fiction and for nonfiction, which should show up next week. Keep an eye out at Vox or on my Twitter feed.
Been watching and reading
I mean, you know what I’ve been watching, but if you want to see the full list you can float on over to Letterboxd (where I keep my viewing log) to see what I saw at Sundance.
I also have been working hard on keeping up with research for my book and for a lecture I’ve had to add to one of my courses, so I’ve been reading Grand Hotel Abyss by Stuart Jeffries, a history of the Frankfurt School (a bit dry and technical but very complete), Walter Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” essay (which I read in grad school but that was like 15 years ago now), and Joan Didion’s 1970 novel Play It As It Lays, which I think I last read in like 2007 and which is a lot more devastating than I remember. Light amusements.
Odds and ends
I have purchased these cheap little doodads (or you can go by their technical name, “French hairpins”) in an attempt to find a slightly more grown-up way to get my hair off my face. So far, so good.
I’m a huge fan of French hairpins. I’ve found the more texture my hair has that day, i.e. I didn’t straighten it, the better the hold.