Karina on SpoutBlog

The September Issue is an irresistible pop culture mashup: imagine the Teen Vogue segments of The Hills (though her royal highness Anna Wintour is swapped in for cut-rate LA imitation Lisa Love, the MTV reality show’s masterful manner of spinning diegetic commentary out of eye rolls taken out of context is left intact), genetically blended into an alternate universe version of The Office. Except in this office, the workers actually work, and in fact are terrified not to because their boss is Michael Scott’s polar opposite: impatient, undemonstrative, and absolutely incapable of taking no for an answer.

As a portrait of Wintour the person, RJ Cutler’s documentary does little to dig under the surface of Wintour’s iconic, impassive under bangs image. But as a meditation on art vs commerce, emotion vs rationality, and the role of fantasy merchants in the recently-burst economic bubble, The September Issue is both cerebral and accessible. If it’s not as provocative as it could be, it’s definitely entertaining.

The themes of the film emerge most clearly via the relationship between Wintour and VOGUE’s creative director, Grace Coddington. A former model a handful of years older than Wintour, Grace started working at American VOGUE on the same day as her now-superior. Both women worked their way up over the course of decades, only to land in a position where Grace is generally agreed to be the best fashion stylist in the world … and yet every move she makes is subject to Wintour’s approval.

Wintour is credited with transforming VOGUE by putting actresses on the cover, thus greasing the wheels for high fashion and its associated esoterica to enter the entertainment media. Grace is more of a purist; she puts her shoots together with the artistry of the image as the first and only concern, only to continually suffer the humiliation of having her work end up on the cutting room floor by the market-minded Wintour. Coddington is the only person around the office who doesn’t seem to buy into the Fear of Wintour, which is palpable on film not because her near-peers and underlings speak to it, but in the way they speak to her. When Anna asks a question, the answer offered is almost always inflected like another question; the people around her are terminally non-committal, as if the worst crime one could commit in Wintour’s presence is to have an opinion.

If the dominant media image of Anna Wintour, from The Devil Wears Prada and beyond, is that she’s a villain, she doesn’t do much here to disabuse us of that notion, and certainly Cutler does her no favors in the way they present her moments of tyranny. The director begins the film with an clip from a sit-down interview with Wintour, in which the VOGUE editor attempts to defend high fashion from unnamed critics. “Just because someone wants to wear Carolina Herrera instead of” — here she reaches for an example, as if she couldn’t possibly think of anything anyone would “want” to wear more than Carolina Herrera –– “something from Kmart, doesn’t make them a dumb person.”

Of course, only a “dumb person” would accuse someone of being “a dumb person” based solely on what they “choose” to wear. The issue is that for most of us the choice between Carolina Herrera and Kmart isn’t actually a “choice”, but a financial imperative. You could chalk this flub up to linguistic imprecision, but Cutler chooses to include right it at the beginning of the film for a reason: it sets the tone for a character whose extreme focus on the bottom line of her magazine causes her to tune out countless realities, up to and including that most of the critics of the fantasy she sells wouldn’t be able to afford that fantasy for themselves.

Cutler may not offer much evidence that Wintour is deeper than our pre-conceived image of her, but he does offer revelations in terms of her actual image. Wintour is often shot from below, the classic angle given to a person in a position of power, but in this instance, it reveals the imperfections of the facade. We see that her neck and the area under her chin are severely bagged, and up against her comparatively smooth face, one gets the sense that this is less from age or surgical restraint than from her habit of lowering her chin in pursed-lip frown. And yet, she’s so concerned with her own image that Grace is able to use Cutler’s camera crew against Wintour to get what she wants.

Grace and Anna embody the age old conflict between art and commerce, given new spin for an age of luxury obsession with the trap door dropped out. A VOGUE couture spread (Grace’s specialty) was the old, safe way for the masses to indulge in luxuries they couldn’t actually have. But when this kind of photo journalism-as-entertainment is pushed out in favor of cover stories revolving around not just non-models, but “it” girl actresses promoting films via carefully calibrated stories of “relatable” personal heartbreak, the fantasy sold within the pages of VOGUE becomes several degrees less blatant in its fantasy, and moves several steps toward actual accessibility. In a climate in which both the pursuit of art and beauty for the sake of it, and of journalism as mass-culture record of the present and contextualization for the future, have been swiftly pushed to the margins, the pretense of escape via advertisement still soldiers on. Though Cutler’s footage was shot over nine months in 2007, September seems to anticipate our current withdrawl from the addiction of spectacular accumulation. More than just aping the escapism of VOGUE itself, it may be the ideal film for those bitter and bedraggled by our current economic fix.

A slightly different verson of this review appeared during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

Under discussion:

We Live in Public  (2009)

“I was the smartest kid in town, and the reporters knew it,” brags Josh Harris in We Live in Public, Ondi Timoner’s documentary on the rise and fall of the Internet’s first (and still its most charismatic) video mogul. It’s a telling statement, in that it points to both Harris’ 1990s raison d’etre, and also his Achilles heel: it’s not what you do that matters, it’s that people are watching you do it. Timoner’s portrait of the prescient (and quite possibly crazy) web pioneer will be a must see for anyone interested in internet fame and the phenomenon of casual over-sharing, even if her storytelling tactics are surprisingly stale.

A quick-cut pileup of stock footage, video captured by Timoner over a decade on Harris’ trail, and footage recorded during his surveillance projects, Public outlines Harris’ troubled childhood and tricky relationship with his alcoholic mom before clicking into its comfort zone with Harris’ founding of Pseudo.com. Pseudo, launched in 1993, morphed from a Prodigy chat service into an internet TV network, complete with themed channels and on-air personalities. The company –– and Harris –– became best known for throwing wild parties, which by the late 90s had formed the core of the Silicon Alley social scene. For a brief, heady moment in time, celebrities mingled with nerds, and nerds became celebrities — just because, as Silicon Alley Reporter & Weblogs Inc founder Jason Calacanis puts it, “you knew how to set up a modem.”

Riding high on hype (and an $80 million “on paper” net worth), in 1999 Harris launched a massive art project called “Quiet,” where he invited dozens of artists to live with him in a bunker complete with firing range and communal showers, with each bed outfitted with a camera and a TV screen. Life was filmed constantly, residents were subject to the interrogation of a CIA operative, and no one was allowed to leave. When the FBI broke into the bunker and made everyone evacuate (they thought it was a cult, and as one member says on screen, “We were quacking and walking like a duck”), Harris and his girlfriend Tanya moved into a loft outfitted with motion control cameras in every room, broadcasting their relationship 24 hours a day to an audience of eager chatters. This project, called “We Live in Public,” fell apart when the relationship cracked under the pressure of surveillance. By this point, Harris’ sanity was slipping away as fast as his fortune, and in late 2001, the entrepreuer disappeared to an apple farm upstate.

Harris is a great anti-hero, and the film more than convinces that we haven’t even begun to grapple with the ramifications of our “always on” internet personas. But for all of its fascinations, the frantic pace is frustrating. Timoner’s montages move so quickly that you can’t begin to connect to or contemplate the bulk of her images. This technique is effective in conveying what it felt like to be in the middle of the whirlwind, but it blocks any beyond-superficial understanding of what that whirlwind meant. (The exception to this rule is the section of the film using footage from “We Live in Public” to talk about Josh and Tanya’s break-up; Timoner gives this material time and space to breathe, which only draws attention to the airlessness of the rest of the piece.) Timoner also relies a little too heavily on pop music for commentary. It’s one thing to set a montage of “Quiet” footage to Le Tigre, to remind us what 1999 felt like; it’s another to ask LCD Soundsystem’s “New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” to bring the poignancy to a 9/11 montage. The song might have been a fresher choice had it not been used not long ago (and to greater ironic effect) on an episode of Gossip Girl, but it still would have been a lazy, literal way to inject feeling.

But Public ultimately overcomes its grating stylistic flourishes. Most striking is the footage of “Quiet,” which looks like a mash-up of The Real World and Abu Ghraib. In the late 90s, Harris anticipated not just our country’s use of quasi-fascist interrogation, but the fascination with documenting it and sharing that document on social platforms. Every Harris project seen in the film includes a chat room. He figured out the core truth behind social media years before the rest of us: the news, the art, the event itself is nothing unless you enable people to talk about it.

This review first appeared during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. We Live In Public opens in New York this week.

In the 26 months or so since I started editing SpoutBlog full time, we have published thousands of posts, covered dozens of festivals, and reviewed hundreds of films. In that time, blogging has become the default format for online content, while at the same time what it means to be a professional film critic has — to put it kindly — evolved. The meme is that the media is dying, but more precisely, information distribution is in a weird kind of limbo: blogs still seem ephemeral, printed matter legitimate.

So! We are going to publish a book, a compilation of SpoutBlog’s “greatest hits,” with special emphasis on my reports from festivals, writings on below-the-radar films, and posts that reflect the evolution in online film culture. We’re going to publish it through CreateSpace, then sell it on Amazon and at film festivals and like events. The goal is not necessarily to make money (although we do hope to break even on publishing costs), but to create a physical snapshot of this thing that I’ve devoted the last two years of my life to creating, and that many of you have gotten into the habit of reading. Also, I made an empty promise to myself in grad school that if I wasn’t able to publish a book by the time I was 30, it would be a sign that this writing-about-movies racket wasn’t the right vocation for me. I’m no longer such a believer in signs, but I do still like the idea of publishing books.

To do this, we need your help, in three specific areas:

1. Curation: Right now we’re thinking that the book will probably include about 40 posts — about 1-2 per month since I joined the fold. I’m in the process of creating a short list of candidates; I’ve currently whittled the 3,000-something posts down to 53 pieces, although I’m still trying to figure out which posts to include to reflect my coverage of documentary film.  If you have favorite SpoutBlog posts that you think absolutely need to be included in this volume — or, if there’s anything specific you think shouldn’t be included — please let me know in the comments.

2. Photography: I’m looking for a New York-based photographer with access to equipment who can shoot the cover image. We have a concept in mind but would love to find someone who could contribute their own ideas. This would need to happen as soon as possible — preferably within the week — and there would be some small compensation — a couple hundred dollars, a couple sample copies of the book. You can email me at karina AT spout DOT come if you’re interested or know someone who is.

3. Promotion: The goal is to have physical copies of the book in hand by the beginning of October. If you are associated with a film festival/event, an independent bookstore, video store, or anywhere else that would be interested in hosting a reading or signing some such endeavor related to the book this fall or winter, please email me.

If you have any additional thoughts or questions, please let me know in the comments. Maybe it’s pollyannaish, but I really do want this to be something that benefits from the input of the audience — you, after all, are the reason why I get out of bed every morning. Or, at least, fire up my laptop from bed.