Critical Musings

Swimming in the Valley of the Moon

Ian Bryce Jones

peter-hutton_merchant-marines1

Ian here—

Peter Hutton died on June 25, 2016. I could tell anecdotes here about having him for a professor across three courses at Bard College, about things he said to his students, places he took his students, and the impact he had on me as a young film student. I’ll spare you that, though, for now. For now, I’ll just say that I am extraordinarily grateful to Jesse Malmed and Patrick Friel for programming White Light Cinema and The Nightingale’s retrospective of Hutton’s work this past Sunday. It is, if I’m not mistaken, the first time Peter’s work has shown in Chicago since I first arrived here in 2008. It was wonderful to revisit it, and I am saddened that it took Peter’s death for this to happen.

What follows isn’t analysis, just some impressions, as a way of expressing gratitude to the programmers. I make such extensive use of visual aids normally in my writing that it can be reinvigorating to write about films that are only distributed on 16mm, and actually rely on the author to describe their experience. (I apologize if I’m out of practice!)

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New Post Category: Critical Musings

Ian Bryce Jones

thats_just_like_your_opinon_man

When I first set up this blog, I intended it to be used for student projects. Over the last couple of months, I’ve been posting my own material with greater regularity: lesson plans, and the odd conference paper.

I have enjoyed being able to share material in this way, and as of now I’m going to be adding a new category to my posts: critical musings. These will be moments where this blog becomes, well, bloggier: serving more as a critic’s journal than an academic’s lesson plan folder.

Although some of these posts will intersect with my academic interests, in general they’ll be less theory-bound and more evaluative. I’m not sure that I entirely agree with Noël Carroll’s position that the primary task of criticism is evaluation, but I do find it disheartening that the evaluative dimensions of criticism are so often squelched out of academic writing.[i] In private conversation, academics constantly offer well-reasoned, evaluative opinions on the artistic merits of a film to each other. It’s always seemed strange to me that when we get up to a podium to deliver a talk, this particular critical impulse drains away, and we treat our objects as mere delivery mechanisms for theory.

So: posts arriving under this category will be a place to acknowledge that I have opinions about things, and occasionally just want to expound upon them.

[i]. Carroll, Noël. On Criticism. New York: Routledge, 2009. (Look at me here, adding citations on my post announcing more casual writing. Typical.)