A Conversation with A.S. Hamrah about The Earth Dies Streaming

Last month I invited film critic A S Hamrah to join me on the Tea with Culture podcast to talk about his book The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002-2018, published by n+1 Books.

We ended up talking for almost two hours (over Zoom) about the book, but also about film writing, film criticism, cinema, the debates surrounding the current state of film releases and streaming, occasionally comparing it to the situation here in the United Arab Emirates.

I transcribed our conversation and below is an abridged version, approximately 50 mins of the entire 100 minute recording.

Tea with Culture · Interview with A S Hamrah

You can also listen to the podcast by pressing on the Soundcloud play button you see here, or find Tea with Culture on whichever podcast app you’re subscribed to. The discussion about the book starts at around the 40th minute.

The Earth Dies Streaming is one of my favourite discoveries of 2020, it’s a thoughtful and insightful book about cinema with astute observations and links to culture and politics. It’s essential reading for anyone interested in cinema, especially given its current crisis. I strongly recommend you buy yourself a copy (it’s available in both digital and printed format).

A S Hamrah is the film critic for The Baffler, you can also find his writings in n+1 and other publications including Harper’s, Bookforum, Cineaste. You can also follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

Part 1 - State of film writing, film criticism, streaming and the cinema-going experience

Hind Mezaina: In this book you talk about your frustration with film criticism, and you have your style of writing which resonated. I’m not just reading about a movie, but also your personality, interests, your thoughts on politics and culture. I'm curious to know if you were lucky that you were able to write the way you want to write? 

A S Hamrah: I don't know if I was lucky actually at all.  I was lucky in the sense that I was able to write what I wanted to write. I started writing in the 90s in zines. Then I wrote online for a website called Suck.com and those experiences were very different from the kinds of experiences that a lot of other writers had in my generation who just wanted to write for the New York Times, or something like that. I was able to maintain my own voice, my own character, my own personality, as you said, and not have to write for the entertainment or weeklies of the world.

When I became the film critic for n+1, and now I'm the film critic for The Baffler, those are the kinds of publications that allow me to do things the way that I want to do them. They don't have word counts, they're not trying to fit me into a space that's the same in every issue. This has allowed me to write the way I want to write without compromise. So that's been very good for me, and that's why my book got published by n+1 Books, their books division, and that book is exactly how I wanted it to be. It's not made by the standards or the scriptures of the publishing industry. 

HM: Culture writing here in general is reliant on press releases, everything is very positive, everything's great. Which is why I'm always looking out for English language writings out of the UK and the US. In the US, are there more Bafflers and n+1s that are doing a good job, or are these kinds of publications shrinking?

ASH: There are other publications like that. I think more appear all the time, but a lot of them have short lives. There's a magazine called The Point, there's a new one called The Drift. But things come and go, it's hard for these kinds of magazines to establish themselves. The reason that you don't see this so much in the US or other countries is because of the internet. People don't want to devote the time and energy to putting out a print publication, when they could just do it themselves online. 

During the blog era, that preceded the rise of social media, people did this kind of thing on blogs, but they were mostly done by individual people. They weren’t a real magazine that had staff. In order for writing to be good, you have to have good writers, but you also need editing, copy editing, proofreading, you need a staff of people that are dedicated to doing this, and the internet kind of washed that all away. There was a period where it seemed like internet writing would be just as good as print. But then social media came and drove that all away. 

At the same time, the rise of corporate consolidation in the publishing industry and in the film and television industry led to the erasure of individual voices in favour of commercial concerns dominated by corporations so that everything is just happy talk. People don't devote themselves to learning how to be writers, they just end up being publicists, and Twitter, of course, is the ultimate example of this in a way. 

HM: Twitter does get a bad rap and deservedly so on many occasions, but I still hold on to it, because it's through Twitter that I find things like your book.  But I'm also noticing, a lot of writers, because of not many paid writing gigs since the pandemic started, are pivoting to newsletter and Substack, and I feel it's becoming even more closed and more fragmented in terms of trying to find good writing. What are your thoughts?

ASH: Something like Twitter to me is essentially a vehicle for self promotion, and if you have a book to promote, it is great. But a lot of people are turning to TinyLetter and Substack and things like that as vehicles for the writing that requires a huge amount of drive to do that. You have to be really dedicated to that, you have to do it every two weeks or every week, every month - some kind of schedule, and then try to get people to pay for it. I think there's going to be a huge amount of burnout in that, and some people I know started those around the beginning of the pandemic and already aren't doing it anymore. I think it is hard to monetise, you need a lot of subscribers to do that. I've been fortunate that I have vehicles for my writing that pay me, because of The Baffler and other magazines that I write for, so that's good. 

We're going through a time of great disruption - I hate to use that word, in the publishing industry, so it's harder and harder for writers to find places to publish. It's also harder for people to get good at their job of being a writer, so a lot of it becomes very diaristic, rambling unedited prose that is not really that interesting. So that makes Twitter more interesting, because it's pithier, shorter and funnier. 

All of this together is not good for writers. Writers need to make a living, and it's a problem that is only getting worse I think. I'm not sure that Substack is going to save people, but maybe some people will emerge from it. But the dedication you have to have for Substack is harder than the dedication you have to have for your craft, because all of a sudden you're putting yourself on a schedule, most people are editing it themselves. They have to produce work in a vacuum. So it's very atomised and it's not as good as magazines, or online publications. At the same time, those things are harder to support, so we're going through a period of great change that's really annoying, frankly.

HM: Speaking of great change that’s annoying, the whole streaming drama, especially in the last couple of weeks, I think about the title of your book, it could have been a title that you could’ve come up with this year, even though the book was launched in 2018.

ASH: It came out at the very end of 2018. The title of my book, The Earth Dies Streaming, gave it new life when the pandemic started and movie theatres closed. A lot of people started to want to talk to me on podcast and interview me in magazines and stuff like that, because they thought that the title of my book was prophetic. But it's just a pun, it’s based on a British horror film from the mid 60s called The Earth Dies Screaming, which is a proto-zombie film directed by Terence Fisher, who is a Hammer horror director. There's two songs that have that title, one by UB40 and one by Tom Waits. People understood the title when it came out, but then when theatres started to close, it got new life. 

Now, especially because the theatres have been shuttered, they haven't really been reopened in New York City since the pandemic started, the topic of streaming has become more and more important in the entertainment industry, and therefore in the news. As big blockbuster films have failed when they have been released, like Tenet, and now the Warner Brothers HBO Max deal, so the things that I wrote about in the introduction to the book, which is called Remember Me On This Computer have become more and more in the forefront of people's discussions about the history of cinema. So the title of the book has served it well. 

HM: Cinemas here were only closed for 12 weeks, when they re-opened they started with re-releases from January and February and then new releases, and not just the American ones. We’ve had some non-American films too. But the way cinema is being written about in mainstream media makes it sound as if cinema is dead everywhere and that annoys me. Anyone who doesn't know any better think cinemas everywhere are closed and they'll never come back. So it's been frustrating reading the way the articles are written, and I know they are American publications for an American audience, but I always wonder how many of these American editors and writers are aware how much of their writing reaches a lot of people outside the United States. 

ASH: Editors don't care about that at all, that's not something that interests them in the least. There are a lot of places in the US where cinemas have been open too. If you live in the middle of Iowa, your movie theatre closed for a while, but it's reopened now. But that doesn't matter because the box office is determined by three or four or five urban locations in the US. If the movie theaters in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston are closed, then that's most of the box office for a movie, and the movie industry is dependent on opening weekends. So these places are closed in those cities, the rest of the country doesn’t matter to them. If 50% or more of their box offices is in four or five or six urban locations, the hinterlands don't matter. 

There are a lot of people in the US who are very interested in foreign films. But it's not substantial enough that it would reach the interest of arts editors of big publications. Those kinds of publications don't want to write about the kinds of films that show on Mubi or on the Criterion Collection channel. That's not of interest to them at all. All they care about is technology and box office. So the art of cinema is really not of much interest to arts editors at major publications, they want to talk about what's going to happen to the industry. They don't want to talk about mise-en-scène. They don’t want to talk about film directors, unless they're very famous and everyone knows who they are, like Christopher Nolan. That's just how it is here and that's bad, because the idea of arts coverage became completely folded up in entertainment, and entertainment means, essentially in the US, television, pop music and gossip. It does not mean cinema at all. 

People are very lazy, they like to stay home and watch television and in many places around the country, the movie theaters closed already. There were multiplexes that were built in places people had to drive to, and they're going the way of malls. E-commerce has destroyed the mall. In many parts of the country, there are closed malls, which are referred to as dead malls that are just empty of stores and no one goes to them anymore. That's what's happening to cineplexes too in many places. So you can go to a part of the country where in a small town maybe they used to have one or two movie theaters. Starting in the 80s, they built cineplexes on the outskirts of town. Now no one goes to those places anymore, because either they're closed, or the film industry priced out the audience. 

People who live in the poorer parts of the country don't want to pay between $10 and $16, to see a movie, when they can just sit at home and pay that amount once a month and see an unlimited amount of movies. As what happened in the music industry with CDs, that's what happened to the film industry. They priced themselves beyond the place that the audience could afford, which leads to piracy and it leads to people not paying for the product anymore. Then these industries find ways to blame the audience for their own predatory practices. Of course, if a record album used to cost $8 and you're charging $16, people are going to pirate it or they're not going to buy it. That's what happened with movies too. The blockbuster form started to dissolve into nonsense and they started charging more and more money for it. People did not want to pay that at the box office. So they started adding 3D and IMAX, making super productions like The Avengers that have many stars in them, that are just bombastic, empty spectacle. And this was a cycle of a de-evolution of cinema, and it was a cycle that they couldn't really get out of and they think streaming is going to solve by reiterating these same things, and breaking them up into smaller chunks so that one franchise can now have 15 different television series based on it. I think this is a bad development for the cinema. I don't think it's sustainable at all.

HM: Yes, because how many prequels and sequels and offshoots of this character and that character, like the whole thing is just overcooked, right? And there’s just no new creative work being done, at least from these big studios. 

ASH: Furthermore, in terms of that, they bet on something that they think they know, but they never look at the current marketplace when they're doing this. What's the most popular streaming series now? It's The Queen's Gambit. It's an original show not based on any pre existing IP. It stars just one actress. It's not a blockbuster, it’s not an action adventure. It's a series about a woman playing chess. That is the biggest thing that's in streaming right now, and Disney's or Warner Bros’ answer to that is just to do more and more things that are the opposite of that, because they were successful in the past. They don't have the right analysis of what people want.

HM: In my part of the world, the cinemas thrive on “experience”. The actual movie is the last thing that gets talked about. It’s more about what service is being offered like the food. Mall culture is huge over here, it's the equivalent of public spaces compared to other parts of the world, especially because it's very hot almost eight months of the year. So malls are very popular and in the malls are all the multiplexes. The cinema as a luxurious experience is becoming more and more expensive, but there is an audience that pays for that. The ones who don't want to pay are more than happy to stay home like you said. 

You brought up the word piracy, and I was thinking of piracy, because it has been rampant here for as long as I remember. My introduction to movies has been through pirated VHS by renting pirated versions of Hollywood movies from the local video store. It was probably by the late 90s/early 2000s there were attempts for a strict policy on piracy. After the pirated VHS, it evolved to literally “the Chinese DVD Lady” where Chinese women would go around apartments with stacks of pirated movies on DVD. People are very open about pirating, and yet the cinemas are still existing here. It’s weird to think how the two exist in the same space, at least where I am. Then there was this article in Wired about how piracy will now benefit the studios, and I still can't get my head around that.

ASH: When you talk about the kind of cinemas in the UAE that are more experiential, that are about the food and the social gathering and the luxury of the surroundings and so on, that's an attempt to defeat piracy because what studios want to sell now is experience, and the woman from Berkeley who wrote that article in Wired was talking about that. Studios are betting on experience, that's why they have theme parks. That has nothing to do with the current cinema, it has to do with repurposing pre-existing intellectual property content. So that's their way to defeat piracy. The films become an advertisement for the experiences. 

There was a period in the US where there was a lot of people selling pirated DVDs. You would get on the subway in New York and a guy would be walking up and down that aisle with a duffel bag filled with pirated DVDs that he would be selling for $5 each or $10 for $8, prices that were very cheap. Certainly no one here feels bad about torrenting movies either if they want to see a new Hollywood blockbuster. 

Movie theaters like Alamo Drafthouse, which is a chain here, also serve food and drinks if you're watching a movie, whatever kind of movie it was. There's a piece in my book about Alamo Drafthouse showing the Baywatch movie, but also showing Stalker too. So you could sit in front of these two movies that are so different from each other, but have the same fancy milkshake cocktail while you're watching them. 

This idea that people want to gather for these experiences is totally out the window now if there’s a deadly virus we can get by going to those places and eating, chewing, laughing,  screaming and shouting and doing the things that people do. 

The movie from the 90s, Outbreak, with Dustin Hoffman is about a plague that starts in a movie theater because someone is laughing. There's a shot of the spittle coming out of his mouth and flying across the entire theater. The Hollywood film industry completely forgot they had already made a film about this. So the pandemic is going to change all these ways of understanding movies. And I think once there is a vaccine that's effective that most people have got, people will want to go back to the movies. But that's not going to change the corporate power grab that's happened by the big studios, which includes Netflix and Amazon. Those places are very deeply invested in getting people to pay for the product by subscription and they only need movie theaters so that their films can be nominated for Oscars. 

I wrote about Netflix at the end of last year after my book came out, that they are releasing their films to theaters, and they had rented a theater in New York to show Marriage Story. Then the pandemic came in and those plans are all squashed. What's going to happen is that they're squeezing out independent cinema. Throughout 2019 lots of new independent movie theaters were opening up in New York City. Those have all been closed. So it's unclear what's going to happen, when they're able to re-open, if they're even still there, because they've had to pay rent while they're closed.

It's a very uncertain time. But what's not uncertain is that places like Disney, Netflix, Amazon, and Warner Bros, which owns HBO Max, they want you to stay at home and watch movies. That's not really the cinema. The cinema depends on large scale projection in the dark theater, with strangers sitting near you. 

There was an article in New York Times in which one of Steven Soderbergh's producers talks about how—he uses the word sadly, which to me was interesting—sadly there are a lot of people who do not understand that cinema can exist on your phone, or however you want to watch it. No matter what they say in Hollywood, that is not cinema. If you were sitting at home watching a movie, it's completely different. You've got the lights on, you can be interrupted, people can text you, call you, you can get up to get food, it can take you two days to watch a two hour movie. It's not the same thing. The main thing about cinema is that it takes place over a certain amount of time that you don't control. The time is controlled by the filmmakers, and then by the movie theater, by the projectionist, and it's not up to you. Somehow it seems empowering to people that they can turn off a movie and watch it over three days or whatever, like a television series. That's television. That's not the cinema. They are two different things, and the film industry does not want to acknowledge that now, because they think that their future is in television not in cinema. 

HM: So if Warner Bros is releasing 17 new titles next year straight to streaming and also a same day release in cinemas in the States, and in markets without HBO Max, which is a lot, do you think studios are relying on big box office numbers from countries outside the US, like China, for example?

ASH: The reliance on the Chinese market to me is overstated. I think the Chinese are getting tired of bad American blockbusters. The domestic market share in China is increasing as the Chinese film industry has ramped up and been able to compete with Hollywood. But like I said, their whole model is the opening weekend. They've never innovated another business model besides that one since the late 70s. Since the rise of blockbuster, their thinking is still based around that opening weekend, which determines the entire ancillary market for films, whether it is foreign releases or DVD or streaming. The pandemic changed that because they could not have an opening weekend anymore. 

They say Warners will open on HBO Max and in theaters. But the other theaters don't matter because the theaters that matter are the ones that are closed right now. So that's why they're doing that, they don't want to have all this product lying around. They don't know how long the theaters are going to be closed, and it may be that they jump the gun because people will get vaccinated and theaters can re-open. But they've set this in motion now and nothing can stop that. Christopher Nolan cannot stop that by whining like Donald Trump in the paper every day, and neither can Denis Villeneuve.   

So this has changed everything and obviously the big studios, these giant conglomerates that own so many things besides movies, are banking on the technology of streaming. Which, by the way, is very bad for the environment.

HM: It doesn't get discussed enough, that's true. It's still not part of a mainstream discussion about digital technology and streaming, and its impact on the environment. I don't know if it's going to take another five or six years for people to realise and think about digital technology and climate.

ASH: The amount of energy it takes to stream all these movies to people all over the world is massive, and the amount of natural resources that's using up is massive. Then the amount of storage all these things take up when their lives are over is also massive. 

Having a movie theater is just electricity. They would ship a print that they made in the lab, and they would show it. The main thing was the electricity bill. It wasn't that big a deal. It's nothing on the scale of this at all. 

HM: I think 2021 is still going to be a bumpy year, in general for the most part of the year. I think things might slightly go back to the norms we might be familiar with, maybe once vaccine is more spread out and more people have it. I think it's a waiting game and it's a shame these decisions by the studios are made where there's no turning back and maybe making other studios also react instead of waiting. No one wants to appreciate patience and waiting. Everything is about fast decisions and making money. 

ASH: Well they have shareholders who demand that. But when the pandemic started, movie theaters closed and to me it’s a terrible thing because I spent my entire life in movie theaters. 

HM: Yes. It’s a lifestyle. Some people go to the gym everyday, and people like us to go the cinema everyday. 

ASH: Exactly. When it started, of course, many people were reading about the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 and saw that it lasted for almost three years. So when this started, I said to myself this is going to last as long as that did. People are not different today than they were then. The only difference is they have the internet so they can be louder. I just prepared myself for this going to be almost three years of this.

The Spanish Flu was all of 1918, 1919 and then a few months into 1920. So I figured this would be the same thing. But people didn't want to look at it that way. So it led to a lot of panic decisions by theater exhibitors and by the studios, they can't prepare for something like this. And again, I wrote this, but it just seems so ironic to me that there was a whole movie about how this started in movie theaters that they didn't pay attention to. Then there was the Soderbergh film Contagion, which is more recent and became the number one film on Netflix for a while when the pandemic started. They didn't learn anything from that either. It's because all movie content in Hollywood is just fantasy. There's no difference for studio executives in their content - a Harry Potter movie and Contagion are the same, they have the same relation to reality.

PART 2 - The Grapes of Wrath as sci-fi, Chantal Akerman and Stanley Kubrick, Jessica Biel’s Hand and war on terror films, the role of film festivals, advice for film writers 

HM: I’d like to talk about your chapter about The Grapes of Wrath, which is a movie I had not seen until recently. I watched it online because it was part of the online program for Il Cinema Ritrovato, a festival I’ve been going to the past three years or so. I planned to go this year but I couldn’t, it was not possible for anyone outside Europe to go to Italy. It was one of my favourite film discoveries this year and reading your piece about it, so much of it felt relevant. The economy, climate change, migrant labor, the police - all of it was in that movie, and in your book you say that America would have been a different country if this novel was read by eighth graders instead of Of Mice and Men.

ASH: Yes, that piece is called Alien Land. I wrote it around 2009 and I said it is like a science fiction movie, because it's about the future. Even though it seems like it's just a film about the Depression in the 30s, the Okies and Americana, it's actually a film that's telling us about the future. And that came to pass. It's definitely a highly relevant film now. 

It's funny you mentioned The Grapes of Wrath because right now I'm writing a piece about Hillbilly Elegy and Nomadland, which are two films that are in the wake of American understanding about the rural poor that are like The Grapes of Wrath in certain ways. Except they don't reach the same heights of cinema as The Grapes of Wrath by John Ford from 1940.

The reason I brought up Of Mice and Men in that piece is because The Grapes of Wrath is a John Steinbeck novel and so is Of Mice and Men. Of Mice and Men is much better known to school children in the US, I think  because it's shorter and it doesn't take long to read it, but the world of The Grapes of Wrath is the world that we live in now. Obviously Hollywood studios do not want to address that. Although Nomadland is a Fox film when it was made, now it's part of Disney and the director of Nomadland is now directing a Disney superhero movie, which she was shooting kind of simultaneously with Nomadland. So it will be interesting when her movie Eternals comes out, to hear her discuss the differences in making these two things, which both end up being products of Disney.

You mentioned Il Cinema Ritrovato, I don't think that anyone should have had film festivals this year with actual attendees. I think that was a big mistake. The world is suffering now because in the summer people had to have their festivals and people had to travel and have to go places, people can't just sit at home and do nothing. And it's tragic, almost 300,000 people have died in the US now. Not that most of those people were going to Il Cinema Ritrovato in Italy, but in Europe, the same thing is happening. I understand people's desire to go to those things and the idea that virtual festivals are fun to attend is not really true. It's terrible to just be sitting at home watching a movie on your laptop, when it can be seen on a 40 foot screen outdoors in Italy. But it was a mistake. 

The pandemic effects everyone in the world, but there’s a story in the news today about how it has impacted poor countries much less than first world countries and that's because this is a first world disease. It's based on people traveling and moving around, it's migratory, like work too, so it affects the poor in first world countries more than it does the rich. People's ability just to sit at home and watch the streaming things that they're subscribing to is very limited. That's what we've learned from this. People have to go out and do things, whether it's going to a film festival, or whatever things that they like to do that where people gather in large groups. This is a learning moment for the streaming giants. People can't just stay at home and watch these things, no matter how many subscribers. Really, in the end, they don't care if people watch it, they only care if you subscribe to it. 

HM: I guess with the festival, it's just a way to show there's a way of trying to do this by following safety standards. I feel there's an element of trying to show that if we're going to have this for three years, we need to find a way to live with it. Which is why I understand certain festivals are still trying to have physical ones.

ASH: It’s the whole way of thinking about how to conduct things under the brutal, ferocious regime of a deadly virus. One that a lot of people don't want to even acknowledge is real. So if you continue to hold things, it will reinforce the idea amongst a lot of people that it's not a problem and then a few months later, your whole city or country will have to be in lockdown again. 

There's always something to me suspect about festivals because they are not open to the average person. The real goal I think of cinema should be that films are available to people to see on screens where they live, in the standard way that movie theaters existed in every town, and you could walk to them. That really should be the goal. The goal should not be that I have to go to Toronto every year to see some movies or to Utah. I have no interest in going to Utah or Toronto, under any circumstances really. 

HM: It obviously works in some cities for its people. At least from my experience, I know Berlinale is very popular with not just the industry or the people who have flown for it.

ASH:  The New York Film Festival is very popular and they show a lot of great films, and the people that program it do a good job in general. But it's not open to the average person. It’s very expensive if you're just a film goer. The tickets are costly, they sell out quickly. The films show once or twice. It’s not for the average person. It’s for an upscale, wealthy audience. 

HM: The idea of festivals for the local community should be a priority. I mean, our own film festival in Dubai, got shut down after running for 14 years. In hindsight, I wish it did more and worked better in terms of engagement because very few miss it. It focused on the glamour, the red carpet and maybe it couldn't sustain itself. It’s unfortunate festivals that are accessible without an elitist agenda is not the norm in more places than they should be.

ASH: I think its entire concept is elitist, regardless of how you run it. I'm not saying there shouldn't be film festivals, by the way, I'm saying, let's be honest about what they are. Replacing them with virtual theaters is also not something that's open to most people, a large percentage of the population in the US and around the world do not have the ability to watch a movie on their computer. Furthermore, showing them only on things that are web based is - I mean, you should be trying to watch these on the largest screen possible. This is why a lot of people like you invested in home projection equipment. I have a flat screen TV that's a good size, and I have an apartment that's not that small either. But there's not a big enough throw for projection in my apartment, that would look good. I used to be a movie theater projectionist for many years, and it just is not the same thing at all. We live in a period where people are trying to pretend that it's the same, it's not the same.

HM: In the intro chapter you say “There are two filmmakers who have come to the fore in recent years in ways I did not expect. Both are gone, but the stark confrontational truculence of each makes them of the moment to me, or at least of a moment I sense existing simultaneously behind the present.” Can we talk about this? 

ASH: The filmmakers I wanted to highlight in that brief section of that piece were Stanley Kubrick and Chantal Akerman. There are pieces in the book about each of them. There’s a long piece on 2001: A Space Odyssey, and there's a long piece on Chantal Ackerman that I wrote the day after she committed suicide.

Those two filmmakers struck me as people who had really thought a lot about the cinema and what it is, and how it should be viewed, perceived, experienced, and who were very uncompromising in their work. They didn't make concessions to the industry they were part of. Kubrick was firmly lodged in the film industry, even though he was living in London making his films in England. Chantal Akerman was kind of marginal and marginalised by the industry. But they still managed to do the things they wanted to do, and do it without making things into just entertainment. They did it from opposite ends. Kubrick's films were dependent on stars and big budgets. Akerman’s films were not dependent on those things at all, although some of her films have stars in them. So they just seem like those were good people to think about in the current context, where their values are so different from the values of the streaming industry which is based on the most low end kind of idea of what cinema can do. It's based on the values of entertainment, which are values that people don't really examine or interrogate.

If you're a critic, I think that involves a certain level of criticality that a lot of critics today do not make use of. They don't really criticise things, they do it on a kind of pseudo political level, which becomes a form of promotion because the films, especially Hollywood films, put things in them that are supposed to lead to these kind of discussions that promote the films even more. Kubrick and Akerman are filmmakers who were completely outside all of that stuff. It hurt both of them in certain ways, I think. But people still love their films and watch them all the time, even though they might be considered boring by the standards of today, people are still happy to watch them, even during the pandemic at home.

HM: But my worry is that there's no way of new audiences to discover them if it's in the world of streaming. That’s where programming and festivals or retrospectives in physical spaces matter. I know some programmers are curating screenings online now, but the reliance on this data dump of movies, and people are going to discover films, I don't think that's going to happen. People are just going to watch what they know, or re-watch things they've already seen, and movies by Kubrick or especially Akerman, these are movies that are so special, and it’s not like their films are the type where you decide to watch at home during dinner time. That’s why I think less people are going to be aware of these filmmakers, if we're going to follow this path that's been determined by the studios in terms of streaming. 

ASH: From an American perspective, I think people are much more aware of those two filmmakers than they used to be. The reason they are is because of both Twitter and streaming. So this is a paradox - Kubrick is a big topic amongst Film Twitter type people, and Chantal Akerman’s films are streamed on the Criterion Channel as part of what they call Collections. So you can see 30 Akerman films if you want to. It took me my whole life to see all of her films, but now you can see them in a week, even though the most famous one is four or five hours long. So that's very different, and to me that gives rise to the question of what are festivals for? We know what streaming is for, what are festivals for? Are they to promote the work of film artists like Chantal Akerman, who are not part of that world? Or are they advertisements, just like, first-run is an advertisement now? 

HM: With Akerman, I have big gaps with her films. I watched her film Jeanne Dielman, in Rotterdam in January. I had seen it on Mubi a few years ago, but when I found out it's in a cinema, I told myself I need to go and sit and watch in the cinema. I was very happy I made that decision. Even though now her movies are on the Criterion Collection, and in theory, I can watch all her films, I still don't want to do it that way because I'm waiting, and maybe I need to get over still being able to see a whole lot of movies in cinemas in the near future. Do I still hold off? Eyes Wide Shut is a movie I've never seen. I've been waiting every year thinking I'm going to get to see it in the cinema and it never happened. Now it's on Netflix and I’m thinking, should I watch it projected at home on December 25. 

ASH: You should watch it because there's no time like the present. You don't know when you'll be able to see it, so you should watch, yes, but that's not the optimum way to experience Eyes Wide Shut, which is just like Jeanne Dielman. That's a film that's - I can't remember the exact running time, but let's say it's four hours - the whole point of Jeanne Dielman is that it is time based. You sit in front of the film, for that amount of time, there's no intermission, and essentially, the same thing keeps happening over and over and over again, until it doesn't, until something changes, and then you know unexpectedly, and then the film ends. That's the whole point of that film that's projected in the movie theater. It's a durational event. If you're watching it at home, it's no longer a durational event, it’s something that you can start and stop, you can watch it like a television show and because you're bored by it at home, if you watch it in half an hour chunks, it's no longer Jeanne Dielman, it’s something else and something that doesn't mean the same thing, and something that doesn't matter as much either.

That’s true of Eyes Wide Shut to which a lot of people when it came out most people hated that film and they thought it was boring and pointless. It was this great thing that people at the time didn't understand. It too depends on this kind of durational presentation where you're not in control of it. Just like the character in the film, his life spins out of control and he's not in charge of the events that happened to him over the few days the film takes place. That the audience is in a position to only watch it at home, that’s no longer true, but I still think you should watch it. 

HM: It's the same for The Irishmen where people were only able to see it in on Netflix. I was lucky that I was able to see it at the London Film Festival last year. 

ASH: And I saw it in a movie theater, not in a festival, but it played first run in New York. I loved it, I wasn't bored by it at all, even though it's long. But I was very surprised when it premiered afterward on Netflix and everyone started talking about how it was boring and they couldn't watch it. Yes, because you're distracted, you’re watching it at home with other people doing things in the house, because it was at a holiday when it came out here. It's ridiculous.

HM: Someone I know said they watched it in three goes. The beauty of this movie is watching it in its entirety because there is time, ageing, melancholia and all of it needs to be experienced in one go and not in chunks.

Right. Well the idea of this important aspect of the cinema is perhaps being erased by streaming. In the last decade or so, films made in Hollywood are already aware of this, so they can be very long like an Avengers film and they can also be not worth watching all at once. In a way, those films don't exist to be seen, they're just products that are the first point in a line of sales that are made. So that's the opposite of Jeanne Dielman or a Kubrick film or The Irishman, which nonetheless is part of that. Scorsese made something that's more in line with Jeanne Dielman. Maybe The Irishman is Scorsese’s Jeanne Dielman made at the late part of his career. He found a way because of his special status in the film industry to do something like that. But that's not something that's going to happen to most filmmakers. 

HM: Moving on to another part of your book, the chapter titled Jessica Biel’s Hand, I found it exceptional. I haven't seen most of the movies mentioned in that chapter, but I feel it is essential reading about war movies and to think about what war movies mean, especially recent wars, and I kept thinking this needs to be a programmed list of film screenings.

ASH: That would be interesting. I would be happy if someone did that and wanted me to come speak at it. But the reason you haven't seen most of those films perhaps is that most of them are terrible. They're not very good so I’m not sure how much interest that would elicit at this time, maybe in 10 years it will seem different. 

That was a piece I wrote in 2008 while the Iraq War was still in full swing. That was the pandemic of the time and no one was really paying attention to it cinematically, like they had for World War II films. The film industry was not responding to the American war in Iraq in any substantial way, although films were coming out. There was a durational aspect to that piece I wrote, I decided in one summer to watch every single film made about the war in Iraq up to that time. I watched 40 films or so one after another, all at once over a fairly short period of time and then I wrote an article that encompasses all of those films with a long introduction and I grouped them thematically.

It is called Jessica Biel’s Hand because one of the films involves Jessica Biel as someone who's a soldier in Iraq, coming home, missing one hand, and trying to resume her career as a gym teacher at a high school somewhere in mid-America. I can't remember the name of the film now, it was terrible, but I compared it to The Best Years of Our Lives which was made during World War II, in which an actor who lost both his hands in the war appears. But he's a man who actually did lose both his hands, he has prosthetic hook hands, which was the technology at the time. In the case of the movie with Jessica Biel, of course she had never lost one of her hands, it was just movie magic, it had no resonance at all. The difference between The Best Years of Our Lives and that film really showed the difference between what happened in America, what happened in America's thinking about what war is, and what cinema is and what it's for. This was a disposable film with no real ambitions except to make some people feel better about what was going on in Iraq, even though it attempted in some ways to criticise the war, it did it in a completely toothless way. 

HM: That's why I’ve not watched a lot of these films, I avoided them at the time. These American movies that get made about the war are frustrating, even more so when they're screened and celebrated here. They’re not being thought of critically, which is why I find this chapter so amazing and I wish it's something that could be addressed in a mainstream platform, to think about these movies, instead of just blindly buying tickets and supporting these movies, pause to ask what do these movies mean, what do they represent, who is it actually criticising? Could you write one now about all the war movies from 2008? 

ASH: A lot of Iraq war movies did come out after that, and for a while I tried to still see them all, but then I stopped doing that because it was depressing. I didn't need to see them anymore. That film with Jessica Biel, it’s called Home of the Brave. 

The films are very insulting to people in the Middle East, they are insulting to Arabs, they do not give the other side any kind of credibility as human beings. They substitute people in Morocco for people in Iraq. They pretend that the Arab world is a unified concept in which Iraq equals all the other countries there.

Looking back on it now, it's really hard to believe these films are being made with the likes of Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal that were about the war in Iraq, in which the filmmakers were just pretending to be interested in the subject for the most part. They felt that they had to make some kind of film about this, but their convictions are so shallow to be almost meaningless.

HM: How do you compare these movies to the Vietnam war movies.

ASH: I did not write the piece to valorise previous films about other wars. But the difference with films about Vietnam are made by people who are very opposed to the war. There's the Emile de Antonio documentary In the Year of the Pig which is the essential Vietnam documentary, other people might name different ones, that’s the one that I would name. Then the films that were made by new Hollywood directors were often either written or directed by people who had fought in Vietnam, and that's the big difference.

A film like Apocalypse Now is not made by people who fought in Vietnam, and there’s a lot of political issues around that film that are that are suspect. But the commitment of Francis Ford Coppola is not the same as the commitment of the people who made Home of the Brave.

But in a sense, Apocalypse Now created this template for how to deal with American colonial wars in foreign countries. There was still the idea that because it was made after the war, people still held the memory of confronting the Vietnamese in Vietnam. This was not true of the war in Iraq films and the war on terror films. Part of the issue in those films, the war in Iraq, the war on terror, the war in Afghanistan are really three different things conflated into one thing and this big kind of fat ball that America does now to the point where none of these three things could be spoken about in the films individually. 

HM: There’s a line in that chapter that says, “An era of endless war chokes off the kind of evaluation that in the past has produced the best war movies. If the war on terror never ends, those films cannot be made. Evaluation will be left to movies like The Dark Knight which indulge our longing for relief from war at the same time as they replicate its stasis us reconfigure its atrocities and blockbuster entertainment.”

ASH: I say also in that piece, conservatives always say that Hollywood hates America. This is a big right wing idea. It's a semi-fascist talking point that they have. The thing to me that proves that Hollywood hates America is how they keep making Batman films.  Just as America is fighting an endless war, Hollywood keeps making Batman over and over again with different actors. 

HM: Moving on from long form, I'm very curious about the capsule reviews, some of them are a sentence long. I'm fascinated that you write them, and that sort of writing is allowed to be treated as a review in your selection of reviews.  I think the shortest one is for Revolutionary Road where you say “Revolutionary Road shows something people think they want to see but really don’t: what happens if Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet survived the Titanic.” 

ASH: The reason I started writing those is for two reasons. One was that the capsule form of reviewing which is a consumer guide for reviewing and totally taken over film criticism by that point. I felt that it needed to be repurposed or subverted for different purposes than just the promotion of films and giving them grades. Also, I was working full time, when I started writing those pieces for n+1. I had a job that was a salaried position that was about a 60-hour week job and I didn't have a lot of time to write long essays when I started doing those for n+1. I explained that too in the introduction to the book. The editor of n+1 at the time asked me to write something, but I didn't really have the time. So I did it in a different way.   

HM: Towards the end of the book, in your acknowledgments, you mentioned the list of reviews which were not in n+1. You list all the different non n+1 publications, and lo and behold, I saw one which is out of the UAE - The National. When I looked it up, you have three articles with your name on The National’s website, but it was also a long time ago, when it was very different to what The national is today.

ASH: When The National started in the UAE, there was an editor there who's an American, Jonathan Shainin. He’s now with The Guardian. He asked me to write some pieces and one of the pieces is in the book, it's a piece on the film critic David Thompson, which is in the book under the title of Oedipal Multiplex. 

HM: Any plans for another book? 

ASH: My book is also available as an e-book that came out last May because we were going to do a new edition of the book, but it was not possible because of the pandemic. There's going to be another print edition of the book soon, probably early next year. 

I've written many pieces since then that I hope will be collected in another book, too. Maybe in the middle of next year I'll start putting that together. And I've just been writing, I write for The Baffler as the film critic there, and I write for a number of other places, too.

HM: We talked about Substack earlier on, and I'm thinking what if 10 years from now, all these individuals who started their newsletter will consider publishing them into a book.

ASH: If I started a Substack, that would be one of my goals doing it. But it's unclear what the publishing industry is going to be like now that it's consolidating more and more in the US. The big publishers, the Big Four as they are called now, they don't really publish books of film criticism. They don't publish any books about film that aren't just pop biographies or memoirs or picture books about a specific film or filmmaker. So my book has done pretty well, it’s done better than I or the publisher expected it to do, and I think that's because people do want to read books on film criticism, they want them to be good, they don't want them to just be shallow, empty books. They want them to be actual film criticism as it used to be published.

HM: What is your advice for someone who wants to be a film critic, is that even a field to pursue today versus writing individual pieces on blogs, Letterboxed or newsletters? 

ASH: It's very difficult to make a living writing as a film critic. For many years, I had a job of a salaried position at a company that did brand analysis for the television industry, before that, I had other jobs. I quit that job because I was making more money as a writer and I wanted to do the book. But now it's such a low level of existence financially. You have to be very dedicated to it. It has to be the only thing you want to do you, in order to live like that. You have to wilfully detach yourself from other things in a way. I don't really recommend that to anyone. 

Most people that want to be film critics now become academics of some sort. They teach in universities and even that is kind of going away. Or they become entertainment journalists and they cover the entertainment industry. If they do write film criticism, it's just consumer guide work for them for the most part. 

Something like Letterboxd is just a social media platform where they're harvesting information about the users and about their tastes and preferences. I look at it sometimes, I'm not part of it. I see a lot of writing that isn't so good, it's mostly people making lists of things, which can be helpful as guides to see movies. But then again, we're in the consumer guide world more than in the writing world. 

So it is kind of bleak right now and it's getting bleaker as corporations consolidate the film industry. But it is necessary to counter these things as writers and thinkers. 

The other avenue is becoming a film programmer and work at festivals, there is writing involved in that because festivals produced catalogues and sometimes essays, and they do interviews with filmmakers and so on. But again, that's a liminal area between actual writing and publicity. 

I’ve written things for people that put up DVDs like the Criterion Collection Blu-rays, and I love doing that, but again, you're working for someone who's putting out a consumer product where the writing is not the main product at all. It’s great and it's valuable to have essays that come with Blu-rays and DVDs that are in the package and also appear online, but that's not really the same as regular film criticism. 

So you have to try to find the avenues that are open to prose writing and criticism, whether it's something like a festival or academia, which has different demands. 

Film criticism is not really supported by mainstream publications, although many of them have film critics. In most cases, those are people that have had those jobs for years. The Wall Street Journal has a film critic who's been there since 1962. The previous generation before mine has not left a lot of avenues open for subsequent generations. That's why things like television recapping started, I talked about this in the book too, because there are things open for people that want to be critics and people want to write and they're interested in these forms of visual communication and writing about it. They have to make their own opportunities. If the book hadn't come out, I still would have been writing my column and other pieces. But it's only because of the publication of the book that I end up speaking to you and doing all this other kind of thing. So a book that comes out that has meaning leads to larger things, and if these things never come out, then it's who is the most popular podcast that talks about Marvel movies that has a big Twitter following. 

HM: If something's out there and it matters, like your book that reached the UAE and it led to this conversation, hopefully it inspires other writers and people interested in doing something that can be meaningful and truthful.

ASH: My goal is to write about the cinema in a way that is valid for the present and to find a new way to do something that's valid for the world that we live in now. I don't think it's my goal to necessarily inspire people to write, but I want people to consider different kinds of understandings about the cinema and about media then they might have had without reading things that I write. 

Of course I'm happy if anyone reads what I write and if they like it. But I didn't start doing it in order to inspire people, because a lot of writing that is done that way I think is bad writing. There's a lot of that now because the world is in very bad shape and there's a great deal of unfairness and injustice in the world. Naturally people want to counter that through writing if they are writers, but that's not the same thing as being a critic. I think that's an important thing to realise if you're a writer.