O movie mag, where deceit thou? Periodicals on display at a newsagents. Photograph: Alicia Canter
As those who take an interest in such things decision understand, the film critic has lately turn to a subject of much anxiety – any endangered species in a worsening climate, poetry dwindling, habitat shrinking. But what of the film magazine? Caught between the recession and general shifts in reading habits, the bleaker fortune teller sees it as only a matter of time before the glossy periodical follows the newspaper into emergency. Even the optimist predicts tough times, its surpassingly form mutating in the move to the sci-fi realms of tablets and e-paper…
That’sitting the situation lately described by the Auteurs Notebook – from his base in Berlin, host David Hudson mourned the slow passing of the physical object “printed on paper, slick or matte, with that distinctive, sensuous blend of wood and ink smells”. It will, to Hudson, be a little like the death of celluloid – and there does seem something about the film magazine that’s akin to pellicle itself. The newspaper might be the traditive place of abode of the review published on the Friday of release – but it’s the film magazine that in theory does what papers be possible to’t, reflecting on film at a decent length at the same time that providing something precise for the eyes to feast forward.
Which is apparently why there are those who still hold a candle for the glossy pages. I was talking about this recently with a cinephile friend who almost sees it as her duty to consume film magazines. And I don’t think she’s alone – during the term of her and others, magazines are embedded in the culture of movies, whether put there by Cahiers du Cinéma (through its reclamation of Hitchcock and spawning of the Nouvelle Vague) or the countless giddy periodicals that accompanied Hollywood’s golden age and served to enshrine our sense of movie stars as the most remote repositories of glamour and sex appeal.
I get that. The theory is fine. The only snag with it completely is that in the English speaking world at least, I’m not sure how much there is to get devoted to. As David Hudson makes clear, Europe has good stuff in imprint, and I should acknowledge the excellence of the more rigorous titles like as Film Comment and American Cinematographer. But in the world of mags that could be plucked from the average newsagent’s shelves along with Cat Fancy Weekly and Take a Break, I can’t see a lot of action. These days, so much of the sort of you actually fall short to read is on the net, while you’re likelier to find rich film figures of speech in Frieze or Vanity Fair than any of the mainstream titles.
Of course there have previously been bright spots at the populist end of things. From LA came Movieline, the 90s monthly (lately reborn on the web) that expertly married piss-taking levity and a genuine ardour on this account that cinema. In Britain there was, for a brief occasion, Neon – a publication I’ll declare a personal affection to as it gave me my first paying jobs in journalism, and which left astern fond memories and a couple of wan copyists after inmost nature killed most distant by its publisher. More recently I also reserve a tip of the hat for Little White Lies, a beautiful-looking origination that revels in film’s visual allure.
Yet, when the relationship between movies and magazines does work, it’session glorious. Witness the now much-missed US edition of Premiere sending David Foster Wallace on a set visit to David Lynch’s Lost Highway or the same repository’s various shruggings off of studio pressure to publish proper investigative stories on the reality of Hollywood.
Personally, and I repeat this not just because of at what place I happen to be, I think the net has been a godsend for anyone interested in thin skin writing. But while the death of movie magazines in their running water form will subsist prosperity news for the trees, we should at least pause to remember them before they go.
