When I got out of film school in the late sixties I was able to make the films I wanted to make for a while. If they are inaccessible and too allegorical it’s because I was inaccessible and too allegorical myself. I was never interested in the world as it was. Things of this world were only manifestations of a ghost world or of a long-gone past I tried to evoke without much success. That kind of filmmaking requires a patron. If I ever had a chance to acquire one, and in retrospect I think I might have had a chance, I didn’t snap to that at the time. I guess the lesson there is to keep your eye on the main chance. There was only one film I wanted to make that I couldn’t. I saw Jerry Jeff Walker perform at Liberty Hall in Houston and left the hall thinking that anyone who had ever had a friend or hoped to have one would want to know Jerry Jeff Walker. But the timing was bad. Before I could put the film together, Walker’s career was in a tailspin. If I had been Albert Maysles, Walker would have been a perfect subject, but I was still thinking like D. A. Pennebaker and trying to get in on the beginning of something good, not to document its end. What I remember best about my career as an independent filmmaker is the generosity of friends who gave me jobs, loaned me equipment and helped me make my films.

In the introduction to I Lost It At The Movies, her 1960 collection of film reviews, Pauline Kael asks: ‘Isn’t it precisely the artist’s task to give form to his experience and the critic’s task to verbalize on how this has been accomplished?” Yes. But to what end? Alfred North Whitehead once wrote: "Our knowledge of the particular facts of the world around us is gained from our sensations. We see, and hear, and taste, and smell, and feel hot and cold, and push, and rub, and ache, and tingle. These are just our own personal sensations: my toothache cannot be your toothache, and my sight cannot be your sight." What mathematics does, Whitehead explained, is create a public world that's the same for everybody. Mathematics imagines a world "as one connected set of things which underlies all the perceptions of all people. There is not one world of things for my sensations and another for yours, but one world in which we both exist."

Can film criticism, or any kind of criticism for that matter, discover one world that underlies all of the perceptions of all people? And does it matter if it can or not? Mathematics is essential to the science of bombs, and vaccines, and medicines. It makes architecture and engineering, air and space travel possible. That these things matter is obvious. But do things like films and what we make of them matter in the same way? And to whom do they matter? Tom Wolfe famously pointed out that without the theories of Rosenberg and Greenberg, Red Mountain and Green Mountain, le monde, the little world of artists, dealers and collectors in the fifties and sixties, was unable to see. Until you grasped the theories, you saw something all right, but not the "real" paintings. So what? Rosenberg and Greenberg didn't even have the same theory about what they were looking at. They weren't seeing the same things at all.

Physicists sometimes think of light as particles. Sometimes they think of light as waves. Neither particles nor waves by themselves explain all there is to know about light, but taken together they do. And that matters. Because the bomb blows up.

What matters about criticism is that it should be useful somehow. A modest goal for a critic might be to make something accessible to a viewer, or listener, or reader, or filmmaker that wouldn't be accessible to them without the critique. And my thought is we should do that without going overboard about the importance of the work we're talking about. We should talk about art the way we talk about mushrooms on our lawns, keeping our heads straight when we swim, finding our way home after a night on the town, or whether we prefer one-egg or two-egg omelets. All I can make accessible to anyone is what I see, hear and think when I watch a film. But again, to what end? To stay afloat as the wave of pap rises to fill the bandwidth streamers are creating.

For the maker of films there are thoughts, jottings, comments and notes here about how to make film from the world. Quentin Tarantino is right. A good review can be studied like a class assignment. And for the viewer of films there are thoughts about how to make film from film. These essays may be more useful to the student than to the accomplished filmmaker or to the viewer who wants only to be informed, entertained or emotionally moved. But there may be something useful here for viewers who can entertain the notion that the film we experience as memory is the real film.

If I have any single reader in mind it is the independent filmmaker on the brink of becoming the next big thing. The good news for that filmmaker is that there is a lot of bandwidth to fill. The bad news is there will be a lot of crap competing to fill it. When bandwidth was scarce, the value of information was that it added something novel to our picture of things. Now bandwidth is unlimited and we have to create a new standard of value. The problem for the filmmaker now is how to stand out and the problem for the viewer is how to make good use of his or her time.

It’s a truism that literature, film and photography, are synthesized experiences. They don’t exist until a maker creates them. But the experiences of the world, of emotions and of memories the maker uses as the building blocks of their creations is important. The maker’s own experience and direct knowledge has special standing. Write what you know. Film what you know. That’s good advice. Or maybe we should say write and film what you remember. Of what you remember, choose those things that are first-hand, intimate and full of emotion for you. Bring those emotions to every situation. Write and film what you know with abandon. Write and film what you feel. Imbue every situation, past and present, historical or speculative, with your own experience and authentic emotions. The story is just an occasion for synthesis and the quality of the film depends on the quality of the emotionally moving experience the maker is able to create.

I am a product of the sixties. Mine is a sixties sensibility, reflecting on the media of the millennium from a low to middlebrow point of view. It’s the viewpoint of an artist more than that of a critic, of someone who, like Pollock trying to recreate the body language that produced a Mondrian, needs to feel in his bones where the maker is coming from.

It is the filmmaker’s task to make emotionally moving films, the streamer’s task to provide emotionally moving streams of films, the viewer’s task to seek out films that linger in memory and enrich their life. It’s not enough to watch reality TV and sports, to listen to rap, country or pop, to follow celebrities on Twitter and Instagram, to watch Tik Toks, and to be up on the latest episodes of series like Game of Thrones (2011 - 2019), that spectacular triumph of mise-en-scène over narrative. If you want to get high and immerse yourself in the rich mise-en-scène of Game of Thrones, just do it. But absorb the mise-en-scène and the second unit-directed action. Don’t subject the narrative to a strip search for significance or meaning. For me, Game of Thrones ended with Daenerys Stormborn, The Unburnt, victorious. For one moment, thanks to CGI, she is not like a dragon. She is a dragon. I don’t really remember or care to remember what happened after that.

We have to paddle hard to reach the top of the oncoming swell, before the wave breaks, swamping our little craft.