In was in 1967 that I discovered Antonioni and Fellini. I saw Blow-Up (1966), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Persona (1966), The Loved One (1965), and Andy Warhol’s Vinyl (1965). I watched Godzilla (1954) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) on late night TV. I read a Wonder Wart-Hog comic book. I saw a drunk sleeping on the stoop of Carnegie Hall.

It was the summer an Army buddy and I took over the second floor of an old duplex in Galveston and put in some time arguing politics versus culture. He was a Swiss Marcusian and argued that politics shapes culture. I argued the opposite.

It was the summer of the Six-Day War and our favorite cartoon showed the aftermath of a collision between an Arab and an Israeli tank, the Arabs holding their hands in the air, the Jews holding their necks.

I read the Koran that summer and I was impressed by the idea of houris.

I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Sitting by the pool at The Galvez, a grand, beach hotel one afternoon, I suddenly understood what a function was and lost my fear of mathematics forever.

I programmed computers at an insurance company downtown. After work every day, I'd drop a deck of punch cards off at the computer room and the operators would run my latest Keynesian model on the company’s IBM 7080 mainframe. The models always blew up. I never got the accelerator and the multiplier right.

My friend totaled my red '65 Barracuda Fastback on the Boulevard one afternoon. He had just come back from the Monterey Jazz festival. The richest man in town sent him out there with somebody's wife, probably as a joke. My friend ended up inheriting a department store in Basel. Somebody’s wife ended up finding Jesus in the bathroom of a cheap motel in Laredo one night. She was crouched in the corner, desperate for help, and it was Jesus or the big cockroach that had just crawled out from under the sink.

I still think it's about culture. About education in all its forms. If I don't know what a credit default swap is, never saw a play or an opera, never read a serious book or saw a serious film, don't know what a function is, never read any history, how can I believe I know anything worth knowing at all? What does “serious” mean? I think it’s about the intention to do more than pass time. 

Politicians, like everyone else, swim in the sea of mass culture. Political movements emerge and ride the wave of mass culture for a while, then sink back into the sea. It is impossible to imagine the New Deal outside a culture that valued people and the idea of society, just as it is impossible to imagine the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war protests that followed outside the Counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies. The problem with the American political system now is that not only the leaders, but all of the possible pretenders to positions of leadership, to political office, you see, have been vetted by an establishment process that has eliminated the possibility that any anti-establishment, read anti-Wall Street and anti-Corporate, idea will work its way into the political process. The culture of dissent just isn't there to sustain it.

It’s not my intention to create a culture of dissent. I wouldn’t know where to start. My intention is less ambitious and less serious than some. Norman Mailer felt “imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time." I just want to raise sensibilities a notch. I freely admit that my intention is highbrow, though I fear I am too lowbrow myself to produce anything of real highbrow value. I will settle for building a little raft by lashing together, in homage to a brilliant scene in the HBO series Rome (2005 - 2007), the bloated bodies of a few old thoughts.

I read John Simon and Pauline Kael before I went to film school. In film school I read Andrew Sarris, Robert Warshow, Claude Levi-Strauss and Hannah Arendt. After film school I read Bazin, Wollen and Tarkovsky. I believe it was Simon who said the difference between critics and reviewers is that critics assume you’ve seen the film.

I could find out if it was John Simon who said that, but I’m determined to resist the urge to “google it." I’ve had too many dinners and friendships ruined by people reaching for their cell phones to resolve a doubt, nail and ambiguity, or dispute a fact. No one vaguely recalls, imagines or speculates in the face of a cell phone and Google. No one makes up a more pleasing reality at dinner anymore.

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.

We're all McLuhanistas now. We take it for granted that the contents of each new medium, the World Wide Web, for example, is other media. In the case of the World Wide Web, it is television, film, photography, music, radio, books and magazines of all kinds that make up most of its contents.

The Web started out where the media that preceded it ended up: as a mass distribution network. The content of the Web, a photograph or a film, for instance, may be transformed by being published in the context of the Web, where it collides, lickety-split, at random, with other data, but the photo or film is not altered on purpose to make it "Webic" in the way books and plays are altered to make them "filmic," by breaking them down and putting them together again as screenplays and films, Frank Nugent’s adaptation of Alan Le May’s novel The Searchers for John Ford’s Western film The Searchers (1956) is as fine an example as any, or for that matter the way film created for television is made "episodic."

There is no art form yet the object of which is the creation of exciting Web collisions, juxtapositions or chains of hyperlinks. Nor, for that matter, is it possible to imagine what the medium that may someday subsume the Web will look like much less what the "art" of that medium might be, unless the medium is an all-seeing artificial intelligence that imagines the ephemeral events of the Web and real life as, essentially, one and the same, and becomes, at the same time, solitary creator and only viewer, muttering to itself.

Generally, art is degraded as it makes its way through the media food chain. Novel to film to streamed television to YouTube snippet, inserted into an article about an article on the Web, is a downhill trip. But only the last stage of that journey, the Web, was designed from the get-go to abstract, distill, decontextualize and repackage without adding value, to transmit, or, when not simply transmitting, to transform, by reducing content to pap. When it is not just moving content from one point to another, the World Wide Web has managed, on purpose, to dumb down its content—print, film, television and the other media—to an extent previously unimagined. Even more than television, the Web is, with a few notable exceptions, a vast graveyard where ideas and creative energy go to die. And now it has an unlimited bandwidth to fill.

The history of television is instructive. Film has been kinder to books than television, the medium the Web resembles most, has been to films. In some ways, television has advanced the art of film. Certainly, the extended length of series like Rome, The Sopranos (1999 - 2007), Lonesome Dove (1989) and Angels in America (2003) has given audiences more time with the characters and mises-en-scène of those films than movie-going audiences ordinarily get. And mise-en-scène, a stage term applied to film by the French critic André Bazin that refers to everything about a film except its script, takes time to appreciate. It's mise-en-scène that makes it necessary to actually see a film before we can talk about it as film. But, at the same time that television gives audiences an extended look at the mises-en-scène of some films, it alters the film experience by degrading a film's mise-en-scène, making it smaller, flatter and more frontal, an effect that favors montage over extended scenes that are blocked and photographed in a way that develops the illusion of depth on the screen and recreates the real world. Sometimes the art of that is subtle, sometimes, as in Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way (1965), it is obvious and in and of itself a pleasure to watch and to study.

Television was not conceived as a distribution medium for films any more than film was conceived as a distribution medium for books. Films may end up, along with made for TV movies, feeding the practically insatiable maw of cable television and streamers, just as novels may end up as films, but television itself was envisioned, like radio before it, as a live medium. That aspect of television is in decline, too.

The fact that television news and opinion has degenerated until even raw video of breaking events is edited, explained and commented on in search of memorable and persuasive phrases designed to lead viewers to preconceived points of view, is not the result of television's intention, so much as it is the result of the corruption of television's original intention to reveal, inform and transport.

The Web, on the other hand, has adhered to its original intention. It remains as it began, a network of people, separated in space, each identified by a unique address on the web, coalescing into temporary communities around points of common interest where data is exchanged. Some of that data is still information. It actually adds to the representation of something. Most of it now is redundant, simply repeating something already known, and a lot of it is noise, data that adds to the representation of nothing. The World Wide Web creates the illusion of connection while it affirms our separation in space.

Apart from the content they pass back and forth, the World Wide Web and the sites on it, are not very interesting. Most sites lack the kind of structure that narrative gives to novels, plays, films and television. Even so-called reality television is structured by formulaic plots that include some element of suspense. Nor does the structure that embeds the mise-en-scène have to be narrative in the sense of a traditional plot with a familiar commercial structure. Films like Warhol’s Sleep (1963) and Blow Job (1963) are structured by the nature of the event. The Netflix series The Keepers (2017) is structured by vivid verbal narration reminiscent of Persona.

The Web has not found a way to adapt content, to transform a subject, without copying it on the one hand, or destroying it on the other. Even when sites manage a sort of transient narrative, usually around some great and scandalous event, a favorite ploy of muckraking sites and tabloids, their mises-en-scène are, frankly, a mess and they quickly turn into echo chambers, some of the most boring sites on the Web. But, I might add, some of the most popular and profitable, too.