Carney-vàle!

[Gregory]

Sorry if I've overlooked some relevant fact here, but how could this be considered BU's affair, and why is tenure even an issue in this discussion? I realize that a major scandal involving a professor's off-campus relationships can lead to disciplinary action if the situation is severe enough to damage the institution's reputation, but the administration is hardly going to butt in any old time there's a legal dispute involving one of their faculty. And if they did, I could see that setting quite an unjust precedent. It looks like those who didn't believe in the institution of tenure to begin with are simply using this to grind that ax.

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

I guess it all depends on the extent to which one believes that this affair implicates his work as a BU researcher, historian, and teacher. Presumably he did work on Rappaport under the auspices of the institution supporting him, and part of this research must depend to some extent on the work lent him by Rappaport (or "gifted," if we're to believe Carney). I don't see this business as being "off-campus," either way, or even terribly distinct from any other research he executes under the aegis of Boston University. It's certainly not as "off-campus" as a sex scandal involving no one from the university, but I can imagine some arguing nonetheless that David Epstein, for example, deserves to lose his job, even though his sexual crime is unrelated to his work at Columbia. This is in dramatic contrast to Carney's alleged crimes (perjury, etc.), but it still brings up the same question of how accountable a professor should be to the university for crimes committed "off-campus." One would have to begin with a basic question: Do alleged perjury and alleged unlawful possession of research materials reflect his professional abilities and ethical status at the university? I would think so, but you and others might disagree. As for being principally opposed to tenure, I'm not except insofar that it permits this kind of professional immunity that students, adjuncts, etc., never enjoy.

[hearthesilence]

I still get a chuckle from this thread's title...

[zedz]

I had always assumed that Carney's position at a reputable institution was absolutely, directly relevant to Rappaport's decision that it would be safe to leave his materials with him, so I don't see how BU cannot be implicated in this depressing clusterfuck. Plus, I'm betting that the university won't be keen to acquire a reputation as "the film department that fucks filmmakers over." *

* or, if you want to be pedantic, "the film department that sits back and watches while its staff fuck filmmakers over." That's a hair nobody with any sense is going to split.

[Calvin]

It looks like there may be light at the end of the tunnel - Jon Jost will be raising funds for 2K transfers to be made of Rappaport's films from the original negatives held by the Cinematheque Francaise

[whaleallright]

that's great news; I wonder why Rappaport didn't let on that the original negatives were in Paris all along--or did he?

Plus, I'm betting that the university won't be keen to acquire a reputation as "the film department that fucks filmmakers over." *

of course Boston University doesn't desire any such reputation; it's pretty clear the administration, not to mention many of the other film faculty, would rather not touch Carney with a ten-foot pole. and I believe most understand that this is an issue with Carney, not BU or their film program more broadly. he's already irreparably damaged his reputation in the field (which he always inflated anyway).

but BU also does not want a long and costly court battle for punishing Carney in some way that violates the terms of his tenure agreement. nor are they likely to want to be a poster child for undermining tenure protections, even given the current hostile environment--their faculty would rightly rebel en masse (and we'd have to suffer Carney actually becoming the martyr to academic freedom that he's long claimed to be). even if they don't mean much to cinephiles bloviating from the other side of the world, these are crucial issues that transcend Carney and Rappaport's dispute.

[MichaelB]

that's great news; I wonder why Rappaport didn't let on that the original negatives were in Paris all along--or did he?

I was certainly aware that Carney didn't have the original negatives, but of course they're not much use unless you have the funds to generate something from them.

[Aflwydd]

Carney responds to The Rappaport Situation, casts himself as a victim of blackmail, extortion, "cyberbullying."

Whatever the actual truth value of that is, I have no doubt that Ray Carney believes every single word of it. I don't think he's uttered a single conscious untruth.

Same here. I am someone who still thinks Carney's academic writing on film is really interesting and share pretty similar philosophies when it comes to art but his behaviour during his whole affair has been disturbing to witness. While I fully believe that he's been treated terribly at Boston University knowing how neoliberal university management attempts to silence any dissenters, it seems that he now feels that people are always out to get him and that he's the sole crusader fighting for the integrity of film and art in the face of innumerable attacks.

Now that he's turned against someone he claimed was a friend and seems to have no logical justification for doing so, those who never liked him anyway have displayed an almost orgasmic glee and let's be honest, care more about making fun of him on an internet forum than about whether Rappaport actually gets his possessions back. Also, if you think that Carney is one of the biggest problems with academia you know nothing about what goes in academia or happen to be the type of person who he attacks.

For me and others who actually don't hate him, I see a man whose mental health doesn't seem to be in a good way and maybe needs help. He's someone who's clearly under constant stress and strain and that is never good for rational thinking, and it just seems that he has adopted a siege mentality where in his mind all criticisms have an agenda behind him. Maybe that attitude inevitable when someone is constantly viciously attacked from so many corners, and I feel he's now beyond the point of being able to comprehend what he's doing here and why he's in the wrong.

I hope for everyone's sake that this can be resolved and that both Rappaport and Carney can get on with their lives but I fear that Ray Carney will have to be lying in a grave before this sad affair comes to an end. The whole situation just makes me really disheartened and honestly sad for both men. It's just horrible.

[zedz]

I am shocked (shocked!) that this thread has not yet been retitled Carney's Twilight.

[Perkins Cobb]

I am shocked (shocked!) that this thread has not yet been retitled Carney's Twilight.

Awesome ... except, retitle it Sawdust and Tinsel, without further explanation.

[domino harvey]

Sorry, I don't think Bergman is one of the four directors Ray Carney approves of [-X

[Perkins Cobb]

Poetic justice, then.

[AtlantaFella]

Warning for anyone trying to obtain books directly from Carney's website: I ordered a copy of Cassavetes on Cassavetes and eventually had to dispute my PayPal order since it was never fulfilled nor acknowledged. Still want to read the book though so guess I'll seek out a used copy.

[Perkins Cobb]

Warning for anyone trying to obtain books directly from Carney's website: I ordered a copy of Cassavetes on Cassavetes and eventually had to dispute my PayPal order since it was never fulfilled nor acknowledged. Still want to read the book though so guess I'll seek out a used copy.

Huh. It's like the guy's a thief or something!

[Film is Life]

While there are only five or ten generic Hollywood movies, there is no one kind of independent film. They come in as many flavors, sizes, and shapes as there are artists. That's why it is easier to say what independent films are not than what they are. I can tell you some things they aren't: They aren't about fancy camerawork and razzle-dazzle visuals. They leave that to TV commercials. They aren't about pretty photography and gorgeous shots. They leave that to the manufacturers of calendars and postcards. They aren't necessarily about telling a suspenseful, gripping story. They leave that to writers of murder mysteries. You don't read Shakespeare for the story. You don't go to Chekhov to find out how it ends.

If you are a famous, established actor–if you are Jack Nicholson, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Robert DeNiro, or Meryl Streep–volunteer to work for free in some real indie's no-budget production. Why be a whore all of your life? Do you really believe that The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Terms of Endearment, Apollo 13, Saving Pvt. Ryan, and Cape Fear are the greatest expressions of which the human spirit is capable? Nicholson in particular hasn't taken a risk with a really daring project since he appeared in Five Easy Pieces thirty years ago. (And that wasn't that daring then anyway, since he couldn't get anything bigger at that point in his career.) It was his last decent performance. Jack, do yourself a favor. Act in one honest, experimental, artistic, non-entertainment movie before you die. What are you afraid of? Accept a script by a no-name director. Take some chances with projects that take some chances. Ones that might be just dreadful, but could be great.

Apparently, he's never seen Antonioni The Passenger nor does he have conception of the Elizabethan audience who enjoyed Shakespeare for all the reasons he criticized traditional Hollywood filmmaking.

[MichaelB]

But he's not wrong about Nicholson and De Niro being distinctly unadventurous in recent decades, even if we dispute when their period of unadventurousness started (for me, it was the early 1980s for Nicholson and the early 1990s for De Niro).

[Gregory]

I was looking up reviews of Phillip Lopate's anthology American Movie Critics and noticed that Carney has resurfaced on Amazon with a bunch of reviews in the past six months.
I have Lopate's book and so far have found it to be pretty impressive and diverse in its scope and methodology, explained in the intro, and I don't understand what Carney was trying to say here. He tries to use Lopate's age against him, suggesting that he's probably old enough to cling to a notion of a "Golden Age" of film criticism, even though Lopate and Carney are roughly the same age!
His other tack (avoiding critiquing this volume directly) is that Library of America used to be good before they totally sold out and stuff—"Commercialism corrupts even the noblest projects." Never mind that LOC isn't a traditional commercial publisher; they're a nonprofit entity that doesn't break even on sales alone and instead stay afloat through outside funding streams. Anyway, enough out of me. Here's the review of the Lopate followed by another in which he tilts at the most predictable old culture wars stuff about scholars daring to look at social themes in film criticism, "affirmative action," etc.

American Movie Critics, ed. Phillip Lopate
"Commercialism corrupts even the noblest projects"

The Library of America has maintained the most consistently high standards in American literary publishing for more than 30 years. But not with this and many of its recently published companion volumes on film. (And I might as well add to the list of commercial compromises the LOA is guilty of the recent additional to their website titled "The Moviegoer"--bad reviews of even worse movies--as yet another illustration of the LIbrary of America's attempt to pander to the American Philistine's movie craziness and attempt to make a buck from it.) This book is more testimony to the shallowness of classic film criticism than a bible to read, consult, love, live with, and learn from. (But to be fair: even at that, this writing is still much better than contemporary, jagon-clad "film theory.") And a testimony to the age of the compilers, I suspect, who apparently miss the bad old days of so-called "literary" journalistic reviewing. Like most Golden Ages, strictly a myth. It wasn't Golden then and it isn't even Tin now. The Library of America seems to have suspended their standards in the past five or ten years, as far as I can tell, after Geoffrey O'Brien picked up the editing reins, particularly when it comes to writing on Hollywood. It's not hard to guess why. Everyone loves the movies. Books about movies are a cash-cow. Film criticism sells. Not as well as DVDs of junky Hollywood movies, but better than John Ashbery for sure. So much for maintaining literary and critical standards. Good to line the bottom of the bird-cage with after a quick skim. About as deep as the newspaper entertainment pages.

Critical Vision in Film Theory, ed. Timothy Corrigan et al.
"a tradition--art--in danger of being lost"

A guide to what's wrong not only with film studies, but with much of the study of the other arts and humanities in the contemporary American university, including the one in which I teach. Sensory experiences are turned into ideas, themes, and theories. Personal expression is turned into cultural manifestation. The unsystematic, idiosyncratic excitements and insights of art are turned into generalizations about race, class, gender, ideology, and culture. Art becomes "representation"--in both senses of the word. The mystery, the thrill of encountering unclassifiable, idiosyncratic genius is schematized, systematized, psychoanalyzed, and sociologized. Greatness is blithely, blandly undone by twentieth-century mediocrity. Works that were meant as replies to fashion are reduced to intellectual fashion statements. Expression is academicized. Welcome to the typical film studies program in the typical American university. Thrilling, unsettling experiences are transformed into predictable, prefabricated, received ideas. It's the students, of course, who are the real losers. They are being cheated, being denied the joys, the discoveries, the mysteries of art by professors who only discover in works of art the political and ideological sermons they themselves have already hidden under the stones they lift. Art becomes a form of affirmative action (or is criticized for not being affirmative action). The students, poor trusting believing innocent souls, are being told that art is about power, culture, psychology, gender, "otherness," and a hundred other affirmative action, social justice projects, when art actually begins where these categories and these externalized understandings of experience prove insufficient. (Life is not about power, equality or, yuk, "representation." At least none of the most important aspects of it are. Only politicians, protesters, and professors are out-of-it enough to believe something like that. It is about imagination and emotion, about awareness and sensitivity, about looking and seeing what is really there, what is left, when the ever-so-fashionable cliches have been swept away, and we are able to think for a change with our own brains and feel with our own feelings, not intellectually mass-produced ones.) But to say any of that in a classroom at my own university would be to be put on the short list for dismissal or an administrative reprimand for "insensitivity." In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to be raked over the coals for saying as much as I have said here if it gets back to anyone there. Such is the power of group-thinking and political-correctness, and such is the intolerance of anyone who dares to think for himself. A sad story. A very sad situation for students. They are being defrauded and denied their birthright. To know what art can be.