What the industry folks are really talking about is the perceived disconnect between people who watch movies to write about them and people who just watch movies.
By the way, just in case anyone was wondering, people who commit a large portion of their lives to writing about movies are people who love movies. Nobody becomes a sports writer because they hate sports. But a prolonged exposure to the Hollywood product can sour you a little. You don’t feel the same after 20 years of marriage as you did on the day you got married.
But it struck me, thinking about The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu, or rather, thinking about why I don’t want to watch The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu, that one of the reasons for the disconnect is that a lot of us in the profession undergo a form of training. We take film courses in university. And we are taught to privilege “the real” over the fantastic. No one ever comes out and says this. No one ever stands at a lectern and announces “Up Lumiere! Down Melies!” But the bias is there.
Go back and take a look at the Ebert and Hoberman reviews and look at how they couch their arguments. You can trace this position back to NFB founder John Grierson, who couched the choice between documentary and fiction as a moral decision, to Andre Bazin’s arguments in the 50s for the long take over montage in terms of fidelity to the “real world.”
