Positive4ColumnsDaney keeps plot synopsis to a bare minimum, if he bothers with it at all. While he can be blunt in his valuations, more often you have to cling tightly to the winding turns of his writing in order to extract anything resembling a \'conclusion\' ... In many of them, Daney will make passing references to the ideas of Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Guy Debord, with confidence that he’s addressing a sharp-minded readership that can either (a) understand the allusion or (b) do the necessary homework to catch up ... Daney so often pounces on a telltale choice in a film that seems to reveal its essence, the loose thread that unravels the garment. These details become springboards, points from which Daney can launch himself into speculations on qualities particular to the phantasmagoric medium of cinema as a whole—for his Cinema House is unquestionably haunted ... the pieces are arranged with an eye to connecting developing lines of thought—on off-screen space, on the relation of sound and image, on the eternal tardiness of cinema addressed to a moment in history—rather than following strict chronology ... Thirty years after his death, Daney’s revenant presence offers a most welcome disquietude.
Glenn Frankel
MixedBookforumFrankel...is diligent in his attention to all of the moving parts that go into making a film: the building of a team of disparate, sometimes at-odds talents; the days and weeks of preparation; the last-minute flashes of inspiration. He is somewhat less convincing in describing the why and how these many elements combine to create something of lasting resonance ... while Frankel is free with superlatives...he gives little sense of what recommends Midnight Cowboy to posterity ... Because Frankel looks at cinema for a reflection of the times and as a means for changing hearts and minds, he has a limited interest in fringe work. Addressed to a small and self-selecting audience, low-profile \'underground\' cinema has only so much capacity to \'shift the dialogue\' or have a \'social impact\' ... From Oscar triumph Frankel proceeds through a familiar threnody—the lament for Times Square, sanitized and Disneyfied, and for New Hollywood ... after a while you might start to wonder how much of this mourning New Hollywood is another form of self-congratulation with the addition of dewy nostalgia, and how much a “breakthrough” like Midnight Cowboy amounts to the mainstream arriving at a point where real outsiders had been hanging out for years[.]
