One trend in the field of writing about motion pictures is that very few individuals stick to just movies or just television anymore, participating in both mediums which used to be far more separated than they are today. Matt Zoller Seitz writes on TV for Vulture, but has done tremendous work on the films of Terrence Malick and Wes Anderson. Much of his work consists of writing reviews, which lean towards being charmingly contrarian. Like most critics, his best efforts are found when he’s championing something like Mad Men or Arrested Development rather than tearing something apart.
Another reason I find Seitz to be a great contributor to the conversation around cinema is his range of interests; he’s not only a writer but a filmmaker, and combines the worlds of film criticism with filmmaking itself, helping to bring the form of the critical video essay to the mainstream of our current YouTube age. This is a format that allows the critic or essayist to focus on audio-visual examples taken directly from the source material rather than relying on their own descriptive abilities. It lets the viewer get a greater sense of the image itself rather than the writer’s impression of that image. And this in turn puts more of the focus on the filmmaking rather than the criticism. He’s also really funny on Twitter.
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