Conversation with A. S. Hamrah
#Scurf196: The writer on writing criticism, watching and often rewatching movies as part of the job
For this edition of Conversations, I spoke with writer A. S. Hamrah. Hamrah’s work has appeared in a number of publications, including n+1, Bookforum, The Baffler and Harper’s. A collection of his work, The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002–2018 (n+1 Books), was called “essential reading” by The Nation and “form-bending, disobedient” by New York magazine. From 2008 to 2016, he was a brand analyst for the television industry.
X: @hamrahrama
Bylines: Criterion, n+1, Baffler, Fast Company, Forum Mag, New York Review of Books
How did your job as a brand and trend analyst for the television industry shape your view as a critic? It’s not very common for an analyst to become a critic. Was that transition natural?
It’s actually the other way around. I was a film critic and writer first, and then became a brand analyst to make money. I’ve never worked as a trend analyst, only as a semiotic brand analyst and cultural analyst. I started doing that kind of work freelance with another guy I was doing a zine with in the 1990s, and in 2008 I got a job with a consultancy in New York doing it full-time, primarily for the television industry. I quit in 2016, started doing it freelance again, and then quit it entirely soon after. Before all that I was a writer and film critic, beginning in zines and then moving into magazines and websites.
Each profession has informed the other. They’re highly related. I could not have been a good brand analyst had I not been a film critic first. It’s a way of analyzing society in general, the big picture of how constructed images determine meaning in people’s lives. The kind of analysis I did began to inform my writing, but more importantly exposure to the workings of the television industry in Hollywood began to inform my thinking and then my writing. The inner workings and the economics of that industry have become so determinant in filmmaking in this age of corporate control that it’s important to be informed by them, just as one is informed by politics and history and film history when writing criticism.
What were the pivotal movies, maybe from your childhood, young adulthood or perhaps during your time as an analyst, that shaped your perspective as a writer?
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in the cinema. As a child I became very interested in 1930s Hollywood films because they were on TV on independent UHF stations from New York all the time, especially Warner Bros. gangster films and film noirs and Thirties comedy, in general. My first loves were films by Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks – at that time in that order – then various film noirs like Out of the Past by Jacques Tourneur and Detour by Edgar Ulmer, and Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields comedies, and screwball comedies with actors like Cary Grant and Carole Lombard, and the Busby Berkeley musicals, especially Gold Diggers of 1933.
What those films had in common, I think, was a certain anarchic, antiauthoritarian sensibility that was essentially left wing and in favor of the common man, very quick to mock the rich. And they were all in black-and-white, of course, and fast-paced. There isn’t a lot of extraneous or ponderous material in American films from that era.
After that I became interested in American avant-garde movies and then the French New Wave and other foreign films, because those kinds of movies played on Public Television and at the local university, which was Wesleyan University, and I started going to them as much as I could, obsessively, really. It was Godard’s films that opened a certain kind of world to me, and showed me how film and criticism (of everything) are so linked.
Films from my time as a brand analyst did not really shape my perspective as a writer because my perspective as a cinephile was pretty formed by the time I began doing that kind of work. I will say that the only accurate portrayal of a cultural analyst I have seen in a movie, or maybe I mean the best portrayal, is the Samantha Morton character in David Cronenberg’s film version of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, from 2012. That movie came out when I was still doing that kind of work, and it really surprised me, it kind of spooked me. It was a strange moment of recognition. I had not read the novel first.
How did you perceive the writing world, especially television journalism while working as an analyst?
From my work as a cultural and brand analyst in television I began to find TV critics ill-informed cheerleaders for certain kinds of dramas and comedies who didn’t really take into consideration the whole of what television is and the role it plays in American life. That kind of criticism is an extension of fandom that the television industry manipulates to its advantage. As for the writing world, when I started, some writers still had a lot of disdain for the movies, but if a work of theirs was sold to the movies they were very happy about it, not just because of the money but also because it’s validating, and then they would just melt if they were asked to play a doorman or something on screen. I found that odd. But that has changed a lot, and now many writers dream of getting jobs writing TV shows for streaming services instead of, not in addition to, writing novels.
Your writing leans strongly towards being brutally honest. When did you realise that you were good at being honest on the page?
Wow, well, I’ve just always kind of written that way. That’s my voice. Criticism should not be afraid to criticize and it should have the courage of its convictions. Many film critics are second-guessers. You can often see in their writing that they are trying to figure out what some perceived, fictionalized audience will think first, and responding to that as much as to the film. I try to never do that.
As critics, journalists hold a lot of power and responsibility of not only informing large masses of people one review at a time but also educating. Are there any living critics and writers whose works you admire?
Speaking of convictions, now I don’t want to name anyone for fear of leaving someone out. One film critic I admire is Jonathan Rosenbaum. He’s living. I read him voraciously all through my late teens and twenties and early thirties. His work had, and has, an element beyond film criticism that is still film criticism but also much more. Though like all the Silent Generation and Baby Boomer film critics in the US he pulled the ladder up after him with no thought to who would come later.
It’s happened to me that while watching or rather immediately after watching a movie or show I feel greatly about it, but a couple weeks later once the bling lifts, the show or movie seems quite average. Nothing too extraordinary about it. And vice versa too. Does this happen to you? How do you weigh your review of said movie or show afterwards?
That happens all the time. Usually, it’s with a film that I didn’t like at all when leaving the theater but upon reflection I begin to like it. My initial resistance to it often means it has confused me or bothered me in some way. If that’s the case I will go see it again, if I can. Of course there are films I have rewatched many, many times, and see every chance I get when they come to movie theaters and I watch them at home, too. As for liking something initially and then finding it blah, that happens too, but less often. Usually if I merely dislike a movie, I don’t come around to it. I mean if I just dislike it, as opposed to having some crazy adverse reaction to it. Or if I do start to like it, it happens years later, because time makes things better just because they exist. Against a backdrop of contemporaneity they begin to look better. I usually enjoy seeing movies that I understand right away are not very good. You have to like to see movies to be a film critic. But you can’t let that get to you.
I know this might be a bit of a stretch, but do you ever imagine yourself making a movie?
I used to make movies that were shown while indie rock bands played and I have written two screenplays that were going to be made by film studios, but things happened, as they do, and they were not made. I have worked in film production, including as an assitant editor for the director Raúl Ruiz, and on some documentaries, and I produced a feature-length documentary called Bunker that Jenny Perlin wrote and directed, which was the opening night film at Doc Fortnight at the Museum of Modern Art in 2022.
The inner workings of writing a film review always fascinate me. While watching a movie without having a review to write is such an immersing, exciting, somatic experience. I wonder what it’s like watching something, say Oppenheimer or Barbie or Anatomy of a Fall knowing that you’ll have to write about it, almost immediately after the screen fades to black. Can you talk to me about the writing of a review and how that process unfolds?
It is such a part of my life that I can no longer separate the seeing from the writing. It’s an organic process now and has been for a long time, informed by my experience and all the films and whatever else I’ve seen. I approach every film, though, as a moviegoer and I hope it’s going to be good. When I write, especially the n+1 reviews, I write more than is published, sometimes quite a bit more, and then try to cut it to the bone before I submit it to my editor.
I just loved your review of Nussbaum’s latest book in Bookforum. While on the one hand it could be argued that that kind of detail, research and in-depth analysis of reality TV could’ve only been written by someone who had been on the “inside”, but on the other hand isn’t the job of a critic to do precisely that!
Can you demystify the process of writing in-depth reviews? Do editors ask you to go long, or do you find out in the process of writing and researching that this is something that’ll take more time?
Everything comes out longer than you expect it to and takes more time than you expect. In the case of that piece on the book Cue the Sun! and reality TV, I submitted a 3,000 word first draft, which is what I was assigned, but then my editor asked me to expand it to about 5,000 words. Most pieces that film critics get to write are not that long. I’m lucky I get to write for places like Bookforum, where that was published. I try to write for places like that, where they aren’t so wed to short word counts.
You’ve had a long-standing relationship with the very peerless n+1 magazine.
I have. But I am still a freelance writer there. I’m not on staff as a film critic. n+1 is one of the kinds of places I just referred to. They let me write what I want with no specific word count in mind, and they are great editors, like the editors at Bookforum.
A large part of my movie watching time is just rewatching titles I saw 4-5 years ago and loved (or hated). I do this to recognise and relive the old me in the parts that moved me, but sometimes I also come out feeling like I got to know a movie better. What are your views on rewatching? Are there any you rewatch?
I rewatch things all the time. All the time. That is part of it. I’ve been doing that my whole life. And in the 1990s I was also a movie theater projectionist at a revival house, and would listen to the movies over and over as they ran. I mean I would make sure to listen to certain movies. So those really seeped into my soul. Though I have to admit I don’t understand children (kids these days) who watch the same animated movie dozens and dozens of times. I recently came across the phrase comfort movie and it disgusted me.
Can you share any recent movies that you’d recommend?
I’m currently writing a new n+1 column for which I just saw maybe 15 new films, so I don’t want to discuss them right now because it might have an adverse effect on finishing the piece. Before that the most recent new film I saw was Kit Zauhar’s latest, her second feature film, This Closeness, which I thought was excellent. Zauhar is an important new voice in cinema, and I hope she makes a lot more films. This Closeness is like an inverted chamber drama version of her first film, Actual People, with a smaller cast and only one setting, an AirBnB unit a couple is renting for a weekend and has to share with the occupant. The film is unsettling and original, with a unique sensibility not at all bound to genre. Zauhar is in her films, too, where her presence is the manifestation of her style in a post-Caveh Zahedi way I have not seen before, even though lots of young writer-directors appear in their own films these days.
Any future projects you’d want to talk about?
I don’t like to discuss future projects because you never know what’s going to work out and what isn’t, but I will mention that I have a newsletter called Last Week in End Times Cinema that is currently private. People can only subscribe to it by following me on Instagram and DM’ing me their email address. It covers various kinds of bad decisions and wrong thinking I find in film industry news.
Thank you so much for your time, A. S.! Really appreciate this.
Thank you for asking me, Anandi.
Read older editions of Conversations here.