It sounds as if Voir, a forthcoming Netflix doc from the hearts and minds of David Fincher and David Prior, is made for film monks…a spiritual current thing for hardcores. I’m obviously speculating but they’re forcing me to fill in the blanks. “A collection of visual essays [about] the love of cinema” sounds kinda vague.
By the same token I could point to a random grab bag of 10 or 20 essays that I’ve written on Hollywood Elsewhere over the past 17 years and call them “a collection of impressionistic essays about the love of cinema”, and they would be.
I could write, produce and star in a short Netflix documentary about Roger Thornhill‘s R-O-T matchbook in North by Northwest — who thought it up, who made the prop — and how the R-O-T monogram becomes a hugely important plot element in Act Three. I would honestly love to watch, say, a 20-minute doc about that.
“Voir” is French for “see,” which obviously alludes to special sight. Things in a film that are best seen or appreciated in an educated-film-buff, taking-it-all-in sort of way…seen by way of particular perception or insight.
Great, but my tongue doesn’t like saying “voir.” Noir, yes — voir, no. I’m saying it over and over, and my mouth keeps saying “leave me alone.”
I’m thinking of a favorite Stanley Kubrick quote: “The truth of a thing is in the feel of it, not the think of it.” In line with that, if I’m being offered a film buff doc with a French title, I’d probably prefer Ressentir (feel, experience, be affected by) or Toucher (touch, affect, feel, hit, receive, contact) or even Lumiere.
Drew McWeeny (whose former podcast buddy Scott Weinberg did a lot to hurt me with two or three film festivals during the summer of ’18, and who, I feel, is not only a fiendish, foam-at-the-mouth personality but has accumulated the most rancid karma imaginable in this journalistic sphere) has revealed that he’s one of the costars (or co-authors) of Voir, and that he’ll be at next month’s AFIFest screening.
McWeeney: “Voir [is the spelling ALL-CAPS or CAPS optional?] is, simply put, the thing I have been working on for the last few years and the project I am most excited about right now. It is a streaming series for Netflix that is hopefully not like any other show about movies that you’ve seen.
“The teaser trailer really only gives you a hint of the tone of what we’re doing, but I can tell you that this is a series of stand-alone video essays about movies.
“We’re not trying to sell you anything, and we’re not interviewing anyone about what Marvel movies they’re doing. We’re each tackling a totally different idea, something that intrigues us or upsets us or that has to do with our connection to the movies.
“Each [Voir doc] runs between 10 and 30 minutes, and they were produced with the full support and involvement of Fincher and David Prior, who you may know as the director of The Empty Man.”
