The cinema-endgame stories keep coming, and here are two in a subset of the genre—Andrew O’Hehir’s piece at Salon, “Is Movie Culture Dead?,” and Jason Bailey’s post at the Atlantic site, “Film Culture Isn’t Dead; It’s Just More Fun.” What they share is the assertion (in O’Hehir’s case, a lament; in Bailey’s, a celebration) that the foreign films screened at the New York Film Festival—art-house films in the literal sense of only being released at specialized theatres in big cities and college towns—have lost their importance in American movie culture.

Apparently no one has ever lost money telling readers that they don’t need to bother with movies they don’t already know about, but what’s notable about these two pieces is their similar obsession with short-term popularity as a touchstone for significance. O’Hehir doubts that the foreign films screened at the New York Film Festival “have any impact at all on the American cultural mainstream” and claims that they are no longer central to “cocktail party debate among the chattering classes,” as they once were. “Those who hadn’t seen such film, or hadn’t ‘gotten’ them, felt not so subtly left out.” (In other words, in the room the women no longer come and go / Talking of Michelangelo Antonioni.)

Perhaps O’Hehir is just going to the wrong parties—people I know are certainly talking a lot about “Holy Motors” and “Like Someone in Love,” and the fact that most of us who are doing this talking are “movie people” is beside the point. There are a lot more movie people now than there were in the sixties and seventies, and, thanks to the Internet, the conversation sparked by a festival screening quickly becomes more vigorous, more diverse, and more substantial than before, and the results of that good conversation emerge even more widely than before, albeit in slightly different ways. These movies won’t just be shown in art-house theatres but will also come out on DVD and be streamed, watched and discussed by friends and friends of friends, shown by film professors in classes, and inspire a rising generation of critics who are, for the most part, writing mainly online but whose voices will eventually push nostalgists to the margins. Now, as before, the best movies in the New York Film Festival—such as those by Leos Carax, Abbas Kiarostami, and Alain Resnais—will take their place in the “culture,” and will likely do so enduringly. Certain cocktail-party chatterers may dodder on in blithe ignorance, but their children will know—and many will love—these films.

Jason Bailey (who starts by citing, approvingly, O’Hehir’s charge about the New York Film Festival’s irrelevance) also thinks that so-called art films have fallen into oblivion—and he’s glad of it:

[I] have to confess that I’ve seen nothing at the NYFF that resonated as deeply or engaged me as thoroughly as Looper—yes, a Bruce Willis action movie, but one with an ingeniously worked-out plot, surprisingly deep emotions, and a thing or two to say about the uncertainty of inevitability. Moreover, it’s a lot of fun, which is a quality that doesn’t have to exist separately from cinematic brilliance.

His idea is that the best of contemporary cinema has what he calls a “pop sensibility,” as opposed to what he calls “emotion-free ‘cinema art,’ ” his main example of which is “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet,” the new film by Alain Resnais that played at the New York Film Festival last week:

Maybe it’s blasphemy to give up on a Resnais, but I’ll own it: I couldn’t find a way into the film, so I looked for a way out of the theater. It’s handsomely staged and marvelously cast, but the picture is so frightfully dull that I couldn’t lock in on it. He’s so busy constructing magical realism and frames within frames that he doesn’t accomplish the simpler task of engrossing his audience.

Resnais may not have accomplished the difficult task of engrossing Bailey, but he sure engrossed me. Bailey mistakenly believes that liking the Resnais film means liking it unemotionally, liking it despite (or, for that matter, because of) its lack of emotion. That’s not my experience of the film; I wrote about it in the magazine and referred to its plot elements—“long-ago love affairs, wrenching separations, tawdry betrayals, wild jealousy, and violent death.” I loved the movie from its very first shot, which made me laugh out loud, and found myself gripped throughout by the passions that the movie unleashed.

In general, it’s a grotesque parody to suggest that viewers who enjoy movies that aren’t mainstream Hollywood productions do so in some second-order, snobbish, or unemotional way. It’s as silly as claiming that classical music and opera are less emotional than pop music, and it’s a claim that, like O’Hehir’s comment about cocktail-party chatter, is mainly a sign of not getting out enough, of not knowing people who can tell him otherwise.

A movie’s pop-ness—its production within the Hollywood system and its marketing and distribution to the widest audience—is simply not relevant to its merits and to its emotional effect. Most of us who follow the critical calling write under the irresistible influence of our passions no less than Bailey does, and it has to be so. It’s not easy to simulate enthusiasm in a review of any length and substance, and critics who take the time to write in praise of a movie and to go into it in detail and with care are, by and large, first of all asserting their primal joy, and only subsequently looking to describe the causes for an effect that is as strong as the one that Bailey claims to have in the presence of “Looper,” “Pulp Fiction,” or the other movies of “pop sensibility” that he adores. Contrary to his surmise, we write about what we love; passion is the great motivator, without which few would (and none should) bother to write about movies.