CINEMA
Art of criticism
SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN
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A primer on the virtues of writing about films with passion and knowledge.
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These writers bring an enriching intellectual ambit to their work, one that is not often found in daily journalistic film writing.
American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now; Edited by Phillip Lopate, The Library of America, $40.00
PERHAPS because the newspaper sired it, film criticism still labours under the impression that it serves only to direct the public towards certain movies and away from other ones. Only the inveterate movie buff or film writer, in fact, even bothers to read about a movie after watching it. For the most part, people just look for equivalents of Roger Ebert's two-thumbs-up signal. This is, of course, in complete contrast to serious art or literary criticism, where prior knowledge of the work is mandatory, and where a two-thumbs-up essay on Jane Austen ("Smashing!") will only net you a failing grade and a sombre interview with your headmistress.
Ebert himself is a part, and one of the best-known members, of an impressive lineage of film writers, many of whom are anthologised in Phillip Lopate's voluminous American Movie Critics. Its volume is well warranted; apart from having the oldest commercial film industry in the world, America has also produced more than a century of fine film criticism.
Bigger issues
Even the earliest writing in Lopate's anthology, dating back to the silent era, noticeably grapples with bigger issues — with genre, with purpose, with technique, with context. As with all good criticism, many of the best pieces also extend beyond the confines of pure cinema. Melvin Tolson, for example, decries "Gone With The Wind" at a time when it was sweeping America off its feet. It is, he writes, "such a subtle lie that it will be swallowed as the truth by millions of whites and blacks alike," before proceeding to examine the politics of its racial themes. Siegfried Kracauer, in an essay titled "From Caligari to Hitler", traces the history of a nation through its cinema. This is, clearly, not "time pass-popcorn" film writing; it views cinema as serious art and treats it as such.
Equally significantly, many of the essayists in American Movie Critics are artistic polymaths. Poet Carl Sandburg reviews "Nanook of the North", novelist Ralph Ellison discusses race in film, and writer Susan Sontag deconstructs the science fiction genre. These writers bring an enriching intellectual ambit to their work, one that is not often found in daily journalistic film writing. Sontag has written so widely, on so many themes, that she can examine sci-fi from a dozen different angles and still delight in the monster from outer space.
From the finest critics
The most rewarding sections of the book, and the ones from which we in India can learn most, are the straight-up reviews by a clutch of America's finest full-time critics — Pauline Kael, Manny Farber, Vincent Canby and James Agee. These are little tutorials in what movie reviews can be, even given a two-day deadline and a 700-word limit. They're analytical, but they never lose touch with the visceral; reviewing Robert Altman's "McCabe & Mrs. Miller", Kael writes: "A slightly dazed reaction to the film is, I think, an appropriate one," even though her subsequent scrutiny is anything but dazed.
Lopate possibly did not intend it as such, but American Movie Critics reads like a primer on the virtues of writing with passion and knowledge. In a wonderful little piece of meta-criticism from the early 20th century, Rudolf Arnheim, a German psychologist, says: "One of the tasks of the film critic of tomorrow... will be to rid the world of the comic figure the average film critic and film theorist of today represents." The body of work this book represents, in large part, is a glorious fulfilment of Arnheim's charter.
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