American Film Criticism Re-visited

[This appeared at both Confabulation and The Blackboard.]

I have been thinking about the "classic" American film critics, and it occurs to me that most of them just aren't very good. Strictly speaking, most were reviewers rather than critics, and I don't think the review format is usually conducive to good work (although Roger Ebert seems to do well with it). It is unquestionably hard to discuss a visual medium in words, and many of our supposedly great critics had very little image sense. Pauline Kael is a particularly flagrant example, since she didn't even care about the visual aspect of the medium (so what was she doing reviewing movies?). Most of these critics were also DFOH (Distinctly Full of Him/Herself), in a way that really detracts from what they have to say. This same phenomenon is all too observable in the blogosphere these days.

James Agee, although confident, is not DFOH, and is a very good prose writer to boot; but he had little visual sense. When you look back at his reviews of Forties films, it is striking how little he has to say about them that strikes a chord today; he entirely misses most of what we find interesting,

Kael can be stimulating, no doubt; she was an intelligent, cultivated woman who wielded a sharp pen. But in her reviews, and even more strikingly in her interviews, she realizes no self-limitations, and she had plenty. She never watched films a second time to re-test her impressions; she completely lost interest in world cinema after 1970 (which was strange); she really overworked the film-as-sex metaphor (it's in all her book titles), in which the point of a film was whether it satisfied her nerve endings like a good lay. Kael is very, very limited.

Andrew Sarris? I just don't think he's that bright, and he's a pretty indifferent writer. He always was a fanboy type, and I don't think he ever outgrew that. I can relate personally to his enthusiasm for list-making and categorizing, but that's not criticism.

The hauteur of John Simon and Dwight Macdonald doesn't bear re-visiting. Stanley Kauffmann, whom I took a course from at Yale, has less innate film sense than anyone I'll mention here, but somehow is still reviewing for The New Republic in his 90s.

Otis Ferguson, who predates Agee, is an interestingly showoffy writer who would fit well on the Internet today. I don't think he's any deep thinker.

Manny Farber is interesting, too, and has his value; he gets the visual side of film better than most of these writers. But he, too, is DFOH; I never found his writing persona appealing. That said, he does seem to get more respect from all the opposing critical camps than almost anyone else.

Jonathan Rosenbaum's range of sympathies is quite narrow. His intellect can clearly be a virtue (although he can use it as a bludgeon, too), and he brings attention to some worthy work that gets ignored in the mainstream. His politics (late Sixties French-style leftist) are off-putting to many.

Roger Ebert stacks up very well next to all these other writers. His range of sympathies is notably broad; he uses the review format as well as it can be used; he is a very good prose writer; his visual understanding is acute, although he can't give free rein to that in his newspaper reviews (I understand that he does so when he teaches). The knocks on Ebert are his soft use of the star rating system (I'll never get over his giving four stars to Superman II -- come on!); and his thumbs-up, thumbs-down television persona, especially when paired with the utterly uninteresting Gene Siskel (or Richard Roeper, for that matter). But generally, Ebert has contributed a lot.

Another critic who comes out well on the scale is Danny Peary, author of the Cult Movies books and Guide for the Film Fanatic; he retired from film-writing in apparent disgust in the mid-1980s. Peary is a very clear, careful, self-effacing writer who has plenty worthwhile to say; he is always at pains to bring attention to the films under discussion, not himself.

Overall, the field is disappointing. It only took me half a lifetime to realize this!