Stuart Klawans's Left in the Dark
Berman, Marshall
AROUND A DECADE ago, the Nation started publishing a movie critic who not only displayed the brains, sensitivity, social conscience, and intellectual horizon that we would expect in James Agee's...
...It enables Klawans to finally say things you know he's been thinking all along, like (about Jurassic Park 2), "Dummy...
...Probably not...
...I called him up and found out a little more...
...He is fifty-one years old...
...Films today, maybe more than any other cultural medium, address a worldwide audience, and express an authentic "world culture...
...Once he reached the East, we can be sure he met important men who spoke loftily of Great Expectations, but who really meant something much more like "professional meat...
...But they, along with their families and their girlfriends, are strong and resilient, and they keep coming back...
...he went to an integrated public high school full of Jews and blacks...
...Check out the range of places, artists, and sensibilities on Klawans's menu: This guy gets around...
...Some are thick, some thin...
...Full Disclosure: my wife and I also belong there...
...If yours is thin, abandon hope, or find something else to hope for...
...but if it's thick, it's your magic carpet out, and your life is changed forever...
...But it's a bag full of lovely images and rich ideas...
...Look at the great critics' books of past generations—Agee on Film, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Confessions of a Cultist, Negative Space...
...The New York intellectuals are defenders of independent thought as it's been enabled by our free society, whereas the Spice Girls are nothing but a marketing ploy engineered to separate people from their money...
...As Left in the Dark draws toward its end, Klawans makes a big play with the politics of identity: he brings a Woody Allen-esque anti-self into the game...
...Since some enchanted April more than thirty years ago, he has been living a life that began with a thick envelope...
...With ten seconds left, the Rebbe sets up one of his most complex plays: he mounts the Spice Girls' latest piece of commercial fluff on top of Arguing the World, an ultra-serious documentary about smart Jewish boys growing old, so that they work as screens for one another...
...Hey...
...MARSHALL BERMAN teaches at the City University of New York and is working on a book titled One Hundred Years of Spectacle: Metamorphoses of Times Square...
...the coach unthinkingly asks...
...Why...
...so has Bill Clinton...
...AROUND A DECADE ago, the Nation started publishing a movie critic who not only displayed the brains, sensitivity, social conscience, and intellectual horizon that we would expect in James Agee's old mag, but who, when he was hot, burned up the page like he was twenty...
...At the buzzer, we can't make a move...
...It consists of fifty or so reviews and essays, going back to the late 1980s...
...For us, it is a thrill not only to see the kids grow, but, unexpectedly, to see the filmmakers grow with them...
...What is the source of its emotional power...
...It's one of those amazing moments when the film's subject, the filmmakers, and the author soar together...
...Who is that greasylooking guy...
...The Rebbe's outfit is a perfect form of blackface for Jews...
...he could make it all come together, fluidly, like a dance...
...Still, as we read, we can feel an author grow...
...His work was bought by Miramax, only to be withdrawn from the market without ever being shown...
...But if we compare the vocation of film critic today with what it used to be, one thing that strikes us is how much farther out we've got to go into the world...
...so has Noam Chomsky...
...In motion, the play raises dire questions, not only about the legitimacy of Klawans's own vocation, but about the good (or bad) faith of readers like ourselves who love him: "But Rabbi," I protested, "how can we believe that these tough-minded social critics would fall for the Spice Girls...
...Early each April, millions of American kids get envelopes in the mail...
...Gates says he's going to major in communications...
...And this great critic splits, and leaves us holding the bag...
...If Kiarostami's Iranian world looks bleak, the story of its American fate is even bleaker...
...Klawans still believes in us, in the great American audience, reveling in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, dancing in the dark...
...It's "my spiritual adviser, the Rabbi Simcha Feffeferman, leader of the Congregation Ansche Tsurres...
...If a name like House of Love signifies Judaism at its loftiest and most idealized, then House of Tsurres (Troubles) must be its shadow, a ghetto full of "Yids" who are irreverent wiseguys—pushy, gross, but real...
...KLAWANS AND THE Rebbe make a great team...
...I don't mean to denigrate those wonderful writers for provinciality...
...The April mail carries as much dread for thousands of teenaged ballplayers as it does for any intellectual...
...He describes the world brought to us by Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1998): "a society that consists entirely of displaced persons and menial laborers, plus one middle-class person who doesn't want to live...
...Through the years, I've become Stuart's friend, but even as I composed this Full Disclosure, I realized I didn't know much about him...
...Hoop Dreams is a remarkable film, and Klawans's essay on it is equally compelling...
...It was only gradually, as he joined a synagogue, got married, had a child, and approached middle age that Klawans metamorphosed into a critic...
...Klawans may not shoot hoops, but he knows dreams...
...They are plucked from Chicago's streets, granted athletic scholarships, and subjected to a grueling process that is designed to turn them into what one high school coach, with surprising candor, calls "professional meat...
...It's a pleasure to be able to give the right answer at last...
...He insists nothing human will be alien to him, and every human landscape can be read by a mind awake...
...It's her old neighborhood...
...A film that started out as a bankable half-hour exposé turns gradually into a quixotic two-andahalf-hour Bildungsroman...
...but lest Americans grow complacent, "I would prefer to talk about the suppression of Kiarostami's work in another country where I have some experience, the United States...
...The author wants to let people know who he is and where he's coming from (even though he might not be all that certain himself...
...Left in the Dark is Klawans's first book...
...Look at the filmography at Left in the Dark's end: serious films coming not only from all the places you would expect, but also from Australia, Taiwan, Finland, Brazil, Iran, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Israel/Palestine, Senegal, and I know I'm missing plenty...
...Even now, he is often forced to morph backward, to work in art publicity and public relations, in order to make a living...
...What went wrong with the program...
...The pieces are not arranged chronologically, but according to some inner code that's hard to crack...
...My point is that the product itself was far more provincial than it has become today...
...Thus he "joined that cinematic Olympus whose gods are barred (though unofficially) from American screens....Hou Hsiao-hsien, Manoel de Oliveira, Chantal Akerman, Souleymane Cissé, great filmmakers all...
...he grew up Jewish on Chicago's South Side, near the steel mills that are no more (do you know Sara Paretsky's mysteries...
...We doubt any of them will reach the heights DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 117 BOOKS of their dreams, but they all seem to be getting over as human beings...
...It didn't take long for a cult following to grow, and I was glad to be part of it...
...For years many people have wanted to know, Why isn't Stuart Klawans in print...
...In a single column, a week's copy, he could do a Hollywood blockbuster, an independent short, a European classic—Fellini, say, or Renoir...
...That kid was supposed to turn into meat, but somehow he grew into a mensch instead...
...In fact, it's on the Upper West Side, it's "Conservative"— which means, in Jewish terms, liberal —and it's called Ansche Chesed, "the House of Love...
...Or, for that matter, what's straight...
...he has spent most of the last thirty years in New York, writing publicity for the Museum of Modern Art while he worked on his (as yet unpublished) fiction...
...Klawans is celebrating Gates's growth, but also testifying to his own...
...Another part, deeper if you ask me, lies in the exploration of a crucial moment in these boys' lives, and in Klawans's own: "the scholarship...
...And yet, and yet...
...One occupational hazard of a book like this is that it's easy for an author to feel he's drowning in his material...
...He is especially good on the cinema of a country that many Americans have a problem with: Iran...
...To write about these films with any degree of sensitivity or nuance, you have to be in touch with the political and cultural traditions of the whole world...
...They evoke the classic vaudeville teams as well as W.B.Yeats's "Crazy Jane and the Bishop" poems...
...The filmmakers show similar virtues, and decide to stay close to them over several years...
...There is plenty we can do with it till next season...
...Is there anyone alive who really possesses that culture...
...Alas, the metamorphosis doesn't work, and the young men are dropped back on the street...
...Part of it is sheer physical location—some powerful scenes, I learned on the phone, take place at his old school...
...I mentioned early on that Klawans belongs to a synagogue...
...If that was true, you wouldn't have a film—just another shtick dreck for making money" Talking about Birdcage, the Rebbe can press forward real human existential questions, cross-dressed as throwaway lines: "Who knows who's straight...
...he won a scholarship to Yale, where he majored in English...
...Nearly everything those critics wrote about was American or European, and nearly all of it could be seen on a big screen in a big city...
...To which the Rabbi merely lifted a shaggy eyebrow, saying, "And...
...DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 119...
...But his sense of identity as a critic feels fairly new—when I asked on the phone, he said maybe a couple of years old, no more—and this may help explain why his critical voice is so fresh...
...When he describes William Gates's climactic encounter with his coach, we know something big is up...
...He mentions the movie's suppression at home...
...If 118 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 BOOKS we could only have the liberty to give Iranian cinema our free attention—maybe on videotape, someday?—"Your reward, other than the experience of political virtue, might be the discovery of another reason to live...
...he could be a muckraker, a gag writer, a liberation theologian ("screenplay by God"), and a lyrical poet...
...Together they roast Natural Born Killers, The Last Temptation of Christ, and many more...
...It's a very nice-looking book, and, because Klawans talks about so many things, it would be even nicer with an index and a more explicit table of contents...
...The first great piece we see, which really pulls us into the book, is a 1994 review of Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert's splendid documentary, Hoop Dreams...
...WITH HOOP DREAMS, Klawans starts close to home...
...So that when you come asking me for a contribution, I'll know the right way to turn you down...
...This film focuses on the lives of William Gates and Arthur Agee, two black teenagers who can play ball...
...Still, its life as a dream has brought an unexpected golden age of world film into being...
...I've lived that life myself...
...you need to know these traditions in order to understand how films question, undercut, and revise them...
Vol. 49 • April 2002 • No. 2
