On Being a Film Critic

...In addition, he must study history, religion, philosophy, mythology, and literature in order to make sense of pictures and sculptures, to say nothing of lesser artifacts...

...so too a flabby-minded, grandiosely inarticulate navel-gazer like Parker Tyler, an effete epigone of the surrealists, surfaces after years of deserved oblivion, borne aloft by a new generation of numskulls overcome by his fantastical word-mongering...

...For under the fine facade of bravado, your average American is desperately insecure, even about movies...

...So anything goes...

...He must attend concerts abroad to keep up with the musical world...

...This is what—again with the collusion of television—gave the film critic a chance to be noticed, or, as some would have it, become a superstar...

...To be a critic—just as to be an artist, and perhaps even more so—you must be as fully a human being as possible: as many-sided, cultivated, civilized as can be...

...Another Harris Poll taken some years back established Judith Crist as the most influential film critic in America, clearly because, at the time, she appeared both on NBC's Today Show and in TV Guide...

...He wants a critic who will confirm him in his likes and dislikes, or, failing that, provide a target for the hurling of epithets or dispatching of irate missives to the editor—a couple of sports apparently almost as satisfying as pitching soda bottles at the umpire...

...Or herself...

...Movies didn't do so well either: only 12 minutes per week—all the same, that adds up to twice the attention lavished upon books...

...yet much the same confusion still obtains, and is exploited by the pseudocritics...

...The real harm comes from the compulsive, fanatical, neurotic film de-vourer: the movie buff turned film critic...

...That leaves film as the only worthy critical pursuit that can be indulged in with the easeful but fatal self-sufficiency of drug addiction...

...That is not so sad...

...Film has rather suddenly been recognized as an art, and has as yet no tradition to speak of, no theory or criteria according to—or against—which a film can perspicuously test, define, and establish itself...

...Hence the easiness of drifting into film expertise and thence into film criticism...

...And you cannot give up any part of living and learning, traveling and meditating, meeting people and making love, to immerse yourself numbingly, stultifyingly, depletingly in one area of specialization, even if it goes by the peripatetic name of movies...

...Indeed, film is the only art to have an industry: Theater is, at most, a business...

...It unites polar opposites in the same category: Pauline Kael and Sarris himself, for example...

...Base art, high genius—how bewildering...

...The true critic, who resembles the artist in many ways, writes, like him, to clarify his own thoughts and feelings, to capture his experiences fully and permanently...

...True, television offers as good an opportunity for tuning in and dropping out, but not even the worst pseudo- or anti-intellectual can then fool himself into believing that he is watching an art...

...Television, that critical kingmaker, will now surely anoint Gene Shalit as the nation's chosen...

...anything Anybody says about films in general or a certain film in particular will get enough of a following to establish Anybody as a film critic...

...This same kind of in-flight training is described by Roger Green-spun, a Sarris disciple, in the January-February 1974 issue of Film Comment: "I began writing about film early in the 1960s, partly as a way of avoiding my PhD dissertation, partly as a way of thinking about material that suddenly seemed as exciting as anything I had come across in English studies...

...Outside of certain enclaves the consumption of film criticism remains minimal...

...Clearly, what Greenspun really means is more exciting, and, probably, simpler...

...He must hear the same piece of music performed many times and develop very fine discrimination between performances...

...there are times, he adds, when he is "drawn to films such as those of the Marx Brothers, which, in effect (and at their best) spit on art and culture...

...Here, however, the honest film critic must feel some doubt or, more precisely, a certain aporia, the state of ironic dislocation in which Socrates would politely leave his antagonists after he cut out the ground under them...

...Finally, he must struggle to express musical concepts and phenomena in words—in short, become a translator...

...But when a so-called film critic like Rex Reed becomes a TV entertainer, those whose tastes are low enough to be entertained by him temporarily become involved with the subject...

...To certify her credentials as a card-carrying movie nut, she has been known-—at the height of a Tarrytown film bash, when the paying guests have dropped exhausted into bed after up to five movies in 24 hours—to stop in the TV lounge before retiring, in hopes of catching something worthwhile on the Late, Late Show...

...Such breadth inevitably involves the film critic with trash: Having a column to fill, he is often reduced to doing it with westerns, thrillers, erotica of the most humdrum sort...

...Only, unlike those hapless sophists, the critic faces his aporia at the outset...

...In public and private, at work or leisure, her favorite topic is the movies...

...This dire commercial necessity can implant uncertainty in the best critical minds, witness the gifted critic Otis Ferguson referring to film as "one of the baser and more common arts" to which a man like Fred Astaire brought "his strange high quality of genius...

...But since movies remain reasonably priced and on them everyone is an authority, who in America needs a film critic...

...More to the point is a recent Harris Poll, which, to quote Newsweek, "revealed that of all occupations, critics—specifically theater and art critics—are the least respected, ranking lower than sanitation workers or gas station attendants...

...Of course, most movie critics are not critics at all, merely reviewers...

...When the movies become a cultural duty, they argue, out goes the enjoyment...

...instead, it has enormous breadth, with films oozing out of every corner of the earth...

...To be sure, that was in 1935...

...Furthermore, knowing full well that no opinion has the right to proclaim itself the gospel truth, the critic must nonetheless try his damnedest to convince the world of his being right, although he realizes that other people whom he respects—some of whom may even be fellow critics—persuasively argue otherwise...

...The mind can fairly boggle...

...All of this makes movies a quasi-ideal way for the anti-intellectual to gain protointellectual cachet...

...And besides museums and galleries, he must frequent studios and private collections...

...No one and everyone...

...A believer in the freedom of opinion must try to make others bow before his "superior" views—paradox number two...

...They want pop, corn, and popcorn...

...Can you imagine Hazlitt or Arnold, Sainte-Beuve or Chesterton, Unamuno or Croce, Hofmanns-thal or Edmund Wilson burying, along with their noses, their lives between the pages of a book...

...Movies are her life...

...Because it began as trash, there are those who want it to remain trash now and forever, with whatever euphemisms like "popular art" they may deck it out...

...He suddenly found himself on talk shows and in gossip columns, profusely quoted and misquoted in the ads, and execrated in all media by actors, directors and producers alike—the equivalent of entering the Pantheon in one's lifetime...

...What they exploit even more is the solipsism of film...

...And movies are just the thing to take your date to, so that with your "film culture" you can also further your sex life...

...Anybody can go to the movies ad nauseam, provided he has a strong enough stomach and weak enough mind...

...But film is still considered mainly a popular art...

...With the possible exception of Ingmar Bergman after he became established, all great filmmakers have, at one time or another (some more often than not) found it hard or impossible to finance their next project...

...Why, they say, should such fine, funky, escapist fun as the movies be perverted by solemn highbrows or cultural snobs into the joyless Art of Film...

...The critic, like no other writer, must live with these ambiguities staring him in the face...

...Now I submit that to be a card-carrying, mind-boggling movie nut, with the scalps of five or six daily movies hanging from your belt—in short, loving movies beyond reason and making them your life—is not the road to criticism, but the road to insanity...

...In contrast, for the book reviewer who deals with serious literature there is always enough respectable material at hand to obviate the need to get involved with Richard Bach, William Peter Blatty, or Jacqueline Susann...

...A music critic has to learn a whole nonverbal discipline: reading music, and probably playing at least one instrument...

...Having sat through a large enough number of films, and memorized sufficient data about them—easy for a film buff with little else in his head—Anybody is well on his way to the critical Parnassus...

...And that, if he is a critic worth his salt, is himself...

...So Yeats might write, were he living here and now...

...not the cul-de-sac of culture or the mutism of museums...

...Without expatiating on that vexed distinction yet again, let me merely say that I locate the difference in the audience: The reviewer writes exclusively for some sort of readership, the critic primarily for himself...

...On the other hand, one knows that if John Simon didn't have a career as a movie critic he might very well be ashamed of being seen going to the movies...

...Film, the most complex and encompassing art, seems, partly because of that, to baptize its critics with total immersion and keep them submerged...

...An art critic must travel everywhere to look at works of art, and read many books in his field...

...Its origin is gimcrack, sleight-of-eye, sideshow entertainment...

...And a literary critic must meet the rigorous demands of books and more books, of books about books, of languages to be mastered, and historical-cultural backgrounds to be absorbed...

...So, curiously, the film critic matters to the public precisely because the public goes to movies as it does not go to concerts or read books...

...Thus they may accept a little help with the more technical aspects of music and painting, and theater has become so expensive that the critic as consumer researcher may still come in handy...

...the movie fan, even turned reviewer, is a harmless enough nonentity...

...All of this is arduous but also broadening...

...Note that Landau is praising Sarris and Kael for loving movies beyond reason, for not being able to let go of them...

...For one gets a sense from both of them that they love movies beyond reason and would be in theaters every night, watching them, whether it was their job or not...

...The late Charles Thomas Samuels has rightly observed that no one who writes film criticism exclusively can be taken seriously as a critic...

...Someday, surely, exacting demands will be made on the film critic, too...

...Film, as a medium, is scarcely older than this century...

...indeed, there is not, and perhaps cannot be, much unpopular art in film because its ex-pensiveness generally requires popularity to recoup its outlay...

...it did not, like the other arts, originate under the aegis of religion, or history, or the hunger for eternity...

...Consider, to begin with, how much less arduous it is to catch a movie than to go to an art exhibition, attend a concert, or read a book—how much more effort is involved in walking through a large museum or sitting absolutely still and concentrating on music or printed words...

...For conditions are especially parlous in a new, still uncertain art riven by internecine warfare...

...He knows that his deep and most sacred conviction, as seen from within, becomes, upon venturing forth into the world, an opinion: subjective, scientifically unprovable, and utterly profane...

...meanwhile, he can justify his self-absorbed ignorance with the excuse that film is a popular art...

...He wants to be read, as does any artist, but he must first satisfy an ideal reader: the best informed and most demanding...

...conversely, when a notable critic, say, Pauline Kael, appears on TV—needless to say, a much rarer occurrence—a better grade of non-film-oriented people often takes notice...

...Generally speaking, though, Americans don't like to be told anything in fields where they take themselves to be experts...

...I quote next from a profile of Judith Crist in the January 1974 issue of Interview...

...And because our friend Anybody got in, so to speak, on the ground floor of film criticism, he becomes in due time the founder or inspirer of a school, as Andre Bazin, through the mediation of Truffaut, became of auteur criticism—the earnest Bazin, with his respectable, mediocre talent and genuine dedication, now venerated as a supreme genius...

...And there are people who to this day dispute its ability to be truly an art...

...A survey conducted in May 1973 showed that the average American spent 23 hours a week watching television, but read books only for six weekly minutes...

...Not so long ago, men as different as Randall Jarrell and Norman Podhoretz were trying to convince us that this was an age of criticism—but, of course, they were talking about the academy, literary magazines, publishing houses...

...as something that might be an art form, it is considerably younger yet...

...The point about film criticism is that practiced on a certain level—or, rather, below a certain level—it becomes ridiculously easy and easily ridiculous...

...I doubt if anyone ever became an art or music critic by drifting down from the heights of Columbia, or away from the stacks of the Yale Library, but with film criticism this is quite normal: "Films are something gone to as an escape from solitude," writes William Pechter in his section of Favorite Movies...

...All in all, enough of an audience to give a film critic the sense of a constituency denied, alas, to most other kinds of critics...

...Even as woolly-headed an eccentric as Manny Farber, who fabricated mystical theories about cheap American movies, becomes an underground hero and cult figure, and eventually emerges above ground in dazzling triumph...

...worse yet, some of these doubters are actually film reviewers...

...Caught in that senseless music, all neglect monuments of any kind of intellect...

...Consider the following comment from Jon Landau, a rock critic turned movie critic for Rolling Stone, reprinted in his collection aptly entitled It's Too Late to Stop Now: "Passion as a requirement for criticism may seem strange at first...

...and if he happens to be a film critic, he is particularly singled out by their sphinxlike stare...

...book publishing largely a trade...

...Andrew Sarris tells us about his beginnings: "As an undergraduate at Columbia I had drifted, like Jack Kerouac, down from Morningside Heights ever deeper into the darkness of movie houses, not so much in search of a vocation as in flight from the laborious realities of careerism...

...This is because there is something solipsistic, stultifying, often downright ignorant about dedicating oneself wholly to film as it now stands...

...A private absolute becomes a public relative—paradox number one...

...Film has no history in length, to allow critical perspectives to develop...