What Gets Lost in Translation

Paul Celan passport photo 1938

There are literary prizes awarded every year for original works written in English, which is a language that is now the native speech on three continents, and is a "second language" in isolated places on two others. The richness of English literature is much greater than that in any other language. But there are many texts in languages other than English that are required reading for anyone who wishes to call themselves well read. Fortunately, there are translations, some of them famous in themselves. The Robert Fagles translations of Homer and Vergil are among the finest available. No one who reads Russian literature can have avoided reading Constance Garnett's translations of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev. Every generation, it seems, there is a new translation of Dante. (I'm looking forward to reading Clive James's highly praised verse translation.) Richard Wilbur, who is a fine poet in his own right, has translated Moliere brilliantly. And the lately departed Richard Howard, also a poet, has left us a celebrated translation of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal. 

But poetry is somewhat inimical to translation. Goethe grew so bored reading his Faust in German that he turned in his old age to Gérard de Nerval's French translation. But Faust is verse, not poetry. There are too many great poets in Italian, German, French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, and modern Greek to enumerate, but the prospect of reading them in translation doesn't inspire in me much enthusiasm or confidence. I can't escape the thought that one can only get a general idea of a poet's greatness from reading his or her poetry in translation. 

One can derive a strong impression from reading Paul Celan's magnificent poem "Totesfuge," in English as "Death Fugue," but even the translated title diminishes its impact. 

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends 

wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts 

wir trinken und trinken 

In English translation the words function to suggest some of the powerful darkness that Celan was communicating: 

Black milk of morning we drink you evenings 

we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night 

we drink and we drink 

   (Pierre Joris) 

But the impact of the poem in German is lost. Celan's parents were German-speaking Jews from Czernowicz in what is now Romania. He spoke Romanian, Russian and lived in Paris after the war, but he chose to write poetry, much of which touches on the Holocaust, in the language of the people who murdered his parents. That fact alone gives his poetry in German an almost insurmountable strangeness - a language made so ugly in the hate-filled speeches of Hitler and Goebbels is used to memorialize the horror they inspired. 

But the very literary device of a poem, the most concentrated form of communication, the direct contact of one consciousness with another, using words for their music and meaning, resists the efforts of the translator. Philip Larkin explained how a poem works: 

It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated. Take, for instance; the writing of a poem. It consists of three stages: the first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it. The stages are interdependent and all necessary. If there has been no preliminary feeling, the device has nothing to reproduce and the reader will experience nothing. If the second stage has not been well done, the device will not deliver the goods, or will deliver only a few goods to a few people, or will stop delivering them after an absurdly short while. And if there is no third stage, no successful reading, the poem can hardly be said to exist in a practical sense at all.

   "The Pleasure Principle," 1957. 

The direct contact between the poet and the reader is interfered with by a translator. No matter how successfully he matches his words with the poet's, the translator interposes himself and his approximated reproduction of the original poem between the poet and the reader. One of the reasons is the shared language of the poet and the reader - a shared history of words. Virginia Woolf pointed out that even someone fluent in a foreign language cannot hope to match the native speaker's relationship with it: 

But to know a language one must have forgotten it, and that is a stage that one cannot reach without having absorbed words unconsciously as a child. In reading a language that is not one's own, consciousness is awake, and keeps us aware of the surface glitter of the words; but it never suffers them to sink into that region of the mind where old habits and instincts roll them round and shape them a body rather different from their faces. Thus a foreigner with what is called a perfect command of English may write grammatical English and musical English, but never such unconscious English that we feel the past of the word in it, its associations, its attachments. 

   Virginia Woolf, "On Not Knowing French" 

W. H. Auden once complained to Joseph Brodsky: “I don’t see why Mandelstam is considered a great poet. The translations that I’ve seen don’t convince me at all.”* Brodsky commiserated with Auden, and wrote an essay about the mediocre translations of Mandelstam's poetry, that quite terribly misrepresent him. But Auden has a reason to complain. I wonder if some Russian readers are as dubious of Auden's greatness because of poor or inaccurate translations from English into Russian. 

I don't consider it far-fetched to compare the difficulties of poetry translation to the extreme dearth of effective literary adaptations to film. Very few successful movies have been adapted from good novels. When I think of an exception, like Carol Reed's An Outcast of the Islands, I have to remind myself that it was adapted from what was Joseph Conrad's second novel, and is far from one of his best efforts. In the process of transposing a written work to a movie, the characters and the story have to be reborn into a different medium - a medium of pictures and movement. The critic John Simon came up with a rule about adapting literary works to film: If it's worth doing it can't be done, and if it can be done, it wasn't worth doing. 

*Joseph Brodsky, “The Child of Civilization,” in Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 142.

The Organizer

Mario Monicelli (1915-2010) was a one-man film industry. He is credited with writing 112 film scripts and with directing 69 films. He started making short films in 1934 and made his last film in 2006 at the age of 91. Known mostly for comedies like the classic I Soliti Ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958) he was credited with a revival of commedia all'Italiana, but he proved with La Grand Guerra (The Great War, 1959) that he could treat a serious subject with a balance of gravity and humor. 

If I had to characterize Monicelli's unique interplay of the dramatic and the comedic, I would simply ascribe it to his humanity. He loved his characters and the world in which they found themselves - a world resembling the actual one as closely as possible. 

Monicelli made his greatest film, I Compagni, in 1963. The title The Organizer is a typical compromise made by its original American distributor. The Italian title means Comrades, but in 1963 that word was verboten if an American exhibitor wanted to attract a paying audience. The Organizer, however, is acceptable, since the film's protagonist, played beautifully by Marcello Mastroianni, comes to a textile factory in turn-of-the-century Turin to organize a strike. 

The film opens on a cold morning in an industrial district of Turin. One by one, a woman wakes her children, one of whom is Omero (Franco Ciolli). It's so cold that the water he uses for washing is covered in ice. The work day for the people living in tenements near the textile factory begins at 6 AM. At 1 PM a whistle blows announcing a lunch break. At 1:30 it's right back to work. Approaching 8 PM, with the machines clanging away incessantly, many of the workers are catching themselves nodding off. One old man falls asleep for a moment and jumps toward a machine to feed fabric into its rollers. He screams when his arm is swallowed by the gnashing gears. The machines stop. 

The film is replete with moments that expose for us the character of these workers. A worker tells his wife to bring their baby to the factory gates at lunch. "He's asleep when I leave for work and asleep when I get home. This is the only time he will see me." He makes faces at the baby through the iron gate (the workers aren't allowed to leave the factory during working hours). The baby cries. "See? He doesn't even know me." 

A group of workers decide to sound the whistle a half hour early so the machines will be shut off and all the others will leave. Trying to decide who will sound the whistle, some of the men write their names on scraps of paper and place them in a hat. When one is drawn, there is an "X" instead of a name. "Who wrote "X?" Several men raise their hands. 

A big man, Pautasso (Folco Lulli), volunteers to blow the whistle, but when he does, the machines keep running and no one stops working. The management catch Pautasso in hiding. He tells them he was drunk and is suspended from work for two weeks and every worker is fined. Their feeble organizing efforts having failed, who should appear as if out of the blackness, but a "professore" - Sinigaglia (Marcello Mastroianni), a strike organizer on the run from Genoa. 

At night, a grammar school teacher, Maestro Di Meo (François Périer) is giving some of the men reading and writing lessons. Sinigaglia taps on his window and the teacher tells one of his students - a middle aged man - to write whatever he wants on the blackboard and for the others to copy what he has written. He writes "Death to the King." 

Omero worries that his little brother will end up like he did, working 14 hour days in the factory. He asks for help from the teacher, who can only tell him to keep after him to do his lessons. Walking around the corner, Omero brutally thrashes his little brother for wanting to follow him into the factory. Finished, Omero wipes the crying boy's tears with his handkerchief and tells him to blow when he covers his nose. They walk away as if nothing had happened. 

Later, fired from his job because of his politics, the teacher is leaving Turin and asks Sinigaglia on his way out "Why do we do all this?" Sinigaglia replies, "Maybe we're out of our minds after all." 

Sinigaglia has to room with Raoul (Renato Salvatori), who is dubious of the professor's slogans. Having to share a bed, they argue, against the cold outside and in, and resort to fighting over the bed covers. 

After a month on strike, a majority of the workers decide to go back to work. Sinigaglia arrives just as they are taking a vote and delivers the following speech. 

Forgive me. In my rush I forgot my glasses. But even if I can't see you clearly, I know all the same who voted to keep up the fight. Barbero? 

  - Yes, Professor. Today and always!

  - Good. I knew it. Gallesio!

  - I won't back down!

  - Bardella. Isn't Bardella here?

  - (quietly) I'm right here. 

  - So you've joined the others too. 

  - (Woman's voice) Bunch of lily-livers! 

  - Please, friends. No, they're not a bunch of lily-livers. They're the majority, and the majority is the voice of wisdom. You're the crazy ones - you, Barbero, and you! You who think 13 hours a day on the job is enough. You who'd like a few extra pennies. You who'd like to avoid the hospital or the poorhouse. The majority are the wise ones. They feel their salary is enough. The proof: No one has actually died of starvation yet. And statistics show that only 20% of you are maimed in accidents. How many are here? Five hundred? Then only 100 of you will end up crippled. You, Bonetto, or you, Occhipinti, or your daughter Gasperina. Mondino, where are you? 

  (An arm without a hand is raised.) - Right here. 

  - Show them! That's what the majority wants!

  - No! We've starved for 30 days now. We've lost. Can't you see?

  - Who says so? 

  - Everyone! 

  - Friends, it's not true. We haven't lost. This is the crucial moment. The side holding out just one hour longer wins! The bosses are even worse off! 

  - How do you know? 

  - I know! You must believe me!

  - No more blind faith! 

  - Our cupboards are empty! And our stomachs too! 

  - Your stomachs will stay empty. And your children's too, if you give up this fight now! The bosses will always win, and your misery will continue to enrich them! 

  - It's not our factory! 

  - Not yours? Who works there 14 hours a day their whole life? Whosr sweat keeps the machines going? 

  - Ours!

  - Then take it! The factory is yours! Show them it means more to you than your own homes! Make the bosses, the city, and the government see that it's your life and death! Go, my friends! 

The Organizer isn't about a revolution, but if it were it would've been a failed one, rather like all the others. It is, I think, as great a film as Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers because it didn't happen yesterday but many generations in the past. Yet it looks and feels not like it were yesterday but today. Yesterday I was putting on a nice brown and white checked shirt. I looked at the label in the collar without my glasses and I could still read the words "Made in Bangladesh." I wonder what conditions prevail in the garment factory there, and if perhaps they aren't very different from the workers' in Monicelli's great call-to-conscience. 

Having participated in a revolution crushed by fascism, George Orwell wrote in his essay "Looking Back on the Spanish War": 

Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight, sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later - some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years.

[Addendum July 27: I have one minor nit to pick in this otherwise magnificent film - a mistake of continuity. When Sinigaglia (Marcello Mastroianni) arrives at the workers' meeting at the film's climax, he apologizes for having misplaced his glasses. He delivers his speech to them and marches with them to the factory. In the very next shot of him in the crowd, Mastroianni is wearing glasses. Monicelli uses them in a brilliant anti-climax in which Omero's sister, shorn of her beautiful hair (she sold it to a wig-maker) slaps Sinigaglia over and over, knocking off his glasses, and in the aftermath, Mastroianni peers around Omero's dead body until he finds the glasses, puts them back on, and meekly surrenders to the police.] 

A Girl in Winter

During the last years of his lifetime, the consensus of the British literary establishment was that Philip Larkin was the greatest English poet of the postwar era. He had been offered the title of Poet Laureate upon the death of John Betjeman in 1984, but declined the honor, explaining that he hadn't any more poetry in him. (Ted Hughes took it instead.) Larkin died the following year. 

His political leanings emerged cryptically in some of his poems. In "Homage to a Government," dated 1969, he wrote about bringing the soldiers home, "which is alright," but that 

Next year we shall be easier in our minds. 

Next year we shall be living in a country 

That brought its soldiers home for lack of money. 

The statues will be standing in the same 

Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same. 

Our children will not know it’s a different country. 

All we can hope to leave them now is money. 

After his death, when his letters were published, and everyone got a much clearer idea of his Tory sympathies, as well as his taste for smutty bondage magazines, there was an attempted backlash. It was ineffective simply because enough people reminded us that a person's private idiosyncrasies were quite separate from his or her work. Since 1992, however, it was discovered that during his last years at Oxford, Larkin had written works of "lesbian" fiction under the pseudonym "Brunette Coleman". It's believed that it had helped him cure his writer's block, because the following three years, 1945-47, saw the publication - in his own name - of his first volume of poems and two novels. 

Having just finished reading Philip Larkin's second novel A Girl in Winter, after having read and admired his poems ever since I first encountered them when I was about the same age Larkin was when he wrote the novel (22), my immediate reaction was he is already all there. 

But there are other things in the novel as well, unfamiliar things to an avid reader of his poetry. First, as he was quick to accede, there are other people. There are other people in his poems, too, but they are there incidentally and not for long. Larkin's first published book was The North Ship, which was his undisguised bow to Yeats. Not a bad model for a young poet. A year later his first novel, Jill, and a year after that, A Girl in Winter. Both of the novels are small - in length (about 250 pages each) and scope. 

A Girl in Winter begins and ends in a provincial English town during the war that is entombed in snow and mist where Katherine Lind, in her mid-20s, works as a librarian. In the middle there is a lengthy flashback set before the war at a sizeable house in Oxford to which Katherine, then a 16-year-old girl from a European country Larkin doesn't identify, has come on a three-week visit at the height of an English summer. She and other classmates had become pen pals with boys in England and she had corresponded with Robin Fennel. Their correspondence dwindles until, out of nowhere, Robin invites Katherine to come to visit him in England. The visit had been amusing except that Robin turns out to be a disappointing bore. It is his older sister, Jane, who proves to be the more interesting of the Fennels. 

Larkin doesn't explain how, some years later, Katherine comes to be in England during the war, but it appears to have been her decision. She was in London, but took an offer of a job in a village some distance away. She writes to Jane to let her know she is in England, 

So where did the Fennels come in all this? Simply, that she was lonely; more complexly, that they supported her failing hope that she was wrong to think her life had worsened so irrevocably. Since writing to Jane, those three nearly-forgotten weeks had taken on a new character in her memory. It was the only period of her life that had not been spoiled by later events, and she found that she could draw upon it hearteningly, remembering when she had been happy, and ready to give and take, instead of unwilling to give, and finding nothing worth taking. It was as if she hoped they would warm back to life a part of her that had been frozen. 

Robin, in the Army and stationed close by the town, learns that Katherine is there and sends her a letter alerting her to a possible visit from him. On examing her expectations of seeing Robin again, 

there had been other, unexpressed fancies: the way she would be swept off to their home, like a long-lost cousin, dropping an airy resignation to the City Librarian, to make herself useful about that fascinating house until Mr. Fennel could find her a remunerative job which she could do while still continuing to live with them; and then of course the slow ripening of her friendship with Robin into love, a love firmer and reciprocal, yet still bearing the fervour of their first acquaintance—or, if this last was too much to swallow, then at least some male friend of the family who would eventually hold out to her love, security, happiness, and a British passport.

The ending is less than she - or we - expected. Robin just wants to sleep with her before he's deployed to the continent (a deployment that is supposed to be secret). Their pillow talk dwindles as they both drift off to sleep. I won't go as far as Clive James, who wrote that "the last paragraphs of A Girl in Winter have something of the cadenced elegance you find at the close of The Great Gatsby." It is a beguilingly written, modest success. You feel a sense of loss, really, for all of the following novels Larkin never wrote. 

As one might expect, Larkin is fond of using metaphors.

Miss Green looked apprehensively up the dark steps, like a dog knowing it has been brought to be destroyed. 

As time drew on, the quality of the early morning, like paper-thin glass, grew deeper and more clear; 

Her mind was like a puzzle in which many silver balls have to be shaken into their sockets; it was her thoughts that were rolling free, and she moved her head from side to side as if to settle them. 

It was all a little insincere, like a school prizegiving. 

Behind them the barn was like a whispering hollow shell as rain beat on the roof. 

It was strange to think it [an old record] had once sounded modern. Now it was like an awning propped in the sun, nearly white, that years ago had been striped bright red and yellow. 

The evening whispered outside, the quiet evening that had suddenly risen up against her in one great stamping chord, like the beginning of music she would never hear. 

It was easy, too, to join in the pallid duties as usual, it composed her trembling hands, and it prevented her thoughts from settling into colourless stillness, like stirring a teaspoon in a glass of cold water. 

In 1976, Larkin was a guest on the radio program Desert Island Discs and at the very end of the broadcast there was this exchange: 

And one luxury to take with you to the island? 

Well, something to write on, something to write with. Could I have a typewriter and an unlimited supply of paper? 

Yes indeed, what are you going to write? 

Well, I might try to write another novel…

The New Biographical Dictionary of Fandom

As silly as it is to believe that a contrary opinion invalidates one's own, it is just as silly to believe that qualified agreement validates it. We don't read the criticism of a book or a movie in order to always find agreement. Disagreement can sometimes be more valuable if one has learned something one didn't know - about the book or the movie or about virtually anything else. I wasn't especially surprised to discover that Clive James was as exasperated by David Thomson's magnum compendium The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its 6th edition, as I was. I reviewed the 4th edition for Senses of Cinema in 2004. In the June 2011 issue of The Atlantic, Clive James reviewed the 5th edition. I was bewildered, however, when James gave the book his qualified approval. I called my review "Confessions of a Film Hater," and I opened it: 

As an artistic medium, which is a distinction lost on most filmgoers, film is particularly needy of critical clarity. If this has been slowly, often painfully, realized over the years – at the expense of too many fortunes and reputations – it is no thanks to the hangers-on of the medium, who are in it for ephemeral fame or simply the vicarious thrill of rubbing up against, even in effigy, the likes of Jack Nicholson and Nicole Kidman. It is these particular people who are always there to remind us that it’s only a movie. 

Clive James called his review "Hollywood: A Love Letter," and found the book provocative but ended with a more favorable review than it deserved: 

After five editions in 35 years, Thomson’s famous compendium of biographical sketches about the movie people—hey, it’s read by the movie people, the movie people are fighting to get into it, male stars measure their manhood by the length of their entry—is still a shantytown with the ambitions of a capital city. It gets bigger all the time without ever becoming more coherent. But with more than a thousand pages of print to wander in, only the most churlish visitor would complain about lack of cogency. Better to rejoice at the number of opportunities to scream in protest at what the author has left out, put in, skimmed over, or gone on about with untoward zeal. As a book meant to be argued with, it’s a triumph. 

To me, Thomson seems much more interested in the people in front of the camera, actors - more specifically the female ones - than he does about the medium of film. This is most noticeable at those moments in the book when he is acutely unfair to the people behind the camera. The number of truly great names he throws to the dogs is incredible. The seven syllabled names that still sound like incantations to me, Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Mario Monicelli, are dealt with in Thomson's typically stupid terms of contempt. Monicelli, who took his cancer diagnosis at the age of 95 by diving out of the nearest window at San Giovanni Hospital - is completely omitted. But sinning by omission is another of Thomson's faults. Showing off his ignorance is another. He omitted the great Swede Jan Troell from the first four editions of his book. I wrote a lengthy tribute to him in 2014 and as if miraculously Troell appears in the 6th and just as miraculously is hustled off stage after a mere 206 words of misjudgement. He even left out Troell's great short film with Max von Sydow, Stopover in the Marshland, from his filmography. 

Rather than continue to cite his dismissal of dozens of brilliant films and filmmakers, I will concentrate on his bizarre and preposterous hatred for Charlie Chaplin. He commits 1,839 words to one of the most inexplicable hatchet jobs I've ever encountered. At one point in his attack on Chaplin, one of the handful of people who gave the whole world proof that movies were a legitimate art form, he asks "Was Chaplin’s common man so far from Hitler?" My guess is that this querelous question was inspired by the coincidental resemblance between one of the most loved men of the 20th century and the most hated - a resemblance Chaplin made the subject of The Great Dictator, which was his biggest boxoffice success. 

Thomson begins by mentioning Chaplin's "persistent handicap" of "delirious egotism," exposed by his insistence on doing everything himself. "Chaplin the actor has an overbearingly winsome personality that cajoles his films into mawkishness." There is something weird, he thinks, about the contrast between the little tramp and "the clear-eyed inquisitiveness with which Chaplin the director and owner of the film is prompting our response... there is in Chaplin a strange mixture of coy charm and heartless cold… his films worship women with an ingratiating but crippled awe… But the cruelty in Chaplin is also feminine, impetuous, and instinctive… Such egotism expresses Chaplin’s hostility to the world, and suggests how his portrait of the little man pandered to the desire for recognition in anonymous audiences. Similarly, Chaplin’s wistful admiration of women seems ultimately prettier and more rarefied than any woman is capable of—as witness the last, tremulous close-up of City Lights. Was Chaplin’s common man so far from Hitler? He spoke to disappointment, brutalized feelings, and failure and saw that through movies he could concoct a daydream world in which the tramp thrives and in which his whole ethos of self-pity is vindicated," etc., etc. 

So what? Tolstoy wrote a pamphlet claiming that Shakespeare wasn't the great poet and dramatist that everyone else thinks he is. It changed no one's mind. Thomson is no Tolstoy, but even if he were, Chaplin's genius would remain intact and perhaps people would recall Thomson as the guy who hated Charlie Chaplin. 

Though he failed to explain Buster Keaton's belated eclipse of Chaplin (he doesn't understand Keaton, either), he came up with some glib comparisons, which is tantamount to trying to prove that Bartók is better than Debussy: "In maudlin, self-reflective close-up, Chaplin wept in crises. Keaton is the more profound artist because he was not beguiled into comfort by his own self-pity." Never mind that Keaton himself expressed nothing but admiration for Chaplin. 

I'll let someone else contradict Thomson. James Agee: 

Of all comedians [Chaplin] worked most deeply and most shrewdly within a realization of what a human being is, and is up against. The Tramp is as centrally representative of humanity, as many-sided and as mysterious, as Hamlet, and it seems unlikely that any dancer or actor can ever have excelled him in eloquence, variety or poignancy of motion… The finest pantomime, the deepest emotion, the richest and most poignant poetry were in Chaplin’s work. At the end of City Lights the blind girl who has regained her sight, thanks to the Tramp, sees him for the first time. She has imagined and anticipated him as princely, to say the least; and it has never seriously occurred to him that he is inadequate. She recognizes who he must be by his shy, confident, shining joy as he comes silently toward her. And he recognizes himself, for the first time, through the terrible changes in her face. The camera just exchanges a few quiet close-ups of the emotions which shift and intensify in each face. It is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies. 

It has always been obvious to me that David Thomson can't make up his mind - does he want to be a film critic like James Agee or a gossip columnist like Hedda Hopper? He's a film fan, not a film critic. Late in his review of Thomson's 5th edition, Clive James states, "But surely he is wrong about Fellini, of whom he writes as if the man had had no talent at all." Indeed. One could go on, but to what end? David Thomson is the person that whomever coined the phrase was thinking of when he or she pointed out that opinions are like assholes.

A Critic's Revenge

The difference between a critic and the average person is, while they both like some things and dislike others, the average person hasn’t examined his tastes long enough to be able to explain why. 55 years ago – when it seemed to matter a great deal more than now – Dwight Macdonald complained that: 

The trouble with most film criticism is that it isn’t criticism. It is rather appreciation, celebration, information, and it is written by intellectuals who have come to be “insiders” in the sense that they are able to discourse learnedly about almost any movie without thinking much about whether it’s any good – the very question must strike them as a little naïve, and irrelevant. I would define the critic’s job as (1) to judge the quality of the film; (2) to state precisely, with examples, just why one thinks it good, bad, or indifferent; and (3) to relate it to other films and the history of the art.

Reading this, you will have noticed that no critic you’ve read in the last few decades does this any more. Because the price of admission to a movie – like the price of everything else – is now prohibitive, moviegoers want to know if a movie will provide them with a return in entertainment for their investment. So critics have long since become consumer advocates. 

The late Clive James was never a full time movie critic, but his success as a poet, novelist, translator, television critic, host of his own talk show and travel show, I would say he is rather overqualified to judge movies. What he says about movie critics – and criticism in general – in his New York Times review of the book American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now, edited by Phillip Lopate(1) is unsurprisingly spot on. What he concludes from reading “this hefty compilation” is that there is something to be learned from the experience - so much so that the title of his review is “How to Write About Film.” 

Since all of us are deeply learned experts on the movies even when we don't know much about anything else, people wishing to make their mark as movie critics must either be able to express opinions like ours better than we can, or else they must be in charge of a big idea, preferably one that can be dignified by being called a theory... It quickly becomes obvious that those without theories write better. This book proves that history is with you: perceptions aren't just more entertaining than formal schemes of explanation, they're also more explanatory. 

James takes aim at perhaps the most prevalent – and preposterous – movie theory known by its French name “Auteurism.” It started out as an acceptably sensible idea – that every hardworking film director is the “auteur” (author) of his or her work and manages to stamp every film he or she makes with something personal, so that an observer schooled in his or her entire filmography can recognize that personal stamp (and can write a book about it). A fine enough idea, but what happens next? 

The auteur theory depended on the idea that any pantheon director had an artistic personality so strong that it was bound to express itself whatever the compromising circumstances. But all too often, the compromising circumstances helped to make the movie good. That, however, was a tale too complicated to tell for those commentators who wanted to get into business as deep thinkers. 

I'm with James every step along the way, but however right he is, he can be occasionally wrong. When he admits to thinking that The Hunt for Red October – a “frivolous movie” – is better than Eyes Wide Shut – a “serious” one – he accounts for it by claiming (hazardously, I think) that while movies have the advantage of facility, they had better use it to their advantage: 

Does this discrepancy of reaction on my part mean that the frivolous movie was serious, and the serious movie frivolous? Only, you might say, if first impressions are everything... But in the movies they are. Or, to put it less drastically, in the movies there are no later impressions without a first impression, because you will have stopped watching. Sometimes a critic persuades you to give an unpromising-looking movie a chance, but the movie had better convey the impression pretty quickly that the critic might be right. 

This is perfectly sensible when a filmmaker isn’t making demands of the viewer, but what if a movie has, to borrow the title of one of John Simon’s books, something to declare? I won’t go so far as Paul Schrader in his book Transcendental Style in Film and claim that some filmmakers bestow a spiritual dimension on their work. James might have disagreed, but there is sometimes more to a movie than meets the eye. Carl Dreyer, for example, made his later films at the pace of a glacier on purpose because, he believed, the audience would never understand the characters and the world they lived in unless they first adapted to the slow pace of that world. (It didn’t work. Dreyer failed to make Ordet and Gertrud anything less than tedious.) James singles out the Frenchman Robert Bresson for his “art of showing nothing” (Bresson’s words): 

Robert Bresson only did with increasing slowness what other directors had done in a hurry. But when Bresson, somewhere in the vicinity of Camelot, reached the point where almost nothing happening became nothing happening at all, you were gone. A movie has to glue you to your seat even when it's pretending not to. 

He’s talking about storytelling, which is where every movie (he claimed) stands or falls. Ages ago, in a collection of short stories called Fourteen for Now, John Simon (theater/literary/film critic) wrote an “Introduction for the young reader”: 

Without literature, we are all one eyed. Of course, we CAN see well enough out of one eye. But we do not get true depth perception: a sense of how far one object is from one another, which is to say a sense of relationships. It is by converging on a thing from two different angles – out of the two eyes placed somewhat apart – that we get our sense of perspective. 

If our eyes were even farther apart, we could see even more. As in the paintings of cubists like Picasso, we could see a face from both the front and the side. Well, the writer is another eye to us: another eye set very far from our two eyes, which are still a little too close together to be more than one eye with improved depth perception. With the help of the writer, we can really see. Not that we should slavishly accept his vision: the truth is not what the left or right eye sees, but what the two perceive together. Out of the writer’s vision and our own we forge our improved understanding of the world. 

This is necessarily simple, but it has a ring to it. I wonder what James thought of Ozu? His films habitually plop the viewer right down on a tatami mat so that we can look his characters (who used to sit on their legs before they adapted to chairs) in the eyes, and stay there for awhile. Yet every critic who saw Late Spring or An Autumn Afternoon came away amazed at what Ozu had accomplished in such a restricted frame. 

Finally, James asserts that what distinguishes the real critics is a knowledge of something other than movies: 

No matter how many movies you have seen, they won't give you the truth of the matter, because it can't be shown as action. To know what can't be shown by the gag writers, however, you have to know about a world beyond the movies. But the best critics do, as this book proves; because when we say that the nontheorists are the better writers, that's what we mean. That extra edge that a good writer has is a knowledge of the world, transmuted into a style.* 

* After James made his case against the auteur theory with, I hope, much-needed finality, a nobody on the Roger Ebert web page (rogerebert.com) named Jim Emerson found it necessary to rebut James’s review by calling it (not all at once) “crap,” “drivel,” “dreck,” “twaddle,” “rubbish,” and “claptrap.” Six synonymous words when only one was necessary is a sure indication that a writer not long enough away from his creative writing class has a well-thumbed Thesaurus. (But as any decent writer could’ve told him, there is really no such thing as a synonym.) The title of the article is “How Not to Write About Film.” 

(1) How to Write About Film.