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.”
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