Stanley and Bert

"Is there no by-law in America to prevent dogs from entering cemeteries?" (Charles Baudelaire, commenting on the scabrous notices in the American press on the death of Edgar Allan Poe.)

 
When Stanley Kauffmann died on October 9, 2013, it was an almost seismic event in my life, as if I had lost a great teacher and mentor. His film column had been a fixture of The New Republic for fifty-five years and he had been my film guide for more than forty of them. I started reading Kauffmann at the same moment in my life that I began to discover the wider world of film, a world whose existence had been carefully kept from me by my own native film industry. It was no accident, then, that the first collection of his reviews was called A World on Film.

Kauffmann had been an informal member of a group of critics that included Dwight Macdonald, John Simon, Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris. It was these critics who ushered in what became known as the Golden Age of film criticism in America. Of these critics, however, only John Simon is still with us, but he gave up writing about film more than a decade ago. Consequently, I have always been on the lookout for good film critics to replace the ones I have lost. When I started to read the essays of Bert Cardullo in The Hudson Review in the 1990s, I believed that I had found one.

But something was wrong. It's one thing to recognize when a critic is in agreement not just with one's own judgements, but also with those of one's other favorite critics. It's quite another thing to discover that the likeness is more than coincidental. When I discovered that the published articles that Cardullo produced resembled - verbatim - the writings of Vernon Young and Kauffmann, my emotions ran a gamut from puzzlement to sadness, and eventually to outrage.

An Australian online film journal known as Senses of Cinema published my review of Cardullo's book, In Search of Cinema: Writings on International Film Art in 2007. In the review I supplied direct evidence that Cardullo had stolen, for two of his articles in the book, the entirety of an essay written by Vernon Young. The Senses editor was reluctant at first to publish the piece because, she told me, it had been a few years since the book was published. She very bravely went ahead with publishing it. As far as I can tell, it was the first editorial notice of Bert Cardullo's theft of another writer's work.

Cardullo is an admirer of both Vernon Young and Stanley Kauffmann. So much so that he edited collections of their writings. This is especially worrisome when you consider that these two writers - Kauffmann in particular - seem to have been singled out by Cardullo for plagiaization.

Then, in 2010, New Yorker critic Richard Brody took the time to publish what he called, "Truffaut's Last Interview," which was reportedly conducted by Cardullo just before Truffaut's death from a cancerous brain tumor. The interview had been stolen, as I soon discovered, from various interviews that Brody later found readily available on YouTube. Brody questioned Cardullo about this by phone (Cardullo was teaching in Turkey at the time) and got a quite feeble explanation from him: that Truffaut was very ill and, in lieu of an interview, told him to glean what he wanted from other recorded interviews.

I published a blog post called François & Bert at the time, and have published several posts since then based on further information I received as comments to these posts. Cardullo has since then turned to capitalizing on the work of Stanley Kauffmann by publishing, with two different publishers, collections of the writings of Stanley Kauffmann. Last year I wrote the director of one of these publishing houses, Anaphora Press, informing her of Cardullo's widely-held reputation as a plagiarist. This resulted in my blog post "Date Due" from January 2016.   

Last week, I received an anonymous comment on that post that I have since published. It reads in part:

"A few years ago I posted on your blog some of the more blatant examples of Cardullo's cut and paste jobs, hoping they might alert publishers to his shady name and game. I also contacted many of the publishers of Cardullo's stolen work, and, like you, had a very strange exchange with Anaphora Press, whose director defended publishing Cardullo by saying that even the "Harry Potter" books contained plagiarisms. So, I shared both your obsession with exposing Cardullo as a plagiarist, and your disheartening feeling that, in spite of some very public retractions of his literary thefts, he was going to continue ransacking the work of good writers simply because publishers were not carefully checking either his dubious record or the purloined work he submitted. [...] Happy endings are so are rare in any strand of my life, that I really wanted to share this one with you. The following recent articles indicate that Cardullo has (probably) finally been stopped:

RIT faces suit over book of film critic's essays
http://www.rbj.net/article.asp?aID=238641

RIT sued over book of late movie critic Stanley Kauffmann's columns
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2017/01/31/late-movie-critic-kauffmanns-columns-prompts-lawsuit/97281672/

It's wonderful that Kauffmann's estate is very determined to make public, through the courts and the press, the extent of Cardullo's fraud. For me, your blog played an early and important part in the long campaign to expose him as a serial plagiarist."

 
One of the links the author of the comment supplied reads as follows:

'RIT sued over book of late movie critic Stanley Kauffmann's columns

Gary Craig Jan. 31, 2017

The Rochester Institute of Technology was duped by a serial plagiarist when it published a book of the works of the renowned film critic Stanley Kauffmann, a lawsuit alleges.

The RIT Press has halted publication of the book, The Millennial Critic, and tried to recall copies it has sold, court papers show. But the estate of Kauffmann, who died at the age of 97 in 2013 , is continuing with a federal lawsuit that seeks damages.

The lawsuit was originally filed in a federal court in New York City but was transferred this week, over the objections of an attorney for the estate, to a Rochester-based federal court.

Kauffmann was the lead film critic at The New Republic for five decades. Upon his death, The New York Times wrote that his reviews "set a standard for critical ease and erudition."

At the center of the controversy is Robert "Bert" Cardullo, who represented to RIT that he had the rights to Kauffmann essays and writings. Cardullo, who has taught film and theatre courses at different universities, has been accused of plagiarism in academic circles.
A letter presented to RIT Press which showed he had the rights to Kauffmann's work was a forgery, the lawsuit alleges.

Cardullo's current location appears to be a mystery. Records show he was recently teaching in Turkey, though the university there does not now list him on its website. The whereabouts of Cardullo could be important for lawyers for RIT, who are considering suing him for his representations.

The Democrat and Chronicle has unsuccessfully attempted to reach Cardullo via an email he used in late 2015.

In court papers, Kenneth Norwick, an attorney for Kauffmann's estate, argues that a simple Google search should have alerted RIT Press to many questions about Cardullo's veracity.

"If RIT made even a rudimentary first-page only Google search for 'Bert Cardullo' before relying on, if it did, any representations by him, it would have readily discovered his history and reputation as a plagiarist," Norwick wrote in the lawsuit.

RIT officials declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

Other Institutions Also Taken In

In a telephone interview, Norwick, who is based in New York City, said Cardullo also bamboozled others into publishing Kauffmann-connected works. The estate is pursuing action with those also, he said.

With the lawsuit against RIT, "there is the issue of damages and there is the issue of making an official acknowledgment of what's going on here," he said. "The lawsuit will establish that RIT infringed (on the copyright for Kauffmann's works) and Cardullo is responsible for those infringements."

After Kauffmann's death, his estate learned of the RIT Press book through an Amazon search, Norwick said.

"Once the executor ... learned about the RIT book he did some further research and found numerous other examples of Cardullo-perpetrated infringements," Norwick said. "We've settled with some and we're in contact with others."

The lawsuit was first filed in April 2016. Months before that, representatives of the estate reached out to RIT Press about the possible copyright violations.

Those contacts prompted an angry email from Cardullo, who threatened to "upload (the book) to multiple Internet sites" if RIT Press was not told it could continue to sell the book.

"I am not in this for the money," Cardullo wrote. "RIT Press and I have performed a service for the late Mr. Kauffmann, in his memory. Please honor that memory by desisting. If you do not, I have spelled out the consequences."

According to the lawsuit, Cardullo did post a copy of the book on the Internet.'
 
Like Cardullo, I am not in this - exposing his outrageous career as a plagiarist - for the money. As you, dear reader, can affirm, I opted against including ads on my blog. The number of views that my posts manage to attract doesn't enrich me in any way, except in the knowledge that one more reader knows who and what Bert Cardullo is. That is my only reward, and it is enough.

Date Due

I do not know, and I have never claimed to know, anything about being an editor of creative or scholarly writing, but I think that uttering the word "plagiarism" in the precincts of a book or magazine (or ezine) publishing office must be like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater.

Bored last week (the week between Christmas and New Year's, the quietest week of the year), I went on a Google search for my favorite plagiarist, Bert Cardullo. On page 2 I found something about a newly published book of his whose title made me nearly choke on my leftover eggnog. The link led me to the website of a small literary press - whose name I withhold out of what is probably misplaced fairness - where I found the book, Persistence of Vision: The 21st-Century Film Criticism of Stanley Kauffmann, edited by Cardullo, published last January. Accompanying a description of the book's contents was a blurb from Gary Bettison from a review of the book published at Senses of Cinema.

The article was like a perfect storm for me - a combination of benign climatic conditions that produce a destructive gale. The article combined the work of Stanley Kauffmann, the man who was for decades the doyen of American film criticism, with Cardullo, who is becoming a by-word for literary thievery, with Senses of Cinema, the very website at which I published in 2007 the first public notice of Cardullo's plagiarism.  

In the interests of the truth, that most elusive of chimeras, I contacted the director publishing house, expressing my outrage that Cardullo should bestow on himself the honor of editing the work of a man from whom he stole on repeated occasions. The director (who shall remain shameless) responded by saying that she doesn't plan on publishing a new book with Cardullo, but that I shouldn't make such formal accusations of plagiarism to a publisher "without solid proof." We went back and forth more than a dozen times about my proof before I realized that I was whipping a dead horse.

Her replies to my insistence that she had published the work of a well-known plagiarist were disingenuous, I think, of even a "small press" (her words) publisher. Evidently bothered by my use of the words "make money," the publisher defended herself by informing me that the pittance that such "academic books" earn is scant justification for plagiarism. Then she asked me if I had contacted Yale University Press and all the other publishers Cardullo has taken advantage of.

I explained that publications prior to the exposure of Cardullo's plagiarism were outside my reach, but that I regard it as open season for publications of books made since his exposure. I told her that "there is little I can do about the publishers over whose eyes Cardullo has already pulled the wool, so to speak."

Then she told me a little about her job as an editor and that there has to be "solid proof" of plagiarism "in the specific book" already published before they can withdraw the book from print. So even if someone proves that an author has committed plagiarism before, it doesn't disqualify all of his books from consideration for publication. I asked her, if she owned a gallery and someone had informed her that a painting on her wall was the work of a known forger, would she leave it hanging there? To this she wrote, "If I spent an enormous amount of time designing the frame and room etc. for a work by somebody that might have forged other works of art and after I hanged them up somebody said he might have forged stuff before and I hadn't made money for all my work - I'd do what I'm doing now and that's not get any more works from the artist but also not throw away all my work. My design etc. isn't a forgery and you should have some respect for a publisher's work."

So, to paraphrase, I shouldn't interfere with her work with such trivial information about the questionable integrity of an author's work that she has published and I should mind my own business. And to top everything off, she told me that only an author who is a victim of Cardullo's plagiarism has a legitimate grievance. If I spend $700 for an Apple i-phone, only to discover that it isn't a genuine i-phone but a cheap Chinese knock-off, it's only Apple that has a reason to complain?

My business, she then brought to my attention, was akin to an "obsession" with Bert Cardullo, that I was "on a mission" to destroy the man's career and that I might consider seeking therapy. In my last (I promise) email to her, I told her that, given the negligible results of my efforts to inform both publishers and the public of Cardullo's crimes, I wished I had left the Cardullo book I found so many years ago on the shelf at the Anchorage Public Library where I found it. Without realizing it, I was echoing that marvelous thown-away line spoken by Claude Rains near the end of Lawrence of Arabia. Playing the role of Mr. Dryden, he is asked what he thinks about the end of the war in the desert in which Lawrence had played such an important but thankless part. With classic airy resignation, Rains says, "Well, on the whole, I wish I'd stayed in Tunbridge Wells."

A Fake is a Fake

From time to time, without expecting much, I follow the fate of Bert Cardullo, once respected film and theater scholar, whose voluminous plagiarisms have been exposed to the eyes of an unsuspecting - and mostly uncaring - public since Senses of Cinema published my article "A Hard Act to Follow" in 2006. Despite further exposure of his pilfering by Richard Brody in The New Yorker in 2010, as well as other reports sent to this blog, many of Cardullo's suspect texts remain in print and for sale on Amazon, and he himself remains a faculty member at a university in Izmir, Turkey.

This is disappointing, to put it mildly. While I have encountered a few persistent and pseudonymous personal attacks on this blog and on my Twitter account, which a source better acquainted with Cardullo tells me are unmistakably his handiwork, I have heard nothing from him directly. What I've managed to learn of him indirectly isn't encouraging, either.

A Google search last week of the words "Bert Cardullo plagiarism" turned up two particular items, one from a website called "Retraction Watch" and another from The Penn, website of Indiana University of Pennsylvania. The mission statement of "Retraction Watch" is "Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process." The article on Cardullo, "Film review by noted critic a rerun, retracted," discusses a book by Cardullo on French film scholar Andre Bazin that was shown to be substantially stolen from another work and was retracted by its publisher. The author of the piece mentions me and several posts on this blog, as well as the retraction statement at website of The Cambridge Quarterly.

But the article at The Penn reports on a recent debate that took place at the start of what they called "Banned Book Week," in which it was proposed that, since the writings of Bert Cardullo have been proven to be spurious at worst and suspect at best, his books, that are carried by the IUP library, should be removed from its shelves. An associate professor of English pointed out that anyone consulting Cardullo's books "for scholarly purposes" would not only put his own work in critical jeopardy but would "compound" the error that publishers made and further enrich Cardullo with their citations.

This is an entirely sound argument, but it was countered by another speaker who insisted that it was not the policy of the IUP library to ban books, in accordance with what she called the "library bill of rights," and that it was the publisher's fault in creating the problem in the first place by not examining the material submitted to them more closely.

I see. So, since they didn't create the problem, it's not for librarians to pull books from their shelves simply because they've been proven to be works of plagiarism. That's like an art gallery refusing to remove a Manet painting from its wall just because someone has proved it's a forgery. The gallery wasn't at fault for hanging the painting. It was the art dealer who passed the forgery on to them.

And there are plenty of intellectual property laws around to prevent the library from passing around someone else's work as Cardullo's. Does the publisher have to recall every copy of every book by Cardullo to correct their mistake? That would be an ideal solution but an utterly impractical one. 

If the library isn't prepared to pull the books, shouldn't it place a proviso inside them warning readers that their contents have been proven to be plagiarized, citing the texts from which Cardullo stole the material? The very lack of urgency demonstrated by professionals involved in the promulgation of these spurious texts shows how little anyone is prepared to take responsibility for them. The one person who could - Cardullo himself - will probably go to his grave denying he did anything wrong, as long as sales of his books and his tenure at a Turkish university remain seriously unchallenged.      

Where Did I Read That Before?

Quite by chance, in August 2010, I read an article in The New Yorker (on its website, that is) by Richard Brody called "Truffaut's Last Interview", reprinting an interview with a seriously ill Truffaut (he died soon after from a brain tumor) purportedly conducted by Bert Cardullo. An observant reader left a comment mentioning the coincidence of the wording in the interviews with material included on the Criterion DVD of The 400 Blows. Since I had the DVD with me, I checked them for similarities and published my discoveries on this blog in October 2010, "Francois and Bert, Parts I & II".

When I brought this to the attention of Gary Morris, who had co-edited the book of interviews with Cardullo, he forwarded my articles, including one I wrote in 2006 for Senses of Cinema which I then republished concerning the first instance of plagiarism from Cardullo that I discovered, to Richard Brody, who discovered even further examples of Cardullo's plagiarizing and published them in another article, "About Truffaut's Last Interview".

This inspired further revelations from other readers, and what I believed, and perhaps hoped, would be my last word on the subject, "An Unravelling" in December 2010. That article inspired yet further comments from readers, including two from just last week, that I have decided to reprint below - if only to get them more out in the open.

Since I am presently living in the Sticks (provincial Philippines), I am in no position to verify any of the claims made. I therefore present them without any editorial caveats. I leave it to someone in a better position than I to assist me in this rather important process. I take the charge of plagiarism very seriously. Even with incontrovertible evidence of it, I try to be careful with the word. After reading from all the links I included here, some might agree that we have been too careful with Bert Cardullo.

Anonymous said...
This is indeed not the only plagiarism that Cardullo has undertaken. The introduction (which he "wrote") to Theater of the Avant Garde, a book he coedited with Robert Knopf, has whole passages in it directly out of Christopher Innes's Avant Garde Theatre. It's so disappointing to look at a career that prolific and realize it is built on theft.
November 17, 2010

Jerry White said...
I read what you wrote in Senses of Cinema, largely because I had read and enjoyed Cardullo's writing. I found what you wrote there sad; I suppose a more intense emotion was probably called for. Anyway, I wonder if you have seen this, specifically the first blurb there: http://goo.gl/NfnPH
December 17, 2010

Dan Harper said...
I suppose the less intense emotion you felt when you read my article is a general one, but I suspect that the cat may finally be out of the bag for Cardullo.
December 17, 2010

Jerry White said...
Well, I think you oughta see this. These are the blurbs on the publisher website for his new book, Screen Writings, published in March 2010:

'Among my contemporaries, the best film critic writing in English in America is Bert Cardullo, and 'Screen Writings' proves why.' Dan Harper, American film scholar

'A lot of what Bert Cardullo has to say about contemporary world cinema would be interesting to a very wide audience. He is someone with an impressive and stimulating command of the difficult dance of the film review.' Jerry White, University of Alberta

'Bert Cardullo's articles and reviews are invariably intelligent, original, and highly informed. I have been a sturdy admirer of his work for years; he's a solid writer and an equally solid judge.' Frederick Morgan, American poet


The full link is at http://www.anthempress.com/index.php/subject-areas/browse-by-type/anthem-monograph-edited-volume/screen-writings-1.html
December 18, 2010

Dan Harper said...
That blurb is also on the Amazon page. Just shows you how a favorable blurb can be extracted from even a negative review (mine was as favorable as I could make it, under the circumstances).

The late Fred Morgan gave Cardullo a job at The Hudson Review in the '80s. It's a mercy that he isn't around any more to see what a mess Cardullo has made of his trust.

But I'm beginning to believe that Cardullo would have to commit murder before anyone else would notice how much "borrowing" (I'm in a generous mood) he's been doing over the years.

Thanks for the link.
December 19, 2010

Anonymous said...
Pages 70-72 and pages 85-86 of Cardullo's "Vittorio De Sica" are plagiarized from Stanley Kauffmann's reviews of "Two Women" and "A Brief Vacation" in "The New Republic" (May 22, 1961 and March 8, 1975 issues). Several sentences are lifted verbatim; Kauffmann's reviews are not quoted, cited, or acknowledged as sources.

Pages 56-58 and page 195 of Cardullo's book "Waves from the East" are lifted directly from Kauffmann's "New Republic" reviews of "Turtles Can Fly" and "What Time is it There?" (March 7, 2005 and February 4, 2002 issues).

Cardullo's two-volume "Screen Writings" is replete with plagiarisms from Kauffmann's old reviews. In Volume 1: pages 94-98 are stolen from the reviews of Olmi's films "The Sound of Trumpets" and "The Fiances" in the August 17, 1963 and February 15, 1964 issues of "The New Republic"; and pages 198-199 are taken almost vebatim from Kauffmann's review of "The Last Picture Show" in the October 16, 1971 issue of "The New Republic". In Volume 2: large portions of pages 16-21 are stolen from Kauffmann's reviews of "The Goodbye Girl" and "Manhattan" in the December 17, 1977 and May 19, 1979 issues of "The New Republic"; and pages 36-46 include several paragraphs Cardullo lifted from Kauffmann's reviews of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Me You and Everyone We Know" (April 5, 2005 and July 11/18, 2005 issues of "The New Republic").

Cardullo's "The Films of Robert Bresson" includes an essay ("Dostoyevskian Surge, Bressonian Spirit") in which he plagiarizes virtually all of Kauffmann's review of "L'Argent" (April 16, 1984 issue of "The New Republic").

Cardullo's "Screening the Stage" is filled with plagiarisms: pages 47-49 are taken from Kauffmann's review of "Betrayal" (February 28, 1983 issue of "The New Republic"); and a large portion of the essay "The Sounds (and Sights) of Silence: 'Way Down East' as Play and Film" (pages 91-99) have been stolen from Kauffmann's essay "D.W. Griffith's 'Way Down East'" in the journal "Horizon" (Spring, 1972).

In the January, 2011 issue of "Notes on Contemporay Literature" the following notice was published:

"This is to inform the readership of 'Notes' that 'Marguerite Ida-Helena Annabel in Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights,' Vol. 40.4:4-6, by Bert Cardullo, is largely plagiarized from pages 82 through 85 of Professor Sarah Bey-Cheng's book 'Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein's Avant-Garde Theater' (Routledge, 2004; reprinted in paper 2005). We condemn Bert Cardullo's dishonesty and apologize to Professor Bey-Cheng and our readers that it escaped our editorial scrutiny."

Cardullo is not a scholar, but, rather, a charlatan and thief who has ransacked the work of critics he professes to respect and admire.
March 30, 2012

Dan Harper said...
Your pains-taking (!) is appreciated. There is an interview of Mr. Kauffmann conducted by Cardullo online. I wonder if Kauffmann was even there? My chief reaction is surprise that all this has gone unnoticed for so long.
March 30, 2012

Anonymous said...
Do you know what's disturbing? As a professor, Cardullo had a history of being extremely strict about plagiarism, warning of expulsion and other consequences for those who plagiarized.

Also disturbing? Sarah Bay-Cheng, from whom he stole material as listed above in the comments, was once his student.
April 15, 2012

An Unravelling

One of the problems of publishing in general - and publishing online in particular - arises when no one reads what one has written. A website can keep track of how many "hits" has occurred there, but it cannot give one any idea of what happened when the "hit" occurred, if it happened in error, if anyone actually reads what is posted there, etc.

When I reported in Senses of Cinema three years ago that a two essays in a book published in 2004 had been copied, almost word for word, from an essay published more than twenty years before by another writer, nothing happened. Or so I thought.

It seems that others have noticed such resemblances involving writings published by the same author. A comment posted by William MacAdams on Richard Brody's blog at The New Yorker, "About 'Truffaut's Last Interview," reads as follows:

"Dear Richard Brody: A few years ago I was curious to see if there were any books in English on the greatly neglected Vittorio De Sica. The only study of him I knew of was Stephen Harvey's monograph (in English) published by Cinécitta in 1991. I discovered there was a new book by Bert Cardullo. When I began reading Cardullo's "Vittorio De Sica: Director, Actor, Screenwriter," it seemed very familiar. I compared Stephen Harvey's and Cardullo's texts to find that they were virtually identical. Cardullo had added the occasional snippet of information, which required alterations in Harvey's text, but otherwise the two books were the same. Cardullo included Harvey's monograph in his bibliography but called it a "brochure." Stephen Harvey was dead when Cardullo published his plagiarism in 2002. I had never heard of Cardullo at that time and only knew Harvey slightly from MoMA, where he was a curator in the film department. I contacted the University of Michigan, where Cardullo was then employed, and referred them to Harvey's monograph (which hardly any libraries in the U.S. had copies of, and at that time there were none to be had from abebooks.com). Shortly thereafter, I received several threatening e-mails from Cardullo, advising me that his lawyer had been informed and that if I continued to repeat the allegation of plagiarism he was intending to sue. He also demanded to know my home address. I didn't reply to his e-mails and never heard from him again. Months later, I was contacted by the University of Michigan to inform me Cardullo had been dismissed. For some time after that, Cardullo's publisher, McFarland, kept the book in print. A while later, a friend who was teaching at N.Y.U. told me that Cardullo had been hired to teach there! Yours, William MacAdams ps I am an admirer of your superb book on Godard."

Read more

This is an ongoing nightmare for some, including myself. Singling out a writer for, albeit qualified, praise has made me somewhat proprietary of his work. This is what happens with all great critics - they are so hard to find that following them is a kind of ritual, an act of faith in criticism and in literature (since even movie critics are writers). Such critics are what is now known as "niche domains."

So it is all the more upsetting to see the work of one such critic unravel before my eyes. I suspected that there are probably more suspect texts by Cardullo around. This is the latest.

Digging for the Truth

After contacting Gary Morris, co-editor with Bert Cardullo of the book Action!: Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran, about the suspect interview with François Truffaut included in their book, and reprinted by Richard Brody on The New Yorker last August, he communicated his own misgivings to Brody, who has since unearthed more interviews with Truffaut on Youtube that contain further material that reappears, without credit, in Cardullo's interview. Clearly, if some of the interview is borrowed from other sources, it is enough reason to suspect that the whole thing was borrowed.

I had intended to write in my post François & Bert Part I that it remained for a researcher more intrepid than I to discover if the rest of the Cardullo interview was lifted from other sources. I have been in the Philippines since late 2007, without access to a dedicated PC (I use internet cafes exclusively), so I had neither the time nor the pera to conduct the research myself. Thanks to Gary Morris and Richard Brody, someone else in this business is on top of this serious issue. I shall, of course, keep this blog posted for further developments.

A Hard Act to Follow

[The following piece, published in the April-June 2007 issue of Senses of Cinema, was the last thing I published prior to leaving the U.S. It raised an issue that, as far as I could tell, went unnoticed. Cardullo is now teaching in Izmir, Turkey. He has not contributed to The Hudson Review, where he was a featured contributor, since this was published. He has, however, published books on film. The reason why I decided to write the review is simply that I wanted to know why Cardullo, who is obviously capable of original and excellent work, wrote it in the first place and how it could've been published (since 1997) without anyone noticing the - to me anyway - obvious problem of authorship. Interestingly, someone identifying themselves as "C.Keller," wrote a comment on "Truffaut's Last Interview," posted by Richard Brody on the New Yorker website on August 16, 2010: "I would invite all readers of this piece, put forward by Cardullo as a last interview with François Truffaut conducted in May 1984, to compare numerous passages, sentence for sentence and word for word, with footage featuring Truffaut speaking in two of the supplements that most recently appeared on the Criterion disc of 'The 400 Blows' — specifically, the extracts from "Cinépanorama" and "Cinéastes de notre temps," which, before being made available (and English-subtitled) for an anglophone audience via the Criterion release, were originally broadcast in France in 1960 and 1965 respectively. —c. keller.
Posted 9/6/2010, 12:08:48pm by evillights." A thorough analysis of Cardullo's writings may be more necessary than I thought in 2007.]



A Hard Act to Follow:
In Search of Cinema: Writings on International Film Art by Bert Cardullo

I write about the cinema because I believe that it is the true Gesamtkunstwerk (or total work of art) and therefore has greater expressive capacity than any other art; because I agree with the pronouncement that, as the one technology that can be absolutely humanist in its outcome, which can embody all the technological impulses, cravings, and interests of our age in the employ, not of machinery, but of the human spirit, film was the art form of the twentieth century and continues to be in the twenty-first; and because I think that criticism of film, still the least appreciated of the arts, matters.
– Bert Cardullo, “First Principles”


“Following Dwight Macdonald is a dirty trick”, Wilfrid Sheed wrote on assuming the duties of film critic for Esquire in 1967 (1). Macdonald, full-time radical scion and part-time film enthusiast, had abruptly abandoned the post for a column on politics. Sheed would later refer obliquely to Macdonald’s defection by claiming that a particularly useless film under review was “enough to drive one to politics”.

No less dirty was Bert Cardullo’s task as successor to Vernon Young at The Hudson Review in 1987. It was Young who had introduced the late Frederick Morgan, founder of the Review, to the novel idea that there was room in a highbrow literary magazine for serious ruminations on an upstart medium, and he certainly proved it for 30 years. It is to his credit that Cardullo made the transition almost painless. However, as we shall see, it was to be a particularly long shadow that Young cast over Cardullo.

As Cardullo points out in his introduction to this collection of his writings, In Search of Cinema, Robert Warshow was “the first American critic to write film chronicles, or quarterly considerations of new movies, as opposed to daily, weekly, or even monthly reviews” (p. 3). Contrary to the opposable thumbs – those interchangeable mass consumption reviewers whose opinions are as tasteless and insubstantial as fast food – Cardullo is in the privileged position to thresh the wheat from the chaff before committing a single word to paper. The result is more timeless than timely: rather than encapsulating the intermittent highs and the interminable lows of week-to-week filmgoing, Cardullo devotes his spacious column exclusively to films of lasting value, and not just throughout the period represented by this collection (1994-2003). In “Part Three: Form, Genre, Oeuvre, and Other Arts”, there are astute reflections on classic films such as Mario Monicelli’s I Campagni (The Strikers aka The Organizer, 1963), David Lean’s In Which We Serve (1942), and Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928).

But the films of lasting merit that were produced during the period encompassed by this collection are given additional resonance in Cardullo’s splendid chronicles: Ta’m e guilass (Taste of Cherry, Abbas Kiarostami, 1997), The Straight Story (David Lynch, 1999), Ni neibian jidian (What Time is it There?, Tsai Ming-Liang, 2001), Eu Tu Eles (Me You Them, Andrucha Waddington, 2000), La Stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room, Nanni Moretti, 2001), Sous le sable (Under the Sand, François Ozon, 2000), Kadosh (Amos Gitai, 1999), Rosetta (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 1999), and Wo de fu qin mu qin (The Road Home, Zhang Yimou, 1999). Cardullo is also reliable for shedding welcome light on otherwise overlooked films like Hans Petter Moland’s Aberdeen (2000), as well as numerous films by the Iranians Jafar Panahi and Majid Majidi.

Cardullo also offers a refreshing change from the politically driven criticism of J. Hoberman, Godfrey Cheshire, and Jonathan Rosenbaum, to name only the most brazen. It was only occasionally that Vernon Young let his politics slip, and they were decidedly reactionary: “Socialism is where Europe goes when it dies” (2). Cardullo does let fly with a riposte of his own in “Wooden Allen, or Artificial Exteriors”, an essay I will return to shortly. Astonishingly, he managed to fit it all into one sentence:

Unlike a host of American movies in which the citizenry’s blindest self-satisfactions with the status quo are upheld, or in which the most immoral and fantastic projections of callow romanticism, spurious religiosity, or miserable sentimentality are indulged, these films [Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973), and Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)] insist on writing down contemporary American society as they see it: a society alarmingly animated by powerful minority factions that are debased and selfish when they are not downright criminal; that is grotesquely peopled by a fringe of parasites surrendered to listless perversions or violent exploitations, or alternatively populated by a growing number of decent yet subsocial creatures who lead unexamined if not unworthy lives; that is forever encumbered by a floating majority, pitifully bewildered, vulgarized, and juvenile, which is sadomasochistic at its core, hence wanting in all resolution, guidance, and dignity except perhaps in time of war. (pp. 254-255)

This might come across as hyperbole, were it not for the sentence that immediately follows it: “If this is not the whole truth about the American experience, it is that part of the truth most commonly suppressed for public consumption.”

If Cardullo’s politics sound more than a little complementary to Young’s, this should not be surprising to anyone familiar with the essay that contains the passage above. Along with this collection, Cardullo has assembled textbook editions of his own writings (3), as well as The Film Criticism of Vernon Young (4), the definitive collection of all of Young’s far-flung writings on film not included in the single volume published in his lifetime, On Film. Although Cardullo was the logical choice for the job, I remain at a loss as to how or why he found it necessary to borrow freely (and this is putting it gently) from an essay that Young originally published in the January 1979 issue of Commentary, and which Cardullo included in The Film Criticism of Vernon Young on pages 270-279. “Autumn Interiors” was Young’s comparison of Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978) and Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978), to the ultimate detriment of both:

If, without knowing anything whatever about the work of either director, one had seen Woody Allen’s Interiors and Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata in the order of their respective debuts in New York City, one might have easily concluded that the Swedish film-maker had attempted to imitate the American: the same photographic and cutting style, the same concentration on a handful of overwrought characters, and the very same subject – namely, maternal domination. (p. 270)

Young was out to satirise Bergman’s “monastic style” as much as Allen’s apparent admiration for it: “That Allen should have been trapped by so obvious an error as to believe that you can depict tragedy by imitating the surface of it from someone else’s version is really amazing.” (p. 277)

No less amazing is that Young’s very words appear in two of Cardullo’s essays included in In Search of Cinema: “Wooden Allen, or Artificial Exteriors” and “Latter-Day Bergman”. And they appear uncredited. Cardullo had published a different version of these essays combined in the Antioch Review in 2000. It was then titled, “Autumn Interiors, or The Ladies Eve: Woody Allen’s Bergman Complex”. Proportionately, only about one-third of either essay consists of material composed by Cardullo. The rest is Young’s essay, carefully rearranged to make up two separate but – needless to say – complementary essays. The obvious care with which Cardullo does this is, of course, in direct proportion to the astonishment it engenders. That some apparent pains were taken to match not only the points of Young’s argument but its very qualities as written English is disturbing. That it has managed to go undiscovered is perhaps indicative of the offhandedness with which so many such books are customarily greeted.

Short of providing a facsimile of all three essays, here is one paragraph from Young’s original (from the collection edited by Cardullo), followed by Cardullo’s essay as it appears in In Search of Cinema:

Allen tries harder – perhaps too hard – to keep his settings from becoming as cluttered as his language, staging crucial scenes at the dining table, in the bedroom, in an empty church, at a beach house, as a means of exiling the everyday world. Self-consciously he employs a camera at rest, passively framing close-ups or middle-distance shots of a static group, except for moments when he is recalling other Bergman strategies: conspicuously, when he tracks two conversing sisters along the beach in a sententious dolly-shot which evokes Persona. (p. 276)

Allen tries hard – perhaps too hard – to keep his settings from becoming as cluttered or static as his language, staging crucial scenes at the dining table and in the bedroom, then in an empty church and at a beach house in an attempt to exile the everyday domestic world. Self-consciously he employs a camera at rest, passively framing close-ups of faces or middle-distance shots of a stationary group, except for moments when he is recalling other Bergman strategies. The most conspicuous of these is the tracking shot of two sisters conversing as they walk along the beach, which sententiously evokes the world of Persona. (p. 258)

In simple bean-counting terms, of the total 107 words in Cardullo’s paragraph, 78 of them are Young’s. And even if Cardullo’s versions are sufficiently leavened with interstices of original prose, it is not nearly enough to disguise the source material to anyone familiar with it (5). But bear in mind that, with only minor differences, these particular essays of Cardullo’s have been in print since 1997 and recast here for publication in 2004, apparently without ever attracting suspicion.

If I admit to taking no personal pride in being the first to point all this out, it is because of the proprietary interest that I take in what I regard is a great American film critic. Cardullo’s immense knowledge of literature, theatre and film has made him an invaluable teacher, literary and stagecraft interlocutor, and – most precious of all – an identifying and celebrating champion of the art of film. As he wrote in his foreword to The Film Criticism of Vernon Young, “He [Young] was one of the great critics of his generation, in any medium, and the writing contained herein proves it” (6). I would write the same of Cardullo and this book, but in my own words.

In Search of Cinema: Writings on International Film Art, by Bert Cardullo, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2004.



1.Wilfrid Sheed, The Morning After: Selected Essays and Reviews, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1971.
2.Vernon Young, On Film: Unpopular Essays On a Popular Art, Quadrangle Books, New York, 1972, p. 404.
3.Published as Bert Cardullo, Practical Film Criticism – An Enlightened Approach to Moviegoing Volume One and Volume Two, The Edwin Mellen Press, New York 1999.
4.The Film Criticism of Vernon Young, edited with a foreword by Bert Cardullo, University Press of America, Lanham MD, 1990.
5.See also my “Vernon Young: Unpopular Critic of a Popular Art”, Senses of Cinema, issue 11, December 2000-January 2001.
6.Cardullo, foreword to The Film Criticism of Vernon Young, p. xiv.

Critical Kudos

First things second, a word about my critical leanings. A long time ago I "liberated" a book from a library merely because it was one that I found myself consulting frequently and because it was a "reference" book not in circulation. It was a hardback copy of Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films, published by the University of Califoria Press. Later I paid for a paperback copy of Sadoul's Dictionary of Filmmakers. In them I learned about films that I, stuck at the time in a middlebrow Southern city (Columbia, South Carolina), could only dream of some day seeing. Some of them I still haven't seen.

Sadoul was a sensible, usable film critic. At the time I discovered his writings, I was also reading all of the American critics I could locate - James Agee, Dwight Macdonald, Stanley Kauffmann (who, amazingly, still writes his column for The New Republic), and John Simon. I knew about Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris but I never read them avidly. The one critic who became - and remains - my personal favorite was Vernon Young, who wrote for the literary quarterly The Hudson Review for thirty years.

Among my contemporaries, the best film critic writing in English in America is Bert Cardullo. I recently unearthed a bit of plagiarism on his part in my Senses of Cinema piece A Hard Act to Follow. Despite this as yet unexplained (and unaccountable) lapse, he is a worthy successor to Agee, Macdonald, Kauffmann, Simon, and Young.

I read a few others infrequently, if only because, while I sometimes disagree with them, I never seem to learn anything from the disagreement - which is never so with a great critic. Also, Jonathan Rosenbaum, J Hoberman, and Godfrey Cheshire have the unfortunate habit of foisting their politics alongside their aesthetic judgements, a practice that is distracting because it is ultimately unedifying. Granted, I would find it more irritating if their politics weren't progressive, so I suppose I should probably count my blessings. To his credit (as a critic, not as a person), John Simon admitted in 1993 that "I have always sympathized with the autobiographical hero of Anatole France's Le Lys rouge who declares, 'I am not so devoid of all talents as to occupy myself with politics.' Yet this credo, which makes some sense coming from a French artist and intellectual, would foul the breath of an American speaker. For if politics has been one of the two enervating preoccupations in France (need I name the other?), it has trailed just about everything, notably sports, in this country."

I should point out that, after Vernon Young, John Simon is a close second among my favorite film critics.