Death and the Artist

Growing up in the 1960s, I went to the movies on weekends. My father, who had been a serious and successful poker player in his youth, still managed to satisfy his gambling itch by playing bingo every Sunday after church. He would drop my brother and I off at a movie theater and go to the NCO Club on Fort Jackson, South Carolina and play bingo all afternoon. 

One Sunday afternoon I saw a movie called The Art of Love.(1) I don’t know why, but the movie, which wasn’t very good, has stuck with me all these years later so that I remember one of its stars, Dick Van Dyke, and its plot, that involved an artist (a painter) in a scheme with his friend, James Garner, in which he faked his own death. The publicity from his death somehow convinces people that he was a great artist and the value of his paintings increases significantly. 

Unfortunately, the artist’s friend gets greedy and demands that he produce more paintings, even though he’s supposed to be dead. Eventually, the scheme is exposed and the artist announces to the world that he’s been alive all the while, etc.

The movie’s plot device is the curious notion that a dead artist’s work is more valuable than a living artist’s, especially if the artist dies tragically, still in his prime. If the artist commits suicide, so much the better. I was reminded of all this when I saw a clip recently from a Dr. Who episode that was aired in 2010. In the episode, Dr. Who brings Vincent van Gogh back to life and transports him to the present. He takes him, rather cruelly I thought, to an art gallery where his paintings are proudly hung beside those of the great masters, like Monet, Renoir and Degas. The brief clip then shows Vincent getting very emotional seeing his paintings being admired by everyone. But his reaction wasn’t the one I expected. Instead of becoming upset that all the effusive admiration being shown to his work has come too late, that he only sold one painting when he was alive and that he was treated for depression and he eventually committed suicide, he goes around the gallery tearfully thanking everyone, shedding tears of joy. Not exactly how the real Van Gogh would’ve reacted. Wouldn’t he have been justified in being extremely resentful – not just about the popularity of his work and how everyone seems to be familiar with his sad life story, but about the ridiculous value being placed on his paintings, how every so many months a new record is broken at an auction somewhere of one of his paintings going for tens of millions of dollars? 

By now everyone should be familiar with the story of Yasuo Goto, a Japanese insurance magnate who, In 1987, bought Van Gogh's painting “Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers" (1888) for $39 million. It was then the highest sum paid for a work of art. On his death in 2007, Goto left instructions in his will that the canvas would be cremated along with his body. I suppose we should be thankful that whomever saved it from the flames probably did so not because of its beauty but because of its obvious resale value?

Worse than this are the occasional art thefts that take place in which thieves break into art galleries and strategically steal certain particularly valuable paintings that thereafter vanish from public view for a number of years or for generations until they turn up again in sometimes unlikely places. Where do the paintings that are stolen go? It’s hard not to imagine them hanging in a secret location, probably in a hidden room in a wealthy person’s palatial home. Perhaps they hang on a wall opposite this rich person’s private toilet where he or she sits alone and basks not only in the beauty of the artist’s work but in their own extravagant and obscene wealth. 

But what I also couldn’t quite understand from the Dr. Who clip was how moved the show’s fans were by Van Gogh’s utterly unconvincing emotional response in the modern art gallery at the display of his canvases – canvases that were preserved by Van Gogh’s loving brother Theo after Vincent committed suicide. My reaction to the scene was “where were they when he needed them?” Where were all those erstwhile art lovers when Vincent needed them in 1890 when he died, alone and forgotten at the age of 37? When Barbara Walters told Robert Redford after The Way We Were was released that he could have any woman he wanted, he said "Where were they when I needed them?"

Recently, I also chanced upon a passage from Woody Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing that addresses this problem – the problem of the survival of the artist and, separately, of the artist’s work:

The illusion you’re doing something to help yourself helps you. You somehow feel a little better, a little less despondent. You pin your hopes on a Godot who never comes, but the thought he might show up with answers helps you get through the enveloping nightmare. Like religion, where the illusion gets one through. And being in the arts, I envy those people who derive solace from the belief that your doing something to help yourself helps others. The work created will live on and be much discussed and somehow, like the Catholic with his afterlife, so the artist’s “legacy” will make him immortal. The catch here is that all the people discussing the legacy and how great the artist’s work is are alive and are ordering pastrami, and the artist is somewhere in an urn or underground in Queens. All the people standing over Shakespeare’s grave and singing his praises means a big goose egg to the Bard, and a day will come—a far-off day, but be sure it definitely is coming—when all Shakespeare’s plays, for all their brilliant plots and hoity-toity iambic pentameter, and every dot of Seurat’s will be gone along with each atom in the universe. In fact, the universe will be gone and there will be no place to have your hat blocked. After all, we are an accident of physics. And an awkward accident at that. Not the product of intelligent design but, if anything, the work of a crass bungler.

(1) The Art of Love, released in 1965, starring Dick Van Dyke, James Garner, Elke Sommer and Angie Dickinson. The script was written by Carl Reiner, from a story by Richard Alan Simmons and William Sackheim. Interestingly, Norman Jewison later commented that the movie flopped because audiences weren’t convinced that an artist's death guarantees a huge increase in the sales value of his paintings.

The Seventh Seal

Listening to some considerably lesser filmmakers than Ingmar Bergman ridicule his film The Seventh Seal has compelled me to look at it again. It was my very first Bergman film, which was shown at some parent/teacher meeting in 1972 or '73 when I was attending a Catholic school. A nun (most of my teachers were nuns, which only became a problem when we were instructed in sex education) had seen the film and had given in to its religious implications. As I learned later on, Bergman had been preoccupied with the ultimate question - the great WHY of existence - when he made the film, but he came up with the novel approach of addressing it directly rather than obliquely. Not long after he made it, however, he lost interest in the subject, even though it continued to appear in several of his subsequent films. But it was no longer a problem to be solved for him, but only a problem without ready-made solutions. (It is in this respect that I am one of those critics who found Wild Strawberries unsatisfying, since it confronts Isak Borg's imminent death momentarily, but loses its nerve, probably because Bergman loved Victor Sjöström too much to see through with his quietus. He is given an utterly unconvincing contented ending instead.)

However much Bergman may have moved on from the issues he confronts in The Seventh Seal, it is a stimulating confrontation. He didn't settle the matter, he simply let go of it. The argument (put forward by Alexander Payne in the documentary Trespassing Bergman) that the film somehow no longer "holds up" is preposterous. What he meant to say, of course, is that filmmakers no longer have the balls to confront such unwieldy subjects. Barry Levinson includes a scene in his masterpiece, Diner, in which two of his characters are in a Baltimore movie theater watching The Seventh Seal. When Death appears, Steve Guttenberg asks Tim Daly who that's supposed to be. "Death," Daly replies. "Oh, come on," Guttenberg says. "I've been to Atlantic City a thousand times and I never saw Death walking on the beach." "It's symbolic," Daly tells him.

But, of course, it's NOT symbolic at all. It isn't a symbol of Death in The Seventh Seal, walking on that stony beach, but Death personified. After the typically terse opening credits, a title appears that reads: It is the middle of the 14th century. Antonius Blok and his squire, after long years as crusaders in the Holy Land, have at last returned to their native Sweden, a land ravaged by the Black Plague.

We then hear a voiceover intoning lines from the New Testament's Book of Revelation, Chapter 8: "And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. . . . And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound." The opening scene is justly famous, but it has contributed to an image of Bergman that he had to work long and hard to escape. At dawn, the knight and his squire are lying on a deserted beach. A figure dressed in black with a pale white face appears suddenly and startles the knight, who asks him "Who are you?" "I am Death," the man in black replies matter of factly.

Two scenes, early in the film, make Bergman's intentions explicit. Jof awakes in his wagon and tumbles out into the brilliant morning. As he practices juggling, he sees a woman and a baby walking alone together. Jof smiles ecstatically and rubs his eyes. But when he opens them again the woman and child are gone. He climbs back inside the wagon and wakes Mia, his wife.

JOF: Mia, wake up. Wake up! Mia, I've just seen something. I've got to tell you about it!
MIA: (sits up, terrified) What is it? What's happened?
JOF: Listen, I've had a vision. No, it wasn't a vision. It was real, absolutely real.
MIA: Oh, so you've had a vision again!
MIA's voice isfilled with gentle irony. JOF shakes his head and grabs her by the shoulders.
JOF: But I did see her!
MIA: Whom did you see?
JOF: The Virgin Mary.
MIA can't help being impressed by her husband's fervor. She lowers her voice.
MIA: Did you really see her?
JOF: She was so close to me that I could have touched her. She had a golden crown on her head and wore a blue gown with flowers of gold. She was barefoot and had small brown hands with which she was holding the Child and teaching Him to walk. And then she saw me watching her and she smiled at me. My eyes filled with tears and when I wiped them away, she had disappeared. And everything became so still in the sky and on the earth. Can you understand...
MIA: What an imagination you have.
JOF: You don't believe me! But it was real, I tell you, not the kind of reality you see every day, but a different kind.
MIA: Perhaps it was the kind of reality you told us about when you saw the Devil painting our wagon wheels red, using his tail as a brush.
JOF: (embarrassed) Why must you keep bringing that up?
MIA: And then you discovered that you had red paint under your nails.
JOF: Well, perhaps that time I made it up. (eagerly) I did it just so that you would believe in my other visions. The real ones. The ones that I didn't make up.
MIA: (severely) You have to keep your visions under control. Otherwise people will think that you're a half-wit, which you're not. At least not yet as far as I know. But, come to think of it, I'm not so sure about that.
JOF: (angry) I didn't ask to have visions. I can't help it if voices speak to me, if the Holy Virgin appears before me and angels and devils like my company.

But Jof IS a fool - the kind whose truths are mistaken for jokes. The second scene that makes Bergman's intentions somewhat more explicit is in a church where Jons encounters a man painting inside.

To the right of the entrance there is a large fresco on the wall, not quite finished. Perched on a crude scaffolding is a PAINTER wearing a red cap and paint-stained clothes. He has one brush in his mouth, while with another in his hand he outlines a small, terrified human face amidst a sea of other faces.
JONS: What is this supposed to represent?
PAINTER: The Dance of Death.
JONS: And that one is Death?
PAINTER: Yes, he dances off with all of them.
JONS: Why do you paint such nonsense?
PAINTER: I thought it would serve to remind people that they must die.
JONS: Well, it's not going to make them feel any happier.
PAINTER: Why should one always make people happy? It might not be a bad idea to scare them a little once in awhile.
JONS: Then they'll close their eyes and refuse to look at your painting.
PAINTER: Oh, they'll look. A skull is almost more interesting than a naked woman.
JONS: If you do scare them...
PAINTER: They'll think.
JONS: And if they think...
PAINTER: They'll become still more scared.
JONS: And then they'll run right into the arms of the priests.
PAINTER: That's not my business.
JONS: You're only painting your Dance of Death.
PAINTER: I'm only painting things as they are. Everyone else can do as he likes.
JONS: Just think how some people will curse you.
PAINTER: Maybe. But then I'll paint something amusing for them to look at. I have to make a living, at least until the plague takes me.

For all the talk about God and the Devil, Bergman made The Seventh Seal to directly confront his fear of death. There is a scene, shot in just one day, in which a procession of flagellants passes through a village, led by a half-crazed monk who screams at the gathering of townsfolk.

MONK: God has sentenced us to punishment. We shall all perish in the black death. You, standing there like gaping cattle, you who sit there in your glutted complacency, do you know that this may be your last hour? Death stands right behind you. I can see how his crown gleams in the sun. His scythe flashes as he raises it above your heads. Which one of you shall he strike first? You there, who stand staring like a goat, will your mouth be twisted into the last unfinished gasp before nightfall? And you, woman, who bloom with life and self-satisfaction, will you pale and become extinguished before the morning dawns? You back there, with your swollen nose and stupid grin, do you have another year left to dirty the earth with your refuse? Do you know, you insensible fools, that you shall die today or tomorrow, or the next day, because all of you have been sentenced? Do you hear what I say? Do you hear the word? You have been sentenced, sentenced!

The monk (impressively played by Anders Ek) never mentions salvation or damnation. Why bother, when Death is much more imposing and terrifying? It is as if Bergman himself stood on a stage and addressed us in the audience directly. "You back there with the swollen nose ..." If I were in the audience, perhaps I would suddenly feel self-conscious about my nose.

The film was made on a tight budget with the expert resources of Gunnar Fischer's utterly raw black-and-white imagery, P. A. Lundgren's inventively economic design, and Erik Nordgren's evocatively authentic-sounding music. Max von Sydow is imposing as Blok. Gunnar Björnstrand is marvelous as the skeptical squire, Jons. Nils Poppe probably got fed up with comparisons to Chaplin, but, for once, they are earned. Bibi Andersson is captivating as Mia. And there was no better Death than Bengt Ekerot.

I have mentioned before that fewer people are reading and being enthralled by Dante's The Divine Comedy because, since hardly anyone continues to believe in personal immortality, heaven and hell have ceased to be interesting to readers even as abstract concepts. But death continues to be a perplexing problem - a problem that needs to be faced, rather than solved. When Bergman wanted to address the problem, he refused to face it in the usual philosophical or metaphysical terms. Especially since film is - as it should be - so damned literal. People in films are given visions, but they never appear to us the way they appear to the character in the film - as visions. Some special photographic or lighting effect may give them a strangeness that signals to us that what we are seeing, through the character's eyes, isn't supposed to be taken literally. When Henry James wrote The Turn of the Screw, he clearly wanted the reader to continually wonder if the ghosts that the children's governess sees are genuine ghosts or simply figments of her - presumably sexually - overheated imagination.

But in The Seventh Seal Bergman wanted to treat his subject in an utterly unambiguous, head-on manner. So why do so many responsible people respond to the film the same way Steve Guttenberg did in Barry Levinson's Diner? Could it be because they're made uncomfortable by it? Sneering at the film doesn't diminish its power or invalidate its argument. As Philip Larkin wrote,

Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
("Aubade")

I think Larkin (and Bergman) would be incredulous of anyone who claimed that they weren't afraid of death. I think they would both have laughed at Woody Allen's line, "I'm not afraid of death. I just don't want to be around when it happens."

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.