Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (73 page)

The difference between the best forties criticism and Sarris's and Kael's work two decades later was the difference between journalismgreat journalism-and criticism. I once opined that Agee and Farber in their Time days were writing "haiku in the margins of film history," and Farber readily agreed. It's not that the short review is the assassin of wit and insight; a clever writer can shadowbox artfully in forty or sixty lines, sketch a line of argument, give hints of a directorial style, vacuum-pack ideas into assertions. But these wonderful writers couldn't take 9,000 words to demolish Siegfried Kracauer's theory of film, as Kael did in Film Quarterly. They couldn't erect the auteurist pantheon in sixty-eight pages of Film Culture, as Sarris did. Both generations of critics were film artists, but Agee and Farber were Tex Avery miniaturists; Sarris and Kael were muralistsAbel Gance, chronicling another revolution.

At first their publications had subscriber lists of just a few thousand, but soon the critics found larger audiences, Kael at the New Yorker and Sarris with his blossoming constituency at the Village Voice. Their occasional brawls were now broadcast in the New York Times. Considerations of Kael's collected pieces appeared on the front pages of the Times' book review. They also created, in their warring images, a generation of acolytes. They raised young readers into writers who, to this day, carry the cultural passions of Sarris or Kael, or both, like DNA. We were called Sarrisites (Wilfrid Sheed's wonderfully malign epithet: rhymes with parasites) or Paulettes (my phrase, for my sins). And like some juicy family feud, the old debates were reheated for new readers when our children's crusade marched into the available jobs. We were shouting at each other-because belligerence was the only sound we had heard as kids at the film-critical dinner tablebut in the same language, the one Sarris and Kael had taught us.

For a while, it seems everyone spoke this language: Hollywood hacks who made "A Film by. . - ," moviegoers for whom "auteurs" now had marquee value, college professors ready to teach Lang, Murnau, and Curtiz-and maybe Larry, Moe, and Curly. Nearly every critic with a regular job published a book, often a scrapbook of his reviews. Someone must be reading this stuff. It must be the "Film Generation," the kids who would attend our wisdom, patronize our anointed directors, and, soon enough, make films tailored to our aesthetic prejudices.

That was delusion, of course-a typically American delusion of power and primacy. The French had started it all, defining and romanticizing the burly energy of Hollywood films. Then, from the early sixties, a batch of British renegades-among them Robin Wood, Raymond Durgnat, David Thomson, Peter Wollen-had been using another brilliant set of dialects. And in Wollen's influential case, dialectics. Sarris and Kael had validated the Hollywood film as a field of study, but their brand of interpretive scholarship never took at American universities; it wasn't sufficiently serious or rigorous or engage. By the mid-seventies academe had been liberated or subjugated by semiology. Approaches to film were more fragmented. Semiologists claimed the high ground-the right to set the aesthetic, political, and moral agenda-while the Paulettes and Sarrisites found themselves loitering in familiarly dank territory, in the monarchy of midcult. We wouldn't be the next Truffauts, just the latest Bosley Crowthers. We weren't the only, and weren't the first. And we wouldn't last.

IT excerpt from the basement video show Wayne's World, starring young Wayne Campbell and his friend Garth, and featured on Saturday Night Live:

WAYNE: OK! Let's take a look at the movies, all right?

GARTH: All right!

WAYNE: Our first movie is Back to the Future 2, starring Michael J.

Fox. I liked it! Garth?

GARTH: Yeah, I liked it too.

WAYNE: OK, let's move on! Steel Magnolias, starring Daryl Hannah and Dolly Parton. I thought it sucked! It's a chick movie! Garth?

GARTH: Yeah, it sucked.

WAYNE: OK, OK! Valmont, with that babe Meg Tilly-growwwwwl! Didn't see it. Garth?

GARTH: Didn't see it.

It remained only for somebody to claim the rich, fertile low ground. How inevitable, how irresistible, the rise of TV criticism now seems! We could write reams of descriptive, delirious, indignant prose. But we couldn't show you a clip from a movie. Sarris once said that much of Agee's famous Life essay on silent film comedy-his evocation of Chaplin's work or a Keaton gag-was gorgeously irrelevant, if you'd seen the films. The evidence was on the screen. I couldn't agree, because every Agee description offered implicit analysis; it was the art of gesture mirrored in the craft of writing. But Sarris was accurate, and prophetic, in spite of himself. Traditional film criticism was images reconsidered in words. First we told you what the picture was, then we told you what it meant; and on both accounts you had to take our word(s) for it.

The next step would be to analyze films on TV. Then you could literally see what we were talking about. And we could finally make good on auteurism's unfulfilled promise of raise-en-scene analysis. All we needed was the technology. And in the sixties, at the same time Sarris and Kael were clawing their way to prominence, TV sports directors were creating the crucial means of reproduction: the instant replay. Now there were "analysts" like Al DeRogatis (and, later, John Madden) who not only told you but showed you what happened and what it meant.

At the time, I was thrilled by the potential this powerful tool offered film scholarship. No more reliance on faulty, fractured memory-you could study a film as you would a painter's oeuvre, frame by frame. And at the Columbia University film school, one professor, Stefan Scharf, was teaching visual acuity by just this means. He would show, say, Chabrol's Leda, stopping each scene to note visual and dramatic composition. In the eighties, at film festivals, Roger Ebert would do the same with a print of Citizen Kane. Entertaining and illuminating, as only a bon vivant scholarshowman can be.

Yes, that Roger Ebert. Gene Siskel's costar on the long-running syndicated series Siskel & Ebert & the Movies. This is, shall we say, no film uni versity of the air. The program does not dwell on shot analysis, or any other kind of analysis. It is a sitcom (with its own noodling, toodling theme song) starring two guys who live in a movie theater and argue all the time. Oscar Ebert and Felix Siskel. "The fat guy and the bald guy." S&E&TMis every kind of TV and no kind of film criticism. It's as tightly structured as a movie star's promotional visit to a talkshow: the requisite clip, the desultory chat. It shows you a couple of minutes from several new films so you can decide if you want to see them or, even better, talk about them at parties without bothering to see them. For moviegoers in a hurry, this is Mas- terplots Theatre.

The format, to be sure, was not designed to offer extended, enlightened commentary on pictures. It means mainly to answer two consumer questions about every movie: What's it like? Will I like it? A minute or two of discussion (which amounts to fewer words on the subject than one of Agee's, or my, Time blurbs), and break for commercial. S&E&TM is what it is. And it is successful enough for each of its stars to earn, it is said, an annual million or so dollars from the gig. Which nobody can deny a jolly good fellow like Roger. Whatever the gripes against their show, Siskel and Ebert do a tough job professionally. They give you movie clips and sound bites. They look at ease and in charge on the home screen-no small feat, as I can attest (and I've got the videotapes to prove it). They have triumphantly marketed TV-size versions of themselves. They are the very best possible "Siskel" and "Ebert." More money to them.

And less power. It's not that I'm embarrassed to see them shooting hoops in a poor-white-kids version of Michael vs. Magic on Late Night with David Letterman. That's just showbiz. I simply don't want people to think that what they have to do on TV is what I am supposed to do in print. I don't want junk food to be the only cuisine at the banquet. I don't want to think that all the critics who have made me proud to be among their number are now talking to only themselves, or to a coterie no larger than the one Kael and Sarris first addressed thirty years ago. They were Ali-Frazier; I don't want us to be Foreman-Cooney.

I hope there is a place in popular criticism for the seductiveness of a David Thomson sentence, with its snap, grace, and insolence. I hope Richard T. Jameson, the new custodian of this beleaguered magazine, will keep writing eloquently about what's on the screen and, as editor, encour age other critics to define their terms when they say a film is well or poorly made. Most of all, I hope there are still readers with the vigor, curiosity, and intelligence that Agee demanded of filmmakers and critics. We're in this fight together. To understand pictures, we still need words.

Did you get to the end of this story? Good. Maybe there's hope for both of us.

BY ROGER EBERT

(From Film Comment, May/June 199o)

ichard Corliss is generally correct in his discussion of new developments in popular film criticism (Film Comment, March/April 199o). The age of the packaged instant review is here, and lots of moviegoers don't have time to read the good, serious critics-the Kaels and Kauffmanns. Thumbs, star ratings, grades, and the marvelous Franklin scale have made it unpopular, if not impossible, for critics to deliver an ambiguous or uncertain opinion of a movie (quick: Last Year at Marienbad-thumbs up, or down?). Newspaper editors around the country want colorful capsule verdicts on the new movies for their weekend pullout sections, and the TV stations in most major markets now have local personalities who narrate clips from the new releases.

What Corliss does not realize is that this is an improvement, not a deterioration, of the situation as we both found it in the mid-i96os when we started in the business of writing about films. That was a time when there was no regular film criticism on national or local TV. Film magazines did not exist on the newsstands, and although Film Quarterly and Film Comment were being published, few outside academia and the film industry knew about them. Variety was the showbiz bible, with the emphasis on biz. As a matter of policy, most daily newspapers did not publish film reviews. In general-circulation magazines, the great influential voice in the late 195os and early 196os belonged to Dwight Macdonald, in Esquire, the man who taught me that movies were to be taken seriously.

The single most influential event in the history of modern newspaper film reviewing took place as recently as 1963, when Twentieth Century Fox banned Judith Crist from its screenings after she attacked Cleopatra in the New York Herald-Tribune. This event so tickled the public fancy that it became necessary for the trendier newspapers to import or create their own hard-to-please reviewers. Before 1963, with the exception of a handful of papers in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and a few other cities, newspaper film criticism existed on a fan magazine level, if at all. The proof of this was that most movie reviews were ghosted by various staff writers under a house byline (Mae Tinee in the Chicago Tribune-get it?). But by the middle years of the decade, any self-respecting newspaper had its own local critic, and every one of them had studied Kael's I Lost It at the Movies and Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema.