Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (77 page)

From what I can deduce, Corliss and Ebert have been engaged in a generally genteel "debate" that has occasionally erupted into a barroom brawl whenever one has questioned the career moves of the other. Meanwhile, Thomson has been busily revising the American cinema-and America with it-through a series of highly speculative reinterpretations almost on a par with the micromanaged critiques of Raymond Durgnat and Garry Wills.

s much as I would like to assume a pose of Olympian detachment from the fray, I shall not be coy about the fact that I am much closer in spirit to Corliss than to Ebert or Thomson. Nonetheless, I would like to begin my own revisionist critique of my revisionist colleagues by correcting Corliss on a minor error he has made in an anecdote attributed to me.

As Corliss tells it (Film Comment, March-April 199o): "When Pauline Kael moved from San Francisco to New York in the mid-sixties, she called her archrival Andrew Sarris and suggested they meet. After the visit, Sarris told his friend Eugene Archer, `She wasn't exactly Katharine Hepburn.' And Archer added, `Well, you're not exactly Spencer Tracy."'

Corliss goes on to say, "But they were, in a way. They raised the musty trade of film criticism to a volcanic, love-hate art. Their wrangles over the auteur theory had the excitement of politics and sport. The intensity of their debate lured people to see new films, and to see old (especially old Hollywood) movies in a new way. They opened eyes, awakened curiosity, aroused intelligence. They made film criticism sexy. Pictures were things that mattered; ideas were worth fighting over. Forget Tracy-Hepburn. Sarris and Kael were more like Ali-Frazier. Film criticism was the main event, and these two were the champs."

Grateful as I am for this enthusiastic tribute, I must note that it wasn't Eugene Archer I told of my encounter with Pauline Kael, but Marion Magid, a friend and confidante, and then as now an editor at Commentary. Marion was also a woman, and that is the point of my correction. She rightly reproved me for what she took to be my shameful lack of gallantry. Years later, Gary Giddins, one of Pauline's passionate admirers, scolded me in a similar fashion for my perceived sexism. Up to now I've never been able to get out from under this anecdote, but I'll try once more. Of course, I was thinking all along of that magical moment in Woman of the Year when Tracy walks in on Hepburn as she is adjusting her stocking in the newspaper editor's office where the two feuding journalists have been summoned to patch things up. Well, Pauline and I were two feuding journalists, and so why couldn't life be like the movies just this once? As it turned out, we weren't each other's "Rosebud" and we have sustained a healthy hostility to each other to this day, more than a quarter of a century later.

But that still isn't the point of the anecdote. I was genuinely surprised by the appearance of the motherly woman who wrote under the byline of Pauline Kael. Then as now, Kael wrote young and sexy in a provocatively conversational style that threw me and almost everyone else off balance. The time was the early sixties, just before the Kennedy assassination, when people were still trying to come to terms with pop, camp, the Nouvelle Vague, radical chic, homosexuality, and rock and roll. Pauline exploded on the scene with a Berkeleyish bravado acquired after a stint at Pacifica with a foulmouthed call-in program. She was on the cutting edge, the vanguard, though not necessarily the avant-garde.

I was no match for her in a straight-on polemic because she championed the popular cause of anti-theory in the movies. All I could do was lick my wounds, and return to the drawing board with the encouragement of Jonas Mekas to turn out the famous 1963 issue of Film Culture with the hilariously chained Goldwyn Girls from Roman Scandals as the metaphor for the Hollywood studio system. I must confess that I had nothing to do with the cover, and that at first I couldn't see the glorious humor of it. That's how green and uptight I was.

And why shouldn't I have been? Here I was, thirty-five years old, living in Queens with my mother, never having made more than a few thousand dollars in any one year, and beset by all forms of belittlers in print from Variety to Cahiers du cinema, from Judith Crist to Claude Chabrol. I had become notorious without becoming rich and famous.

For her part, Pauline was a later starter than I was. And though everything went her way at first, and though she nurtured an impressive array of acolytes in movie-reviewing berths around the country, she soon found herself alienated from a large part of the cultural establishment that had initially embraced her as the scourge of the New Seriousness in Film Criticism.

Hence, the years Corliss describes in such glowing terms were no picnic for the people like Pauline and me grappling for a livelihood in the critical trenches. Who won? Who lost? Who knows? Who cares? The name of the game has become survival. Eugene Archer, with whom I began my endless adventure in film scholarship in 1954, died in a Los Angeles bathroom in the midst of preparing his first university course after a disastrous attempt to break into movie production in Paris. George Morris, one of my most dedicated auteurist allies, died in Texas from AIDS. Tom Allen, my dear friend and collaborator, and the man-more than any other-who dragged me screaming into the new horror genres and thus broadened my politique, died of a heart attack two years ago. But the dead are always with us, and auteurism continues evolving as a collective statement of many individual tastes in many countries.

am not singling out Corliss, Ebert, and Thomson for their supposed slights to the contemporary applicability of auteurist doctrine. As an allegedly outmoded auteurist, I am the frequent target of the arcane semioticians flaunting such secret passwords as "aggregate" (the sublime AstaireRogers song-and-dance numbers) and "diegesis" (the sappy Astaire-Rogers spoken love scenes). I hardly wish to dismiss the entire structuralist and semiotic movements of recent decades, but I often suspect semioticians in cinema of being unjustifiably delighted with "insights" comparable to that of Moliere's bourgeoisgentilhomme when he discovers that he has been speaking prose all his life.

My abiding argument with semioticians is that they simply recycle the movies discovered by the auteurists. How can Laura Mulvey, for example, gaze on the obsessive meditations of Sternberg and Hitchcock as the work of "typical" Hollywood directors? Still, I cannot quarrel with the semiotic emphasis on social contexts. Even when I disagree with a witty semiotician (not entirely an oxymoron) such as Umberto Eco, I respect his ability to surround his subject and still penetrate it. To the commonsensical outsider, all the specialized jargons seem pointless and pretentious. We auteurists have been persecuted too long for imputing the glories of mise-en-scene to once-unfashionable filmmakers such as Samuel Fuller and Anthony Mann (not to mention Jerry Lewis, the big joke of francophobes) for us not to look past the buzzwords of semioticians for genuinely original formulations on the cinema.

The fact that I have always been too much of a journalist for the academics, and too much of an academic for the journalists, makes me especially sensitive to the deplorable noncommunication among various critical camps now on the scene. In this context, Kael and I at our most contentious at least spoke the same language. Nowadays many film departments dominated by semioticians have virtually excommunicated all mainstream film critics from the sacraments of "discourses" and "texts." This may explain some of the malaise of Corliss, Ebert, and Thomson, all of whom still write in mainstream English.

ne must recall that the big brouhaha in film criticism took place more than three decades ago when auteurism was not yet even a word. This was a time when a new generation of cinephiles scattered in Paris, London, New York, and other cosmopolitan centers on the five continents cast off the socially conscious shackles of the thirties and forties in looking at movies. The late, great Andre Bazin was the spiritual father of this vaguely vagueish, unaligned assemblage of movie buffs; even he eventually issued paternal warnings against auteurist "excesses," though this revolutionary revisionism was never as monolithic as its detractors claimed it to be.

When I finally appeared on the scene as an underpaid guru of this "movement" in America, it was with the purpose of discussing a Bazin essay on "La Politique des Auteurs," which had appeared in the April 1957 issue of Cahiers. My own essay was entitled very tentatively- "Notes on the Auteur Theory in L962"-and appeared in Film Culture, a specialized periodical that never had more than io,ooo readers. I prefaced my argument with a Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) quotation from Either/Or: "I call these sketches Shadowgraphs, partly by the designation to remind you at once that they derive from the darker side of life, partly because like other shadowgraphs they are not directly visible. When I take a shadowgraph in my hand, it makes no impression on me, and gives me no clear conception of it. Only when I hold it up outside the wall, and now look not directly at it, but at that which appears on the wall, am I able to see it. So also with the picture which does not become perceptible until I see through the external. This external is perhaps quite unobtrusive but not until I look through it, do I discover that inner picture too delicately drawn to be outwardly visible, woven as it is of the tenderest moods of the soul."

Kierkegaard, of course, died long before the movies were born, but, like Plato's Cave, his shadowgraphs seemed to anticipate the cinema. I was fascinated also by the idea of interiority on a graphic surface. By this time I had stayed in Paris long enough during the one impoverished bohemian interlude in my life to develop a passion for paradoxes and dialectics-for the bizarre notions that Raoul Walsh was to Poussin as Joseph Losey was to Delacroix, that Hitchcock plus cinema equalled Kafka and Dostoyevsky, and that Keaton plus cinema equalled Beckett. But nothing had prepared me for the polemical fury of Pauline Kael, who denounced me and my ilk as a bunch of closet queens with a passion for Howard Hawks action movies with barechested heroes-much as if we were all auditioning for the Sal Mineo role in Rebel without a Cause.

Since that time, the word "auteur" has seldom appeared in print without being accompanied by an undertone of derisive irony. When I was introduced to a slightly inebriated Budd Schulberg at a dinner party in the Hamptons a few years ago, he sputtered and stuttered furiously at me as the supposed glorifier of "auteurs." He seemed to blame me for all the trouble he had had on the set of Wind across the Everglades with that presumptuously self-styled director-auteur Nicholas Ray. Schulberg had both produced and written the movie, but he was merely the humdrum "author" whereas Ray strutted around as the godly auteur. Hence I was presumably responsible for the financial failure of the film. What a burden for a mere theorist to bear.

When I reread the article almost thirty years later, I feel very much like Mario Puzo when he remarked that if he had known so many people were going to read The Godfather, he would have written it better. If I had known my modest piece would be reprinted so frequently, as if it were a seminal statement comparable to Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, I would have spent more time working on it-perhaps as much as thirty years, but even then I would not be ready for the last word on the subject.