Martin Scorsese - The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema

The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema
by Martin Scorsese
The New York Review of Books



...

Frank Capra said, “Film is a disease.” I caught the disease early on. I felt it whenever I walked up to the ticket booth with my mother or my father or my brother. You’d go through the doors, up the thick carpet, past the popcorn stand that had that wonderful smell—then to the ticket taker, and then in some of the old theaters there would be another set of doors with little windows and you’d get a glimpse of something magical happening up there on the screen, something special. And as we entered, for me it was like entering a sacred space, a kind of sanctuary where the living world around me seemed to be recreated and played out.

What was it about cinema? What was so special about it? I think I’ve discovered some of my own answers to that question a little bit at a time over the years.

First of all, there’s light.

Light is at the beginning of cinema, of course. It’s fundamental—because cinema is created with light, and it’s still best seen projected in dark rooms, where it’s the only source of light. But light is also at the beginning of everything. Most creation myths start with darkness, and then the real beginning comes with light—which means the creation of forms. Which leads to distinguishing one thing from another, and ourselves from the rest of the world. Recognizing patterns, similarities, differences, naming things—interpreting the world. Metaphors—seeing one thing “in light of” something else. Becoming “enlightened.” Light is at the core of who we are and how we understand ourselves.

And then, there’s movement…

I remember when I was about five or six, someone projected a 16mm cartoon and I was allowed to look inside the projector. I saw these little still images passing mechanically through the gate at a very steady rate of speed. In the gate they were upside down, but they were moving, and on the screen they came out right side up, moving. At least there was the sensation of movement. But it was more than that. Something clicked, right then and there. “Pieces of time”—that’s how James Stewart defined movies in a conversation with Peter Bogdanovich. That wonder I felt when I saw these little figures move—that’s what Laurence Olivier feels when he watches those first moving images in that scene from The Magic Box.

The desire to make images move, the need to capture movement, seemed to be with us 30,000 years ago in the cave paintings at Chauvet—in one image a bison appears to have multiple sets of legs, and perhaps that was the artist’s way of creating the impression of movement. I think this need to recreate movement is a mystical urge. It’s an attempt to capture the mystery of who and what we are, and then to contemplate that mystery.

...

Does cinema really begin with Muybridge? Should we go all the way back to the cave paintings? In his novel Joseph and His Brothers, Thomas Mann writes:

The deeper we sound, the further down into the lower world of the past we probe and press, the more do we find that the earliest foundations of humanity, its history and culture, reveal themselves unfathomable.

All beginnings are unfathomable—the beginning of human history, the beginning of cinema.

A film by the Lumière brothers of a train arriving at a station in France is commonly recognized as the first publicly projected film. It was shot in 1895. When you watch it, it really is 1895. The way they dress and the way they move—it’s now and it’s then, at the same time. And that’s the third aspect of cinema that makes it so uniquely powerful—it’s the element of time. Again, pieces of time.

When we made the movie Hugo (2011), we went back and tried to recreate that first screening, when people were so startled by the image of an oncoming train that they jumped back. They thought the train was going to hit them.

When we studied the Lumière film, we could see right away that it was very different from the Edison films. The Lumière brothers weren’t just setting up the camera to record events or scenes. This film is composed. When you study it, you can see how carefully they placed the camera, the thought that went into what was in the frame and what was left out of the frame, the distance between the camera and the train, the height of the camera, the angle of the camera—what’s interesting is that if the camera had been placed even a little bit differently, the audience probably wouldn’t have reacted the way it did.

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Roger Ebert: 1942 - 2013

The New York Times: Roger Ebert, Popular Film Critic, Dies at 70

In 1967, new in my job at the Sun-Times, I walked into the Clark Theater and saw Persona. I didn't have a clue how to write about it. I began with a simply description: 'At first the screen is black. Then, very slowly, an area of dark grey transforms the screen into blinding white. This is light projected through film onto the screen, the first basic principle of the movies. The light flickers and jumps around, finally resolving itself into a crude cartoon of a fat lady.' And so on. I was discovering a method that would work with impenetrable films: Focus on what you saw and how it affected you. Don't fake it.

Chicago Sun-Times -- Roger Ebert dead: Film critic had the soul of a poet

Sound on Sight -- The Artful Roger: A Thank You To Roger Ebert

Matte Hjort: Film ... has an extraordinary capacity to expand our reality

Film matters, among other things, because it has an extraordinary capacity to expand our reality, to deepen our moral sensibility, and to shape our self-understandings, sometimes by moving us closer to cultures, problems, and realities that are distant from those we know well. That said, I think it is far from being the case that all films matter. The task, I think, for film scholars in the future will be to help to ensure that films that genuinely do matter continue to get made, and that they receive the attention they deserve.

Matte Hjort, "Film ... has an extraordinary capacity to expand our reality." Why Does Film Matter (Intellect Books, 2008)

Current: Sight & Sound Poll 2012 -- Tokyo Story

Sight & Sound Poll 2012: Tokyo Story
Current

Not only was Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story ranked the third greatest film ever made in the critics’ poll (right below Vertigo and Citizen Kane), it came in first place in the directors’ poll. It’s clear: filmmakers continue to be influenced by Ozu, whose astonishing insights into the human condition are reflected in all his works. Tokyo Story, though, has long been held in particular esteem. Its every elegantly composed shot contains some poignant truth. Following an aging couple from the country as they visit their grown children in the city, only to be disillusioned by their offspring’s neglectful treatment of them, it’s a perfect distillation of Ozu’s pet theme of generational divide. Among its many filmmaking champions was the late Lindsay Anderson (If….), who in this 1993 interview (part of the documentary Talking with Ozu, available on our release of Tokyo Story) reminisces about first encountering Ozu in the fifties, thanks to a screening of Tokyo Story, and discusses the profound effect it had on him and on film itself.

To Read the rest and to watch video clips

Dennis Lim: Time Has Been Kind to Heaven's Gate

Time Has Been Kind to Heaven's Gate
by Dennis Lim
The New York Times



...

Lee Kline, the technical director at Criterion, said, “It wasn’t an option to go back to the original negative because that was what was cut down to the short version.” The original 70-millimeter prints were also in poor shape. So in a costly, complicated process, the restoration team scanned each color separation negative individually and recombined them.

“Heaven’s Gate” may be a subject Mr. Cimino has avoided for years, but once he gets going, the floodgates open. He spoke fondly of the performances of Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken and Isabelle Huppert, which he feels have never gotten their due. And he recalled the genesis of the project: Researching the history of barbed wire and the cattle industry, he came upon an incident known as the Johnson County War involving cattlemen, hired killers and local ranchers. He described the epilogue — the weary hero, James Averill (Mr. Kristofferson), on a yacht off the New England coast — as “a prelude to ‘The Great Gatsby,’ ” with Averill as the mogul awaiting the arrival of the young James Gatz.

Mr. Cimino also recalled his obsessive quest for authenticity that led many to characterize “Heaven’s Gate” as a runaway production. (First budgeted at less than $10 million, the film grew to a cost of $35 million, or $44 million including promotional costs, according to Mr. Bach’s book. Mr. Cimino maintains that it was “all in $32 million.”) As he put it, “Everything was problematical”: the locomotive that had to be transported to the Montana location from a Denver museum; a horse-drawn buggy whose spokes and upholstery had to be made in different states. “The movie could not be made today, even if you threw $300 million at it,” he said. “All of that is being lost. The wagons don’t exist, the skills are gone.”

Present-day viewers may well find that time has been kind to “Heaven’s Gate,” which plays more than ever like a fittingly bleak apotheosis of the New Hollywood, an eccentric yet elegiac rethinking of the myths of the West and the western, with an uncommonly blunt take on class in America. (“It’s getting dangerous to be poor in this country,” someone says. The rejoinder: “It always was.”) But this defiant last gasp of the downbeat ’70s, opening two weeks after Ronald Reagan was elected president, was plainly a movie at odds with its time.

Reached at his home in Hawaii, Mr. Kristofferson said he believes the themes of the film, with its grim view of American capitalism, were what made it so unpalatable. “It was a political assassination,” he said. He recalled getting word that Reagan’s first attorney general, William French Smith, had told studio heads that “there should be no more pictures made with a negative view of American history.”

Mr. Kristofferson, sounding more rueful than bitter, said that the reception to “Heaven’s Gate” knocked him off the Hollywood A-list for good. “I never really recovered from that,” he said, but he acknowledged that it was worse for Mr. Cimino. “It completely destroyed him.”

Mr. Cimino continued to work, albeit infrequently; he has made four features since “Heaven’s Gate,” the last one, “Sunchaser,” in 1996. A painter who began his directing career in advertising, he said that at home in Los Angeles he rarely watches movies now (and prefers to reread Pushkin and Flaubert). But he does have a film project in mind, which he hopes to shoot in digital soon.

Ms. Carelli, who was with Mr. Cimino in Venice, said that while there remain misconceptions about the making of “Heaven’s Gate,” “I don’t want to revisit old erroneous stories and try to correct them.” She added, “Now the film finally speaks for itself, and it has the final word.”

To Read the Entire Article

More Resources:

The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate

Manohla Darghis and A.O. Scott: Film Is Dead? Long Live Movies - How Digital Is Changing the Nature of Movies

Film Is Dead? Long Live Movies: How Digital Is Changing the Nature of Movies
by Manohla Darghis and A.O. Scott
The New York Times

IN the beginning there was light that hit a strip of flexible film mechanically running through a camera. For most of movie history this is how moving pictures were created: light reflected off people and things would filter through a camera and physically transform emulsion. After processing, that light-kissed emulsion would reveal Humphrey Bogart chasing the Maltese Falcon in shimmering black and white.

More and more, though, movies are either partly or entirely digital constructions that are created with computers and eventually retrieved from drives at your local multiplex or streamed to the large and small screens of your choice. Right before our eyes, motion pictures are undergoing a revolution that may have more far reaching, fundamental impact than the introduction of sound, color or television. Whether these changes are scarcely visible or overwhelmingly obvious, digital technology is transforming how we look at movies and what movies look like, from modestly budgeted movies shot with digital still cameras to blockbusters laden with computer-generated imagery. The chief film (and digital cinema) critics of The New York Times, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, look at the stuff dreams are increasingly made of.

A. O. SCOTT: In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1986 movie “Keep Up Your Right” a movie director (played by Mr. Godard) declares that “the toughest thing in movies is carrying the cans.” Those once-ubiquitous, now increasingly quaint metal boxes contained the reels of exposed celluloid stock that were the physical substance of the art form. But nowadays the easiest thing in digital movies might be carrying the hard drive or uploading the data onto the server. Those heavy, bulky canisters belong to the mechanical past, along with the whir of the projectors and the shudder of the sprockets locking into their holes.

Should we mourn, celebrate or shrug? Predigital artifacts — typewriters and record players, maybe also books and newspapers — are often beautiful, but their charm will not save them from obsolescence. And the new gizmos have their own appeal, to artists as well as consumers. Leading manufacturers are phasing out the production of 35-millimeter cameras. Within the next few years digital projection will reign not only at the multiplexes, but at revival and art houses too. According to an emerging conventional wisdom, film is over. If that is the case, can directors still be called filmmakers? Or will that title be reserved for a few holdouts, like Paul Thomas Anderson, whose new film, “The Master,” was shot in 70 millimeter? It’s not as if our job has ever been to review the coils of celluloid nestled in their cans; we write about the stories and the pictures recorded on that stock. But the shift from photochemical to digital is not simply technical or semantic. Something very big is going on.

MANOHLA DARGIS: Film isn’t dead yet, despite the rush to bury it, particularly by the big studios. Film does not have to disappear. Film isn’t broken — it works wonderfully well and has done so for a century. There is nothing inevitable or natural about the end of film, no matter how seductive the digital technologies and gadgets that are transforming cinema. A 16-millimeter film camera is plenty cool. A 35-millimeter film image can look sublime. There’s an underexamined technological determinism that shapes discussions about the end of film and obscures that the material is being phased out not because digital is superior, but because this transition suits the bottom line.

The end of film isn’t a just a technological imperative; it’s also about economics (including digital rights management). In 2002 seven major studios formed the Digital Cinema Initiatives (one later dropped out), the purpose of which was “to establish and document voluntary specifications for an open architecture for digital cinema that ensures a uniform and high level of technical performance, reliability and quality control.” What these initiatives effectively did was outline the technological parameters that everyone who wants to do business with the studios — from software developers to hardware manufacturers — must follow. As the theorist David Bordwell writes, “Theaters’ conversion from 35-millemeter film to digital presentation was designed by and for an industry that deals in mass output, saturation releases and quick turnover.” He adds, “Given this shock-and-awe business plan, movies on film stock look wasteful.”

To Read the Rest of the Conversation

Jim Emerson: The great movies (almost) nobody voted for

The great movies (almost) nobody voted for
By Jim Emerson
Scanners

OK, this is where it really gets interesting. Forget the consensus Top 50 Greatest Movies of All Time; let's get personal. Sight & Sound has now published the top 250 titles in its 2012 international critics poll, the full list of more than 2,000 movies mentioned, and all the individual lists of the 845 participating critics, academics, archivists and programmers, along with any accompanying remarks they submitted. I find this to be the most captivating aspect of the survey, because it reminds us of so many terrific movies we may have forgotten about, or never even heard of. If you want to seek out surprising, rewarding movies, this is a terrific place to start looking. For the past few days I've been taking various slices at the "data" trying to find statistical patterns, and to glean from the wealth of titles some treasures I'd like to heartily recommend -- and either re-watch or catch up with myself.

I know we're supposed to consider the S&S poll a feature film "canon" -- a historically influential decennial event since 1952, but just one of many. I don't disagree with Greg Ferrara at TCM's Movie Morlocks ("Ranking the Greats: Please Make it Stop") when he says that limiting ballots to ten all-time "best" (or "favorite," "significant," "influential" titles is incredibly limiting. That's why I think perusing at the critics' personal lists, the Top 250 (cited by seven critics or more) and the full list of 2,045 films mentioned is more enjoyable pastime.

It's wise to remember that, although the top of the poll may at first glance look relatively conservative or traditional, there's a tremendous diversity in the individual lists. Even the top vote-getter, "Vertigo," was chosen by less than one quarter of the participants.

I guess if you really wanted to make a "boring" list, you could start by asking a bunch of people what films they felt were most significant landmarks and they'd feel compelled to check off the usual suspects. You'd probably get results resembling the syllabus for an early intro-to-film-history course: "The Birth of a Nation," "Battleship Potemkin" ( #11), "Metropolis" (#36), "The Gold Rush" (#154), "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (#9), "Rules of the Game" (#4), "Citizen Kane" (#2), "Bicycle Thieves" (#33), "Rome: Open City" (#183), "Rashomon" (#24), "The Seventh Seal" (#93), "8 1/2" (#10) and other canonical classics that were officially endorsed as standard "texts" in the formative days of university cinema studies departments. Not that there's anything wrong with acknowledging such cinematic landmarks -- most of these also happen to be indisputably great movies.

Scott Tobias ("The radical visions in Sight & Sound ") addresses the complaints raised in some quarters that the list is safe and "stodgy" because there aren't enough post-1960s movies on the list:

But that argument is wrong, for two seemingly contradictory reasons: The list should be stodgy, and the list isn't stodgy in the least.... [T]he stability of the Sight & Sound list is a big part of what gives it value: For film critics and historians--and would-be critics and casual historians--the poll is the compass pointing north, the absolute baseline for an education on the medium. Every critic who submitted a ballot deviated from the Top 10 either partially or wholly--just as any film fanatic heads down their own personal tributaries--but the consensus of the many has given the study of film a useful foundation. A radically altered Sight & Sound list would be weak and destabilizing; breaking into the Top 10 should be slow and carefully considered. For now, just losing "Citizen Kane" [to second place, for the first time in 50 years] is radical enough, like having to orbit around a different sun.

Now here's the second point: Many of the films on this list are fucking crazy. If you can imagine yourself going back in time and seeing any of these films for the first time, nearly all of them are mini-revolutions, breaking so firmly with what people expected cinema to be that they were often misunderstood or hated. There's nothing "stodgy" about "The Rules Of The Game," which had to be removed and drastically re-edited due to mass outrage and a government ban. "Tokyo Story" and "The Passion Of Joan Of Arc" violate the most basic rules of how a film is supposed to be shot, the former by breaking "the 180-degree plane" and the latter by abandoning spatial relationships altogether. "2001: A Space Odyssey" attempts nothing short of accounting for existence itself--and doesn't even get to the space part until after a long prologue about a breakthrough in ape evolution. "The Searchers" remains an absolutely chilling rebuke to what we expect from John Wayne, John Ford, and the American Western itself. If you were to add, say, "Pulp Fiction," to the list, that would be a relatively stodgy choice in this company, despite being a sensation in itself.

To Read the Rest of the Essay and to Read Emerson's List of the 25 Favorite Movies That Nobody Voted for in the 2012 Sight & Sound Critics Poll

British Film Institute: The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time

The British Film Institute conducts a global poll of critics and filmmakers every decade and for the first time in a long, long time, Orson Welles Citizen Kane is not the number #1 film. To check out the 50 films that made the list and to see what film is now #1: The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Adam Cook, Mike Archibald and Josh Timmerman: The Big Murk - A Conversation About Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises

The Big Murk: A Conversation About Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight Rises"
by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Adam Cook, Mike Archibald and Josh Timmerman
Notebook (MUBI)

The Dark Knight Rises: a big pop-cultural event, the epicenter of a tragedy that has (unfortunately, inadvertently) become 24-hour news cycle fodder, an illustration of what is (and isn't) meant by the word "ambitious" in today's Hollywood, a much-anticipated sequel to a film that's popularly seen as the superhero-flick-to-end-all-superhero-flicks, a major talking point in the ongoing discussion of what film criticism means to audiences at large. It's easy to forget that it is, first and foremost, a movie. And as a movie, it happens to be a mess—long, loud, and full of seemingly contradictory ideas and plot threads.

In the following exchange, Adam Cook, Mike Archibald, Josh Timmermann, and I try to make sense of the film, its politics, and its director.

***

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: Positives first. I liked the first half of the film the most. It has all of these different threads of intrigue going on: Jim Gordon hunting criminals down drainage pipes, Bane putting together his master plan, Bruce Wayne living as a doomed-romantic recluse in his mansion, Selina Kyle's burglaries, corporate skulduggery. I like the crazy-quilt way in which Nolan uses IMAX, switching aspect ratios shot to shot. I like the Revolutionary Tribunal-style courtroom scenes with Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow presiding as judge, even though the narrative context within which they appear leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I like the image—almost Monty Python material—of policemen living in sewers, huddling together, keeping their uniforms clean for the day when they can step out into the daylight again and arrest people. In other words, I like the silliest, cartooniest, most out-there things about the film. I like the detailing. The grand design is a totally different matter.

The three most common complaints about Christopher Nolan's movies that you're likely to hear are: (1) they have a shoddy grasp of space and time, despite always being centered around chronologies and intercut action; (2) they use political issues and reference-points and take contradictory stances on them (this point applies only to The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises); and (3) most of them use personal traumas (more often than not, Nolan's "dead wife" motif, which appears twice in The Dark Knight Rises) and public tragedies as plot points, but have no sense of the emotional. I think Nolan's best movies are the ones that turn points 1 & 3 into strengths; to me, the appeal of The Prestige, my personal favorite of his films, rests in its which-story-within-a-story-is-being-told? spatial slipperiness and its coldness. In The Dark Knight Rises, however, all three of these points are liabilities.

Since it's specific to Nolan's Batman films, I'd like to start with point 2: the politics. I know that for some people, the ending of The Dark Knight was a big problem; it appears to celebrate surveillance and the necessity of lying to the general public for their good (through the Joker / Batman / Harvey Dent narrative thread) while at the same time preaching about the general goodness of people and the ability of a group to make the right decision (the "two boats, two detonators" dilemma).

The Dark Knight Rises is even more self-contradictory. The images of this film are constantly cancelling each other out. There is Bane's attack on the stock exchange, while plays out as an Occupy-era revenge fantasy—and yet, of course, Bane is the bad guy. Group solidarity is celebrated (the marching policemen, for example) and many jabs are taken at wealth and business, yet the hero is a lone billionaire. Batman operates outside the law, yet law enforcement is fetishized. Scarecrow's revolutionary court is presented as a sort of nightmare—yet it rightly convicts a slimy villain. You have the suggestion (which I actually think is a smart move on Nolan's part) that The Dark Knight's "print the legend" ending was a bad idea—and yet when the Joseph Gordon Levitt character essentially repeats the same "lie to give them hope" move late in the film (to a busload of orphans, no less!), it's presented as the right thing to do. Every image seems charged for maximum political impact—with references to the images and words of the French Revolution, fascist Italy, the Bush administration, the War on Terror, the Occupy movement—but there is nothing like a coherent ideology. Nolan strikes me as either apathetic—using whatever ideology fits for any given scene—or politically schizophrenic.

To Read the Rest of the Conversation

J. Hoberman: The Single Antidote to Thoughts of Suicide -- Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s American friends

The Single Antidote to Thoughts of Suicide: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s American friends
by J. Hoberman
Moving Image Source



...

My thanks for inviting me to participate in this event as well as facilitating that participation by having this part of the program in a foreign language, English. I hope I won’t offend you if I begin by observing that for an American of my generation, born shortly after World War II, the sound of conversational German emanating from the screen was uncanny and even menacing, a vehicle for barked Gestapo torturers or sneering East German spies. As late as 1976, Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris would cite "a commercial jinx against German-language films in the New York area, at least partly for reasons that are too painfully obvious to mention."

"Jinx," which connotes "bad luck," is too coy a word to account for this provincialism, as is the reference to the New York area. The German language was stigmatized by powerful negative associations particularly but not exclusively among Jews and political leftists. German silent cinema was enshrined but the entirety of German talkies was reduced to a single letter M, which also happened to be a movie about the worst sort of human monster, a serial child killer. M opened up on the void and there was nothing like it…until Fassbinder. He dispelled the jinx.

I’m talking from the perspective of a civilian filmgoer rather than a professional movie critic. I did not review any of the movies I’ll be citing. In fact, the first thing I ever wrote about Fassbinder was an obituary for a no-longer extant journal, American Film. But I did follow Fassbinder’s American career from the cheap seats. I saw The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, The Merchant of Four Seasons, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Fox and His Friends more or less in that order in the mid-’70s when I was in my mid-twenties. What I remember impressing me was their strange affect. The language was part of it but, more generally, it was unclear whether the movies were funny or sad. They were certainly not bittersweet. There was a lugubrious quality that was also disconcertingly, irresistibly comic.

Not understanding the language or appreciating the context can sharpen other forms of attention. I was struck by Thomas Elsaesser’s comment [in the preceding presentation] that Fassbinder seldom included the German landscape because one of the things that initially impressed me about his films was their emptied-out, blandly paranoid urban settings. I thought these were a humorous invention until I spent a few days in Frankfurt in 1979. Then I discovered that these stylizations were actually a form of documentary truth. [silence]

Now, Fassbinder was not entirely unique. Between 1967-71, which is to say at the height of the ’60s, the New York Film Festival showed nine German-language features, three by Werner Herzog, two each by Alexander Kluge and Jean-Marie Straub, one by Volker Schlöndorff and one by Fassbinder. I did see most of these. Kluge appeared to be a more pedantic Godard, Straub seemed a lighter Bresson. Herzog was too freakish to be anything other than himself—definitely strange but not necessarily German—which is to say that the dwarfs were more striking than the language they spoke. In terms of the so-called New German Cinema, Fassbinder was something of a late addition, although Susan Sontag would later maintain that New York Film Festival director Richard Roud turned down her suggestion to show Fassbinder’s first feature Love is Colder Than Death.

Fassbinder made his debut two years later at the 1971 New York Film Festival with Recruits in Ingolstadt. Response was dismissive, even hostile. The lone exception was the New York Times lead critic Vincent Canby, whose review linked Fassbinder’s direction to "the methods and the manner of early Brecht" (a good and very fashionable German whose name was strategically dropped in the NYFF blurb). Canby deemed Recruits to be "an oddly unfocused satire but one that has many lovely moments….The movie fails, but it’s a failure of concept, not of intelligence, nor of style and performance." In sort, he recognized something.

To Read the Entire Presentation

Jonathan Kirshner: When Critics Mattered -- Kael, Ebert, and ’70s Film

When Critics Mattered: Kael, Ebert, and ’70s Film
by Jonathan Kirshner
Boston Review

The years from the late 1960s through the middle of the 1970s were remarkable ones for American movies. In the words of critic David Thompson, it was “the decade when movies mattered.”

With the collapse of the draconian censorship regime that had imposed a strict moral code on the content of films, the decline of the studio system, and economic and demographic changes in both the industry and its audience, a window of opportunity opened for a new type of commercial film. At the same time, the content of these movies was inevitably shaped by the social and political upheavals of the era: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, and the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon presidency.

These films, filmmakers, and, implicitly, their audiences, were dubbed the “New Hollywood.” New to reflect their relative youth, but also as a nod to the foundational influence of the New European cinemas of the 1950s and 1960s; Hollywood because the makers of these personal, ambitious, arty films nevertheless hoped to return a fair profit. During this golden age, a night at the movies was still an evening’s entertainment, but it was also an invitation to discuss important works of art that were shaped by, and in dialogue with, the political, social, and philosophical issues of their times.

The New Hollywood was a cinema of moral ambiguity. The notorious Production Code Authority, in ruins by the close of 1966, had insisted on movies about right and wrong, with right winning in the end. By contrast, in the world portrayed by the “’70s film” (and in tune with the tenor of the times) choices are not always easy and obvious (Klute, The King of Marvin Gardens), authorities and institutions are compromised (Medium Cool, The Friends of Eddie Coyle), and, finally, the “hero” rarely wins (Chinatown, Night Moves). Individually ’70s films offer character-driven explorations of troubled, imperfect protagonists and complex interpersonal relationships, with no obvious solutions or clean resolutions proffered (or expected). Collectively they reflect a thriving and identifiable film culture—movies that “don’t supply reassuring smiles or self-righteous messages,” but share “a new openminded interest in examining American experience,” as the critic Pauline Kael put it at the time. “Our filmmakers seem to be on a quest—looking to understand what has been shaping our lives.”

These were movies to talk about, and fight about, and accordingly it was also the decade when the critics mattered. An ambitious cohort of film critics, shaped by new sensibilities, expectations, and experiences, led a tumultuous public debate about the movies, their meaning, and their relationship with society. Of these critics, the argumentative, bohemian Kael was the most influential. A singular voice in the Berkeley film scene during the 1950s, Kael made her way East supported by a Guggenheim fellowship and then landed a job at McCall’s, from which she was fired soon after dismissing The Sound of Music (1965) as “a sugarcoated lie.” A brief stint at The New Republic also ended unhappily, but in 1968 she would land, and remain, at The New Yorker, having established her reputation with an elaborate, breathtaking defense of Bonnie and Clyde (1967). That review fills out twenty exhilarating pages of her new Selected Writings, and it remains well worth reading (and re-reading). Kael wrote in a distinct, jazz-inflected style, offering a personal, emotional reaction to what she saw on the screen. Her reviews were steeped in the rich context of film history, but, in contrast to the stentorian lectures of many authoritative critics, Kael told you what she felt, and if she didn’t feel it, it wasn’t worth seeing. (Her first collection of reviews was called I Lost it at the Movies.)

Bonnie and Clyde, in what would become a watershed moment in the emergence of the New Hollywood, was originally dismissed and buried by establishment critics as a brutal, immoral farce. With its outlaw heroes, rule-breaking portrayal of bloody violence, and counter-culture sensibilities, Bonnie and Clyde was particularly offensive to critics such as Bosley Crowther, the enormously influential guardian of good taste at the New York Times, who famously trashed the film in print not once but three times. Kael, in dissent, opened her review with a question: “How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?” For Kael, “Bonnie and Clyde brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about.” It is a film that “upsets people,” even viewers who pride themselves in maintaining an emotional distance from what they see on the screen. But “Bonnie and Clyde, by making us care about the robber lovers, has put the sting back in death.”

To Read the Rest of the Essay