Critical Mass

Anton Ego (Peter O’Toole) from “Ratatouille” Disney/Pixar

Why do we read criticism? I can think of three reasons.

1. It’s a learning experience in examining critical thinking, application of critical theory, and developing one’s unique aesthetic sensibility.

2. If I have doubts or speculation about a film, book, piece of music, food, etc., there are critics who I am familiar enough with to get an idea of whether or not any given work is going to be something I’ll like or not. It does not mean that I will feel the same way about the piece, just that I can make a decision about spending money and time on one thing as opposed to another.

3. It’s fun.

Let’s take a look at these points, particularly in regard to film criticism, since this is a cinema-oriented site.

I had to learn observational critical thinking as a young artist. At Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, we were expected to respond to works and give valid reasons for supporting our responses. Yes, in high school. This was a very large leap from writing essays in English class in middle school about assigned reading because these critiques were live and in the moment. If I recall correctly, critiques were also part of our finals, as well. 

Additionally, a similar commitment to thoroughgoing critical analysis was fostered, if not expected, in our academic classes, as well. At the same time, I was also reading lots and lots of arts criticism from across all disciplines and my mind was blown. 

From André Bazin to Pauline Kael, I kept bumping into something like a consistent tone, if not homogenous attitudes toward the filmic art. In many ways, these two couldn’t be further apart. Bazin was rigorous in his analysis with a background in philosophy and disciplined in the current trends of Lacanian psychology and mid-century Marxist theory. Kael, no less disciplined but with an equally extensive background in literature and literary criticism, had a finely sharpened critical eye; however, I think I wouldn’t be far off the mark to say that she was the much easier read.

The rise of Cahiers du Cinema in France signaled the arrival of a more or less concentrated approach to film criticism that established movies as just as worthy of serious aesthetic consideration as painting, music, dance, and the other arts. It also presaged the interrogation of what is or is not “fine art” which would eventually be central to my contemporaries in the seventies. 

As a teenager, I felt like I’d been thrown into the deep end of the pool. I played catch-up with almost every review people like Kael, Penelope Gilliat, John Simon, and some others wrote. Even where I disagreed with them, there were was an erudition that made me think increasingly about what I was encountering on screen. 

Plunging into anthologies of criticism on modern cinema, collections of analyses of the works of directors like Antonioni, Godard, Bergman, and Fellini, and whatever issues of Film Comment or Premiere I could find at the newsstand led to digging more and more into continental philosophy and really expedited my readings in phenomenology and structuralism. Like I said, my mind was blown.

Locally, in Houston, there were only a couple of critics worth reading. The late Jeff Millar at the Houston Chronicle, Eric Gerber at the Houston Post, and a little later, Joe Leydon, but in Boston? Between the Real Paper and the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Globe for more mainstream reviews, the joint was lousy with smart eggs. 

None of this is to say that I personally cared particularly for any one approach or school of thought to film crit. I didn’t really care if any given writer thought of themselves as a Foucauldian or a Freudian. If I found out that, yeah, Bazin was the shit for them, then that gave me a kind of grain of salt with which I would approach their work. It helps contextualize their contextualizations of a film for me, but mostly, if the review or analysis proved to be logical, well-reasoned, and comprehensible, then that was enough for me.

In any case, consuming criticism was less about letting other people tell me what to think than to introduce me to the immense options available for approaching all art. Given references to schools of thought and other writers, philosophers, and theorists in many of these reviews, I was given bibliographies on a regular basis and you better believe I did my level best to follow up on them. Hoo boy. 

Over any given period of time, I gravitated to favoring some critics over others and because I really did have other things to do beside reading criticism, I narrowed my pool of reviewers down to those whose writing I just liked and whose critical eyes were more or less aligned with what I saw or was looking for. Which is not to say, that at a certain point, I might find myself aghast when I disagreed with, for example, Her Holiness Pauline. 

I remember her slagging “Goodfellas” late in her career and thinking, “how can you be so out of touch?” I’m not going to hunt the review down, but she really concentrated on what she felt was Scorsese’s technical execution overwhelming the story and if I recall, she really didn’t see much in the story, at all. A decade plus earlier, I remembered her review of “Raging Bull” trafficked a bit in damning with faint praise but there, it was more tempering or balancing the review’s more positive notes. 

In fact, come to think of it, I don’t recall her particularly liking “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or very much of the new Hollywood Film Brats’ works. I remembered being particularly disappointed by her take on Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander”. She lamented that Bergman cured of his neuroses just wasn’t very interesting. I still liked the review, the wording, and Kael’s wry dry wit. But by that time, I realized that she was more conservative than I would have thought. 

Besides, there were writers like Owen Glieberman, Peter Keough, Gerald Peary, Gerber, and Leydon to read who, while not always as replete with literary references or philosophical deconstruction, were aces in terms of getting to the point and with acute stylistic chops. In other words, they were also fun to read in a way that even Kael was not. 

Of course, the figure looming in the background here is the late, great Roger Ebert. I really hadn’t read him much prior to the arrival of “At the Movies” on PBS, the show he co-hosted with his Chicago rival/colleague, Gene Siskel. They were both joys to watch, but when I’d pick up a Chicago Tribune, it was clearly Ebert who had the mastery of the written word (and don’t misunderstand, Siskel was no slouch by a long shot.) 

If writers of the generation preceding Ebert were more likely to be able to articulate their unique and specific-to-them aesthetic-critical approach or theory (and Ebert could, too, of course), Ebert and many of his contemporaries are more likely to simply write well and while as critically astute as their predecessors, I think they were more likely to let a film stand or fall on its own merits. 

Which raises the question of just how valuable or important is criticism, in and of itself? Given my three points, I think these speak for themselves. The first point, I genuinely believe is extremely useful. Reading and studying criticism buttressed by sound theory and filled out with reasoned argument - of any subject - is a lesson in itself of how to approach thinking for oneself. 

No one should ever agree with anyone all the time, but we should be able to appreciate a well-reasoned argument and explication and profit from it in terms of how we examine and question our own thinking. Indeed, it’s harder to find anyone who will admit to having been wrong or learned something - anything at all - and changed or grew as a result. I’m not writing this as an observation on arts criticism, but certainly, elected officials, representatives and some celebrities seem to have difficulty accepting that their approaches are ill-informed/wrong/feeble/worse. 

Consequently, critical study helps identify arguments and policies that are suspect and/or should be scrutinized more closely. If nothing else, Pauline Kael didn’t like bullshit and was clear about that in her writing. So, too, was Ebert. And so, too, are a number of writers currently, whose work I still make a concerted effort to follow. I’ll append a list below.

Personally, what I write here is less about making any definitive critical statement than sharing what I found in watching any given film. I love watching films (I love making videos, too, but that’s a whole other thing). It follows that I like to share what I enjoy about a film (or sometimes not). 

It is my hope that what I write is honest. There are times when I feel called on to just write a solid, straight-up response to something; there are other times when a work requires more attention and thoughtful reply (hence, footnotes and bibliographies; I like to share my resources, too).

The list that follows are writers whose works resonate with me for any number of reasons. The things they have in common are a genuine love of the medium, a deep understanding of cinema both as an art and as an experience, and they are all compelling writers. I hope you check out some of these folks; they’re pretty great.

Outlets, journals, sites I regularly visit

Archived

The Dissolve. For year, this was possibly the single best destination for film criticism online. Formed from a nucleus of the film reviewers from The Onion’s A.V. Club, it offered themed series, long form essays, and just plain rock-solid reviews. A number of the names above were the founders and have since moved on to other outlets or started their own platforms.

Links:

Yes, in some cases I am linking to Wikipedia entries. While the articles are interesting and solid, definitely follow the “External Links” and references to primary sources to get a taste of the works themselves.

Bazin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/André_Bazin

Kael: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Kael

Cahiers du Cinema (French): https://www.cahiersducinema.com

Joe Leydon:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Leydon

Penelope Gilliat: ;while she wrote for other publications, it is her New Yorker Magazine work that takes pride of place. https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/penelope-gilliatt

Jeff Millar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Millar

Peter Travers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Travers; https://www.rollingstone.com

Roger Ebert: https://www.rogerebert.com

Ty Burr: do yourself a favor and subscribe to Ty Burr’s Watch List at Substack: https://tyburrswatchlist.substack.com

Gerald Peary: yepyepyep: http://www.geraldpeary.com

Owen Glieberman: https://variety.com/author/owen-gleiberman/

Peter Keough: Lately, publishing at The Arts Fuse (https://artsfuse.org/?s=Peter+Keough); see MuckRack for more (https://muckrack.com/peter-keough)

Steve Vineberg: Critics at Large is another great rabbit hole of a site to go down: https://www.criticsatlarge.ca.    

The Onion AV Club (now pretty much just The AV Club)/The Dissolve: https://thedissolve.com

Regarding the core that made up The Dissolve, most of them came from the Onion’s AV Club and since the dissolution of The Dissolve, some returned to The AV Club only to disperse with the latest corporate buy-out and relocation of the offices to Los Angeles from Chicago. These days, I can only cautiously recommend The AV Club. In some cases, they seem to be experimenting with longer form essays and reviews, but the writing is so variable and in some cases, poor, that I am at pains to support it. That said, you can find much of the work from a number of the authors located below by searching for them at The AV Club/https://www.avclub.com.

Keith Phipps, Scott Tobias (with Keith Phipps at The Reveal: https://thereveal.substack.com),, Noel Murray (https://www.latimes.com/people/noel-murray), Nathan Rabin (at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place aka  https://www.nathanrabin.com), Genevieve Koski (deputy TV editor/writer at Vulture: https://www.vulture.com/author/genevieve-koski/), A.A. (Alex) Dowd (https://www.digitaltrends.com/users/adowd/), Tasha Robinson (https://www.polygon.com), Sam Adams (at Slate: https://slate.com/author/sam-adams), Mike D’Angelo (at Panix: https://www.panix.com/~dangelo/), and Katie Rife (try her at Vuture: https://www.vulture.com/author/katie-rife/ or at IndieWire: https://www.indiewire.com/author/katie-rife/). Sadly, I can’t find any one link to Ignatiy Vishnevetsky; he has written a fair amount this year at different outlets. Start with the Wikipedia entry on him and move on from there. He is definitely worth exploring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatiy_Vishnevetsky)