Posted on 07/27/2010 11:38:36 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
When you love a given film and the guy next to you doesn’t, what do you think? Who cares, right? After all, taste is subjective. Newsreal Blog managing editor David Swindle and I often discuss and debate films we’ve seen. Now, I’ve studied film formally for years. Does this make my opinion more important? Perhaps for some academics, but does this make Swindle’s opinion useless? Most certainly not.
My view of film is often based in academia and film history while Swindle’s is based in the comparison to other contemporary films. Both views are justified and have their place. We represent two different possible approaches to film criticism. There can be scholarly/historical criticism as well as journalistic/populist criticism. The latter is a much more useful approach when it comes to mainstream film criticism. The fact is anyone who takes their film viewing experience seriously is capable of having a voice as a critic. However, for some people like New York film critic Armond White, it is not that simple. For White, if a critic disagrees with him (especially if they don’t have a PhD in film studies) they are likely not very smart and should not continue writing criticism. White’s elitism has provoked him to attack fellow critic Roger Ebert, mostly because he doesn’t have a PhD in film studies. What White fails to recognize is that Ebert is writing film criticism for a newspaper, not submitting to a film journal. Ebert’s audience is not looking for the ideas presented in a doctoral thesis.
White attacks Ebert :
"I do think it is fair to say that Roger Ebert destroyed film criticism. Because of the wide and far reach of television, he became an example of what a film critic does for too many people. And what he did simply was not criticism. It was simply blather. And it was a kind of purposefully dishonest enthusiasm for product, not real criticism at all…I think he does NOT have the training. I think he simply had the position. I think he does NOT have the training. I’VE got the training. And frankly, I don’t care how that sounds."
White feels that due to his academic studies in film that he is a pedigreed film critic. This is wrong, he is a pedigreed film scholar, and there is a difference. While I spend a lot of time writing essays for graduate classes, I try to change my tone and focus when writing a film review. People reading film reviews aren’t looking for a journal entry and Ebert knows this. Inside Movies responded to the statements from White and broke down the differences between types of critics:
"The critics may quibble over those labels, but for this discussion, an elitist is a critic who believes his primary responsibility is to educate readers so they may better understand the film medium while a populist, using his knowledge and tastes, sets out to explain his responses to films. One assumes the voice of authority; the other assumes the voice of a confidant."
When we think of the pioneers of today’s film criticism who comes to mind? Certainly Pauline Kael (not a scholar) who was a major inspiration for both Ebert and White. Going further we can find a more scholarly approach to modern film criticism such as the work of Andrew Sarris and Robin Wood, but for most people reading film reviews they prefer the confidant over the elitist academic. Unfortunately, White has neglected the useful purpose of critics like Ebert.
It does not take a PhD to watch or understand a movie. Therefore, why can’t someone passionate about the art comment on it formally? White’s animosity to a less scholarly approach are ironic because many film scholars actually do appreciate the work Ebert has done. It is good to have useful non-academic film writing to balance out all of the dense articles that frequent film journals. For example David Bordwell, Professor Emeritus from the University of Wisconsin who has many influential books in the field of film studies, wrote a forward to Ebert’s 2006 book Awake in the Dark. Bordwell writes:
"Roger Ebert has blended prodigious energy, keen judgment, wide knowledge, probing insights, and a sharp sense of humor into some of the most perceptive commentary on cinema published in our time. In the tradition of George Bernard Shaw and Robert Hughes, he practices graceful and deeply informed art journalism. Some pieces he writes are ephemeral, but nothing he writes is trivial."
This is quite a complement coming from a scholar like Bordwell. One can also look at the blurbs on the back of this book from filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Robert Atlman to see that Ebert has certainly earned his platform as a film critic (whether you like him or not). Sure, in recent years his politics have become more of a threat to his credibility as a journalist, but not as a film critic. However, those movie buffs that don’t align with Ebert’s politics still have one thing in common – a deep love of film (it is this shared love that has allowed me to get along with even the most Leftist of film professors).
Just like I don’t attack Swindle’s outlook on certain films because he lacks a film degree, White shouldn’t discredit Ebert either. If someone is a good writer and serious film lover, they deserve a seat at the table. What can it hurt? Film critics are not tenured professors, who still have their journals and graduate seminars where the semantic debates rage on. If all reviews were written by snobby academics, no one would read them except other snobby academics. People like Ebert have helped bring film discussions into the mainstream for everyone to enjoy, we should at least be grateful for that.
No surprises there.
If you say so. I can’t trust any critic who gives bad reviews to both Inception and Toy Story 3.
Living in Oklahoma I know plenty of conservatives who love Nolan movies too. The most famous of which is notable to most people for having quite the conservative bent.
‘Eve’s Bayou’ and ‘Dark City’ as Best of the year is fairly surprising. I don’t agree but its not expected...
A lot of the classic old school film critics (aka film snobs) hate Ebert largely because of his unabashed fondness for Russ Meyer. It’s important in that crowd to not like movies that are fun, for them a film must be “art” to be good and in order to be “art” it can’t be entertaining. The fact that most Americans know who Ebert is and can’t name a single “serious” critic just irritates them even more.
White's point is that the urban cultural elite creates an artistic image that is a mirror of itself. It then takes this mirror (which is laden with all kinds of cultural assumptions) and creates artistic conflict and artistic resolution all within the context of its original cultural assumptions.
White points out that this supposedly "gritty and realistic" film depends on an absolutely ridiculous notion - that a student in the early 1980s plagiarizes a song from a popular album by a popular group and almost no one at his school - student or teacher or parent - recognizes a song from an album taht's only a few years old.
Is this magical realism? No. Is it a clever conceit? No. It's laziness - Baumbach wanted this song's aesthetic resonance to plug up the aesthetic gap in his movie and so he just used it without coming up with a creative method for it.
And the "criticized" milieu itself provides the answer: the son of two novelists goes to an analyst and the analyst opens his mind to realize that his father is the deluded one - probably because of his father's frustration at being reduced to teaching rather than art.
I stopped paying any attention to official critics a long time ago, I’ve found Yahoo user reviews far more pertinent and revealing about what’s in a movie than a critic’s take.
There have been too many times where a critic decried a movie as horrible and I liked it.
I thought that was the whole PREMISE of the ARGUMENT in the TITLE.
New York Critic Armond White says Ebert destroyed film criticism.
Why? Because he was 'popular' and people listened to his advice, which was on TV?
Isn't White just being jealous?
After all, Film Criticism doesn't seem to be DESTROYED. Armond White still has a job, doesn't he?
Dark City is the one everyone mentions—an awful, derivative mess, it’s his “hip’ and “unconventional” grandstand move. (His commentary track isn’t as dull as his others, but it’s hilarious in how he tries to explain away the movie’s wretchedness—he sounds like a studio flack.)
Dark City is his Last Tango. ;)
Are you talking about The Dark Knight?
Yes. I remember reading several articles at the time it came out about how it was essentially pro-WOT.
Except for the size of the 'audience'. And the syndication. National Exposure.
Much more exposure than, say, a single column write-up in some small town newspaper.
I found “Squid” anything but a criticism of the characters’ social circle—it came down to daddy being a bastard, not that there was something wrong with the cultural/scholastic elite. He was a flaw that adherence to the characters’ (liberal) cultural values would expel.
You just showed why critics like White are twits that should be ignored. I’m not coastal, urban, or liberal and I love Nolan’s films because they’re creative, interesting, and tend to ask core questions about the nature of reality and its inhabitants.
Which seems to be why he wrote this article.
BTW, who is Armond White?
Is he a movie critic too?
White's point is that the cultural elite's notion of "great artistic film" - i.e. Syriana, Revolutionary Road - is basically self-congratulatory nonsense masquerading as art.
The Passion Of The Christ was derided by the critics, yet White praised it, precisely because it was made with total artistic commitment (dialogue in Aramaic!) and grated against all the cultural elite's assumptions.
He's the guy pointing out that we are being herded along by pretentious snobs who instruct us to consider George Clooney vanity projects as bold artistic triumphs.
Apparently, he seems to think that all movies are produced by “cultural elites” to make themselves feel better and are only liked by same. It’s funny how the guys that spend a lot of time slamming others over cultural things always insist the other guys are cultural elites.
That's exactly what they aren't and what they don't do.
They have one-dimensional characters that ask generic philosphical questions that are answered by rote cynicism.
There's nothing interesting about rehashing David Hume on film.
And the most creative thing Nolan ever did was to make a dark version of a Seinfeld episode (i.e. Memento).
What is a movie, an album, a novel? It's a cultural product created as a form of entertainment.
Pretending that movies have no cultural importance and no cultural effect isn't rejecting "elitism" - it's rejecting the reality we live in.
Sure, she did. Did you not read Raising Kane? She didn't say "nothing", but she implied "little" and that the true auteur was Screenwriter Herman Manciewicz.
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