Layoffs, firings, demotions, sick leaves, and retirements haven’t faded American film critics to black--at least not in a year that saw five of them drawing notices for movies of their own.
Both documentary vets,
Time’s Richard Schickel and
Variety’s Todd McCarthy returned to the director’s chair for feature-length portraits of Hollywood auteur Steven Spielberg and French cineaste Pierre Rissient, respectively. (Alas, neither Schickel’s
Spielberg on Spielberg nor McCarthy’s
Man of Cinema: Pierre Rissient has appeared on DVD as yet.) Of first-time documentarians,
Film Comment’s Kent Jones and
The Independent Weekly’s Godfrey Cheshire stuck relatively close to familiar turf--Jones with his Martin Scorsese-produced ode to psycho-thriller producer Val Lewton (
The Man in the Shadows, which airs January 14 on Turner Classic Movies before hitting DVD), and Cheshire with his
Moving Midway, which tenderly charts the geographic and political relocation of his family’s plantation in North Carolina.
But the ultimate film critic’s film of late is
For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, which the
Boston Phoenix’s
Gerald Peary premiered in Telluride as a work in progress and has been tweaking and selectively screening since. Well-named for having occupied Peary and producer Amy Geller for the past seven years and counting,
Love of Movies devotes itself equally to spanning a century of print reviewing, lingering just a tad partially on Andrew Sarris’s long volleys with opponent Pauline Kael (Peary is a self-described “Sarrisite”), and to interviewing critics about their objects of desire, obscure and otherwise.
It’s on the latter count that Peary’s rough cut best makes the case for print critics’ survival into the digital age, even though the film favors passion over polemics and scarcely if ever acknowledges mounting threats to the profession. Peary collects smart and thoroughly entertaining testaments to cinema’s supernatural power from the likes of
Lisa Schwarzbaum (still freaked by
The Boy With the Green Hair),
Molly Haskell (ditto
Diabolique), and
J. Hoberman, whose childhood memory of animals fleeing the train wreck in
The Greatest Show on Earth is so intense that he has stubbornly refused to diminish it with repeat viewings.
Peary, speaking by phone on New Year’s Eve, says the moral of
The Story of American Film Criticism is “Never make a movie with [film] clips unless you pay for them up front”--which it may well be for him, though for me and anyone who’s reading between the lines, it’s that there’s no substitute online or anywhere else for critics whose preoccupations are articulated with literary wit and flair. If anything, the aforementioned talking heads in Peary’s movie--
performance artists onscreen, as on the page--are lively enough to send us not reeling, but reading.
# posted by Rob Nelson @ 12/31/2007 06:42:00 PM
Comments (1)
Great piece (especially from someone whose shabby treatment merited the question mark after "year of the film critic"). Can't wait to see the doc—did Gabe Klinger make the cut?
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posted by @ 1/03/2008 2:36 PM
