An even more general problem rules critics' social etiquette in admitting that they pay attention to one another. A striking difference between the behavior of critics in London and New York is that the former find many more occasions to socialize with one another, largely because the atmosphere is noticeably less competitive. After many evening press shows in London — those most commonly held for magazine reviewers, who require longer lead times — drinks and hors d'oeuvres are served, in effect inviting the critics to swap opinions and theories about what they've just seen. It's always struck me as an agreeable and helpful custom — the equivalent of what one finds at most film festivals, where one's overall sense of a critical community is also very pronounced.

When I once asked a prominent American critic why this was never done in New York, his response was swift and emphatic: "You can't talk about a film right after you've seen it — other critics will steal your ideas!"

It was hard to explain to him that in London, where ideas are less likely to be seen as private property, critics are often delighted if their ideas are stolen, because this means that their ideas have power. In New York, only the critics are supposed to have power, and the ideas have to fend for themselves. This creates a different notion of criticism, a different notion of community, and a different notion of ideas. It also helps to explain why film critics are regarded as stars in America — a situation that has only existed since the 1970s — but nowhere else.(At the moment a critic becomes a star, the critical discourse becomes a nightclub act.) To be a star means to have an aura, and in a media ruled by the marketplace, auras are strictly personal possessions, not to be shared.

What seems most ironic about this is such auras always depend more on institutional bases than they do on ideas, expertise, or even personalities. As writer-director Samuel Fuller once put it to me with characteristic bluntness and lucidity, "If Vincent Canby got fired from the Times today, and he went to a bar and started talking about a movie he'd just seen, nobody there would give a fuck what he thought. They'd probably just tell him to shut up."

This helps to dramatize the fact that authority in matters of film judgment is often an illusory construct — a point emphasized in my piece on BélaTarr. (Seeing a particular movie because "the Times says it's good" means in effect trusting not Canby but the people who hired him — and what do they know about movies? — as well as all the traditions and particular interests that The New York Times embodies, for better and for worse.) Public opinion of a given movie generally grows out of a general "buzz" that circulates around it, and publicists, reviewers, and audiences — usually in that order — all contribute to that drone and influence each other in the process. The buzz usually starts well before the picture's release and grows (or dies) over many weeks afterward, and the cacophonous overlaps that compose it often make it hard to determine which voices are the most dominant or influential.

***

{niftybox background=#afdeb2, width=360px} It was hard to explain to him that in London, where ideas are less likely to be seen as private property, critics are often delighted if their ideas are stolen, because this means that their ideas have power. In New York, only the critics are supposed to have power, and the ideas have to fend for themselves. This creates a different notion of criticism, a different notion of community, and a different notion of ideas. It also helps to explain why film critics are regarded as stars in America — a situation that has only existed since the 1970s — but nowhere else.(At the moment a critic becomes a star, the critical discourse becomes a nightclub act.) To be a star means to have an aura, and in a media ruled by the marketplace, auras are strictly personal possessions, not to be shared.{/niftybox}

Although I've omitted my earliest pieces for Film Comment, I've included extracts from my "Journals" (from Paris, London, and elsewhere) for that magazine from the mid-1970s which represent for me today some of the best as well as some of the worst tendencies of that column. (For purposes of illustration, I ask for the reader's indulgence; the commentary on film criticism is more fleeting here than elsewhere in this section.) Although the freedom granted me by Richard Corliss and the personal-confessional mode I adopted enabled me to spread my nets fairly widely — eventually leading to a kind of research and writing inMoving Places that took me outside reviewing entirely — it also fostered a certain intolerance and belligerence that probably reached its shrillest level in my "London and New York Journal." Some of this undoubtedly grew out of a sense of impotence and ineffectuality in relation to American film culture which was only exacerbated by my years of living abroad.

When I was living in New York during the 1960s, one could count to some degree on such writers as Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael for a defense of a certain intellectual approach toward cinema; but as their audiences grew, their intellectual partisanship tended to wane, and the philistinism and xenophobia that seemed to me on the rise in New York film criticism often sent me into intemperate rages.

Here's a characteristic sentence from my May–June 1977 column — entitled, like the ones immediately following it, "Moving," and written while I was in the process of moving from London to San Diego, shortly after a brief trip to Paris: "The first indication I had that Alain Resnais' PROVIDENCE might be something special — apart from the enthusiasm of the French press — was the report that most Manhattan critics hated it." It was undoubtedly remarks of this kind that eventually led Andrew Sarris to write (in the January–February 1978 Film Comment): "I have been disturbed for some time by a note of unending apologia in [Robin] Wood's writing for Film Comment, particularly in apposition to the boringly relentless pugnacity of Jonathan Rosenbaum."

This was undoubtedly one of the periods in my career when my writing habits were proving to be most irksome to some of my colleagues. In the 22 October 1976 issue of the [London] Times Educational Supplement, Wood himself had already gone further than Sarris would later and virtually linked me to the downfall of Western civilization — specifically for some flip comments comparing moviegoing and sex apropos of CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING in London's Time Out, and for the nature of my praise of FAMILY PLOT in my "London and New York Journal," which Wood saw as being darkly related: "The implicit trivialization of art and life is the ultimate stage in our alienation," he concluded.

This scarcely begins to describe some of the repercussions that my anger in print was having, and not only among active critics. To cite another example, the 27 March entry in my "London and New York Journal" provoked a distressed letter half a year later from François Truffaut, whom I had been working with at the time — I was translating André Bazin's Orson Welles for Harper & Row, and had been serving as both editor and translator on a lengthy preface that Truffaut was writing for that book. (For those who want to read that letter and follow our ensuing exchange, see pages 461–464 in Truffaut's Letters [Faber and Faber, 1989].) And it's possible that the closing two sentences of the same two paragraphs permanently prevented any rapprochement or future friendship between myself and Pauline Kael, whom I had already undoubtedly alienated by writing an attack on her essay "Raising KANE" for Film Comment four years earlier.

I can't say I look back on my former venom with pride — some of it is stridently over-the-top and unpleasantly self-righteous, although I still agree with most of the positions I took. What surprised me at the time, however, and continued to surprise me for years afterward, was that established critics with vastly more power and influence like Kael and Sarris would be as unforgiving as they were about the criticism of a relatively unknown upstart like myself.

In the case of Kael, the first time we met face to face, and then only briefly, was at the New York Film Festival in 1978; both before and after that, mutual friends advised me that I could never hope to become friends with her because of what I'd written about her. I had wrongly assumed that because she'd been so merciless herself about attacking others at the start of her career that she'd be a good sport about being at the receiving end. In fairness to Pauline, however, I should report that after I became a member of the National Society of Film Critics in 1989, she came up to me at the end of the next annual meeting and told me that she had voted for me because (I quote from memory) "no one else has attacked me so consistently over the years." I laughed and replied, "That's because no one else has read you so consistently over the years." The following year — the last meeting she attended before retiring — she was kind enough to tell me that she had only been kidding the previous year and that there were other good reasons to have voted for me.

As for Andy, who was never very fond of polemics to begin with, I've been told that he refused to speak to me for a couple of years in the early 1980s because of some critical remarks I had written about him in my entry on Erich von Stroheim in Richard Roud's Cinema: A Critical Dictionary — an entry I had written six or seven years earlier. In recent years, I should add, he's been friendly. This paragraph, of course, may conceivably lead him to cut me again, but I should stress that I'm less interested here in settling old scores — or opening old sores — than in revealing to disinterested students the prices that have to be paid sometimes for speaking one's mind in print, especially when it concerns critics in the New York area.

***

A final note on "A Bluffer's Guide to BélaTarr," the first of a dozen of my Chicago Reader columns included in this book. As with my otherReader reviews reprinted here, I have retained their original formats, including the star ratings, because I consider these to be inextricably tied to their meanings. (I've adopted the same principle for my Monthly Film Bulletin review in the next section.) The explanation of these ratings, printed in the Reader with each review, is "**** = Masterpiece, *** = A must-see, ** = Worth seeing, * = Has redeeming facet, and 0 = Worthless." Star ratings tend to be common currency in Chicago film reviewing, and it's a system I inherited when I started working at theReader.

Jonathan ROSENBAUM
first publihed in:
www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2016/03/placing-movies-part-1-the-critical-apparatus-introduduction-tk