A Film Unfinished (Rhoades)

“A Film Unfinished” Gets Finishing Touch
Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Those wily Nazi’s were masters of propaganda. They practically succeeded in convincing parts of the world that there was no Holocaust. They turned Germanic director Leni Riefenstahl into a party-line filmmaker. And they commissioned films that told the story the way they wanted it to appear.

Of course, the U.S. did the same thing, kinda. Frank Capra, the lovable director who gave us “It’s a Wonderful Life,” cranked out a series of short films titled “Why We Fight.”

Sure, ours were right and true. But they were designed to sway public opinion.

I once had a conversation with Clifton Fadiman (that grandfatherly host of radio’s “Information Please” and a founding member of the Book of the Month Club) about America’s secret propaganda board during World War II, where noted editors and publishers agreed to publish that which was best for the war cause. “We hated to do it, but it seemed like the best way,” he said, shaking his head sadly.

Further proof of the Nazi’s propaganda machine recently came to light with the examination of some old film footage that had been left lying about in a forgotten canister in a vault at an Air Force base in Ohio. It showed scenes from an unfinished Nazi wartime film comparing the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto with wealthy Jewry living the high life. But as these lost outtakes demonstrate, much of the film was staged. You can see Nazi cameramen directing its “actors” how to behave, firing guns to arouse screams, creating false memories of life in the ghettos.

You might call it Hitler’s version of “Why We fight.”

However, in this case, the raw footage has been incorporated into a new documentary called “A Film Unfinished.” And it’s currently exposing the truth about Nazi propaganda at the Tropic Cinema.
Now why would young moviegoers, not even born in the ’40s, choose to see a documentary about some dusty old war? Viet Nam already seems ancient and Desert Storm is blowing away in our recent consciousness while we worry about Afghanistan and avoid roadside bombs in Iraq and turn a suspicious eye on Iran.

Director Yael Hersonski says, “When I embarked on this journey I was bothered by our contemporary ethical status as passive (Israelis, in my case) viewers, as citizens who imagine they know ‘something’ about their reality, for they watch the media reports, but in fact remain paralyzed in front of the limited television screen and its edited images.”

So she decided to return to that “crucial starting point in the history of cinematic documentation of human atrocities,” and by approaching it as a study case to learn something about people’s ability to determine the truth of history.

We can only know what we witness. “Something like 95% of the imagery of the Holocaust was shot by the perpetrators for their own purposes,” notes Hersonski. “We have the documentation of the liberation of the camps by Americans and others but while the war was going on the only ones to take pictures were the Nazis themselves.”

“A Film Unfinished” features testimony by Willy Wist, one of the Nazi camera operators who filmed scenes for what was to be titled “Das Ghetto.”

Hersonski also interviews Holocaust survivors. “We found four women who were still alive. This was the most urgent part of the filmmaking so it was the first thing we did. I invited each one of them alone to screen the footage to make it as intense as could be so maybe they would remember things even they did not know they knew. It was one of the most emotional and exhausting part of making the film. And of course it was hard for them. But these women felt it was urgent for them to interpret this silent footage as those who were there, who were hiding from the film crew, to have the last word, the final word over these images.”
Like a serial killer keeping souvenirs of his crimes, the Nazis had a passion for documentation. As Yael Hersonski puts it, “They took their own atrocities and shot it as if it was caused by the Jews. The most powerful propaganda is not entirely lies; they know how to combine what is true with what they want the story to be.”

It’s a difficult film to watch. But an important one.

srhoades@aol.com
[from Solares Hill]

Inspector Bellamy (Rhoades)

“Inspector Bellamy” Takes a Holiday
Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Remember that French classic, “Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday”? Where a guy goes to a beachside hotel for a vacation, but causes havoc?

Well, in this French film – “Inspector Bellamy” – a famous detective takes a vacation with his wife to the family house in Nîmes. And a brain-teasing mystery lands on the inspector’s doorstep.
Those Frenchmen and their annual sojourns to relax!

“Inspector Bellamy” is currently enjoying a holiday at the Tropic Cinema.
Overweight, rutabaga-nosed Gallic actor Gérard Depardieu stars as Inspector Paul Bellamy, a sleuth not unlike Inspector Maigret of the Georges Simenon novels. His wife Françoise is played by Marie Bunel in a warm, affectionate Thin Man manner.

In this lighthearted, old-fashion mystery a suspicious-looking fellow called Noël Gentil (Jacques Gamblin) interrupts Inspector Bellamy’s holiday to confess to a murder. Well, not exactly a murder, more of an insurance scam where he staged his own death in order to get his wife’s life insurance money so he could run away with his girlfriend (Vahina Giocante). But M. Gentil’s scheme has gone awry.
So this is actually more of a “what happened?” than a “whodunit?”

French film director Claude Chabrol is considered a master in the mystery genre. His 57 films – with titles like “Dirty Hands,” “The Girl Cut in Two,” “Blood Relatives,” “The Nada Gang,” and “The Champagne Murders” – prove the point. This was his last film, for he died last year at the age of 80. A film critic and historian who became a director, Chabrol is considered the founder of the French film movement known as Nouvelle Vague.

European movies show ordinary people’s lives being lived at an ordinary pace. This film too ambles along, at times dull and meandering, with far too many subplots. It appears to be the work of a director who had lost his stamina for hardboiled thrillers.

This was Chabrol’s first time working with Gérard Depardieu. The iconic actor dominated the French cinema during the ’80s and ’90s, winning two Césars as Best Actor for “The Last Metro” and his nose-perfect role in “Cyrano de Bergerac.”

Chabrol modeled the character of Inspector Bellamy partially on Depardieu’s personality, partly on the fictional Inspector Maigret. A clue is found in the closing credits, where Chabrol dedicates the film to “the two Georges.” These are French singer-songwriter Georges Brassens (whose music appears as a plot device in the movie) and the prolific Belgian-born mystery writer Georges Simenon. In fact, there’s a Maigret novel in which the Parisian detective goes on vacation with his wife, but then becomes involved in a case (“Les Vacances de Maigret”).

It’s obvious that both Inspector Maigret and his doppelgänger Inspector Bellamy are happiest when solving a mystery. You might call it a busman’s holiday.

srhoades@aol.com
[from Solares Hill]

Inspector Bellamy (Brockway)

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway 
 

INSPECTOR BELLAMY

The late Claude Chabrol, France's answer to The Master of Suspense, who  passed away last year, hauntingly thrills us with "Inspector Bellamy". This is his final film, a fitting Hitchcockian haiku: atmospheric, pensive and dry---a fitting clap to a great career.  

Gerard Depardieu stars in the title role as a soft sex-distracted police inspector on holiday, a caged stuffed animal. Locked in the grid of manicured lawns and crossword puzzles, Bellamy yearns for more. His wife (Marie Bunel) ceaselessly does household chores while mildly putting the brakes on Bellamy's bearish affections. A stalker awaits at the window in a grey silk suit with a grin, echoing images of Joseph Cotten in "Shadow of a Doubt" and Robert Walker in "Strangers on A Train". Who is this dapper cypher and what does he want?
The enigmatic man distracts Bellamy's mind. He calls him and agrees to meet. Dark doorways pursue Bellamy even in bright sunlight--a half open door is a metaphor for the aperture of Chabrol's camera---behind every frame is an adventure.

The Mystery Man, Noel Gentil (Jacques Gamblin) is mystified by hints of guilt: he tried to alter his appearance, do an insurance scam and fake his own death by kidnapping a homeless man  during a car crash. But since the homeless man wanted to die by his own hand, did he really kil him? 

Bellamy walks further and further into the resort town. With each open door and empty room, he is perplexed and addled by ambivalence and the push and pull of sex. He questions massage therapists of  M. Gentil who is often alone in his bunk and toys with the girlfriend of the deceased. We are never quite sure why Bellamy is so obsessed with the odd man. Perhaps Gentil is a figure of Zen criminology. Perhaps it is the thrill of the chase which releases him from the confines of his resort chalet its oppressive blinding greens. 

Whatever the case, Bellamy becomes increasingly flustered and insecure, his lumbering frame seeming to yearn for the suspense of Noir. If he is not fretting about the mystery, he is sexually magnetized and is frequently denied, either by a ringing phone or his wife. Bellamy is also besieged by his shifty brother (Clovis Cornillac) who is often drunk, caustic and hunched--a squinty wolf of a sibling burden. Not a moment of peace for Bellamy who sees Gentil and the homeless victim as an almost celebrity pair, who both liked the musician Georges Brassens and became locked in circumstance, but were free. The scorched wreck of the car with the headless skeleton inside, is for Bellamy, a memorial to the vague and unsolved crimes that became perfect in complexity. The image of the car is as much a nod to writer J.G. Ballard as it is to Dali or Hitchcock. 

As the last scenes unfold, we learn that Bellamy himself is guilty for the near death of his brother Jacques, who is blighted under a lifetime of derision. As his fatalist brother dies in a crash, Bellamy's life implodes upon him in a quantum collapse that might seem half Bunuel and half Buddha, but this echo of spirit makes the yin/yang of Chabrol complete.

Write to Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Week of December 31 to January 6 (Mann)

What’s on at the Tropic
by Phil Mann

Guess you can’t argue with success. The hot threesome of BLACK SWAN, THE FIGHTER and THE KING’S SPEECH are held over for another week. Each is a Golden Globe Best Picture nominee, and each is drawing record crowds. One of them will probably be squeezed out by next week, so take your chance while you have it to see any you’ve missed so far.

I’d also recommend highly the less-high-profile feature HOWL, also held over. James Franco personifies Allen Ginsburg throughout, but the actual words are from transcripts of the poet himself. Even if you’re not a poetry lover, you’ll appreciate the down to earth way in which the film explains and gives insight into this beat generation literary icon. Three threads, all set in the fifties when “Howl” was first published, run through the movie -- Ginsburg reciting his poem in a San Francisco café, Ginsburg giving an interview about it and his work, and testimony at the censorship trial of his publisher -- each giving a window into the meaning of key passages. A movie as original and innovative in its own way as “Howl” itself.

Joining this collection is a new French film, again centering on an adulterous affair. Two weeks ago, in Mademoiselle Chambon, we saw a father bed his young son’s schoolteacher. This week, in LEAVING, we find a bored wife swept away by her gardener. Sorry, my mistake, he’s not a gardener, but a handyman building a shed. But old D.H. and Flaubert, too, might well appreciate this “searing sex drama about an upper-middle-class wife and mother who falls in love and goes a bit mad,” especially because the wife is the estimable Kristin Scott Thomas.

Real film fans will welcome back the Monday Classic Series, with a Damsels in Distress theme for January. This week it’s Hitchcock’s REBECCA, hosted again by our resident classicist Craig Wanous. The master’s first American film and Winner of the Academy Award in 1940, this Gothic melodrama has been rated one of the top 250 films of all time. Joan Fontaine stars as the new second wife of Sir Lawrence Olivier, a wealthy gentleman. But life is not simple at his estate, with the spirit of his first wife (the eponymous Rebecca, who is never seen) and a sneaky housekeeper (Judith Anderson) undermining the new bride.

The Special Event feature of the week is another of the Tropic’s Visiting Filmmaker programs. Boston Phoenix film critic Gerald Peary will present FOR THE LOVE OF MOVIES, his new documentary. Directed by Mr. Peary, and featuring leading critics, including Roger Ebert, and A.O. Scott the film provides “an insider’s view of the critics' profession.” The director will host a Q & A in person after the screenings. Two shows, on Tuesday and Wednesday, both free to members of the Film Society ($15 to non-members).

Why not make it a New Year’s resolution to join the film society? It’s only $35 for a full year’s membership. You’ll save $4 on regular movie tickets and get the benefit of special events like the Gerald Peary show. A no-brainer, I’d say.

Comments, pretty please, to pmann99@gmail.com

Howl (Mark Howell)

Let’s Look at This Thing About Howl

By Mark Howell

Howell here — and bear with me while I go on for a bit about my thing, OK?

Anybody who’s studied literature within the past 40 years knows T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins ... Shantih shantih shantih”). They also know that this threnody for contemporary civilization, first published in 1922, has since been paired with a later dystopian masterpiece, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” first published in 1957.

I have a thing about “Howl.”

It was Ginsberg who famously saw the best minds of his generation “destroyed by madness, starving hysterical, naked.” Ginsberg it was who named us “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” Ginsberg who said we “passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-like tragedy among the scholars of war.”

There is no greater turn-on of our time than “Howl,” except, maybe, for the Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (and Ginsberg’s on the cover of that).

Showing at Tropic Cinema is a film called “Howl” that tells the tale of this poem, covers the obscenity trial it generated, even illustrates its febrile, Hebraic verses in animated form. This is a wonderful film. I know because I was sent a preview copy by its distributors. When their package arrived with its label, Oscilloscope Laboratories, I thought it was some sort of sex aid or medical device.

Indeed it was.

But I’ve done this before, so watch out. Not so long ago, in these pages, I interviewed the author Robert Stone, who spends his winters in Key West with his delightful wife of 40 years or so, Janice. Stone had just published his memoir, “Prime Green,” about the hippie days he spent on the magic bus with Ken Kesey and his merry pranksters in the mid-1960s. One of the tripsters was Neal Cassady, primary driver of the bus “Furthur” and, further, named in “Howl’ as the poem’s “secret hero.” Stone knew Cassady well but never dug him (I never met him) and dismissed Neal in our interview as a chattering car thief. Nevertheless I went on about Cassady in the story; my son Rafe, after all, got his middle name from the fellow. I knew that Cassady had become a huge draw over the years, ever since he died while on speed and counting the railroad ties outside of San Miguel de Allende in 1968. I knew, too, that he’d be a huge draw for a reading Stone was due to give at the Tropic that week.

It was as I expected. On the evening of the reading, every middle-aged longhair and unreconstructed hippie in the Lower Keys assembled on Eaton Street to fill the cinema. I sat in a seat at the very back, in case Stone caught my eye. For it was also as I feared. Stone never even mentioned Cassady but chose instead to read a chapter about his experience as a writer for a tabloid newspaper. “This is bullshit,” grumbled a white-haired, pony-tailed character in front of me.

Be warned, as I say. Just because I’m going on here about “Howl” doesn’t mean the movie will be whatever you think it will; I cannot be responsible for your reaction. For myself, I was in tears from the moment that Judge Clayton Horn, played to perfection by Bob Balaban, prepares the room to receive his judgement at the obscenity trial. As the music turns angelic and the judge declares his immortal horn on “Howl,” the waterworks began and the tears never stopped. It was, for me, one of the grandest and most gentle moments in all of moviedom and American life.

“Howl” the movie stars James Franco, who once upon a time played James Dean and in this film channels Ginsberg in every respect, from the look to the body language to the poet’s signature voice and sentence-length. Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, “Howl” was the opening night selection at this year’s Sundance Film festival but has had a mixed reception since then. That, I think, is because it’s simply too much, not because it’s way too little.

Let’s cut to the chase. The movie delivers, holy and completely, in two spectacular regards. One occurs when literary critic Mark Schorer, played by Treat Williams, explains to the courtroom that there is a difference between poetry and prose. “You can’t translate poetry into prose,” he says. Essentially, poetry goes where prose cannot. This is the argument that flows between the prosecutor, played by David Strathairn (who was nominated for an Oscar as Edward R. Murrow in “Good Night, and Good Luck”) and the defense attorney, in real life the model for Perry Mason and played by Ian Hamm (of the TV hit, “Mad Men”).

The prosecutor keeps asking what Ginsberg’s inflamed words and phrases mean. The defense says he can’t answer that in prose.

Which begs a question that has haunted me for more than 50 years, back when my twin brother and I were 13. What does it mean when a poem is “prophetic?”

I understood even then, from what was called “divinity “ class, that prophecy meant literally “speaking for another.” But what does it mean that a poem can be prophetic — in the sense of sensing the future, good for a thousand years?

I never did get it until I got my own private DVD of “Howl” and watched it one night about a month ago. It didn’t take prose to explain it, naturally. It took Eric Drooker to convey the meaning of six long lines at the end of Part 1 of the poem that explore the alchemy of writing.

Drooker was a Lower East Side friend of Ginsberg (Allen died in 1997) who illustrated his “Illuminated Poems” and has created the animation in “Howl.” His work somehow uncovered to this reader that those six lines at the end of Part 1 are literal in what they say. That when they speak of trapping “the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images,” it is in reference to the prophetic pairing of, say, the last two words in the poem’s 15th line about “the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox.” The words “hydrogen jukebox” cannot be explained in prose but they can clearly be read with an eye to the future.

Here are the six lines that illustrate to any writer how to be prophetic in words — and, too, come up with an ending of all endings:

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.


[from Solares Hill]

Leaving (Brockway)

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway  

 LEAVING

Domestic discontent can bring out monsters. Such is the case with "Leaving" (Partir), the latest film by Catherine Corsini, who directed  "Replay" in 2001 which detailed a tormented friendship between two female drama students. Corsini is not a director who pulls her punches and she doesn't disappoint in this latest venture.

Suzanne (Kristen Scott Thomas) is married to Samuel (Yvan Attal).  Suzanne lives in a geometric modern house that is sparse, glaring-white and curved with Minimalist and abstract paintings on the walls that sometimes resemble blood vessels on canvas enlarged to life size. Samuel is a  doctor, a man of smug affection and rules who runs his life like a medical chart. He is handsome, hawk-like and not overly warm. With Samuel, the house is a lukewarm egg with two kids inside. When they go to bed, Samuel is on his smartphone and Suzanne reads a magazine. The scenes group together briefly and slowly. Ending with fade outs, the episodes are visual sighs, showing a shared life short of breath.

  Samuel offers to have a reflexology studio built for Suzanne. Enter the earthy carpenter Ivan (Sergi Lopez). After a conference and a sudden kiss, Suzanne walks away, but her mind is occupied by the stubbled laconic Catalan stranger who spent time in jail, which doesn't seem to matter. At home under the ice cube of a house Suzanne is an anemic vampire, wearing pale pinks and muted pastels, but once she catches sight of Ivan, the two conjoin like lascivious crustaceans or lustful octopi---grunting, glued, enmeshed. During one clinical lunch in the Modernist house, Suzanne gives the news: she wants out. Samuel goes into a rage, hurling sexist attacks and slapping blows of physical violence. Suzanne becomes like a bounding gazelle under Samuel's bestial ego. 

Suzanne and Ivan sort of set up house. They find a crumbling brick sea-side shack and begin a Byronic idyll. Suzanne is infinitely touching, kissing and caressing, sharing more joy with Ivan's little daughter than her own. 

But all is not well. 

Samuel cuts off all monetary support and freezes her account. Suzanne is forced to look for work at a local pharmacy and Samuel writes a letter to Ivan's foreman, who ultimately lets him go. After a gas machine devours her credit card and she sells her gold watch, Suzanne gets an idea.

She will break into her own house and take the expensive art.

What emerges is class-warfare: the Status Quo against the reflexologist who follows her heart. Samuel with his brooding darkness is a bit like Macbeth. And Ivan is a little too nonchalant. To save Ivan from prison, Suzanne moves back with her white-ruled husband, but she is a wilted rose, cooking dinner like an automaton. 

Then with an unexpected clap---an end to a visual sigh that is part Raymond Carver and part Patricia Highsmith, Kristen Scott Thomas shows us what impulsive monsters there might be under the Minimalist veneer of a  marriage.

Write to Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

For The Love Of Movies (Rhoades)

“For the Love of Movies” Looks at People Who Write About Them
Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Being a movie critic is sometimes a lonely job. You sit alone in darkened theaters or screening rooms, or hunch in front of your TV set watching a screener DVD of an upcoming movie. And afterward you might want to talk about the film with a friend over a cup of coffee, but deadlines loom and you must put your thoughts on paper. A visual experience translated into a cerebral one.

So you can imagine how excited I was to talk with another film critic, Gerald Peary of the Boston Phoenix. Like Siamese cats seeking each other out in a room full of tabbies.

Like many critics, Peary plays a dual role: filmmaker as well as film aficionado. Peter Brogdonovich was such. So was Martin Scorsese. Even I’ve been involved in movies ranging from “Men in Black” to “My New Life” (which will premiere at the Tropic Cinema in March).

Peary’s new documentary “For the Love of Movies” – subtitled “The Story of American Film Criticism” – covers familiar ground for him. And is a tour of movie history as well. It will be playing this week at the Tropic Cinema.

Gerald Peary will be on hand to discuss his film. And I will be on stage with him, having a conversation about why we love movies and choose to write about them.

In his documentary, Peary traces American film criticism back to 1907 (“The Dawn of Criticism,” he calls it) with synopses of movie plots appearing in popular newspapers, mostly written by general reporters. The first to develop a point of view was Frank E. Woods, a columnist of the New York Dramatic Mirror.

“Woods was arguably the first movie reviewer in America,” says Richard Schickel, film critic for Time Magazine. Woods recognized that movies had the potential “for being art.”

An admirer of D.W. Griffith, Woods went to Hollywood to work with his favorite director. Perhaps this was the first blending of critic and filmmaker. Few people realize that Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” was co-written by a dastardly film critic.

Another early film critic was Vachel Lindsay, “a poet bitten by the movie bug.” He wrote the first serious book about the subject, “Art of the Moving Picture.” He called film “painting in motion, poetry of the eye.”
Peary’s documentary tells us that Lindsay recognized that “The arrival of film was a key moment in the history of human consciousness. It was going to change the way people thought, dreamed, fantasized, the way the shaped their inner selves.”

In 1920 Robert Sherwood started a decade of film reviews for Life Magazine. Sherwood’s playful upbeat voice was in tune with Hollywood. A good-natured reviewer, he won multiple Pulitzer Prizes for his plays. He even wrote screenplay for the Academy Award-winning movie “The Best Years of Our Lives.”

“I would go to the movies even if I were not paid to do so,” wrote Sherwood.

Thus establishing the theme of this documentary that takes us through the emergence of Bosley Crowther’s film criticism at the New York Times to the word wars between Andrew Serris of the Village Voice and Pauline Kael of the New Yorker (“the Paulettes versus the Serrisites”).

A side note: Key West’s Kim Ramono is the voice you’ll hear reading Pauline Kael’s reviews in the documentary. She was a film student of Peary’s. Her son Cody is a local filmmaker in the making.

In “For the Love of Movies” many noted critics appear onscreen, each offering their observations and little chunks of film history. We encounter such vaunted names as Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, Stanley Kaufman of The New Republic, Owen Glieberman of Entertainment Weekly, Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe, Stuart Klawans of The Nation, Andrew Serris of the New York Observer, his wife Molly Haskell of the Village Voice, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, John Power of Vogue, Richard Corliss of Time Magazine … and on and on.

We’re treated to the writings of such legendary critics as James Agee who managed to align both highbrow and popular taste and Bosley Crowther who championed foreign films with subtitles. We look at such early practitioners as Otis Ferguson whose sharp incisive reviews often praised fast-paced genre films and Vincent Canby who reigned as the most powerful film critic in the United States for a quarter of a century and Manny Farber whose “funhouse mirrors in his prose” appreciated low-budget crime melodramas, what he called “termite art.”

We follow the auteur theory espoused by the French members of Cahiers du Cinema, a philosophy not unlike Agee’s earlier viewpoint about strong directors. And Pauline Kael’s initial opposition to the theory (“silly, dangerous, anti-art,” she called it) before embracing it around her own set of favorite directors.

As bitchy as Kael could be, she was right about one thing. Previous film criticism hadn’t taken popular culture very seriously, even though it affected people more than high culture. And so the movie experience was returned to the people – where it remains today with bloggers and online critics weighing in just as vehemently about new movies as do the lineup of professional critics you find clustered together on Rotten Tomatoes.

“For the Love of Movies” poses the question to them all: What qualifies you to be a film critic? They seem to agree that there are no real qualifications. It’s mainly that someone will pay you to do it.

But that’s not true. I’m a film critic syndicated in five Cooke Communications newspapers throughout the South. And I do it pro bono, so I can get into movie theaters for free. I do it (as I think most critics do) for the very reason Gerald Peary’s title suggests – “For the Love of Movies.”

srhoades@aol.com
[from Solares Hill]