In "The Moviegoers," a bleak New Yorker article from a few years back, the film critic David Denby bemoaned both the current state of movie culture and the marginal role of serious criticism in shaping popular taste. According to Denby, the commercialization of the whole enterprise has brought about a brand of slicked-up, dumbed-down cinema that he and his friends would never have stood for as younger, engaged moviegoers. "As I listen to people talk (well, let's say older people)," he wrote, "I get the sense that many moviegoers who loved the French, Italian, Japanese, British and Eastern European films of the Sixties and the American films of the Seventies...have simply stopped going to the movies, or go with limited hopes, with a sickened sense that the house is sliding down the hill and can never be pulled back to the top again."
While I am too young to remember the era that Denby describes with suchwobbly-voiced longing, I've seen those films and I know what he means. Working asthe film critic for a daily newspaper these last eight years, I have had ampleopportunity to survey the current movie landscape from up close, often feeling,as I sit alone with my notebook in the dark, a rather numbing sort of despair.
This is not, I should hasten to add, a complaint about my extremely enjoyableoccupation: No matter how much I worry for the Fate of the Art, I can think offew other paying jobs that provide such an intricate web of pleasures--or thatdemand such constant flexibility, precision, and honesty. When I write, I tryalways to keep in mind the words of poet and dance critic Edwin Denby (norelation to David), who said that criticism has two different aspects: "One isbeing made drunk for a second by seeing something happen; the other is expressinglucidly what you saw when you were drunk." Though this morning-after model wouldideally apply to the lucid description of beautiful visions, the same principlealso holds true for the treatment of bad work, so that no matter how rotten the production in question, the challenge it poses to the critic remains steep and, at a rhetorical and even moral level, exciting.
The fun, however, begins to dry up when one is faced, week after week, monthafter month, with responding to endless miles of the most undistinguishedcelluloid. And this prevailing mediocrity is not represented only by big, loudHollywood movies; many of the so-called art films I'm asked to evaluate are justas dubious.
Yet while it's easy (and common) enough to make such sweeping doomsdayproclamations, it is much harder to get to the root of the problem--let alonedetail what might be done to change it.
The particulars vary in discussions of this sort, but when pushcomes to shove it's the members of the audience who are invariably blamed for theemptiness of the movies they are watching. Producers, we are told, are just"giving the people what they want." If viewers weren't interested in these sortsof pictures, they'd simply stop buying tickets.
But maybe that's not entirely right. Perhaps the problem comes from thesource, or sources. This rather uncomfortable premise--that a shady network ofstudio bosses, distributors, promoters, and, yes, critics is really responsiblefor keeping better films out of sight, thus causing the collapse of the culture'scollective cinematic sensibility--forms a major chunk of an important new book byJonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to LimitWhat Films We Can See (A Capella Books). In Rosenbaum's view of the inner workings of what he calls the "media-industrial complex," it's no surprise that the victim gets blamed:
Given the uncritical promotion of the major studio releases,one might...posit that the press, in order to justify its own priorities,maintains a vested interest in viewing the audience as brain-dead. After all, ifit showered most of its free publicity on more thoughtful and interesting movies,it would run the risk of being branded elitist. How much easier it becomes towallow in the slime if you and your editor or producer are persuaded that it'sthe audience's natural habitat--that the audience, not the press working incollaboration with the studios' massive publicity departments, is calling theshots.
Though it may seem perverse to find cheer in a book that points anaccusing finger at critics more or less like me (hired to offer lively commentaryon whatever the latest "big" releases are), I do. Indeed, it is one of the manyironies of Rosenbaum's work that he--whom critic Stuart Klawans of The Nation dubbed the "angry man of American film criticism"--offers a far more optimistic take on what both the movies and criticism could and should be than an ostensibly mild-mannered writer like Denby.
The senior critic for the Chicago Reader and the author of more than half a dozen works of film criticism along with a memoir about growing up Jewish in Alabama as the son of a family of movie theater owners, Rosenbaum may be angry. He's angry at the vapidity of certain commercial American pictures, at the commonly held faith in the abiding wisdom of producers, test-marketers, box-office returns, and Miramax head Harvey Weinstein--but he hasn't succumbed to hopelessness. Throughout Movie Wars, Rosenbaum makes a vivid case for the fact that cinema hasn't kicked the bucket; it has, however, changed profoundly since the era for which many mourn.
Rosenbaum makes it clear that it may, first of all, be necessary to look beyondParis or Burbank--to Taiwan or Iran, perhaps--for the new century's great movies.And the method of looking has also changed; a critic can't just coast along inthe faith that the best of world cinema will automatically be placed in his orher lap for review. On the subject of distribution and promotion, for instance,Rosenbaum has several hair-raising stories to tell about the way that the moviecompanies themselves--especially a so-called alternative outfit like Miramax (infact a division of Disney)--conspire to suppress certain films in their ownstable, determining from the get-go which will succeed and which will fail.Rosenbaum suggests that Miramax may actually buy particular films just to keepother distributors from getting hold of them. But mere acquisition doesn'tautomatically translate into attention and advertising, or even release. Abouthalf of Miramax's purchases, according to Rosenbaum, are never let out of thecan.
In recent years, the company has mounted major media campaigns to promote suchpictures as the sexed-up British version of The Wings of the Dove, while it has (in his words) "chosen to dump" Abbas Kiarostami's Through the OliveTrees, the color version of Jacques Tati's Jour de fête, and the restoration of Jacques Demy's film The Young Girls of Rochefort. Readers will have to trust me when I say that Rosenbaum is right to be horrified by this particular ordering of cinematic priorities, since I've seen three of the four films in question and can vouch for the fact that The Wings of the Dove is a swank, mindless watering-down of a great Henry James novel, while the Kiarostami and the Tati are genuine masterpieces. But the very fact that viewers don't have the freedom to judge for themselves is Rosenbaum's point. Someone has already decided for you. (And the decision is final: In a staggering postscript to the book, Rosenbaum says that Miramax has actually destroyed the single remaining American print of the Kiarostami picture, so that it can't even be shown in retrospectives.)
Meanwhile, publications like The New Yorker have their own financial health (not the future of the movies) to keep in mind. And they're helped on this front by a critic like Denby, whose belief that the cinema is moribund, paired with his responsibilities as a regular critic, often leads him to lavish hyperbolic praise on a few commercial releases, in order to justify his own position and put his readers at their ease. But while such critical pillow-fluffing may endear Denby to his audience, it doesn't do much for the movies. It's also neurotic: One week, Denby protests the dearth of "major" movies and criticizes foreign-language films like Pédro Almodóvar's All About MyMother and Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us for not being as entertaining or as profound as the "classics" he remembers from his youth. The next, he raves about some ephemeral piece of Hollywood fluff (Cast Away,X-Men). Then he protests, then he raves, and so on and on, in the process continuing to serve the studios' and distributors' own cynical needs--in essence feeding the very monster he claims to want to slay.
Rosenbaum, on the other hand, digs much deeper, making up with hisiconoclastic skepticism, enthusiasm, and curiosity for what he sometimes lacks insmoothness or stylistic control. (To be fair, the New Yorker critic is not the devil. Rosenbaum's fixation on Denby often feels defensive and self-defeating.) The paranoiac tilt of his book's subtitle may also be enough to disqualify him for many mainstream readers. But what is in fact so heartening about Rosenbaum's work--and why anyone who cares about film would do well to track down and follow his writing--is that he doesn't just bash or mope but also provides the nonspecialist an accessible path into a whole other universe that exists beyond the multiplex. And even the specialist stands to learn a thing or two: While my own sort of consumer-oriented reviewing inevitably falls prey to the various syndromes that Rosenbaum diagnoses, reading him over the years has also made me much more alert to the promise the movies still hold and to the critic's responsibility to track down that promise and spread the word.
Throughout his career, Rosenbaum has argued passionately on behalf of variousdirectors whom Americans have not yet given the attention they deserve. It's notthat he expects films by the likes of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, LéosCarax, Joe Dante, Béla Tarr, Jean Eustache, Jim Jarmusch, orRâúl Ruiz to catch on big. Small would do. And that's notunimaginable: A year ago, after all, most people would probably have laughed atthe prospect of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon--a historical, Mandarin-language, feminist ballet--holding masses of ordinary Americans in its delicate, foreign spell.
