Film Critics After the "Age of Movies"

Recently considering how film criticism has changed since the "Age of Movies" I remarked, along with the diminished centrality of film in contemporary culture, and of the "theatrical experience" in our enjoyment of movies, two major factors--the maturity, or decadence, of the cinematic form, and the changes in politics in our times, with all they meant for battles of ideas of all kinds.

However, besides that there is the matter of the critics themselves and how they stand in relation to the cinematic past. Those critics of that past generation at the center of the comment here--those of Andrew Sarris' and Pauline Kael's generation--experienced the Golden Age of film in their youth (in the theater, of course), drinking it up so that it seeped into their very bones. Indeed, they were still fairly young when the studio system was falling apart, when world cinema had its post-war bloom with figures like Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa, were only middle-aged when the New Hollywood emerged, and still writing when it came to an end.

By contrast those reviewing professionally today come from a generation largely born after the Age of Movies--the generation of MTV and the video arcade, if not the generation of Netflix and TikTok on their smart phone; the generations which in their film viewing came of age after the blockbuster as we know it ascended to dominance, to which the criticisms of Pauline Kael of Raiders of the Lost Ark seem antediluvian if not incomprehensible, what she thought unfortunate taken by them quite in stride as an ideal (a Steven Spielberg followed by a Michael Bay). The classics of American and world cinema were not something they grew up on, but something they picked up deliberately and perhaps academically, the more dutiful perhaps respecting them for their historical significance more than loving them for what they are--and the less dutiful not having much of them at all.

The result is that they suffer no great dissonances when they claque for crappy indies and Big Dumb Blockbusters as though they were Heart-Breaking Works of Staggering Genius.