Film Criticism After the "Age of Movies"

Recently looking back on the career of Pauline Kael, and the kind of cultural standing that a film critic could have back in the "Age of Movies," I was struck again by how much it was a matter not just of the standing of a critic but of critics.

Why is that? It seems to me that there is more to this than the reduced centrality of film in pop culture, or the ways in which it was possible then in a way that it was not later, more culturally fragmented, era, to speak of publications and writers that "everyone" read, important as that was. It also mattered that film was a younger medium than it is today--and that really serious film criticism was also younger, younger and fresher, so that there was more chance for newness, for surprises, for people to see and hear things they had not seen and heard before, and be really affected by them. Indeed, the interest of the major critics of that day was partly a matter of their having different, dueling, ideas about what film was, and what it could and should do, and how we could appreciate it. One may regard the auteurism of Andrew Sarris and the anti-auteurism of Kael as a tempest in a teacup--and with considerable justification (as Frank Rich put it, Kael could be quite the auteurist herself), but it was still something to talk about, without anything close to a parallel today.

Meanwhile, if Sarris and Kael (both of whom were "cultural Cold Warriors") indulged in the hypocrisy that they were anti-ideological (there is no such thing, in art or anywhere else), others did not, and, for all the limitations of, for example, the "New Hollywood" at its most daring, they passionately espoused and fought for their ideas, and this enlivened and enriched both the works and the broader scene in a way that gave even these that much more to write about.

Again, we live in a very different world that way.

Thus have we ended up with our current crop of film critics, who, honorable (usually non-mainstream) exceptions apart, give us little but claquing for mostly crappy would-be blockbusters, and the "culture war" as what passes for intellectual content, as we can see in both the rising average scores awarded a far from rising quality of filmmaking as shown by Rotten Tomatoes, and the oceans of ink spilled over that other tempest in a teacup, like the meaning of Greta Gerwig's cheap piece of culture war-stoking Barbie last summer.

That is no basis for any great standing as a cultural authority.