John Simon on Film Criticism

From His essay Movie Musings 1990:

"When you see such movies, you despair for the future of film, to say nothing of its present. And as you look at the audiences at the Festival's special screenings-ostensibly scholars, critics, distributors, and such, but actually also many rather more peripheral types-you see a lot of characters more suited to rock concerts, disreputable discotheques, late-night subway platforms, and cockfights. Was the cinema intended for the likes of them? Or were they once wholesome human beings, gradually eroded, corroded, used up by movie going.? Certainly the questions they ask during press conferences attest to an advanced state of cerebral atrophy cerebral atrophy

Nevertheless, I refuse to believe that this is the final and irreversible phase of cinema: infantilism and dotage joining hands across an abyss of stupefaction . There were in this very same festival (and I didn't see everything) three good films and two interesting ones. So all is not lost. But it must become possible to attend movies without a sense of deja vu., tired blood, the terminal exhaustion of an art form. Perhaps something truly new could come from the newly liberated countries behind the Iron Curtain-ex oriente lux.

And perhaps we are due for a new era in film criticism, beyond the raised or lowered thumbs of two television caricatures of film critics, beyond the perfunctory and insipid stuff we read in most newspapers and such magazines as deign to bother with movie reviews. If we could get film criticism on a par with the best in book reviewing in our reputable journals, we could perhaps experience something analogous to what happened in France after World War II, when a new wave in film criticism spawned a cinematic New Wave. To be sure, this was the rare case where the film critics themselves become the filmmakers.

There is one quality that more than any other could help revitalize the cinema: believableness. Characters in films must re-establish contact with social, economic, and political realities even where film style is non- or antirealistic. We should not have to ask questions such as: How come she has that much free time? Where does he get his money from? Why would they have been so purblind It may sound like rather simplistic advice, but, if heeded, it could make for major improvements. And truly persuasive critics could-maybeteach their readers to demand that much.

The problem with film critics, however, is that most of them aren't really critics, merely movie buffs who managed to preserve their childhood enthusiasms intact. They like movie movies, as they call them, much more than art films, as they call genres they don't care for. Can you imagine a literary critic preferring book books? Or detective stories to literature? On the other hand, can you imagine a book critic obliged to review most of what lands on his desk, the way movie reviewers are expected-indeed want to-see everything? Granted, a movie takes much less time and effort, but is that an excuse for critical omnivorousness, particularly if it results in your reading in the papers that such-and such a film must be seen, only to have you feel, as you come out of it, the victim of highway robbery?

And now visualize, please, a bunch of grown men and women whose job it is to see movies as bad as that and worse, week in, week out. Or, more likely, day in, day out. If they weren't cretins when they started out, surely they must be feeble-minded by now.

Film criticism should be protected from our so-called critics. Movies should ideally be reviewed by persons well versed in all the arts, who, preferably, are also professional writers of something: plays, essays, poetry, fiction. True, some of the silliest film criticism I have read was signed Alberto Moravia. But then take someone, as early as 1928, writing sensibly about his enjoyment of "a touching screen love story, cast with actors who must be expressive, attractive, and agreeable, and are allowed to be vain, but never unnatural." That someone was Thomas Mann."