Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (78 page)

As I wrote at the time, auteurism was the first step rather than the last stop in solving mysteries of the medium. Like all my other disclaimers, these words of caution were completely ignored by Kael. Perhaps it is just as well. If she had presented me as a reasonable person, I would have been filed away and forgotten. As a monstrous purveyor of Theories and Dogmas, I was magnified as a Menace to all that was enjoyable and worthwhile in movies. The estimable Dwight Macdonald went so far in that epoch to describe me as a Godzilla clambering from the depths. (I am gratified to say we later made up in print-something I cannot say about Pauline and me.)

can see now and I can say now that my supposedly seminal article in 1962 was a nervy blend of bluff and instinct. I had a long way to go to understand fully the implications of what I was writing. At the time I grossly underrated Ingmar Bergman, and grossly overrated George Cukor. I had not yet integrated my special brand of auteurism with Sigmund Freud on Leonardo da Vinci, Northrop Frye on genre, Maurice Valency on romanticism, Lionel Trilling on Henry James and Theodore Dreiser, Roger Leen- hardt and Alexandre Astruc on anti-style, and Bazin himself with all his blazing brilliance and his infrequent blind spots (notably on Hitchcock).

Through the sixties, I was journalistically trapped as an auteurist by feeling I had to rationalize the declining works of such still-living and active Pantheon directors as Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles. I was too sentimental to follow Kael's strong-willed practice of abandoning old favorites when their work ceased to please and astonish her. I was stuck also with a quintessentially American pragmatism that compelled any "theory" to prove itself in practice, and the more prophetically the better. Who's that at the door, dear? Oh, it's the Accidental Auteurist come to straighten out our reception of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He has to get his tools: his Aristotelian anvil, his Bazinian hammer, and his Freudian flashlight.

There was nothing particularly new or original about what I did, but I did help correct some lazy, if widely held, assumptions about movies. Before auteurists came along, if a movie called 0 Brother, Where Art Thou? opened on the same day as a movie called Bang, Bang, You're Dead, the firststring reviewer would automatically be assigned Brother and the secondstringer would cover Bang. Nowadays, the reverse is more likely. A humanistic document with noble sentiments may well be dismissed as "Masterpiece Theatre" while a bloody special-effects extravaganza may be hailed as an advance in cinematic art. Indeed, this revisionist turnabout has gone to such extremes that I find myself vis-a-vis Kael defending the literate humanistic against her espousal of the brutal kinetic.

ence, Corliss and Ebert should not be discouraged if their burgeoning feud does not achieve the impact of the now-legendary Sarris-Kael collision. Corliss and Ebert are much smarter and more sophisticated than we were, but so is everyone else, including presumably older-and-wiser Sarris and Kael. It is hard to imagine the sensation I created back in 196o when I wrote a rave review in a proto-auteurist style of Hitchcock's Psycho. Dave Kehr alerted me to John McNaughton's much more gruesome but nonetheless brilliant Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but neither of our rave reviews can create a sensation in today's genre-wise environment.

Typically, David Thomson's prolonged "rediscovery" of Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross in the same issue of Film Comment takes me and auteurism to task for inadequately appreciating still another film noir, of which there are an almost infinite number patiently waiting to have their quirky virtues and expressionistic virtuosities savored and recorded. Agee missed a few, and Farber caught a few, but it was the relentless search for auteurs that elevated the noir genres above the soleil genres once and for all. The rest is refinement and elaboration, and Thomson is as good at it as anyone around.

The bad news I brought back in the sixties was that even fun movies had finally been absorbed by an elitist culture, and nothing would ever seem the same again. Despite the resistance of the academic establishment, movies had become irrevocably one of the humanities. It has long been my dream to implant the cinema in the Columbia College curriculum. Still, there was more to my opening Kierkegaard quote than its prophetic aptness. It was the emphasis on a creation outside the creator that makes auteurism viable. If there had not been a multitude of good but unexplained movies, there would not have been any Pantheon auteurs to discover.

The movie's the thing, the message, without which the "personality" of the author is unimportant. Long before I knew anything about directors and direction, I was moved by movies. Auteurism is history, not prophecy. It seeks to understand the past, not to shape the future; for the mystery of artistic creation can never be completely understood. I have never been an activist critic like Pauline. I have ceased regretting what might have been to concentrate on what was and what is.

inally, I do not share Corliss's despondency over the state of film criticism, nor Ebert's over the state of the film industry. It is simply too early to tell. Despite the prevailing media wisdom, more great films were made in the fifties than in the sixties, yet as I recall both decades, the former was considered the Dark Ages and the latter some sort of Renaissance. The cinema has been going to the dogs virtually since its inception, only to provide in retrospect one Golden Age after another. The nineties promise to be no different as we slouch with our press passes and film classes toward the third millennium.

As for the disputed career choices of Corliss and Ebert, I would like to remind all concerned that we live in a capitalist society and, lately, perhaps in a capitalist world. In any event, I would be the last person in this nowgreediest world to condemn any critic for wanting to make a little more money. Besides, if Agee and Farber could write brilliant Time movie reviews in the limited space available, there is no reason Corliss should not use his considerable writing skills in the same endeavor. (The petty bickering over word counts baffles me. What ever happened to "Brevity is the soul of wit"?)

Having taught film a little myself, I would venture the opinion that both Corliss and Ebert tend to overestimate the educational value of frameby-frame visual analysis. When facing an unsophisticated tabula-rasa audience, it is easy enough to elicit oohs and aahs with the most elementary demonstration of cinematic technique. This facility has been designated as the Slavko Vorkapich effect.

If I may be allowed to conclude by furrowing my brow to express mild concern over future temptations facing my colleagues: I would caution Corliss to avoid the sin of despair. And I would advise Ebert that what is at risk in his very accomplished Laurel-and-Hardy routines with Gene Siskel is neither his aesthetic integrity nor his emotional sincerity, but, rather, what I have perceived in private conversations as an irreverent wit being steadily eroded by too calculating a deference to the banalities of a mass audience.

Still, these are temptations we all face as we try to climb higher and higher on the movie food chain. The main thing for me is that the pillars of my Pantheon have stood tall, and that I have never had to revise my opinion downward on any Pantheon director. But there are many directors whom I have underrated, and still more whom I have neglected. The past is still rich with promise.

NOVEMBER 17, 1991

new thriller has opened, starring Nick Nolte, Robert De Niro, and Jessica Lange. There are supporting performances by Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck. And those are the terms in which 95 percent of moviegoers think of Cape Fear. But if you read the critics, you would have heard about a man named Martin Scorsese, who directed the film, and maybe something about Bernard Herrmann, who has been dead for fifteen years, but whose musical score was used in the picture.

There is a gulf between people who go to the movies (the public) and people whose lives revolve around them (critics, movie buffs, academics, people in the business). For most people with seven bucks in their pocket and an evening free, there is only one question about Cape Fear that is relevant: Will I have a good time? The "good time" may depend on whether the moviegoer has an appetite for violence, or is a fan of one of the stars, but it will not depend on whether the film was directed by Martin Scorsese.

That's why I question myself when I write a review like the one about Cape Fear. I tried to say whether the filmgoer would have a good time, and I had something to say about the actors. But my central concern was with Scorsese, who I think is the best director at work in the world today, and whose career is therefore the most interesting single aspect of my job. I wondered whether it was good news or bad that he had a multipicture deal with Steven Spielberg and Universal, that he was working with a $34 million budget for the first time, and that he could use stars like Nolte, Lange, and De Niro without asking them to defer their usual salaries. Would he gain Hollywood but lose his soul?

Those are questions that may not be fascinating to everybody who reads the daily paper. Maybe some were interested in the fact that Mitchum and Peck had starred in the 1962 version of the same film, but I imagine almost nobody was interested in the fact that Scorsese had recycled the orig- final score that Bernard Herrmann wrote for the 1962 movie. And if I had written that Herrmann was also the composer of the music for Citizen Kane, Psycho, and Taxi Driver, would that have made any difference?