Such Sweet Sorrow.(film critics, and criticism)

Near the end of his book It's Only a Movie!: Films and Critics in American Culture, Raymond J. Haberski Jr. writes (forgive me for quoting at length):

While both [Andrew] Sarris and [Pauline] Kael have out-shone [sic] Simon in historical longevity and influence, all three fell victim to the same plight: irrelevance. Simon's intention . . . was to justify film criticism as a craft that was respectable because filmmaking itself was an art and moviegoers should, in an educated society, be informed critics of that art. Yet what both Sarris and Kael understood, and Simon did not, was that movie criticism was a traditional craft in constant conflict with a disreputable art. The appeal of critics like Sarris and Kael came from their enjoyment of playing with that conflict and speaking to audiences who wanted something between scholarly criticism and synoptic reviews.

Many of the best writers on movies . . . have understood that as mass art, movies exist between the worlds of entertainment and art. Once the perception of them slides farther toward the world of art-and to the margins of scholarly discourse-the pleasure of reading about movies vanishes for large audiences. People clearly were interested in the transition that movies were undergoing during the 1960s. However, once the suspense ended, movies became the province of either entertainment or art. The mystique of movies as a rebellious art-the most vital art of the day-vanished, and with it fell the power critics had to move people and use discussions of movies as a protest against the critical traditions of the past. The transition of the movies into art has, ironically, meant the defeat of the forces that fought hard to get them there. Ultimately, the prestige was in the fight rather than the victory.

There is something to this, but less than meets the eye-we are not even told which camp won that Pyrrhic victory. The movies, as such, are not a homogenous something that can be nudged either toward entertainment or toward art, depending on a critic's perception of it. Nor is it because some criticism treats them as art that "the pleasure of reading about movies vanishes for large audiences." Large audiences have never bothered with criticism beyond the synopses and ratings in the local papers. When Pauline Kael wrote briefly for the slicks, she soon alienated readers and editors (she dared mock The Sound of Music), and was duly sacked.

The reasons so-called serious film criticism enjoyed a short heyday during part of the Sixties and Seventies have nothing to do with an alleged "transition" during the Sixties. Then as now, there were movies of all kinds: art-house films, revivals, retrospectives in special venues, and a vast supply of schlock, mostly from Hollywood. And film meant different things to different people.

What did happen in the late Sixties and early Seventies was that colleges instituted film courses and, eventually, degrees in film studies. This meant that students, either because of course assignments or out of rebellion against them, sought out criticism more stimulating than that of the daily papers. So the opportunity was there for a vivid critic in a lively magazine to make his or her mark.

And it was not only college students who looked for more from movies than they usually got. Some older viewers, who had been through World War II and gone to college on the GI Bill, were dissatisfied with the cultural blandness of the 1950s. For them, perceptive criticism could point the way to what to see, as well as analyze, interpret, and judiciously evaluate it. And it could make short shrift of the trash.