April
8
Film Critics: New York and New Wave
In the latest issue of New York celebrating its 40th anniversary, David Edelstein lists his fave the movies that most define New York, including Annie Hall (pictured).
The New Yorker is keeping its profile of the French New Wave's Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard behind its firewall, damn them. (I have a sub, but I can't link to the full profile.) Here's a slide show and audio interview with the writer Richard Brody.
I got a huge kick out of showing Godard's Alphaville to my USC film criticism class. Godard's reviews are fun to read, especially on Hitchcock. It's heady to see his pieces move from an enthusiastic embrace, appreciation and analysis of American movies to full-blown treatises on cinema, as Godard works out his ideas and starts to put them on film.
This ongoing debate about film criticism may be missing a crucial point. When the cinema was still a young medium--and the critics were figuring out their role in relation to it--everyone was making discoveries. The auteur theory was created so that critics addressing a backlog of movies accumulated over decades could codify and index them.
Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris were battling over different ways to read movies. Sarris was the more learned and academic; he was really an historian. Kael was a popularizer and passionate advocate, and wrote far more entertaining prose.
We haven't seen their like since for several reasons. The explosion of movies in the 60s and 70s has subsided. Critics became more established, and they stopped arguing about their modes of discourse. In the end, Kael won the battle. Learned auteurist Dave Kehr is not a film critic at the NYT, although many point out that reviewing DVDs is a far better job. The New Yorker's Anthony Lane is the quintessential reviewer as entertainer, where it's less about what he has to say than how he says it.
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'Dog Day Afternoon' and '25th Hour', great flics, had forgotten about 'The Brother From Another Planet' which I enjoyed when it came out and might well Netflix. I would add 'Coogans Bluff' not because it's that good a movie, but because my Junior High School 43 class trip to the Cloisters ran into the film crew during a rain delay and Clint Eastwood spent time with us rather than ducking into someplace where he could stay dry.
Posted by: mitkid | April 08, 2008 at 08:18 PM
Anne I adore your column, read it faithfully, and appreciate the notice. Just a clarification: these are not my "fave" movies but movies I think have contributed to the perception of New York City in the 40 years of New York magazine's publication. (That meant nothing I couldn't cite anything before '68, so there goes the Warhol films and Flaming Creatures, etc.) No way Death Wish is one of my favorite films, but it still resonates, unfortunately. I had to cut many of my "faves" for space (they gave me 1400 words!) as well as movies like After Hours because how many Scorsese films can you have? (I wasn't going to leave out Mean Streets or Taxi Driver.) I especially regret having to cut Demme's Something Wild for its yuppie-angst theme and Tucci's Big Night. Wait for the sequel.
Posted by: David Edelstein | April 09, 2008 at 06:32 AM