I got a little misty-eyed last weekend when At the Movies with Michael Phillips and A. O. Scott aired its final episode, including a tribute to the show back when it featured those irascible, inimitable, and always entertaining Chicago newspapermen Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. Evolving from a movie review program on PBS in the mid-1970s to a syndicated series in the mid-1980s distributed by Disney-ABC Domestic Television, the show has since undergone different titles and hosts, and its history over the last two years has been especially rocky. Phillips of the Chicago Tribune and Scott of The New York Times took over in September of 2009, signaling a silver age for At the Movies -- and, if you ask me, it was never better. On March 24, 2010, Disney announced the show's cancellation: "from a business perspective it became clear this weekly, half-hour, broadcast syndication series was no longer sustainable."I've blogged about recent developments in the show's life here and here. The cultural history and future of film reviewing was a central research interest of mine, coincidentally (or maybe not coincidentally) paralleling some of those behind-the-scenes shake-ups at At the Movies. More broadly, the print vs. online "crisis in criticism" has become the subject of an endlessly fascinating and, from certain voices, quite a productive conversation, one in which I enjoyed taking part with colleagues at SCMS last year. As much as there is still to say on this topic, I got burned-out on it and wound up returning to postwar Hollywood, my old stomping ground, where I'll happily reside for the remainder of my graduate work. However, I'm eager to see where this conversation continues among professional critics, independent writers online, and media scholars, and I'm sure the cancellation of At the Movies will spur discussion about criticism at the intersections of print media, television, and digital technologies.
This is an exciting time for online film reviewing, contrary to what the more traditional party line says about the "death of film criticism," while wonderful magazines with more academic leanings like Cahiers du cinema, CineAction, Cineaste, Film Comment, FilmInt., and Sight and Sound are still surviving the new millennium, managing to co-habitate with the Internet. For example, Film Quarterly, published by the University of California Press, remains the gold standard for writing about film and exists in print form, but makes select articles available online to download for free. Readers will soon be able to subscribe to an online only version for less than half of the print subscription rate and receive access to all issues dating back to 2001. At the same time, I'm saddened to see that the sort of critical "talk" provided by At the Movies no longer has a place on network television, and whether that format can be resurrected by new media has yet to be determined. For the past eight years or so, I usually watched episodes of At the Movies on the show's website, so I'd love it if the show could go on it that venue.
At the Movies in all of its various iterations became something of a punching bag among film academics, who grew up reading more "in-depth," more "authoritative," and less "commercially-oriented" film criticism in the high-minded magazines mentioned above. But we're really comparing apples and oranges here. It seems to me that the same sort of elitism and nostalgia informing such a position is also at work in the accusation that online reviewing has bastardized film criticism. At the Movies has been harangued for reducing film criticism to silly "thumbs up"/"thumbs down" conclusions and superficial analysis -- and yet to me those limitations seem bound up more in the constraints of the half-hour TV programming format, not in Siskel and Ebert's critical acumen. After all, Ebert always urged people to look past "the thumbs" and the star ratings, and instead listen to the debate and read the full-length reviews.
For the generation of moviegoers like me who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, Siskel and Ebert brought attention to new Hollywood releases and documentary, independent, and international films to which we might not otherwise have been exposed. On the series finale, Phillips reminisces how working in a factory in 1980, he talked to people who saw their first subtitled film because of Siskel and Ebert. My experiences with the show are fairly similar: after stumbling upon Siskel & Ebert as a junior high school student, I discovered that it was okay to take movies seriously and talk about them critically, and I was introduced to some of the films that, well, got me into film studies. Before I wanted to be a film professor, I wanted to be a film reviewer (thanks to a gig at my college paper, I got to try my hand at that). This mainstreaming of criticism, Phillips and Scott argue, widened the exposure and appeal of less mainstream films beyond newspaper reviews. Further, Scott adds that Siskel and Ebert's democratizing of film reviewing opened it up for "the noise and argumentation of the Internet, where you have a hundred flowers blooming in angry contention."
If critics can bring people together to argue in a collegial spirit about the cinema, does it matter where that dialogue takes place...or in what direction their thumb points? And if critics can teach academics anything, it's that we shouldn't be afraid to make our evaluations explicit in our historical and theoretical research. Jim Naremore hit the nail on the head when he wrote that the best writing on film is neither devoid of value judgments nor a consumer's guide to the movies, but lies in-between those extremes, "where a certain historical perspective and openness to experiment are joined with the manifest love of the thing one is discussing. I don't think it's possible to write any kind of film history, theory or criticism without engaging in value judgments on some level" (120).* Not that we should only write about the films we love, but we should come to terms with the implicit evaluations that are always already there in our writing. Siskel and Ebert sometimes played the role of contrarians and provocateurs, sometimes reactionary curmudgeons, sometimes friends of the industry, sometimes the good, PC liberals, and most often smart, impassioned cinephiles. Above everything, they just wanted to talk about the cinema, and isn't that all what we're here for, too? I can't think of a better pair to carry the torch than Phillips and Scott. There's something fitting about this post being my last word on contemporary film reviewing for a while, and also my last word on At the Movies, the show that turned my head in this direction in the first place. Here's hoping the balcony doesn't stay closed for good, no matter in what medium it reopens.
*Martin, Adrian, and James Naremore. "The Future of Academic Film Study." Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia. Eds. Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin. London: BFI Publishing, 2008. 119-132.
