NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

The Awkward Ages: Film Criticism, Technological Change, and Cinephilia

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

for the degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Field of Screen Cultures

By

Jason Kelly Roberts

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

DECEMBER 2015
 ProQuest Number: 3741433

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 3
Abstract

The Awkward Ages: Film Criticism, Technological Change, and Cinephilia

Jason Kelly Roberts

This dissertation examines the rhetoric of popular and academic film criticism across moments

of major technological change, focusing on the coming of sound, television broadcasts of movies,

home video, and digital projection. Specifically, I investigate the appearance of four seemingly

binary oppositions (change/continuity; specificity/convergence; scarcity/plenitude; and

hope/disillusionment) constructed and deployed by film critics to ascertain the scope and value

of these changes. In doing so, I uncover common responses to otherwise new and distinct

cinematic technologies.

Although material and cultural differences distinguish these moments and their respective

critical receptions, I argue that the persistence of these tropes belies claims frequently made by

film critics that such changes represent “radical breaks.” My analysis of film criticism thus

reminds us that both the use and interpretation of new technologies is contingent and relational,

not determined by the technologies themselves. Technological determinism of this sort is

stubbornly resilient among film critics, but viewed in the alternative perspective I propose,

cinema and film criticism become interdependent mirrors of one another. Forged by humans

and therefore lacking an immutable essence, cinema and film criticism are subject to being

transformed, redefined, and reevaluated. Each must be understood as liberated from any

medium-specific destiny; indeed, they are always the products of our invention, not objects of

archaeological discovery. As I demonstrate, film critics meet such epistemological uncertainty

ambivalently, evoking sensations of exhilaration and melancholy.

In tandem with my study of technological change, my study of cinephilia looks at the styles

of thought and structures of feeling characteristic of serious film culture since the silent era.
 4
Whereas most studies of film criticism and technological change assess new styles or articulate

new theories, I also contemplate technological change’s emotional resonances. In other words, I

am interested not only in problems of filmmaking practice and modern technology, but also in

probing the affective bonds connecting film critics to the medium. The Awkward Ages shows us,

then, that film culture’s current crisis—the impact of digital technologies—is just the most recent

instance of a larger pattern, whereby moments of major technological change simultaneously

unsettle the myth of medium specificity, and provide an occasion for affirming the myth.
 5
Acknowledgments

Over the duration of this project, I received encouragement, advice, and feedback from many

people. The following list of names is far from exhaustive, indicating the good fortune from

which I have benefited, not only in relation to this dissertation, but also throughout my life.

Before I arrived at Northwestern, two institutions and several mentors nurtured my

cinephilia and channeled it into academic research. At the University of Colorado Denver, Susan

Linville and Howie Movshovitz helped turn an inveterate slacker into someone who truly cared

about his education. At Emory University, I learned from a peerless cohort of scholars who

taught me more in a year and a half than seems possible in retrospect. In particular, I would like

to thank Karla Oeler, Matthew Bernstein, Evan Lieberman, and David Cook. Each of these

professors taught classes that continue to resonate with me on a daily basis, while Dr. Cook’s

seminar on Stanley Kubrick remains one of the singular highlights of my long tenure as a

student.

At Northwestern, I have met an abundance of wonderful human beings. I am especially

grateful for the intellectual sustenance, editorial guidance, and cheerful company provided by

Alex Bevan, David Gurney, Brendan Kredell, Neha Kamdar, Catherine Clepper, Lucia Blanchet-

Fricke, Beth Corzo-Duchardt, Alla Gadassik, Cary Elza, Phil Scepanski, Emily Goodman, Hollis

Griffin, Hamid Naficy, Jacqueline Stewart, and Jacob Smith.

As my dissertation neared its conclusion, a handful of readers offered me their time and

wisdom. I owe a debt of gratitude to a pair of fellow Wildcats, Zach Campbell and Meredith

Ward Huntsman, and to a pair of readers on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon line, Wayne

Stengel and Girish Shambu. Perhaps all of you were only being polite, but your kind words

about my research and writing made a huge difference in my drive to complete this journey.
 6
Along the way, I also received tremendous support and inspiration from the members of my

committee. My chair, Scott Curtis, exercised remarkable patience through every arduous step of

this process. Without his faith in my work and persistent reassurances, I never would have made

it to the end of the road. Through the courses she taught when I first arrived at Northwestern

and the last-minute boost of confidence she gave me, Mimi White was an instrumental figure in

the quality of this project. Through his example as a writer of academic prose that one can

actually enjoy reading, Jeffrey Sconce was on my mind with every word I committed to the page.

Last but not least, Greg Taylor showed exceptional generosity through his mentorship and

participation in this endeavor.

A trio of friends have been invaluable to me since my life in academia began. My first and

greatest friend in cinephilia, Steven Rybin, is the scholar I wish I were. Dave Sagehorn continues

to put up with me despite the fact that I must have the most boring opinions of anyone lucky

enough to call him a friend. And Dan Bashara has been the most fun person to be with since the

moment we met. You are all very fine fellows, indeed.

Four years ago, the opportunity to work as a graduate assistant at Northwestern’s Office of

Fellowships just fell into my lap, happily changing the course of my future. During my time in

the office, Angela Johnson Keys, Amy Kehoe, Stephen Hill, Beth Pardoe, and Sara Vaux have

showered me with more support than any person could reasonably expect. I cannot thank all of

them enough for the role they have played in the completion of this dissertation, and for the

chance they have given me to do work I love alongside such caring and conscientious colleagues.

Thank you to my father, mother, and sister for their enduring love and support. No matter

how gloomy or frustrated I became, I knew that I could always count on you to put this

experience in the proper perspective. Thanks as well to all the members of the Roberts and

Lenaghan families.
 7
Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to my beautiful and brilliant wife, Elizabeth Lenaghan.

Whatever value exists in these pages exists because of her. If I wrote another 300 pages solely in

praise of her, they would only begin to scratch the surface of her talents and of what she has

meant to me, both as a reader and, most importantly, as a partner. I cannot believe she stood

beside me throughout the thick and thin of this chapter in our relationship, and I cannot wait to

enjoy the rest of our lives together in the post-dissertation world.

 8
Contents

1 Introduction | 7

To Speak in the Voice of a Cinephile 12

The Keynote of the Common Mood 16

Chapter Outline 24

2 Change and Continuity | 29

The Debatable Art of the Movies 34

Because the Moving Picture Moves 45

A Certain Kind of Necessity 63

3 Specificity and Convergence | 88

Born in the Age of the Multiple 93

A Naturally Expectable Thing 112

An Over-All Serious View 132

4 Scarcity and Plenitude | 150

A Previously Undreamt of Opportunity 157

So Meaninglessly Present 167

Special Because It Was Rare 183

 9
5 Hope and Disillusionment | 210

An Often Melancholy Pursuit 215

We Ask So Little of Them 224

A Machine That Generates Empathy 248

Conclusion | 276

Notes 281
 10
1

Introduction

Whether we like it or not, we can never sever

our links with the past, complete with all its
errors. It survives in accepted concepts, in the
presentation of problems, in the syllabus of
formal education, in everyday life, as well as in
language and institutions. Concepts are not
spontaneously created but are determined by
their “ancestors.” That which has occurred in
the past is a greater cause of insecurity—
rather, it only becomes a cause of insecurity—
when our ties with it remain unconscious and
unknown.

- Ludwik Fleck

Early in 2008, Hollywood produced a notable pair of replies to the latest developments in home

video and new media. On February 25, as host of the Academy Awards ceremony, comedian Jon
1
Stewart lampooned the arrival of the iPhone. Holding the device in his hands, Stewart

remarked, “I love new media. I was watching Lawrence of Arabia. It’s just awesome.” “To really

appreciate it,” he sarcastically advised, “you have to see it in the widescreen.” Stewart then

slowly rotated the iPhone ninety degrees to alter the visual orientation of its signature

touchscreen. Delivered as a punch line, the gesture referred to the stark contrast between the

film’s iconic grandeur and the iPhone’s more modest dimensions. As a light-hearted parody of a

self-aggrandizing industry, the joke complemented the persona Stewart had crafted on Comedy

Central’s The Daily Show—witty commentator on the media’s foibles and hypocrisies. After

decades spent trying to lure customers with the spectacle of sheer size, Hollywood had been

surprised to learn that size might not matter so much in the end. Yet Stewart also seemed to take

sides in a generational conflict that unexpectedly pitted him against the so-called Millennials,

whose surplus of discretionary income and leisure made them Hollywood’s most coveted
 11
demographic group. Usually celebrated (or envied) for his ability to connect with and influence

Millennials, Stewart appeared to chastise them that night for the way their moviewatching

habits disrespected film history. If the future of the movies belonged to Millennials and their

iPhones, his routine implied, the future looked grim.

Four months later, the animated feature WALL·E premiered in theaters and offered an

alternative to the future conjured by Stewart. The film tells the story of its titular hero, a plucky

robot ordered to retrieve, compress, and stack the refuse littering the lifeless landscape of a

post-apocalyptic United States. But the film quickly reveals that WALL·E does more than

execute the manual labor dictated by his programmers; he also collects a trove of peculiar

objects that transform his home into an ad hoc museum, populated by such discarded ephemera

as Zippo lighters, bowling pins, and a confounding spork. When WALL·E returns from a day of

work and treasure hunting at the outset of the film, he glides by a toaster and pops out a VHS

tape, which he then inserts into a VCR that has been routed through an iPod powered by jumper

cables. Reaching to his left, WALL·E drags a jerry-rigged magnifying glass in front of the iPod’s

screen to (consciously?) approximate the shape of a traditional television monitor. As the 1969

musical Hello, Dolly! comes into focus, an elemental plot—boy meets girl—speaks to WALL·E

across the expanse of time (to say nothing of the gulf that separates man and machine). The

scene thus delivers an inexplicable but convincing portrait of imagined longevity for cinema and

cinephilia. Whereas Stewart had suggested that home video formats and new media

technologies could never do justice to the art of film, WALL·E depicts them as vehicles for the

survival of the medium’s ineffable emotional powers.

These disparate visions of the future mirror how film critics and cinephiles have reacted to

similar changes in home video formats and new media technologies. Along this spectrum of

critical response, the most familiar kind of reply aligns with the wistful attitude Stewart adopted.

Consider, for example, a short article by Joe Morgenstern, film critic for The Wall Street
 12
Journal. Published just a few days before the Oscar broadcast that Stewart emceed, “ ’Pod

People” recounts a “revelation” that occurred to its author at a film screening he attended while

seated near a “young” woman and two children, presumably hers. When the movie began,

Morgenstern recalls, the woman “pulled out a pair of earbuds, stuck them in her ears and

started watching her own show on her iPhone.” “I couldn’t tell what it was because her screen

was so small,” he reports, “but it didn’t matter. Watching her fixated by whatever wee spectacle

it was, I thought I could see the death knell . . . of theatrical exhibition as we know it.” “To see

what such radical downsizing does to the medium I love,” Morgenstern announces, he bought an

iPod Touch. As a platform for moviewatching, the device promptly lived down to his

expectations, leading him to conclude “ ’Pod People” on a bleak note: “Feature films squeezed

into iPods and the like represent a technical triumph. They are also an oxymoron bordering on a

travesty for those of us who’ve grown up going to movies in theaters, where, in the company of

others, we’ve been taken out of ourselves by images vastly bigger than real life. Yet the

fascination with ever smaller screens seems unstoppable,” Morgenstern laments. “In an era of
2
take-out food, people want take-along entertainment.”

In addition to its rueful tone, “ ’Pod People” exemplifies another crucial component of the

worried responses to these developments among film critics and cinephiles. As film scholar

Chuck Tryon attests, such “nightmares” about “the eclipse of the cinematic century . . . reflect an

almost willful historical amnesia.” Consequently, they ignore or repress the record of “similar

pronouncements about film [that] arose at the dawn of television, cable, and the VCR, all of

which were supposed to put an end to moviegoing because of the convenience of watching
3
movies at home and the potential dangers of going out.” Absent any trace of the cultural and

industrial precedents for the developments at hand, accounts like Morgenstern’s respond to

such changes with alarm and despair. Moreover, they routinely condemn technological changes
 13
as “radical” breaks that violate cinema’s nature, diminish the medium’s reputation as an art

form, and threaten the very basis for cinephilia.

Although these aspects of “ ’Pod People” predominate in responses to home video and new

media among film critics and cinephiles, popular accounts that address the existence of previous

technological changes can be found as well. For instance, in the article “The Revolution Will Be

Downloaded (if You’re Patient),” published on March 18, 2007, New York Times film critic

Manohla Dargis briefly contemplates the overlap between moments of major technological

change as she narrates her attempts to stream video online. Ahead of the mainstream curve,

Dargis complains about a fledgling website’s interminable download speeds but uses the hassle

as an excuse to enter a vital debate within film culture: “Some film critics wax nostalgic about

the big-screen experience in the age of the diminishing movie image, but I can’t relate. For me

movies are movies whether on the big screen or small, on my laptop or on a plane, captured in

celluloid or digital.” “My preferred medium is film,” Dargis acknowledges, “though like a lot of

Americans,” she adds, “my movie love was nurtured at home while flopped in front of a

television, in my case while watching Chiller Theatre and, every Sunday morning without fail,

Abbott and Costello.” After all, Dargis reasons, “The first commercially exhibited moving

pictures were watched through peepholes in machines called Kinetoscopes, so watching a film
4
on an iPod shouldn’t really seem all that different. A screen is a screen is a screen, isn’t it?”

Much as WALL·E would do a year later, Dargis refused to endorse the typical narrative about

technological change among film critics and cinephiles, choosing instead to highlight a deeper

sense of continuity that spans the history of cinema.

While “The Revolution Will Be Downloaded (if You’re Patient)” tries to correct some of the

“historical amnesia” behind so many jeremiads against these developments, the article still

leaves something out—how film critics and cinephiles responded to the prior technological

changes Dargis mentions. Likewise, the cycle of critical responses cited by Chuck Tryon merely
 14
stands as a truism in a book otherwise devoted to recent debates about the impact of digital

technologies. Shared by popular and academic discourses, then, this neglect not only enables the

presentism seen in such accounts; it also begs a number of pertinent questions for anyone

interested in the intertwined histories of film criticism, film culture, and cinephilia. How did

film critics and cinephiles respond to moments of major technological change in the past? How

do those responses relate to and differ from contemporary debates about technological change?

What can the relationship between these responses reveal about the significance of technological

change for film criticism, film culture, and cinephilia?

Inspired by these questions, this dissertation explores the rhetoric of film criticism during

four distinct moments of major technological change. These moments include the coming of

sound in Hollywood, the rise of broadcast television as an exhibition platform for past theatrical

releases, the commercial and experiential dominance of home video, and the conversion to

digital projection in brick-and-mortar theaters. As I demonstrate below, film critics and

cinephiles greeted each of these moments as if it were a sui generis event. Notwithstanding the

real material and social differences that distinguish these moments, however, a common thread

in the rhetoric of film criticism implicitly unites them—they all provoked the same fundamental

concerns about the loss of cinema’s medium specificity, a loss that would entail as well the

decline of film culture and the demise of cinephilia. Despite the hyperbole and cynicism of these

immediate responses, film critics and cinephiles have also displayed equal amounts of

pragmatism and ingenuity in their subsequent efforts to reconcile with the effects of

technological change.

In the chapters that follow, The Awkward Ages examines this pattern of response as it

unfolds across the moments of major technological change outlined above. Through case studies

of several prominent American film critics and overviews of the larger debates in which they

participated, the ensuing analysis of this pattern identifies a series of persistent tropes that film
 15
critics and cinephiles have relied upon to interpret and evaluate the consequences of

technological change. By highlighting the discursive parallels between such moments, The

Awkward Ages contributes an important historical dimension to the current scholarship on film

criticism, technological change, and cinephilia. Opposite the presentism so prevalent in this

scholarship, I argue that none of these moments constitutes a radical break in the histories of

film, film culture, or cinephilia. To the contrary, they belong to the history of an ever-changing

medium that film critics and cinephiles have struggled to define since its invention.

To Speak in the Voice of a Cinephile

Alongside the research questions that give this project its scholarly impetus, The Awkward Ages

also springs from sources of curiosity that are more personal in nature. When I became obsessed

with cinema as a teenager, I picked up the works of popular film critics instead of a camera.

Through the reviews, essays, and books written by figures like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert, I

gathered advice about the movies I should see, both old and new, and then I tested my

developing tastes against their expert opinions, both singular and collective. Beyond my interest

in their opinions about movies, I read these film critics in search of insights about my new

identity. I wanted to know how someone properly obsessed with cinema should think, feel, and
5
act. That is, I wanted to learn how “to speak in the voice of a cinephile.”

While the criticism I read offered guidance on these matters, I also confronted a host of

discouraging reports about the current state of the medium, and about the current state of film

culture. As I soon discovered, my life as a cinephile had commenced during a fraught juncture in

film history. In the late 1990s, the prevalence of home video and the looming threat of digital

projection had resulted in “an almost relentless desire” among film critics “to declare the death
6
of cinema.” Correspondingly, film critics argued as well that cinephilia was no longer possible

due to the effects of these social and technological changes. Despite the evident conflict between
 16
their dour pronouncements and my own burgeoning obsession with the movies, I duly adopted a

melancholy attitude to match the tenor of the era. Thus I held the following set of interlocking

beliefs: cinema could not exist in the absence of celluloid, home video and new media could

never be sufficient substitutes for the real thing, and my cinephilia could never be authentic

because it was fatally compromised by the simple fact that I had been born too late. For many

years, I assuredly declared these beliefs to anyone who would listen, from friends and fellow

cinephiles to unsuspecting family members and innocent bystanders.

In the summer of 2006, though, two events disturbed my certainty. The first of these events

occurred when I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest at an ordinary multiplex in

suburban North Carolina. Although I had been entertained as much as the next person by the

franchise’s inaugural installment, I could not have imagined that this particular trip to the

movies would prove so pivotal. That day, however, I watched a digital version of a film and had

to admit to myself that it looked fundamentally indistinguishable from a celluloid print. I had

known that the theater converted to digital projection before the show began, but not because of

any cinephilic savvy on my part—advertisements preceding the main attraction proudly

proclaimed that the theater had entered the digital age, a transformation that allegedly

promised a better moviegoing experience for the whole audience. I must have grumbled to

myself about the emptiness of this promotional hype, but my previous thoughts and feelings

about the superiority of celluloid seemed harder to defend once the movie started rolling (a

phrase that is more metaphorical than literal today).

As the summer ended, I left North Carolina to pursue a PhD in the Screen Cultures program

at Northwestern University, near Chicago. This program quickly introduced me to ideas that

further challenged the central tenets of my cinephilia, including my faith in the virtues of

capital-a Art and my insistence that cinema possessed a medium-specific essence. The force of

these challenges eventually coalesced around a pair of texts that planted the seeds of this
 17
dissertation: A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980-1989, written

by film historian Stephen Prince, and The Virtual Life of Film, written by film theorist
7
D. N. Rodowick. According to an argument forwarded by each of these books, the ontology and

plenitude of home video caused the demise of cinephilia. In the former volume, for example,

Prince writes:

Before video, when access to individual films was more restricted, the opportunities to see or

screen them were more privileged. A chance to see Citizen Kane or Seven Samurai or A Star

is Born was special because it was rare and value was based in scarcity. By contrast, with

access to nearly any film on video, one’s encounter with an individual title, no matter how

fine or special that title, grew more unremarkable. . . . Film is now more abundant on
8
videotape, but it is not the same medium and does not have the same emotional charge.

At the beginning of my life as a cinephile, I would have reflexively agreed with such a claim and

cursed my rotten luck. But armed with a newfound skepticism about my prior understandings of

and affections for cinema, I considered this claim to be an implicit attack on the legitimacy of

my relationship to the medium.

Indeed, my encounter with these books encouraged me to see the birth of my cinephilia in a

fresh context. Life as a cinephile had begun for me on an otherwise routine visit with a friend to

our local Hollywood Video. At the store, my friend said that we should rent “a Woody Allen

movie.” Though Allen’s name was vaguely familiar from media coverage about the notorious

aspects of his biography, I had never seen one of his films. Furthermore, I had no clue what my

friend meant by the phrase “a Woody Allen movie.” But the film we watched that night

resonated deeply with me, immediately setting the course of my future. In addition to my

intense feeling of sympathy with Allen’s worldview, I latched onto the notion that films had
 18
individual authors: “a Woody Allen movie” meant a movie created by Woody Allen. Suddenly,

movies were no longer a mere diversion—they were a profound art form. They had also
9
instantaneously become the intellectual and emotional focus of my daily life.

Thereafter, as I learned how to speak in the voice of a cinephile, I gave little or no credit to a

key feature of that light-bulb moment—I had watched the film that altered my life via home

video (on a VHS tape, no less, played on a rather small television). My subsequent training in

cinephilia taught me about the purported inauthenticity of this experience. Cinephilia has long

been linked with the materiality of celluloid and the atmosphere of brick-and-mortar theaters,

explains film scholar Barbara Klinger. Along these lines, she notes, the French film theorist

Christian Metz helped to shape the definition of a cinephile “as an extreme but logical extension

of the regular filmgoer who loves the cinema with a ‘passion for seeing’ that is tied inextricably

to the movie hall’s ‘theatre of shadows’ and the technology that makes it possible (i.e., the

camera, projector, and screen).” Likewise, Klinger contends, film scholars have “regarded

cinephilia as essentially and exclusively a big-screen experience, absolutely dependent on the

projection of celluloid within the public space of the motion picture theater.” This definition of

cinephilia therefore renders television “as the antithesis of the movie theater . . . , a prime

example of the ‘death’ of rapture caused by removing film viewing from its proper context. In

the wasteland of affect defining the home and its subdued, private entertainment space, the
10
exercise of cinephilia would be unimaginable.”

These views substantially informed my evolving relationship to the movies. For instance, not

long after I watched that fateful videotape of a Woody Allen movie, I stocked my bedroom with a

DVD player and a bigger television than my parents had ever owned, but I drew figurative

boundaries around the value of watching films on celluloid and watching them on home video.

As many cinephiles do, I kept a list of all the films I watched, jotting them down regardless of the

format in which I saw them. Yet I also kept a parallel list in my head that separated and ranked
 19
the formats: films seen on 35mm (or, less frequently, 16mm) were recorded in mental ink while

films seen on any home video format were recorded in mental pencil. If I really liked a film that I

saw for the first time on home video, I longed to see it again on 35mm, thereby allowing me to

erase the mental record of the video screening and permanently replace it with a memory of the

“authentic” screening that had ultimately transpired. Just as often, I chose to not watch a film if

it could only be seen on home video, especially when the only available copy was a VHS tape.

I suspect that these thoughts, feelings, and practices are typical among cinephiles my age,

and they are probably typical for many of my cinephilic elders, too. But I began to doubt their

wisdom when I recognized that digital projection could satisfy my trained eyes, and when I

recognized that the most common arguments against home video were founded on the faulty

logic of essentialism and technological determinism. Consequently, I saw these arguments as

attempts to valorize an earlier generation’s cinephilia at the expense of mine. Perhaps if I had

been a different person at the outset of my life as a cinephile, I would have happily and

righteously asserted my independence from those who presumed to control the meaning of

cinephilia for everyone else. Alas, my psychological makeup demanded the opposite of

independence—it demanded that my growing love for the movies belong to a larger tradition of

relating to cinema in the same way. By studying the rhetoric of film criticism during moments of

major technological change, The Awkward Ages provides an intellectual history of the very

tradition I sought to be a part of as a young cinephile.

The Keynote of the Common Mood

Alongside the premise that moments of major technological change are the cause of radical

breaks in the nature of cinema itself, film critics and cinephiles have often declared that such

moments are the cause of radical breaks in how we experience and relate to the medium. From

the coming of sound to the disappearance of celluloid, film critics and cinephiles have professed
 20
that each new moment of major technological change established an irrevocable boundary

between generations of moviegoers. Counter to the presentism and technological determinism

at the heart of this narrative, The Awkward Ages posits the existence of a more or less coherent

tradition of thought and feeling that connects film critics and cinephiles across the entire history

of cinema. In the remainder of The Awkward Ages, I refer to this tradition as serious film

culture.

As a way to signify a certain kind of attitude toward the movies, the word serious first gained

widespread purchase during the height of the famed Film Generation. Indeed, the film critic

Stanley Kauffmann considered the Film Generation’s seriousness to be its signature as a social

formation. In the 1966 essay that gave the Film Generation its name, Kauffmann avowed that a

crucial shift had occurred within American film culture. “Before 1935,” he asserted, movies were

“more popular than they are now,” but for most of their audience, he added, “they represented

a . . . bath of escapism.” The purportedly escapist audience still persisted “in large number,” but

it had been joined by members of “another audience, most of them born since 1935.” For

Kauffmann, the new audience represented “the first generation that has matured in a culture in

which the film has been of accepted serious relevance, however that seriousness is defined.”

“This group, this Film Generation, is certainly not exclusively grim,” he concluded, “but it is

essentially serious. Even its appreciations of sheer entertainment films reflect an over-all serious
11
view.” Kauffmann then championed this development as “the most cheering circumstance in
12
contemporary American art.”

Forty years later, the key facets of Kauffmann’s account have been overwhelmingly

confirmed by histories of the Film Generation. In the 2006 book Cinephilia and History, for

example, film scholar Christian Keathley echoes Kauffmann’s essay with his own summary of

the period. I want to quote Keathley at length here to provide more detail about the Film
 21
Generation, and to emphasize the extent of his accord with Kauffmann, especially with respect

to the Film Generation’s fundamental seriousness:

In the 1960s and 70s, the cinema was the most urgent and important art form, interacting in

extraordinarily dynamic and diverse ways with its cultural and historical moment. Although

interest in the cinema as a serious art form predates these years, phenomena like organized

film societies, independent filmmaking, serious film criticism, and academic cinema studies

had been limited to large metropolitan areas like New York and San Francisco; also, interest

had most often focused on European art cinema and/or avant-garde filmmaking. The 1960s

and 70s, however, saw a nationwide diffusion of interest in cinema; furthermore, the interest

extended beyond so-called “serious” cinema to an embracing of Hollywood film and its
13
history.

Within the space of a single paragraph, Keathley says serious three times to portray the novel

ideas, tastes, and practices that distinguished the Film Generation. He does temper his final use

of the adjective with scare quotes, but the overarching message is unmistakable—above all else,

the Film Generation was serious about the movies. Even though Keathley points to a few of the

Film Generation’s social and cultural precedents in the above passage, he ultimately agrees with

Kauffmann that the tenor and scope of the Film Generation’s seriousness marked a significant

difference from the relationship with movies enjoyed by previous generations.

When Keathley subsequently turns his attention to the current state of film culture, he finds

that the Film Generation’s successors have marked the appearance of yet another unique

audience. However, opposite the excitement Kauffmann conveyed as the Film Generation

emerged, Keathley bemoans the circumstances in which the latest generation of moviegoers took

shape. In concert with the pervasive talk about the death of cinema and its parallel nostalgia for
 22
the Film Generation, Keathley blames the plenitude of home video and new media for the

decline of cinephilia. “As a result of the restricted availability in the pre-video days, the cinephile

not only anticipated or recalled happily the times when one was able to see a rare film gem, but

also let that anticipation or recollection seep into other aspects and areas of one’s life,” he writes.

“This dynamic balance of availability and rarity did not end in the 1950s,” Keathley clarifies,

“but in fact lasted well into the 1970s and early 1980s, when the expansion of cable and pay

television and, most importantly, home video brought it to an end” (20).

Following the work of French film scholars Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Frémaux,

Keathley labels the present a “post-cinephilic era,” but he separates the Film Generation’s

experience of residual cinephilia from the impossibility of authentic cinephilia for younger
14
moviegoers (3). Along these lines, Keathley contends that members of the Film Generation

could successfully adapt to the arrival of television and home video because the plenitude

eventually afforded by these formats evolved slowly. For instance, he notes, VCRs only became

widely available in the late 1970s, so television broadcasts of past theatrical releases “were

marked by a restricted accessibility. . . . For me and for many others like me, then, television,

video, and cable were able to nurture our already established cinephilic relationship to movies”

(23). “But for the most part,” he attests, “this new kind of cinephilia was enjoyed by those like

myself, who had some experience with the old kind, and who thus knew how to navigate what

was now available to them” (23-4). Meanwhile, the plenitude of home video and new media

adversely affects the “younger generations who have never known cinephilia in its ‘pure’ state.”

Stunted by the “shift to virtual accessibility,” the “post-cinephile generations” unknowingly

suffer from “a certain loss of history due to the ‘televisualization’ of cinema,” Keathley surmises.

Moreover, rather than encouraging them to be adventurous and voracious in equal measure,

plenitude evidently narrowed and calcified their moviewatching preferences: “[F]aced with an

abundance of stimuli—or in this case, an abundance of availability, of choices—one closes down,

 23
sets up boundaries where none seem to exist, retreats into what one already knows instead of

seeking out what is new” (24).

If the contrast Keathley explicates in Cinephilia and History reflects the tendency among

film critics and cinephiles to treat moments of major technological change as barriers between

generations of moviegoers, a broader picture of his career reveals an alternative approach to

these issues. Beyond his advocacy for the video essay as a valid genre of film criticism and

scholarship, Keathley has also more recently proposed that cinephilia is alive and well in the
15
digital age. In the preface he contributed to the 2009 book Cinephilia in the Age of Digital

Reproduction, Keathley celebrates the “reinvigoration and expansion of cinephiliac discourse”

via the Internet. “[T]hanks to the Internet,” he proclaims, “a budding cinephile can read all the
16
finest critics from across the country and, indeed, around the world.” Likewise, Keathley begins

this piece with a brief sketch of film history that depicts a continuous lineage of cinephilia:

“Cinema’s first century has shown that there is no better formula for stirring up cinephiliac

discourse than the introduction of new technologies into the film experience. The transition to

sound and color in the 1930s, the development of widescreen formats in the 1950s, and the

introduction of home video and pay/cable TV in the 1970s all prompted cries of despair from
17
one group of cinephiles and shouts of joy from another.”

Two aspects of Keathley’s commentary on these matters are pertinent for my analysis of film

criticism. First, his revised definition of cinephilia exemplifies the pattern of response to

moments of major technological change that constitutes the subject of this dissertation. Despite

his initial claim that home video and new media led to cinephilia’s demise, Keathley later

reversed course to credit the positive role these technologies play in the contemporary

atmosphere of robust cinephilia. In doing so, he reconciled with these changes by retroactively

highlighting elements of continuity across the overlapping histories of cinema and cinephilia.

The ensuing chapters of The Awkward Ages illustrate how other film critics and cinephiles have
 24
done the same thing during moments of major technological change in an effort to preserve the

central tenets of their prior understandings of and affections for the medium.

Second, Keathley’s revised definition of cinephilia presupposes a tradition of relating to

cinema that mirrors what I mean by the phrase serious film culture. While the words cinephile

and cinephilia rose to prominence with serious during the Film Generation, the case studies in

The Awkward Ages show how film critics and cinephiles have routinely and repeatedly

employed the latter term since the silent era to describe both the medium and themselves. As a

consequence of cinema’s mechanical origins and commercial exploits, its partisans have always

been compelled to insist upon the medium’s potential as a serious art form. Correspondingly,

they have also been compelled to insist upon the serious character of their relationship to

cinema. Instead of privileging the Film Generation, then, this dissertation sees it as a vital

episode in the longer story of America’s serious film culture, a story that continues to unfold

today.

To identify and analyze serious film culture as a discrete entity, The Awkward Ages draws

upon a set of complementary concepts. The first of these concepts—thought collective and

thought style—are taken from the work of Ludwick Fleck, a Polish microbiologist and historian

of science. In the 1935 book Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, Fleck submitted this

pair of concepts as a challenge to the notion that scientific experiments and observations

uncover natural truths about the world. “This would be the keynote of the common mood in
18
which the thought collective of natural science lives its life,” he averred. Against the grain of

this dominant ideology, Fleck argued that every act of perception and every body of knowledge

is socially constructed. Members of the scientific community do not necessarily have a special

access to truth—their ideas are just as much a product of the thought styles that characterize

their collective as are the ideas of any other collective. The critical theorist Barbara Herrnstein

Smith offers a useful synopsis of this intervention in her 2005 book Scandalous Knowledge:
 25
Science, Truth and the Human: “For Fleck, the emergence and specific features of what we

experience as ‘fact,’ ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ are made possible, but also severely constrained, by the

systems of ideas, assumptions and related perceptual and classificatory dispositions (or, in his

phrase, ‘thought styles’) that prevail in our particular epistemic communities—that is,

disciplines, fields of specialization, sub-cultures and so forth, or what he called ‘thought

19
collectives.’ ” The rest of The Awkward Ages regards serious film culture as one such thought

collective and aims to map its governing thought styles (or, as I will henceforth call them, styles

of thought).

The analytical framework Fleck supplies thus helps to illuminate what he would label the

“keynote of the common mood” for each generation of serious film culture, but his

epistemological critique also implies that serious film culture’s views are never universally true.

When members of serious film culture describe their outlook on cinema as being distinct from

highbrow disdain, middlebrow escapism, or lowbrow fandom, they are describing real

differences; in light of Fleck’s critique, though, The Awkward Ages eschews the self-

congratulatory terms in which serious film culture’s members regularly express their styles of

thought. As Fleck writes, “Truth is not ‘relative’ and certainly not ‘subjective’ in the popular

sense of the word. It is always, or almost always, completely determined within a thought style.”

Consequently, he maintains, “One can never say that the same thought is true for A and false for

B. If A and B belong to the same thought collective, the thought will be either true or false for
20
both. But if they belong to different thought collectives, it will just not be the same thought!”

Ergo, serious film culture is different from, but not superior to, other ways of relating to cinema.

Given the importance of cinephilia for serious film culture’s way of relating to cinema, any

discussion of its styles of thought would be incomplete without also considering its structures of

feeling. As it appears in The Awkward Ages, this concept is loosely adapted from the work of

British cultural historian Raymond Williams. In the 1977 book Marxism and Literature,
 26
Williams recommends the concept of structures of feeling as a method for grasping the lived

experience of social changes through shifts in literary style. “Such changes can be defined as

changes in structures of feeling. The term is difficult,” he admits, “but ‘feeling’ is chosen to

emphasize a distinction from more formal concepts of ‘world-view’ or ‘ideology.’ ” “We are

talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective

elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought,” Williams elucidates,

“but thought as felt and feeling as thought . . . We are then defining these elements as a set, with

specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension.” Whereas Williams forwarded

this theory to suggest how scholars might retrospectively study “a social experience which is still

in process,” The Awkward Ages borrows structures of feeling as a companion to styles of

21
thought. In other words, the concept indicates here that feeling is also enabled and constrained

by membership in a collective.

As I demonstrate below, serious film culture’s styles of thought and structures of feeling

operate in tandem. Perhaps the primary style of thought for serious film culture has been the

belief that cinema possesses a medium-specific essence, an essence that is rooted in the

medium’s technological foundations and allegedly serves as the wellspring of cinephilia.

Accordingly, one of the primary structures of feeling for serious film culture has been its

inclination toward disillusionment in response to moments of major technological change. Such

moments are therefore invaluable in the effort to isolate and examine serious film culture.

Although the rhetoric of film criticism has always chiefly been used to interpret and evaluate

actual movies, moments of major technological change have provoked film critics and cinephiles

not only to disclose their own understandings of and affections for the medium, but also to

construct idealized versions of film, film culture, and cinephilia. Whether they occur in film

reviews, long-form essays, published interviews, or blog posts, these rhetorical acts shed light on
 27
the thoughts and feelings of serious film culture’s individual members while simultaneously

seeking to outline the contours of serious film culture as a whole.

Chapter Outline

In the 1929 book An Hour with the Movies and the Talkies, Gilbert Seldes provided readers with

a short history of cinema and delivered a few words of cautious optimism for the medium’s

future. The caution was necessary, of course, because the coming of sound had thrown cinema’s

destiny into doubt. Like many of his fellow silent-era aficionados, Seldes considered

synchronized sound and speech superfluous to the art of film, but he left the door open to the

possibility that talkies would find their own path to aesthetic legitimacy. At the time, though,

Seldes had to exercise his benevolence toward the infant form by offering “to pass lightly over

the faults and disasters of the talkies,” which included such infelicities as “fatal close-ups of

actors’ necks” and voices that had a “tendency to leap from the top corner of the screen when the

speaker is diagonally opposite.” “[L]et these all go down as the awkward age of the talkies,” he
22
hopefully recommended.

Although Seldes focused here on the clumsiness of the earliest sound films, he might have

also discussed this period as an awkward age for film critics and cinephiles. Indeed, just as

Hollywood had struggled to incorporate a new technology into its established filmmaking

practices, film critics and cinephiles struggled to incorporate the same technology into their

prior understandings of and affections for the medium. They had championed silence, in

particular, as a fundamental component of cinema’s specificity, but the coming of sound

challenged their key assumptions about the nature of the medium. Were silent films and talkies

separate media? Would film art perish if general audiences preferred talkies to silent films?

Could the talkies become a bona fide art form in their right?
 28
While these questions mark the coming of sound as the first moment of major technological

change to trigger an awkward age for serious film culture, this dissertation treats the entire

history of serious film culture as a series of awkward ages. Rather than study these periods in

chronological order, each of the chapters below is organized around a different pair of terms

commonly used by film critics and cinephiles to weigh the impact of technological change. In

keeping with their tendency to greet moments of major technological change as radical breaks,

film critics and cinephiles have typically proposed these terms as binary oppositions, suitable for

demarcating a bright line between the past and the present. Moreover, they have routinely

assumed that these terms pertain uniquely to the moment of major technological change at

hand. My analysis, however, shows that the same terms have been used throughout the history

of serious film culture to assess distinct moments of major technological change, from the

coming of sound to the disappearance of celluloid. Furthermore, I argue, these terms have

ultimately served as the basis for dialectical engagements with the consequences of

technological change, whether seen in the career of an individual film critic or measured across

the wider debates within serious film culture.

Chapter 2 explores the most fundamental of these dialectics, change and continuity. In any

moment of major technological change, film critics and cinephiles assess the effects of change

through a set of basic questions that seek to ascertain what has changed and what has stayed the

same. Although film critics and cinephiles tend to emphasize change in their immediate

responses to these moments, this chapter demonstrates how they have also reconciled with the

effects of such moments by finding a way to emphasize important aspects of continuity that

cross the technological divide. Through case studies of the careers of Gilbert Seldes and

Jonathan Rosenbaum, I show how film critics and cinephiles have employed similar rhetorical

strategies to reconcile new technological realities with their prior thoughts and feelings about

the medium.
 29
If chapter 2 covers the most broadly applicable of the dialectics examined in this

dissertation, chapters 3 and 4 cover dialectics that are widely assumed to be applicable only for

the age of home video and digital technologies. The first of these dialectics, specificity and

convergence, is the subject of chapter 3. Since the mid-1970s, film critics and cinephiles have

accused home video and new media of blurring the boundaries between media, especially

between film and television. Beginning with a case study of the career of Harry Alan Potamkin, I

illustrate how this concern stretches back to the coming of sound. With his theory of cinema as a

“compound” form, I argue that Potamkin’s film criticism represents an important precursor to

the recent debate about convergence. In the final two sections of this chapter, I consider the

convergence of film and broadcast television before the age of home video through a case study

of Bosley Crowther and an overview of the Film Generation.

Chapter 4 covers another dialectic often assumed to be of recent vintage, scarcity and

plenitude. According to many film critics and cinephiles, home video has been the cause of a

disastrous plenitude of access to films. In light of home video’s plenitude of access, film critics

and cinephiles have retroactively valorized the purported scarcity of access to celluloid prints

that characterized film culture before home video. On the other hand, a minority of film critics

and cinephiles have pushed back against this claim and declared a renaissance of cinephilia due

to home video’s plenitude. This chapter challenges the logic of these claims in two ways. First, it

shows a longer history of the dialectic of scarcity and plenitude, with an emphasis on the

presence of this dialectic in debates about the rise of broadcast television as a platform for the

exhibition of past theatrical releases. Through case studies of Steven H. Scheuer and Pauline

Kael, this chapter illustrates how the pleasures and perils of plenitude predate the age of home

video. Second, this chapter concludes with an overview of the contemporary debate that

questions the assumption that the balance of scarcity and plenitude determines the value of film

culture for any given era.

 30
Chapter 5 concludes my study of the rhetoric of film criticism by exploring another

fundamental dialectic, hope and disillusionment. While the previous dialectics have been used

to address questions of historical interpretation, the dialectic of hope and disillusionment has

been avowedly subjective. Although the terms themselves appear to speak to general ideas about

the state of film and film culture, these terms have a special meaning within serious film culture.

Hope and disillusionment have been used to reflect upon cinema’s progress toward fulfilling its

medium-specific capacity. This chapter investigates the dialectic of hope and disillusionment

through case studies at opposite ends of this discursive spectrum. For Alexander Bakshy, the

coming of sound initially signaled an opportunity for cinema to realize its potential as an art

form, but he quickly became disillusioned with the medium when the promise of sound seemed

to be extinguished by the Hollywood mentality. For Roger Ebert, home video and digital

technologies repeatedly threatened the health of film and film culture, but he eventually found a

way to embrace these technologies and preserve the optimistic outlook that first distinguished

him as a film critic.

Through its consideration of these debates about technological change and cinema’s

specificity, The Awkward Ages ultimately suggests that an update is required for one of serious

film culture’s most famous axioms. In the 1977 book The Imaginary Signifier, Christian Metz

described the ambivalence demanded by the act of criticism: “To be a theoretician of the cinema,

one should ideally no longer love the cinema and yet still love it . . . Not have forgotten what the

cinephile one used to be was like, in all the details of his affective inflections, in the three

dimensions of his living being, and yet no longer be invaded by him: not have lost sight of him,
23
but be keeping an eye on him.” For members of serious film culture in the twenty-first century,

the primary challenge of cinephilia is to believe in the myth of medium specificity and to

understand it as myth all the while.

 31
2

Change and Continuity

In the widely read New Yorker article “Big Pictures,” published on January 8, 2007, David

Denby illustrates many of the most common ways that film critics respond to moments of major

technological change. As his article considers the impact of digital technologies upon film

culture, it provides him a chance to contemplate the history of cinema and speculate about the

medium’s future. “Big Pictures” thus combines two genres of popular film criticism that often go

hand in hand: diatribes against an alleged “dumbing down” of Hollywood movies, and urgent
24
think pieces spurred by recent technological change. Throughout the article, Denby links a

purported decline in modestly budgeted films created for grown-up audiences to the use of

digital technologies in every facet of production, distribution, and exhibition. According to his

analysis, these technologies regrettably dictate the special-effects-laden style of contemporary

movies and encourage Hollywood studios to “replace [human] instinct, taste, and daring” with

algorithms that synthesize consumer habits. Consequently, Denby writes, Hollywood avoids

“execution dependent” movies because they must be “good” to achieve box-office success,

choosing instead to puts its corporate resources behind “audience dependent” titles that fill
25
seats with Pavlovian regularity, quality be damned.

Alongside his concerns about the woeful quality of movies in an age of media conglomerates,

Denby worried even more at the time about home video’s growing role in film culture after a

wave of advances enhanced picture resolution but shrunk screens in the bargain. At the outset of

the “Big Pictures,” then, he narrates his frustrated attempt to watch Pirates of the Caribbean:

The Curse of the Black Pearl on a video iPod’s tiny monitor. Calling the device “a new

convenience that will annihilate old paradigms,” Denby details with humor and alarm the

physical strain he endured to watch the tent-pole hit on a palm-sized screen. “If you are sitting
 32
down,” he attests, “the natural place for an iPod is in your lap; that way, your arms don’t get

tired. At that distance, however, I couldn’t focus on the image. So I rested the iPod on my

stomach. And there it sat, riding up and down every time I took a breath. I was on the Black

Pearl, all right, standing on her foredeck like a drunken sailor as she plowed through heavy

seas.” But the video iPod failed to deliver what he expected due to the reduced scale of its screen.

“In a theatre,” Denby describes, “you submit to a screen; you want to be mastered by it, not

struggle to cozy with it.” Although he insists that “no one will ever be forced to look at movies on

a pipsqueak display,” Denby spies trouble on the horizon for “fervent believers in the theatrical

experience.” Indeed, he fears they will be ignored as Hollywood caters to a generation of

“platform agnostic” customers, happy to “look at movies on any screen at all, large or small.” (To

prevent the article from devolving into a “Get off my lawn!” manifesto, Denby also coupled his

anxiety with a dash of humility. Unable to operate the video iPod with bodily ease, he admits

that most “kids don’t have bellies, and they can pretzel their limbs into almost any shape they

want, so they can get comfortable with a handheld device” [54]).

For Denby, the stakes of these shifts were as clear as they were encompassing. In addition to

the complementary factors that seemed to push movie theaters from the center of film culture to

the periphery, home video’s ascendance appeared to threaten film’s entire worth as an art form.

“Digital technology opens enormous possibilities for filmmakers, and even for distributors, but

it also offers a radical break with the many ways of watching movies that have given us pleasure

in the past,” Denby contends. “Every kind of screen comes with its own aesthetic and imposes its

own social experience on moviegoers. We’ve all watched hundreds of movies on old TVs, and

taken endless pleasure from doing so, but to watch Citizen Kane on TV for the first time is a

half-fulfilled promise; to see it on a big screen,” he announces, “is a revelation.” Unfortunately,

Denby did not elaborate on the belief that Citizen Kane could only be a “revelation” when seen

on a standard theater screen. (Was it scale alone? Or did multiple factors determine the
 33
difference?) Rather than pursue such an inquiry, he declares, “If watching movies at home

becomes not just an auxiliary to theatregoing but a replacement of it, a visual art form will

decline, and become something else” (56). Thus “Big Pictures” ultimately reflects the tendency

in serious film culture to greet a moment of major technological change as a radical break. The

corresponding pangs of nostalgia and remorse have been par for the course as well.

A tendency toward hyperbole and cynicism may constitute the norm for serious film culture

during such moments, but alternative attitudes also exist. In 2008, for example, Terrence

Rafferty wrote a short New York Times piece on Vertigo’s 50th anniversary and highlighted a

vital sense of continuity he felt between the film’s premiere and its availability on DVD. To set

the scene, Rafferty quotes an apparently banal line of dialogue, “I look up, I look down” (spoken

by Scottie, played by James Stewart), and then weaves it into an account of the way audiences

might have received the film upon its release: “Fifty years and two days ago, at a preview in San

Francisco, moviegoers looked up at the screen and saw Vertigo for the first time, and maybe

some of them looked down too in confusion or dismay, wondering, as in a dream, where they

were and how they had gotten there and how they would make it back to safer ground.” Just as

Denby leaned on Citizen Kane, Rafferty ponders home video through the lens of a canonical

film. Unlike Denby, Rafferty ends his article with a note of optimism: “Seeing Vertigo on DVD is

maybe a shade less overwhelming, less deranging, than seeing it as its first audience did, but it

has the compensating quality,” he notices, “of seeming a more solitary and more intimate

experience, and this is, always has been, a movie that makes you want to be alone with it. It’s

like Scottie’s surveillance of Madeleine: he watches her from a distance, then there’s no distance

at all, just him and her, no one else around.” Rafferty then concludes the article by invoking an

oft-cited media philosopher and respectfully disagreeing with one of his better-known

aphorisms: “Jean-Luc Godard once described the difference between cinema and television as

the difference between raising your eyes to the movie screen and lowering them to the TV
 34
screen. Whether you look up at Vertigo or look down, the effect is the same: You fall and hope
26
that somebody’s there to catch you.” In other words, Rafferty attests, Vertigo guides all of its

viewers to the same troubling destination, on a journey that can take place in a theater, or a

living room.

As film critics like Denby and Rafferty evaluate a moment of major technological change,

they confront a variety of commonsense questions: What has changed? What has stayed the

same? Does the change at hand redefine the medium? How do I feel about the consequences of

the change? These questions are broad and abstract enough to address any kind of change, and

their content is obvious, if fundamental. Yet the answers film critics submit are neither

predictable nor uniform. Whereas Denby decries the above confluence of social and

technological shifts as a dramatic schism, Rafferty emphasizes enduring traits. Together, their

articles indicate how film critics locate themselves across a discursive spectrum as they react to

moments of major technological change.

The spectrum of critical response to home video has its roots in the first moment of major

technological change encountered by serious film culture: the coming of sound in Hollywood. As

the inaugural generation of cinephiles, silent-era aficionados set a lasting precedent when they

howled with disapproval at the emergence of synchronized sound and speech, a new technology

that supposedly cleaved the medium into separate and competing branches: one pure, the other

an ungainly hybrid. These early cinephiles saw silence as a prerequisite for cinema’s cultural

legitimacy, so they denounced synchronized sound and speech as incompatible with the

medium’s true ontology. They also nervously predicted that talkies would achieve commercial

dominance and assumed that their preferred medium would soon become obsolete, a bitter

irony given their belief that the silent film had almost reached aesthetic maturity before

technological change crudely and needlessly intervened.

 35
Repeated for decades thereafter, serious film culture’s preliminary thesis on sound began to

face a crucial challenge in the late 1970s when a new crop of film historians questioned the
27
conventional wisdom. Instead of treating sound as a radical break that split cinema into

disparate forms, the revisionist historians of sound accentuated the strains of continuity that

crossed the technological divide, including Hollywood’s stability as an industry, the signature
28
style of Hollywood’s films, and the whole experience of American moviegoing. Along these

lines, the revisionists rightly faulted silent-era film critics for exaggerating sound’s

repercussions. In the words of film scholar David Bordwell, silent-era film critics were

“[a]ttuned to change rather than continuity,” so their critiques of the transition suffered from
29
crucial blind spots. In their own focus on a conscribed window of time, however, the revisionist

historians often overlooked how the thoughts and feelings of individual film critics might evolve.

This chapter therefore revises their intervention through a case study of Gilbert Seldes,

America’s leading film critic of the 1920s. For Seldes, the coming of sound seemed to mark a

likely end to the dream of perfecting the silent film. In concert with his fellow early cinephiles,

Seldes initially conceived of the silent film and talkies as distinct media with opposing but

intertwined fates—the former would fall as the latter rose. But he eventually settled on a film

theory that united the erstwhile enemies under the shared banner of cinematic “movement,”

thereby offering a more complicated appraisal of change and continuity than has heretofore

been recognized.

Following my study of Seldes’s career, I show how the model of reconciliation he navigated is

mirrored by the work of a later film critic who embraced home video in a similar fashion. For

Jonathan Rosenbaum, a catalytic voice in global debates about cinephilia since the 1970s, home

video’s arrival seemed to signal capitalism’s defeat of film art. More than twenty years later,

though, he mounted a defense of home video on the grounds that audiences had started to build

community through non-theatrical formats in ways that echoed the cinephilia of his youth. Over
 36
the course of careers that spanned decades, then, Seldes and Rosenbaum gravitated away from

their immediate proclamations about technological change and moved toward more

theoretically sophisticated and historically informed ideas that emphasized continuity.

Furthermore, I argue, their respective responses to the existential crisis of technological change

not only illuminate the styles of thought and structures of feeling that characterize serious film

culture; they also suggest the potential resilience of its cinephilia.

The Debatable Art of the Movies

Perhaps the best-known piece of film criticism by Gilbert Seldes ran in the November 1928 issue

of Harper’s, but he probably wished it had been forgotten. Years later, Seldes expressed

embarrassment about the article, entitled “The Movies Commit Suicide.” “I was not allowed to
30
forget this [title],” he confessed. “I am therefore chary of predictions.” Seldes made two

important predictions in the article, though neither warrants much regret. He began by

reiterating the widely held belief that Hollywood had turned to synchronized sound and speech

in a desperate attempt to ward off an economic crisis caused by radio’s rapidly increasing

popularity. Talkies thus represented a last-ditch effort to recapture the dwindling audience for

movies through an act of technological appropriation—film “incorporated radio in itself,” he

31
argued. Whether or not talkies did in fact rescue Hollywood financially, Seldes thought they

would displace the silent film and become the dominant mode, and he was right.

His second prediction also came true, for the most part. If talkies resulted in boosting

Hollywood’s bottom line, the situation would be perilous for film art, but not hopeless.

According to Seldes, the silent film and talkies were separate media; moreover, synchronized

speech had the potential to kill the silent film: “The introduction of speech (not of sound) is

suicide for the movie in the sense that, given speech, the old movie ceases to exist. A new

thing . . . comes into being, with an entirely new range, new problems, and new opportunities”
 37
(706). But his hopes were not for the “new opportunities” of the talkie, which shared little in

common with the silent film. “A deaf man seeing a talking picture would (if he were also a critic)

say that, except mechanically, it had no relation to the established technic [sic] and debatable art

of the movies,” he asserted (706). Rather, Seldes wondered if the talkies’ commercial triumph

might “win salvation for the cinematic art” of the silent film by making it the “plaything of

amateurs, thousands of whom are now making films” (706, 712). In this scenario, the silent film

could “begin its development at the point where the commercial producers left off—that is, at

the point of becoming an independent art” (712). He was more or less right on this count, too:

the silent film lived on in the avant-garde, home movies, and the avant-garde’s home movies.

Throughout the transition to synchronized sound and speech, Seldes effectively described

the talkies as a radical break that disrupted the silent film’s path to fulfilling its artistic promise.

But he eventually reconciled with this moment of major technological change by nominating

“movement” as the lone medium-specific property necessary to unite the two forms, as I discuss

at greater length in the next section. In the remainder of this section, I situate Seldes within the

broader milieus of American film culture and film criticism by concentrating on the idea that the

“art of the movies” was still “debatable.” This historical background illuminates the traits that

made serious film culture distinct and shows why a film critic like Seldes struggled with the

coming of sound in the first place.

When Seldes hedged his bets on the art of the movies, he tapped a deep vein of skepticism

about film’s aesthetic legitimacy that dated back to the medium’s invention. Because of the

commercial alliance between cinema and a host of fin de siècle “cheap amusements,” American

cultural elites, such as snarky raconteur H. L. Mencken and esteemed drama critic George Jean

Nathan, dismissed the medium as nothing more than a faddish contrivance suitable for the weak
32
moral fiber and meager intelligence of the times. “More than any other force, more than any

other ten forces all compact, have the moving pictures in the last half dozen years succeeded
 38
brilliantly in reducing further the taste, the sense and the general culture of the American

nation,” Nathan inveighed. “Like a thundering flood of bilge and scum, the flapdoodle of the

films has swept over the country carrying before it what seeds of perception were sprouting,
33
however faintly, among our lesser peoples.” I. A. Richards, leading authority on British

literature, succinctly demonstrates that the medium’s reputation was just as poor among

highbrows across the pond: “At present bad literature, bad art, the cinema, etc. are an influence

of the first importance in fixing immature and actually inapplicable attitudes toward most
34
things.” While Richards divided “literature” and “art” into categories of good and bad works, he

brushed cinema aside altogether. (At least he mentioned it by name. Pity everything subsumed

by the biting “etc.”)

In the debate over cinema’s status as an art form, Nathan and Richards spoke for an

intellectual ruling class that juxtaposed its innate gifts of refinement to the allegedly coarser

pleasures enjoyed by the medium’s predominantly working-class patrons. Yet cinema’s

detractors were not the only voices passing judgment atop lofty perches. By the mid-teens, a

small but committed group of enthusiasts had started to defend the medium. Alexander Bakshy,

for instance, penned one of the earliest briefs on cinema’s behalf. In the 1916 essay “The

Cinematograph as Art,” Bakshy mocked cinema’s naysayers for misunderstanding the aesthetic

fruits of modernity and staked a claim for the utility of criticism in forwarding the cause of film

art:

We may ignore the criticisms of those who condemn as utterly vulgar all moving pictures,

photographs, and gramophones, as well as most other products of our resourceful

mechanical genius. These well-intentioned dilettantes are only victims of prevailing artistic

conventions, and have no standard of their own by which they may discriminate between

what is art and what is not. The future of the cinematograph does not rest with them. It
 39
depends upon those enlightened and liberal lovers of art who can see beyond the

conventions of the moment . . . Theirs is the task of creating the canons and standards, of
35
shaping the conventions of cinematographic art.

Bakshy fought an uphill battle against the “well-intentioned dilettantes,” but he was hardly

alone. Poet and Lincoln-biographer Carl Sandburg reviewed movies, as did prominent

screenwriters Robert E. Sherwood and Frank E. Woods. In 1916, Harvard-professor Hugo

Münsterberg signed The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, considered the first book-length

volume of film theory, while Vachel Lindsay had finished the first edition of The Art of the
36
Moving Picture the previous year.

Like Bakshy, Lindsay believed that respected cultural institutions, from art museums to

universities, needed to endorse movies in order for them to be appreciated correctly as “fine
37
art.” Consequently, he took the proverbial insults leveled at cinema and turned them on their

heads: “It is a quality, not a defect [of the medium], that human beings tend to become dolls and

mechanisms, and dolls and mechanisms tend to become human. But the haughty, who scorn the

moving pictures, cannot rid themselves of the feeling that they are being seduced into going into

some sort of Punch-and-Judy show.” Lindsay instead recommended embracing cinema in the

spirit of American egalitarianism: “And they think of course one should not take seriously

anything so cheap in price and so appealing to the cross-roads taste. But it is very well to begin

in the Punch-and-Judy-show state of mind, and reconcile ourselves to it, and then like good
38
democrats await discoveries.”

Seldes himself joined the ranks of silent-film aficionados when The 7 Lively Arts appeared in

1924. This volume announced his enthusiasm for Hollywood movies alongside other types of

popular culture, such as the short stories of Ring Lardner, comic strips, and jazz. For Seldes,

cinema’s ability to capture and reproduce movement was one of its chief glories, so he praised
 40
Charlie Chaplin and Mack Sennett because “everything capable of motion [was] set into motion”

in their films (24).

In addition to the conflict between taste cultures, the search for cinema’s medium specificity

was crucial to detractors and defenders alike. Since Aristotle’s Poetics, cultural critics and art

historians have insisted on the principle that each medium possesses a unique and intrinsic

quality not found elsewhere among the bona fide arts. As David Bordwell notes, medium
39
specificity was film criticism’s primary motif from the start. Seldes offers a sample of this

tradition in “The Movies Commit Suicide” as he summarizes snobbish responses to the coming

of sound: “The purists are horrified by a mélange de genres, the aesthetes of the cinema

complain that the problem of each art should be solved in the medium of that art, without

calling in alien effects” (706).

Despite keeping the “purists” and “aesthetes” at arm’s length in this passage, Seldes had

mobilized the same logic four months earlier in the short article “Theory about ‘Talkies,’ ”

wherein he confidently borrowed from the received wisdom on medium specificity. “It is a pretty

well established principle that nothing should be attempted in one art which another can do

equally well or better,” he wrote. Already preoccupied with the distracting influence that stage

techniques had exerted on the silent film, Seldes worried that synchronized speech would drag

movies backward toward canned theater, a style exemplified by the brief reign of the film d’art

cycle. He therefore cautioned against stealing from the stage’s medium specificity, an act that

“diverts the movie from the exploitation of its own capacities, introduces alien elements, and
40
hampers free development.” At first glance, it may seem that the interval compelled Seldes to

reverse his position, but the contradiction stands more as a testament to the confusion critics

felt in the wake of sound’s arrival. As did his peers, Seldes stayed firmly attached to the demand

for medium specificity, retaining it as the main criterion for evaluating individual films and

cinema writ large.

 41
Yet nothing distinguished the young medium so much as its heterogeneity, suggesting the

difficulty commentators faced when they tried to pin the thing down. Edison’s peephole

kinetoscope and the Lumière brothers’ projecting cinématographe envisioned different futures

for the making and watching of moving images. As film historian Charles Musser details, the

inaugural decade of “screen practice” after the advances made by Edison and the Lumières was a

fertile period in which to experiment and innovate, a fleeting window of time when a burgeoning

medium adopted numerous guises that drew from the past and mapped virgin territory. Both

the big players and fly-by-night operators courted potential customers with an array of viewing
41
devices, each guaranteed to deliver voyeuristic thrills without the fear of getting caught. Alas, it

was also a fertile period for protracted legal battles over copyright disputes and patent
42
infringements, further exacerbating the tenuous chances of survival for a fledgling business.

Ultimately, the paradigm tested by the Lumières defeated the penny arcades, but the

technology entailed in showing movies to crowds remained problematically diverse. If movies

were going to serve as the foundation of a genuinely modern industry, the technological basis for
43
“cinema” (i.e., theatrical projection and sound accompaniment) had to be standardized. The

goal of universal compatibility thus aligned the entire panoply of cinematic technologies (e.g.,

film stocks, gauge sizes, sprocket holes, the Latham loop) under a shared umbrella. Combined

with the focus on narrative and the establishment of the feature-length running time, cinema’s

newly achieved technological homogeneity allowed for America’s nascent but inchoate film

industry to consolidate. Bitter rivals came together, weeding out the weakest in the herd and

forging the stable and singular oligopoly known as Hollywood. By 1920, the pace of

technological change had slowed to a crawl, letting everyone train their attention on perfecting
44
the “debatable art of the movies.” Along these lines, silent-era enthusiasts then expended a lot

of energy complaining about Hollywood’s hegemony, but industry consolidation also constituted
 42
a necessary precondition for serious film culture’s emergence as a discernible alternative to

commercial discourses and mainstream consumption.

Two other key developments nurtured the pioneering subculture of American cinephilia

before the coming of sound. One, a cadre of independent exhibitors opened a circuit of “little

theaters,” inspired by European ciné clubs. Unlike lavish picture palaces, these modestly

apportioned venues catered to sophisticated urbanites and ethnic enclaves by showing

experimental and foreign films. Two, a concomitant boom in periodicals expanded the number

of outlets for writing about cinema as an art form to an educated readership. As Seldes-

biographer Michael Kammen says, cultural criticism “truly came of age as a vocation” with the

“proliferation of journals and magazines, highbrow as well as middlebrow, during the early and
45
middle decades of the twentieth century.” Prior to the Jazz Age explosion in hip, smart talk

about popular culture, the “well-established and avant-garde magazines of art, literature, and
46
politics exhibit[ed] only sporadic enthusiasm for the motion picture.” Notwithstanding the

aforementioned exceptions, American film criticism was previously published mostly by trade

journals, such as Film Daily, Moving Picture World, and Variety. Daily newspapers also

reviewed new releases as a courtesy to the studios that gave them a robust source of advertising

revenue, a mutually beneficial arrangement between media industries that subordinated

criticism to publicity (and that might be considered an early form of convergence). Thus the

exclusive atmosphere sold by the little theaters complemented film criticism’s hierarchy of taste

and opinion. Movies were no longer always judged en masse in the 1920s, and neither were their

audiences; movies were now intricately divided and subdivided into a vast assortment of genres,
47
each with its own loyal fanbase.

As a participant in these overlapping conversations on criticism and taste, Seldes played a

conspicuous but paradoxical role. On the one hand, he became America’s premier multimedia

critic by refuting genteel mores and championing the cream of the crop in the nation’s native
 43
popular culture, from Krazy Kat to Fanny Brice. The mock apology he gave for his sensibilities

in The 7 Lively Arts indicates both the terrain and the extent of their rebelliousness: “I have

used the word art throughout this book in connexion [sic] with jazz and jazzy things; if anyone

imagines the word is belittled thereby and can no longer be adequate to the dignity of Leonardo

or Shakespeare, I am sorry.” Yet being one of the “good democrats” summoned by Vachel

Lindsay did not imply that Seldes had jettisoned his standards—they were urgently required in

the ongoing fight against mediocrity. “I have suggested that people do what they please about

the gay arts, about jazz; that they do it with discrimination and without worrying whether it is

noble or not, or good form or intellectually right,” Seldes contended (107).

On the other hand, Seldes organized the landscape of film criticism by ranking its members

in self-congratulatory terms. In the ensuing passage from the 1929 book An Hour with the

Movies and the Talkies, Seldes puts himself on the top of a rhetorical hierarchy:

Several types [of film criticism] occur: that of the professional journal, which is merely a by-

product of paid advertising and is entirely negligible: that of independent professional

journals, directed to the exhibitor and offering for the most part criticism of the box-office

value of films, which is often combined with “the lowdown” on producers’ claims and

frequently coincides with the strictest aesthetic criticism . . . ; that of the daily press which

was for a long time in the hands of gushing girls or cub reporters, is still ridden by those

pests, but is emerging into decent criticism varying only with the intelligence and the

independence of the critics; and that of the unattached aesthetes of the film which has

recorded some extraordinary errors. Among these errors the greatest is the long contempt of

the movie and all its works; when that passed, came the period of praise for whatever was

not popular; later the worship of all foreign films and the denigration of all American

films . . . For in almost all practical matters, the theorist has been right about the movies and
 44
the practical men, with a few exceptions, have been consistently wrong. I have been among
48
the theorists myself.

Although Seldes touted his stature “among the theorists,” he can be situated in the company of

his fellow film critics—and in the wider domain of the whole American discourse on taste—

without accepting his self-aggrandizing judgment. By labeling Seldes an “upper middlebrow,” I

seek to retain his portrait of a variegated national film culture while simultaneously refusing to

valorize any of its constituent groups. (Again, serious film culture is not superior, just different.)

Approaching Seldes as an upper middlebrow can also shed light on the ambivalence that

underlined his use of the phrase “debatable art of the movies.”

What was an upper middlebrow, then? In the 1954 monograph The Tastemakers, Russell

Lynes erects a sardonic history of American class and taste that bifurcates the middlebrow into
49
upper and lower halves. The partition is productive because it more accurately reflects the

differences in class and taste that began mounting in the late nineteenth century. Seldes’s career

reflects the differences, too. In his path-breaking capacity as a critic of popular culture, Seldes

wrote for highbrow art journals, such as The Dial; upper-middlebrow periodicals, such as The

New Republic; and mass-market magazines, such as the Saturday Evening Post. Even if the

distinctions between these channels of discourse, the journalists employed therein, and the

audiences they reached finally pertained solely in the eyes of their beholders, Americans had

nonetheless become acutely conscious of the relative quantity of social, cultural, and intellectual
50
capital they possessed. The above quotes from Seldes attest as well to the nation’s newly

heightened awareness of differences in class and taste. Indeed, Lynes might have been thinking

of Seldes as he painted this picture of upper middlebrows: “These are the men and women who

devote themselves professionally to the dissemination of ideas and cultural artifacts and, not in

the least incidentally, make a living along the way. They are the cultural do-gooders,” Lynes
 45
stresses, “and they see their mission clearly and pursue it with determination. Some of them are

disappointed highbrows; some of them try to work both sides of the street; nearly all of them

straddle the fence between highbrow and middlebrow and enjoy their equivocal position.”

Upper middlebrows were thus the “principal purveyors of highbrow ideas,” and lower

middlebrows were the “principal consumers of what the upper middlebrows pass[ed] along to
51
them.” Fluent in the language, habits, and styles of highbrows, upper middlebrows exploited

their knowledge in occupations dedicated to elevating the tastes of citizen-consumers lower on

the socio-cultural ladder. The producer-consumer binary here is too facile, but Lynes crucially

highlights the mediating function performed by upper-middlebrow figures like Seldes in public

discourses on class and taste.

Subsequent scholarship agrees with this aspect of his critique. In her study of the Book-of-

the-Month-Club, a cardinal avatar of the dreams, fears, and self-assigned duties that animate

America’s middlebrow, Janice Radway echoes Lynes as she elucidates how the Club’s editors

“positioned themselves and those they served in a space between—between those who longed for

sensations unclouded by reflection and those whose command of intellectual capital had
52
produced nothing but disdain for anyone incapable of understanding their every word.”

Similarly, Joan Shelly Rubin calls such cultural mediation the very “middleness” of the
53
middlebrow. Yet the upper-middlebrow psyche is correspondingly insecure. An upper

middlebrow, Lynes avers, is constitutively “unsure of his own tastes,” owing to the perception
54
(or maybe the reality) that “neither the highbrows nor the lowbrows like them.” Hence Seldes’s

nagging doubts about the “debatable art of the movies,” a medium scorned by elites and loved

unpretentiously by the masses.

Apropos Seldes’s role in the middle of the national debate on cinema’s status as an art form,

“The Movies Commit Suicide” settles on an awkward compromise between contempt for movies

in toto and blithely welcoming whatever came from Hollywood’s lust for commercial novelty.
 46
Seldes had built his brand as a writer by lobbying the country to adopt fresh attitudes toward

modern modes of aesthetic expression, but discernment never stopped being vital to the

purpose of his critical enterprise. So, even as he relayed his skepticism about Hollywood’s

newfangled toy, Seldes decided that the silent film and the talkies were discrete media with

parallel destinies, and that each possessed an equal claim to the possibility for artistic

authenticity. Nevertheless, the prognosis for either form was dim and would only get dimmer

until Seldes took another theoretical route: fusing the two forms together by foregrounding the

continuity of cinema’s inimitable movement.

A medium’s contested reputation, a consolidated industry, a technical and aesthetic

standard—these factors all contributed to the total context in which the coming of sound became

the first moment of major technological change encountered by serious film culture. For the

silent-era aficionados, the medium was ripe with promise but incomplete; cinema was fragile. In

tandem with the medium’s fragility, serious film culture itself seemed to teeter on the brink as

technological change provoked its collective insecurity. Film critics and cinephiles cut from the

same cloth repeated this response in later moments of major technological change, forming a

rhetorical pattern that continues today.

If the preponderance of melancholy makes such a response look natural, other communities

of film and media critics have supplied alternatives to serious film culture’s signature styles of

thought and structures of feeling. For example, the coming of sound excited African American

film critics because it had the potential to open industry doors and enlarge the scope of

independent filmmaking. In the worst-case scenario, talkies could do no more harm than the

racist representations endemic to Hollywood’s silent films, so America’s black film critics had
55
nothing to mourn when the transition commenced. Meanwhile, successive generations of

television critics have applauded technological changes (e.g., remote controls, VCRs, mobile
56
platforms) that seek to “repair” the medium’s dubious cultural record. Their suspicion of
 47
television’s intellectual and aesthetic history also figures the past as something technological

change can fix. As these replies contrast with serious film culture’s regressive tenor, they

underscore the degree to which critics like Seldes wanted to protect the familiar contours of a

medium that had treated them well and that they cherished in return. However, the following

sections on Seldes and Jonathan Rosenbaum reveal how members of serious film culture have

also found ways to reconcile their former understandings of and affections for cinema with

moments of major technological change, thereby preserving the spirit of cinephilia they once

seemed destined to lose.

Because the Moving Picture Moves

By arguing for cinema’s place in the pantheon of bona fide arts, serious film culture

distinguished itself from the medium’s genteel detractors, the trade press’ cheerleading, and the

mass audience’s box-office support. Upper-middlebrow film critics of the 1910s and 1920s

believed that cinema’s reputation would be secured by doggedly pursuing its immanent but

hidden medium specificity, a vital endeavor enlisting filmmakers and theorists alike. They

equated medium specificity with artistic legitimacy and explained cinema’s aesthetic

development through a biological analogy borrowed from the conventions of art history. Cinema

advanced in stages familiar from the arc of a human’s life: birth, infancy, and then—under the

proper conditions and nurturing guidance—maturity.

This logic had deep roots and was closely tied to the matter of medium specificity. David

Bordwell calls it the “Standard Version of stylistic history,” writing that its adherents “plotted

the history of film as a progressive development from simpler to more complex forms, treated

according to that biological analogy of birth/childhood/maturity so common among art

historians.” “Some film historians,” he adds, “likewise embraced the idea, proposed as long ago

as Aristotle, that an art form reaches perfection by disclosing its essential and most distinctive
 48
57
qualities.” Despite the medium’s youth, death loomed prematurely on the horizon because a

moment of major technological change had interrupted its natural trajectory in the eyes (and

ears) of enthusiasts. Gilbert Seldes invokes these themes in the opening sentence of “The Movies

Commit Suicide”: “After some twenty years of being only in its infancy, the moving picture

which gave promise of an interesting adult life, has gone suddenly senile—and garrulous” (706).

As a paradigm for understanding and evaluating cinema’s status as an art form, the

Standard Version had trouble accounting for unanticipated shifts in technology or style.

Progressive film critics then responded to the “problem of the present” in one of two ways: they

either closed the biological cycle and announced cinema’s irreversible decline, or they celebrated

the present as a “moment of ripeness,” wherein the medium had reached the apex of its long-
58
foretold maturity. Thus the coming of sound represented a fork in the road that initially

signaled the medium’s untimely demise for silent-era aficionados like Seldes, but marked the

fulfillment of prophecy for other commentators, such as New York Times-reviewer Mordaunt

Hall. That said, serious film culture more often lauds stylistic changes for delivering moments of

ripeness, as seen in the acclaim for Soviet montage and the Film Generation’s embrace of the

French New Wave. Conversely, technological changes—from the coming of sound to online

streaming—are usually regarded as ominous clouds hanging over cinema’s suddenly bleak

future. The dialectic of change and continuity is therefore central for progressive film critics as

they try to decide if current events denote the result of a teleological path toward cinema’s

inevitable triumph, or a tragic last act precipitated by a shocking fracture from the past.

When Seldes began weighing the effects of synchronized sound and speech on the “debatable

art of the movies,” ideas about “movement” occupied his mind. Since his earliest film criticism,

Seldes had considered movement a key ingredient in cinema’s medium specificity. In doing so,

though, he only reiterated the upper-middlebrow film critics who had previously indicated the

same, including Bakshy, Lindsay, and Münsterberg. Moreover, the desire to capture and
 49
reproduce movement was an animating drive behind cinema’s emergence. Eadweard Muybridge

and Étienne-Jules Marey pushed the boundaries of instantaneous photography in their animal-

locomotion studies. Edison and the Lumières then transformed their predecessors’ gains into

true moving pictures that showed humans at work and play. As film historian Tom Gunning

notes, the “delight in the reproduction of motion” during this trailblazing period “focused
59
primarily on the movement of bodies.” Placed in front of gridded backdrops designed for

scientific measurements, horses galloped, birds flew, and humans walked. Performing for

stationary cameras, people exited factories, danced exuberantly, and boxed valiantly in

commercial entertainments. Astonished spectators watched this menagerie of shadow-figures,

stirred by their mere existence, their lifelike impressions, and their stunning fluidity. Even

anchored to the ground, the camera’s ability to freeze and reanimate movement engendered

fascination. In D. W. Griffith’s phrase, early film’s awe-inspiring aura sprung from the endlessly
60
repeatable “beauty of the moving wind in the trees.”

The exhilarating novelty eventually waned, but upper-middlebrow film critics maintained

their focus on movement by extending its importance beyond the realm of cinema’s medium

specificity. For example, Lindsay attributed the rapid pace of movement in silent movies to the
61
“rampant speed-mania in every American.” Seldes later echoed Lindsay, claiming that

movement was the wellspring for a substantial bond that connected the nation’s ethos to

cinema’s essence. The “moving picture corresponds to something fundamental in American

life,” he contended. “America has always been on the move and has kept moving, its history . . .
62
is a history of transportation.” Consequently, movement was more than a medium-specific

property or an aesthetic ideal—it was the lifeblood of every American and the very stuff of

modernity. In the language of American exceptionalism, Lindsay and Seldes said the movies

embodied the democratic spirit that justified the myths of westward expansion and Emersonian
63
self-determination. Movement thus served as the nexus of a powerful theory, linking together
 50
cinema’s ontology, the American character, and the texture of modern experience. Movement

was such a ubiquitous concept that film critic Harry Alan Potamkin chided his peers for over

relying on the trope: “Every sententious young aspirant to the role of film critic reiterates the
64
platitude of motion as the key to the motion picture.” Insight had apparently calcified into

cliché.

Upper-middlebrow film critics certainly emphasized movement when discussing cinema’s

medium specificity before synchronized sound and speech arrived, but they never listed it

exclusively. Instead, a host of qualities (e.g., silence, two-dimensionality [“flatness”], framing,

editing, black-and-white images) always accompanied movement as probable or confirmed

components of film art. Each feature helped make cinema distinct from older art forms;

however, the diversity also made it hard to identify which expressive resources were appropriate

for cinema amid the many counterproductive options offered by literature, theater, opera,

poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Furthermore, the essentialist logic of medium

specificity all but guaranteed that film critics would contradict themselves, and Seldes was no

stranger to the rhetorical hazards of searching for cinema’s essence. At the outset of An Hour

with the Movies and the Talkies, for instance, he refused to totalize cinema: “The movie has no

fixed form, no standards, no classics: it is full of equivocation and paradox.” But then he told

readers on the very next page that the following meditation required knowing the “nature of the

instrument” and the “essential quality of the movie” (8-9). Was the medium “full of equivocation

and paradox”? Or was Seldes?

Yet the muddle humbled him, too. In his inaugural comments on the sound transition,

published by The New Republic on August 8, 1928, Seldes admitted he was “imperfectly

acquainted” with talkies and thereby constrained to exercises in “pure theory” (305). A year

later, he struck an unusually deferential tone: “The ten dead years in the development of the

silent movie may be repeated in the talkie unless the producers of the new type are capable of
 51
discovering their own materials and their own methods. It is hard to say what these materials
65
are; it is easier to say what they are not.” In highlighting his criticism’s errors, evasions,

waffles, and whoppers, my aim is not to discredit Seldes. Rather, I agree with Michael Kammen

when he writes that “what observers had to say at the time is important not because of their

profundity—they often speculated incorrectly—but because the history of hesitation,

uncertainty, even confusion, deserves a more prominent place in our cultural assessments than
66
it has hitherto received.” As Kammen suggests, moments of major technological change

provide a unique glimpse into the styles of thought and structures of feeling that comprise

serious film culture, so scholars should be careful not to judge the past solely by contemporary

mores.

While not yet the lone medium-specific quality that defined cinema for Seldes, movement

did consistently take priority, no matter how tangled and twisted the coming of sound left him.

Although Seldes contradicts himself on the subject of cinema’s medium specificity, movement

remains a constant bulwark in his film criticism. For example, in “Theory about ‘Talkies,’ ” he

contemplates the likelihood that synchronized speech will lead filmmakers in the wrong

direction—reverting to storytelling methods based on the stage. He then asserts that “speech

and gesture and grimace and action” belong to the stage, while the movies “should have, above

all, movement.” Perhaps sensing how puzzling and porous were his terms, Seldes meekly

qualifies them, remarking that “a certain amount of mimicry taking the place of speech, among

other things” could meet cinema’s stylistic needs not covered by movement. The contrast

between stage and movie proposed here begs several questions: Why were “gesture” and

“grimace” ineligible for cinematic use? How did they differ from “mimicry”? Were they not also

forms of “movement”? How did film actors perform without them? What is “action”? What are

the “other things”? Apparently, Seldes realized that some of these traits did in fact belong to the
 52
silent film, as he declared a few months later in “The Movies Commit Suicide” that “movement

and change of pace and gesture and pantomime” were among its “natural materials” (710).

Implicitly, the connotations of movement had shifted for Seldes alongside wider shifts in

popular taste, storytelling style, and filmmaking technology. Whereas the movements of bodies

and objects alone once thrilled film spectators, Seldes joined the restless audiences and

ambitious practitioners who demanded new kinds of movement as cinema’s novelty phase

wound down. Ultimately, innovations in parallel editing allowed complex plots to rotate quickly

between disparate locations, replacing the one-take movies that dominated the medium’s first

decade. Lighter cameras also allowed elegant tracking shots to glide through space, nudging

aside early film’s stage-bound frontality. But as Hollywood converted to synchronized sound and

speech, heavy sound-recording equipment halted such movements, an unforgivable affront to

many upper-middlebrow film critics and Hollywood veterans. Per the stereotype, talkies

produced at the beginning of the transition were sometimes clunky, clumsy affairs. Beholden to

actors’ voices, directors arranged entire scenes around microphones stashed artlessly in décor.

Interminable dialogue stilted narrative momentum as cameras sat impassively, slaves to the

spoken word. This is the context in which Seldes ambivalently summed up the sound film’s

dubious achievements by the summer of 1928: “If the talking-movie can manage to talk without

breaking continuity, it has a future, and it will not wholly ruin the moving picture” (306). Four

months elapsed and Seldes complained again about the directors who had been tempted by

speech to shoot their films in a series of “semi-close-ups which completely destroy all sense of

action and of movement.” Industry insiders told him the sound film’s visual stasis was, at least

technically speaking, “entirely unnecessary,” so Seldes duly formulated the following hypothesis:

“[I]n a good movie movement need not be broken by speech” (710). Another year passed and his

doubts about the sound film’s chances of finding its own medium specificity softened.

Nonetheless, the whole enterprise still hung on movement. As Seldes stated in the September
 53
1929 article “Talkies’ Progress,” synchronized sound and speech plus an “immobilized” camera

did not equal “a new form of entertainment—the true talkie—but a combination of movie and

phonograph,” an illegitimate and unpleasing hybrid (458).

At this juncture, Seldes still conceived of the silent film and talkies as separate forms, though

his request that the latter copy the continuity of the former seemingly violates his obsession with

medium specificity. Holding both media to the singular aesthetic preference for continuity also

unexpectedly aligned Seldes with the trade and popular press film critics who gave sound a

favorable reception, as film historian Donald Crafton recounts in The Talkies. Contrary to Seldes

and such Hollywood stars as Chaplin and Lillian Gish, the foreign film theorists Rudolf Arnheim

and Béla Balázs, and the international directors Sergei Eisenstein and René Clair, America’s
67
trade and popular press film critics “welcomed sound and preferred talkies to silents.” Their

criticism eschewed the issue of sound’s ontological legitimacy and concentrated on the

filmmaking practices that would make talkies better. Crafton names the style they advocated for

the “modulated soundtrack.” This approach entailed seamlessly integrating synchronized sound

and speech into Hollywood’s preconstituted storytelling model. These film critics “threw on the

brakes when the studios exaggerated the sound track’s presence” and implored filmmakers to

keep “acoustic effects . . . in balance and under control as the first principle.” “Acting, voice, and

story values were primary. The audible part of the film was not to distract the viewer,” Crafton
68
summarizes. In his New York Times review of the 1928 talkie Napoleon’s Barber (directed by

John Ford), Mordaunt Hall exemplifies the preference for a modulated soundtrack when he
69
applauds the film as “good enough to cause one to forget the novelty of audible productions.”

Maurice Kann seconded Hall in his Film Daily editorials, encouraging talkies to retain the
70
“coherence” typical of silent movies released immediately prior to the coming of sound. In

other words, America’s trade and popular press film critics had internalized Hollywood’s
 54
continuity-editing system. They adopted it as their own criterion of value and wanted to hear it

manifest in the new aural dimensions encoded on a film’s soundtrack.

Curiously, so did Seldes. Given his upper-middlebrow credentials, it might be guessed that

he stood with Eisenstein and Clair, who trumpeted “contrapuntal” sound as the solitary

technique capable of sustaining what they deemed cinema’s most important medium-specific
71
trait: its inherent ability to turn reality into fantasy. But Seldes met them only halfway, sharing

their faith in fantasy while disagreeing about “what the talkie ought to be doing” (457). Seldes

passionately and repeatedly told readers that movies must be more than a mere “transcription of

actuality,” and, as the transition to sound commenced, he wished that the talkies’ predicted

commercial success would let the silent film “be relieved of all obligation to record the actual

and give itself up to fantasy and imagination” (711-2). In the opening pages of An Hour with the

Movies and the Talkies, he introduced the legend of cinema’s binary destiny, pitting the

Lumières-style actualities against the magical films directed by Georges Méliès. Seldes cast his

lot with Méliès and fantasy (15-20). He also cited Chaplin again, championing his movies

because their “break with the realism of the screen is decisive” (63). He urged moviegoers to

recognize that reality had “almost nothing on earth to do” with cinema’s essence, and that the

talkie should be combated for patting itself on the back “as the last word in realism” (138). Eight

years later, in Movies for the Millions, Seldes commended Walt Disney, whose animated films

were the “most satisfying creation” among talkies due to their “perfect use of the moving picture

for the purpose of illusion and fantasy” (46).

When Seldes reviewed several titles from Hollywood’s first season of all-talking films, then,

why did he gripe about failed verisimilitude more than any other flaw? His commitment to

classical Hollywood continuity principally dictated his distaste for the early talkies’ failed

verisimilitude, but his views on film authorship were also an important influence. Like

America’s trade and popular press film critics, Seldes preferred a modulated soundtrack and was
 55
transparently uneasy when confronted with the talkies’ growing pains, which consisted of a

technical and aesthetic struggle to tame and master the proper fidelity, emphasis, and

synchronization of sound and speech. He amusingly portrayed the shortcomings in fidelity as a

“disinclination to reproduce the letters ‘s’ and ‘z,’ causing strong men to lisp and ingénues to say

to young heroes, ‘You are a puddle to me’ ” (708). Efforts to balance the respective volume of

sound effects and dialogue elicited derisive guffaws as well. Seldes mocked The Terror for the

way it emphasized speech at the expense of other diegetic sounds. Slammed doors, shuttled

furniture, footfalls on hardwood stairs—none of these actions had “any sound of their own.” “A

few people in the auditorium laughed at the absurdity of this,” Seldes reported (710). Yet the

early talkies’ faltering and peculiar synchronization was less unintentionally funny than it was

frankly unnerving. “[T]he moment a character begins to speak from the screen,” observed

Seldes, “his bodily unreality becomes marked—at least until one becomes accustomed to it”

(710).

Film historian Robert Spadoni describes such liminal effects as “uncanny,” and his history of

the transition speculates on the experiences audiences had in the presence of these effects before

an industry-wide set of best practices specific to sound filmmaking took hold. According to

Spadoni, the horror film, a then-burgeoning genre, exploited the strange sensation generated by

the ambiguous origins of synchronized speech in the earliest talkies. In this cycle of films,

speech was situated amorphously, hovering somewhere between the sheer artifice of pantomime

and the grain of real-world voices, floating in the invisible but charged membrane that divided

spectators from the shadows of moving lips up there on the screen. Writ large, Spadoni

conjectures, the transition to sound made Seldes and everyone else more “medium sensitive”
72
than spectators had been since the medium’s invention.

But why was Seldes so anxious to become “accustomed” to the early talkies? Why not revel in

their striking unreality? Coupled with his preference for continuity, Seldes had been a pioneer in
 56
73
the practice of critiquing a film as the product of an individual author, its director. The above

questions can thus be answered by also gauging his assessment of The Perfect Crime, which

pivots on evaluating the film’s director. Reviewed in “The Movies Commit Suicide,” The Perfect

Crime belongs to a group of films made silently that became talkies shortly before (and
74
sometimes even after) being released in theaters. Per Seldes’s review, the film “went on for

most of its length as an ordinary moving picture” (i.e., as a silent film), but “suddenly burst into

speech quite effectively, with a newsboy shouting extras for a murder.” However, the talking

sequence ended awkwardly, resulting in an “animated dialogue between two characters who

seemed temporarily to have lost their voices.” “For a few minutes the effect was disconcerting

and then with a sigh of relief,” Seldes confessed, “one fell back into the old moving picture.” (Oh,

the melancholy evoked by the phrase “the old moving picture”!) Uncanny sound effects and

campy speech impediments displeased Seldes because they could not pass the test of authorial

intention—they were mistakes. So he blamed the “disconcerting” sounds in The Perfect Crime

on the film’s “not so skillful” director. Evidently, he was one of the directors who did not

comprehend that “they face[d] a new problem in the talking movie” because “they ha[d] not

solved the principles of the silent movie” (710). If such a critique was fair at the time, maybe it

was also true.

Most pertinently, Seldes’s critique of The Perfect Crime underlines the limits of his own taste

and spotlights the limits of upper-middlebrow taste in general. Seldes likely admired how

Eisenstein and Clair used contrapuntal sound and could reasonably credit its unrealistic effects

to the directors’ conscious aesthetic designs. But a cinephile more adventurous than Seldes—

imagine an unabashed Parisian surrealist wandering in and out of movie theaters, irreverently

delighting in random snippets of cinema—might not have wrung her hands over authorship and

intent and just basked in the disorienting, medium-sensitive awareness created by the same

filmmaking techniques Seldes dismissed as simple ineptitude. On the one hand, Seldes had built
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his reputation on a modicum of iconoclasm, knocking genteel propriety down a peg and putting

popular culture on a pedestal. He carved his niche as an upper-middlebrow critic by negotiating

the high and low, seeking the slightly elevated “middleness” that characterized the privileges and

mobility of his class. In The 7 Lively Arts, he railed against the “snobbism” that made Americans

“inheritors of a tradition that what is worth while must be dull,” and defended the “moments of

intensity” sparked by the “minor” arts, cinema foremost among them (265-6). When fellow film

critic Clifton Fadiman raved about the Marx Brothers, for instance, he knowingly treaded on

Seldes’s turf but assured readers they could “remove that frightened, I-think-I-hear-Gilbert-
75
Seldes look from your face[s].”

On the other hand, Seldes “frequently differentiated between high and popular culture in

qualified ways that appear to be at odds with his desire to minimize [such] distinctions,” as he
76
did during the transition to sound. In “The Movies Commit Suicide,” he lambasted

Hollywood’s feeble aspirations and the mass audience’s bovine acquiescence, both of which he

juxtaposed to his own superior taste: “One of the largest houses in two years of weekly changes

has hardly presented a passable film to millions of thoroughly satisfied spectators. Sensitive

people disliked these pretentious entertainments, because they were bad in themselves” (707).

Sure, the earliest talkies were terrible, but Seldes balked at the quality of most films, “the

majority of which are so stupid, tasteless, and wearisome that no man of average intelligence

could bear to look at them twice,” he scoffed. In “Talkies’ Progress,” Seldes caught a glimmer of

optimism for the sound film, congratulating The Broadway Melody as “the beginning of a real

talkie,” yet nevertheless wrote: “Not one of the talkies shown by midsummer, 1929, is worth a

minute of any intelligent person’s time” (457, 454). The coming of sound was a pressing

theoretical conundrum, and it thrust serious film culture into a fresh crisis over cinema’s

cultural value. Seldes may have been famous for defending popular culture’s easily accessible yet
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vibrant pleasures, but the coming of sound mostly made him defensive about his love for the

debatable art of the movies.

Shaken but undeterred, Seldes forged ahead. Expounding on the promising glimmer

represented by The Broadway Melody, “Talkies’ Progress” and the October 1929 New Republic

article “The Mobile Camera” married Seldes’s longstanding fealty to movement and fantasy with

an unexpected pitch for what the talkie ought to be doing, especially when it talked. In the

former piece, Seldes recalled and revised one of his prime predictions from “The Movies Commit

Suicide”: “I am now not nearly so certain of the talkie’s inevitable success and quite willing to

believe that an intermediate form can be created. If it cannot the talkie will be the loser” (454).

Unbeknownst to him, Hollywood had been fully dedicated to all-talking production since the

summer of 1928, when Lights of New York and The Singing Fool convinced the studios that
77
talkies were economically viable. Regardless, the implied gray area on medium specificity is

more compelling than his inability to accurately forecast the future.

Although Seldes prevaricated, he never relinquished his demand for medium specificity. For

instance, in “Talkies’ Progress,” Seldes concurred on this issue with Welford Beaton, editor of

the Los Angeles-based Film Spectator, who had recently scolded directors of sound movies—

“Find your own technic,” Beaton barked (455). But Seldes did cut the talkie some slack on the

journey to discover its own authentic medium specificity. “Until they [i.e., Hollywood studios]

develop a group of special writers, conversant with the talkie mechanism, knowing its capacities,

and intelligent enough to direct experiments, the talkies will naturally borrow, and their growth

will depend on the skill with which they reduce their material to their own terms,” he reasoned

(458). Throughout the article, Seldes refers to the silent film as “the movie,” an entity still

separate from but now also overlapping with the talkie. In the following passage, talkies clearly

count as a legitimate form, but Seldes also held out “cinematic” status like a carrot for the

younger medium to chase: “In its first excitement over the new trick of speech, the talkie forgot
 59
that it was still a movie; it chose to exploit the phonographic and to neglect the cinematic,” he

remembered. “[A]s the talkie develops it will choose such material as does not too violently

conflict with its cinematic nature. For if the movie part of the talkie stops moving,” Seldes

argued, “the talkie becomes merely a phonograph. To avoid that, to keep the movie going while

speech is heard, is the actual problem of the talkie” (458).

Actually, Seldes outlined several ills then plaguing the talkies, from its well-known problems

with fidelity, emphasis, and synchronization to the poor “acoustics” in an average movie theater,

and he enumerated several corresponding fixes (459). In conjunction with maintaining the

silent film’s camera movement and rapid editing, Seldes directed the talkie to mold “a new

convention of speech” not automatically drawn from “the speech of real life.” As articulated in

“Talkies’ Progress,” the “new convention” would free the camera from the stultifying chore of

slavishly attending to the face of whichever actor was speaking. “Unless this new convention of

speech is accepted,” he warned, “the talkie will remain languid, and it dare not be because it is

associated with the movie which accustomed us all to speed” (460). Notice how Seldes hesitated

to fundamentally bind the silent film and talkies, even as he spoke of the talkies’ “cinematic

nature” in the same article. Here, the talkie is only “associated with the movie.”

A month later, Seldes delved further into the twinned tasks at hand for the talkie. In “The

Mobile Camera,” he apologized for previously stating too “roughly” the sound film’s chief

problem and clarified his position: “The essential problem of the talkie is to find the proper

relation between the camera and microphone.” Both should be able to move at the same time,

and independently of each other, too. He also attempted again to staunch the talkies’ excessive

use of “the speech of real life,” another problem stemming from an ontological bias: “The

camera is a recording instrument, but the record it makes is an illusion; the microphone is a

recording instrument and the record it makes is a duplication (within quite narrow limits) of the
78
actual.” Therefore, he beseeched the talkie to fashion a highly stylized manner of speech
 60
indebted to stage traditions, such as “the form of the polite comedy, of Shavian harangues, of

blank verse tragedy, and of operatic speech” (298). If the producers of talkies took his advice,

they could escape the “closeness to actuality of the microphonic record” and pursue fantasy
79
instead. Seldes indicated what that would sound like in filmmaking practice when he honored

the underworld patois of the 1930s gangster films in Movies for the Millions: “I think it is

correct to say in the gangster picture the talkies found themselves, and that all pictures made

after the gangster cycle was finished are more terse in speech and more vigorous in action

because of the invigoration which this type of picture brought to the screen” (53). Granting the

talkie permission to borrow from the stage relaxed the necessity for medium-specific purity and

inched Seldes toward an understanding of the relationship between the silent film and talkies

that was informed more by strains of continuity than the wages of a radical break.

In “Talkies’ Progress” and “The Mobile Camera,” Seldes charted a compromise capable of

preserving his stake in movement and fantasy at the cost of loosening his grip on the necessity

for medium-specific essentialism, but the latter piece also points to a more obvious solution that

reflects serious film culture’s initial impatience and its subsequent pragmatism during moments

of major technological change. Synchronized sound and speech was not quite four years old

when “The Mobile Camera” took its name from Seldes’s praise for the aesthetic success of two

recent releases, Hallelujah! (directed by King Vidor) and Applause (directed by Rouben

Mamoulian). Seldes cheered these films because they had “restored” the graceful camera

movements missing from the earliest talkies (298). Finally, talkies proved they could meet the

standard for film art established by The Last Laugh (directed by F. W. Murnau), which Seldes

had hailed in “The Movies Commit Suicide” as “the turning point in the movie’s history” because

it was the first film that “completely and exclusively expressed itself in cinematic terms” (707).

For progressive film critics like Seldes, then, the coming of sound had an ironic impact on their

esteem for the medium. Retrospectively, Murnau’s film looked responsible for inaugurating a
 61
“moment of ripeness,” but the moment was visible only because it had already passed:

“[S]tanding as the culmination of cinematic technic,” The Last Laugh “should have been the

beginning of the art of the movies. It seems, however, to have been the end, for almost

simultaneously with its appearance there came to the moving picture houses the first examples

of the tonal picture which is today precisely in the infantile stage of the silent picture of about

twenty years ago” (708).

Hindsight makes it look like Seldes had rushed to judge the talkies. It also makes the

reconciliation he later effected look a little too easy, a lot of Sturm und Drang that amounted to

much ado about nothing. Why had Seldes found it so hard to square the coming of sound with

his prior understanding of and affection for cinema? First of all, parsing infinitesimal

distinctions in hyperbolic tones is cultural criticism’s meat and potatoes—Seldes was just doing

his job. But his reply to the talkies involved genuine professional risk as well. His reputation as

an upper-middlebrow commentator rested on rejecting high culture’s “irretrievably bogus”

aspects, uplifting popular culture’s finest aspects, and insisting all the while that discernment

remained necessary (The 7 Lively Arts, 256). His reputation as a film critic rested on the belief

that “the movie” was truly great only when it used those expressive methods born of or suited

solely to its own medium specificity.

To sacrifice that principle overnight would have endangered his intellectual integrity and his

upper-middlebrow status, so Seldes tried to avoid the road taken by America’s trade and popular

press film critics, such as Mordaunt Hall. In his enthusiastic New York Times reviews of the first

Vitaphone shorts, released in August 1926, Hall exalted the new technology for its capacity to
80
“deliver grand opera as it is given in New York” to the “inhabitants of small and remote places.”

Thanks to synchronized speech, he proclaimed, “[W]e can expect a Hamlet on the screen with
81
John Barrymore, as well as other classical works.” For upper-middlebrow cinephiles like

Seldes, Hall’s interpretation of sound was anathema. As an art form by right of birth, cinema
 62
should not try to siphon legitimacy from opera, Shakespeare, or “other classical works.” Yet the

flipside of sticking to an ideological principle presented its own risk—becoming irrelevant.

Ambition must have also motivated Seldes’s reconciliation with sound.

Predicated on strains of historical continuity, the reconciliation Seldes constructed upheld

his integrity as a self-professed “theorist” of the medium and realized its most persuasive

enunciation in Movies for the Millions. The book begins with a sweeping claim that not only

binds together silent and sound films ontologically, but also unites the spirit of all moviegoers

across the technological divide:

It is natural for the producers of the movies to emphasize the millions they spend, the stars

they hire, the stories for which they pay great sums and all the other supposed attractions of

their products. These are the special stock in trade of the producer today. Sheer pride would

make it impossible for any contemporary producer to admit that people go to the moving

picture today for precisely the same reason they went nearly forty years ago. They went

then because the moving picture moves. The only reservation that has to be made is this: if

the moving picture had not learned how to tell a story, it might have vanished except in the

form of the newsreel and the historical record. But this does not mean that the story is the

essence of the moving picture; the essence is still the way the story is told, which is by
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movement, and this remains just as true today as it was in the time of the silent pictures.

(8-9)

Throughout this volume and in such later works as The Public Arts, Seldes continued to discuss

the different “arts” of the silent and sound film, but the familiar phrase carried a crucial new
83
meaning. No longer seen as incompatible media, silent and sound films represented distinct

idioms spoken in a shared language, the language of cinematic movement. By nominating

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movement as the only medium-specific quality required to fuse the silent film and talkies, Seldes

emphasized continuity over change, preserving the central components of his film theory, and

his cinephilia. As I discuss in subsequent chapters, Harry Alan Potamkin and Alexander Bakshy

reacted similarly to synchronized sound and speech. With varying degrees of anticipation and

anxiety, they also redefined the medium in sound’s wake, treating the change as a springboard

for saying anew what cinema had really been all along. Likewise, broadcast television’s rise and

home video’s dominance inspired their own ex post facto claims about cinema’s eternal

ontology.

Once inescapable, the need to reconcile with the coming of sound was largely confined to

Seldes’s cohort. After the transition, film critics typically understood silent and sound films as

equally legitimate modes derived from a single medium. In 1933, for example, William Troy

succeeded Bakshy at The Nation and seldom mentioned the silent film. Otis Ferguson’s career at

The New Republic began at the same time, and he, too, scarcely wrote about the silent film or its

relationship to the talkies. Moreover, Ferguson is now recognized as the first American avatar of
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serious film culture’s new preference for cinematic realism. For André Bazin, French poet of

cinematic realism, the coming of sound marked a huge step in the medium’s teleological

progress toward a greater “faith in reality.” Synchronized sound and speech were less significant

in Bazin’s mind than the indexical trace of the phenomenal world imprinted on celluloid by the
85
camera’s automated mechanical processes, which were identical in silent films and talkies.

Even a film critic whose politics and tastes were diametrically opposed to Bazinian realism, as

they were for Jean-Louis Baudry, likely agreed that silent and sound films had a shared

ontology. Although he refuted Bazin for his purported naivety, Baudry said that Man with the

Movie Camera (directed by Dziga Vertov) had the ideal combination of cinematic fantasy and

Marxist critique to fight the hegemonic ideology imposed by the “cinematographic apparatus,”
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and he saw no reason to note the film’s silence.
 64
If generational membership often determined the scope and intensity of interest in the

relationship between silent and sound films, it also spawned nostalgia for the silent era and its

brand of cinephilia. Notwithstanding the reconciliation this chapter outlines, Seldes felt

nostalgic for the silent film and disillusioned about cinema during the latter decades of his

robust career. The specter of technological change lurks on the surface of these recollections. In

a 1950 review of Paul Rotha’s book The Film Till Now, for example, Seldes tells the bittersweet

story of a trip with “some young people” to see Chaplin’s City Lights:

I understood that we who lived through the era of the silent film had something the present

generation lacks. I remember my resentment against people who told me in 1917 that if you

hadn’t seen Paris before the war, you didn’t know what life is, or words to that effect. I hope

no one will resent my saying that if you didn’t know the silent movie, the excitement of

watching it create itself before your eyes, you missed something and, in a sense, you don’t

know what the movies are. We who went through it know something special; we are,
87
cinematically speaking, a race apart.

Comments Seldes inserted into a 1957 reprint of The 7 Lively Arts baldly declare cinema’s

decline: “[T]he great area of the movies . . . did not yield nearly as well as I said it would. In 1935

(that is, long after the coming of sound) H. G. Wells could still see in the movies ‘the possibilities

of becoming the greatest art form that has ever existed.’ Who can see such possibilities now?”

(85). Even as Seldes posed this question, though, the so-called Film Generation was taking

shape. The emerging consensus in serious film culture thoroughly countered Seldes’s dour
88
eulogy, underlining the contingent nature of value. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, cinema

was hailed as the art form of the twentieth century, turning the once-rebellious upper-

middlebrow celebration of the medium into a mainstream idea. Decades later, however, the
 65
Film Generation itself would remember the moment before home video as the last gasp of “what

the movies are,” underlining the longevity of serious film culture’s characteristic styles of

thought and structures of feeling, which include the demand for medium-specific purity and the

tendency to mourn cinema’s decline after moments of major technological change.

As the ensuing section on Jonathan Rosenbaum explores, the tendency to greet

technological change as a radical break also persists. For Rosenbaum, movies watched on home

video were not real movies but something else entirely, an altogether different medium. Home

video thus split cinema into legitimate and illegitimate forms, just as sound had according to

Seldes and his upper-middlebrow peers. Because silent and sound films are no longer seen in

such starkly contrasting terms, it can be easy to miss how subsequent moments of major
89
technological change echo the talkies’ initial reception within serious film culture. However,

the evolution of Rosenbaum’s rhetoric about home video demonstrates that reconciliations with

moments of major technological change persist as well.

A Certain Kind of Necessity

Born in 1943, Jonathan Rosenbaum seems almost destined to have become a cinephile, if not a

popular film critic of international renown. More than most postwar American kids, Rosenbaum

grew up at the movies. His grandfather, Louis, owned a small chain of Alabama theaters, in
90
which young Jonathan watched “practically every feature” released by Hollywood. As a teen,

Rosenbaum enrolled in a Vermont boarding school before he matriculated at Bard College,

where he then spent a couple of unhappy years as a grad student. Moving north took him away

from the earliest source of his cinephilia, but it also put him nearer to New York City, the Film

Generation’s physical and spiritual epicenter.

Rosenbaum’s career as a film critic began shortly thereafter, when he left America to be the

Film Comment correspondent in Paris. This post afforded him another opportunity to acquire
 66
an immersive education in film history, now at the Cinémathèque Française. His European

sojourn continued in London, where he worked as an editor at Monthly Film Bulletin and as a

staff writer at Sight & Sound, housed in the British Film Institute. In addition to the sheer

quantity of films Rosenbaum saw, the influence of his experience abroad is marked by his

advocacy of foreign films, and by his repeated pleas for Americans to reject xenophobia and

isolationism in their movie-watching habits. Rosenbaum has also embodied these qualities as an

annual attendee at film festivals around the globe, an activity he occasionally deploys as a litmus
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test for his colleagues.

Upon returning to the United States in the mid-1970s, though, Rosenbaum tried to chart a

new course, away from film criticism and toward fiction. Funded by a modest grant from the

National Endowment for the Arts, he drafted a quasi-memoir that combined elements of

autobiography and cultural critique. Equally abstract and ambitious, the project was meant to

herald the arrival of a vital literary voice. Published in 1980, Moving Places: A Life at the

Movies failed to generate the lofty impact Rosenbaum sought. While the book garnered a

handful of noteworthy reviews (and has since been re-issued by University of California Press),

Rosenbaum typically describes it as a well-intentioned but misbegotten experiment. Hindsight

later allowed him to pinpoint an intractable problem: an overemphasis on idiosyncratic details,

such as when and where he saw individual films. These details were evidently “too private and
92
specific” to resonate with readers.

Yet Moving Places is only an extreme example of the most distinctive features of his film

criticism, which often reads more like a sophisticated diary than a disinterested attempt to

interpret and evaluate movies. As a conscious effort to situate his thoughts and feelings about

cinema in the lived experience of particular times and places, Rosenbaum’s approach risks—and

is sometimes guilty of—navel-gazing banality, but it has also helped him win a devoted following

among like-minded film critics and cinephiles, for whom he has been one of the central figures
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in recent debates about cinephilia. Indeed, the self-confessed fatal flaw of Moving Places is the

most common manifestation of Rosenbaum’s uniquely personal brand of film criticism.

Whether reviewing a new movie or assessing an entire oeuvre, he routinely tells readers what

films he has seen by the director in question, betraying his auteurist roots, and he routinely

recounts the context in which he saw those films, an issue of heightened consequence in the age

of home video.

Rosenbaum’s first significant statement on home video, a short article called “Cinema Via

Videotape,” appeared in the November 1979 issue of the magazine American Film as part of the

semi-regular section The Video Scene, which also discussed cable television in its coverage of

non-theatrical news. Alongside the New York-based Village Voice and Soho News, American

Film commissioned freelance pieces from Rosenbaum in the period that also produced Moving

Places. These assignments provided him a modicum of financial support and avenues for

writing film criticism before the Chicago Reader, an independent weekly newspaper, hired him

in 1987. Afforded the stability of a full-time gig and the freedom of an unusually generous

editorial policy, Rosenbaum established his current reputation through his twenty-year tenure

at the Chicago Reader, but “Cinema Via Videotape” arrived at a more uncertain interval in his

career. The article also arrived at an equally uncertain interval in the history of America’s

serious film culture.

Declining attendance for and distribution of foreign films, the rise of the New Hollywood

blockbuster, and the burgeoning home video “revolution” triggered the Film Generation’s belief

that cinema’s reign as the most important art form of the twentieth century had drawn to a
93
close. Rosenbaum anxiously registered all of these threats to serious film culture’s survival in

“Cinema Via Videotape,” but he framed the latter development as the catalyst and fulcrum for an

existential crisis. “So it’s hard not to be just a little ambivalent about some of the changes in

store for us,” he lamented. “If videocassettes wind up giving us an analytical relation to films
 68
that now seems possible only at editing tables, the material that we have to analyze may not turn

out to be worth all the bother.” Serious film culture had long pined for more access to movies,

yet “Cinema Via Videotape” suggested it would be unwilling to pay the ontological price for the

access home video delivered. In the article’s closing remarks, then, Rosenbaum worries that “the

competition between film and video” will erode cinema’s medium specificity and convert “both
94
media into a kind of visual Muzak.” Much as the coming of sound made Gilbert Seldes falter in

his support for the “debatable art of the movies,” home video initially struck Rosenbaum as a

severe blow to cinema’s cultural value.

Although alleged editorial interference led Rosenbaum to dismiss his contributions to

American Film and exclude them from multiple volumes of collected criticism, “Cinema Via

Videotape” nonetheless accurately reflects the negative assessment of home video that he
95
reiterated and intensified over the next two decades. Throughout this phase of his career,

references to home video were infrequent but consistent in their judgment—in all of its guises,

home video was an inferior and illegitimate substitute for the real thing. Worse, home video’s

emergence had bifurcated film history and irrevocably damaged film culture, as he stipulated in

the foreword to the 1995 re-issue of Moving Places: “This book marks one of the last gasps of an
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era of moviegoing and movie theaters that ended with the widespread use of VCRs.”

Rosenbaum’s intermittent but angst-ridden commentary on home video echoes the panicked

replies to the coming of sound from “progressive” film critics in the 1920s. It also exemplifies

serious film culture’s longstanding prejudice against television and other non-theatrical
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outlets. “For film scholars and enthusiasts,” writes Barbara Klinger, “cinema is fully realized as

a medium in the projection of 35mm film in the motion picture theater.” Consequently, she

states, “The big-screen performance is marked as authentic, as representing bona fide cinema,
98
while the small screen by comparison is characterized as inauthentic and ersatz.” “Cinema Via

Videotape” illustrates this trope when Rosenbaum proclaims, “[N]one of my favorite films
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qualify exactly as ‘films’ on videotape (I’d sooner regard them as ghosts of movies I once knew,

or as snapshots of friends I’ll hopefully meet again)” (24).

However, his position shifted in the new millennium. Contrary to serious film culture’s

predominant rejection of home video and the corresponding death-of-cinema meme,

Rosenbaum seized a customarily contrarian stance, embracing home video’s capacity (in

conjunction with a robust online community) to foster the same type of “collective cinephilia”
99
that flourished with the Film Generation and canvassed the world in the 1950s and 1960s.

Along these lines, he posited revised definitions of cinema and cinephilia that try to “step away

from absolutist positions” while foregrounding the record of constant changes that have taken
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place in the histories of film and film culture. In the 2004 essay “Goodbye Cinema, Hello

Cinephilia,” he writes: “If we start to think of cinephilia less a specialized interest than as a

certain kind of necessity—an activity making possible things that would otherwise be

impossible—then it starts to become possible to conceive of a new kind of cinephilia in which

cinema in the old sense doesn’t exactly disappear but becomes reconfigured (something that,

after all, has been happening with a certain constancy throughout the so-called history of
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‘cinema’).” Just as Seldes had done with synchronized sound and speech, Rosenbaum

reconciled with home video by favoring a narrative of continuity that binds together the past and

present. Therefore, notwithstanding the material (and socio-cultural) differences that

distinguish the dominance of home video and the coming of sound as moments of major

technological change, I argue that Rosenbaum and Seldes employed fundamentally similar

rhetorical strategies to preserve and extend serious film culture’s characteristic styles of thought

and structures of feeling. In the remainder of this chapter, “Cinema Via Videotape” serves as a

point of entry to investigate both Rosenbaum’s thoughts and feelings about home video across
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his career, and the wider debate about home video within serious film culture.
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The premise of “Cinema Via Videotape” is a report on two “encounters” Rosenbaum had

with novel moving-image technologies: a videotape copy of Star Wars, seen on a conventionally

sized television, and an ordinary broadcast of the evening news, seen on a much larger monitor.

The tone of the piece is foreboding at the outset: “[T]hese encounters . . . suggest a future of

simplified images—a relatively brittle and synthetic landscape where most signs of doubt or

ambiguity have been eliminated for purely pragmatic, ‘technological’ reasons.” Rosenbaum then

contends that home video had already made movies “simpler.” Television, meanwhile, “simply

becomes larger.” The context and significance of his argument come into focus as he compares

the experiences of watching Star Wars in a theater and on video. “I had expected an enormous

contrast between watching the space opera, in Technicolor and Panavision, on a massive screen

and seeing it as a small black-and-white video reduction,” he notes. “[B]ut, in fact, the

differences proved to be relatively minor. Making all due allowances for the unavoidable

changes in sound, color, and screen width, I felt I was watching essentially the same movie.”

Rosenbaum ascribed the unexpected correspondence to the film’s “overall sense of design,”

which was “so well defined, graphically, that it could easily be transposed to other visual media

without any crucial losses.” The graphic design gave Luke Skywalker and the gang “some of the

immediate legibility and familiarity that we associate with Disney creatures,” but it also made

“them equally suitable as toys, comic-book figures, and movie or television stars. It was more

important to know that Chewbacca was Chewbacca than to think about whether it was film or

video that was presenting him.” “Practically speaking,” he concludes, “the medium wasn’t so

much the message here as the necessary method for transporting the characters, sets, gadgets,

and special effects to us, by whatever means available.” In other words, Rosenbaum considered

Star Wars an early exemplar of what came to be called “convergence culture,” a concept I

discuss at greater length in the next chapter.

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If the tenor of this claim seems neutral so far, the intended evaluation is unmistakable as

Rosenbaum juxtaposes Star Wars on videotape with a series of canonical films he had watched

on the same format. The extent to which Star Wars could be justly “transposed” from celluloid

to video, and from theaters to living rooms, was “clearly not the case with such films as The Blue

Angel, The Rules of the Game, Citizen Kane, Ivan the Terrible, Rear Window, or Playtime,” he

asserts. “More often than not, what they lose on television is a level of visual ambiguity,

complexity, and nuance that requires a certain size and definition in order to be seen and

responded to” (23). Fifteen years later, the last title again proved that home video’s inescapable

deficiencies: “Quite simply, the richness of Playtime is not available to anyone on a single

viewing, especially on video. At best, one can discover that this richness is present; at worst, the

viewer can become so bored by what he doesn’t see that he fails to notice that a radical change in
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the language of cinema is being proposed” by the film. (The ability to stop, pause, and rewind

was presumably an insufficient compensation for the disparity in size and definition, but

Rosenbaum does not say as much in the quoted essay.) Conversely, “Cinema Via Videotape”

postulates that director George Lucas had crafted a blockbuster by working “on visual registers

that are at once less problematic and more adaptable” for consumption in other forms and

formats. Hence, Rosenbaum writes, “Something is lost as well as gained in the process” when

film is transposed to video, though “gain” carries a hint of sarcasm—the Hollywood filmmakers

that operated at the forefront of convergence culture were apparently destined to thrive in the

new media landscape, but the situation was more perilous for genuine film artists and the

discerning audiences who supported them (23).

Leveled on the cusp of home video’s meteoric success in the mid-1980s, Rosenbaum’s

critique became a familiar refrain in popular and academic film criticism. For example,

Frederick Wasser seconded Rosenbaum’s thesis in the 2001 book Veni, Vidi, Video, one of the

earliest monographs about home video by a film studies scholar. According to Wasser, home
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video put the final nail in the coffin of film’s waning medium specificity, resulting in the

preference for “elements that play well on both the small and large screens” rather than “ones
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that give pleasure in only one format.” Like Rosenbaum, Wasser evoked Marshall McLuhan in

his analysis of media convergence: “In today’s economy of proliferating media, producers are

encouraging the audience to consciously eliminate that part of the message that is medium

specific and to retain only that part of the movie that can be translated from medium to
105
medium” (198). The features that could “survive” the translation from film to home video were

“those things that give a movie the visceral pleasure of a roller coaster ride, such as powerful
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camera moves, morphing and other digital enhancements, and quick editing” (196). In sum,

Rosenbaum and Wasser insisted that New Hollywood’s hit-driven, sequel-hungry, youth-

oriented ethos matched home video’s limited aesthetic capacity and reviled commodity status.

Thus they equated the styles of bad cultural objects with the ontologies of bad technologies.

“Home video technology shares a responsibility for ushering in an era when market values have

totally subsumed cultural values,” stressed Wasser, so movies like Star Wars got the respect

they deserved from a technology like home video (199).

Regardless of its merits as a media theory, this idea about home video is most pertinent here

for the way it mirrors the prior response to the coming of sound. Members of serious film

culture blamed each moment of major technological change for making movies “simpler.”

Whereas synchronized sound and speech had subordinated the camera’s range of movement to

the microphone’s sonic demands, home video allegedly subordinated the potential complexity of

cinema’s mise en scène to television’s reduced scale and resolution. A complementary logic also

informs serious film culture’s response to the shift in movie consumption from a predominantly

public ritual to a predominantly private one.

This shift began in the late 1950s with television broadcasts of “old” movies and became a

permanent fixture of American film culture with home video’s ascent. For Rosenbaum and his
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peers, it bespoke a more unsettling trend that led them to condemn popular practices and

eulogize the bygone era of authentic cinema and cinephilia. In “Cinema Via Videotape,”

Rosenbaum wonders about the social outcome “when the distinctions between” film and

television “start to break down.” “[W]ho’s to say that our behavior won’t change as well?” he

asks (23). The answer comes when he diagnoses home video as symptomatic of a deeper

malaise: “Transforming the public space of the . . . movie theater into the private space of the

home is, of course, what most of television has been all about. It is a snowballing process that

continues to gain force today, particularly in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. It reflects a

growing antipathy for public life and an increasing value placed on the home as a sanctuary, or a
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fortress” (24). Two decades later, Wasser once more concurred with Rosenbaum, assessing the

“age of video” as “a severe swing of the pendulum, one where staying in [rather than ‘going out’]

approached a collective autism” (17). Home video’s success was thus “the story of movie industry

triumph despite rampant agoraphobia” (18). As further proof that home video spectatorship is

pathologically anti-social, film critic Kent Jones offers this searing anecdote amid the exchange

of “letters” written by a host of international film critics, an endeavor initiated by Rosenbaum

and published in the 2003 book Movie Mutations:

From 1982 to 1984 I worked in one of the first video stores in Manhattan, and I will never

forget the shock I felt when a customer asked me for “something big and plush that I can

really sink into, like the Godfather movies.” I realised right then and there that home video

was opening up a new form of film appreciation antithetical to any I had ever seen, in which

each film could be used as a self-prescriptive therapeutic device. Home video had made each

film into a consumer item and potential fetish object which could be stopped, started,

reversed, repeated or abandoned at will. This was the beginning of a whole new world, the
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world we live in today.
 74

In a comparable vein, film historian David A. Cook is one of many commentators to bemoan

home video’s repercussions by rendering it analogous to the disreputable (self-)gratifications of

pornography, a culturally dubious but economically indispensable genre for all home video

formats: “[W]hat home video did for hardcore films it did for all movies—reduce them (literally)

in stature and turn watching them, with or without masturbation, into a private act. How

perfect, then, that what Tom Wolfe had branded as ‘the Me Decade’ should end by making one
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of twentieth-century America’s great public rituals a form of narcissistic gratification.”

Overseas, a moral panic erupted about the VHS “video nasties,” a moniker that stood for a

loosely affiliated group of violent movies indicted for corrupting England’s impressionable
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children and turning them into criminals.

Members of serious film culture were not only concerned with home video’s deleterious

effects on contemporary film style and social mores; they were also troubled by home video’s

treatment of film history. Unlike the coming of sound, which had bothered silent-era aficionados

for its supposedly harmful bearing on cinema’s promising but fragile future, home video was

rapidly and inextricably tied to cinema’s past. Not long after the publication of “Cinema Via

Videotape,” VHS secured its victory over Betamax tapes (and SelectaVision discs) in the “format

wars,” a triumph fueled by the sale and rental of pre-recorded content—especially Hollywood

movies. Originally expected to disrupt the television industry because it gave consumers the

ability to “timeshift” (i.e., to record “live” broadcasts and watch them at one’s leisure, sans

commercial interruptions and the revenue they generated), home video cemented its economic

viability as an ancillary market for feature-length films that had premiered in brick-and-mortar

theaters. (Eventually, theatrical releases and their attendant marketing campaigns would

become the compulsory investments for netting sizable profits through home video.) Casual film

fans around the world quickly welcomed home video as an inexpensive and convenient
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supplement to traditional moviegoing, and as a means to revisit old favorites whenever they
111
desired. Yet Hollywood held home video at arm’s length, fearing piracy and slashed profits.

Serious film culture was circumspect about home video’s value, too, but for different

reasons. In “Cinema Via Videotape,” Rosenbaum highlights a few key issues with home video’s

treatment of film history that have since taken precedence for serious film culture and separated

it from Hollywood’s anxiety and the chorus of popular approval. Foremost among them has

been a question of home video’s visual and auditory fidelity to the films it re-presents in spaces

other than theaters, and on formats other than celluloid. As discussed above, Rosenbaum

argued that home video’s size and definition were no match for the “visual ambiguity,

complexity, and nuance” of cinema’s greatest achievements. At stake in the discrepancy was

nothing less than the possibility of truly understanding and fairly evaluating a film. When

restored prints of The Manchurian Candidate were released to American theaters in 1988, for

example, Rosenbaum underlined the magnitude of the event by recalling a parallel circumstance

in the inaugural paragraph of his review:

The first and only time I’ve seen a good 35mm print of Carl Dreyer’s 1944 masterpiece Day

of Wrath was in Europe about a month ago. The film was being rereleased, . . . and the

difference in seeing it in optimal conditions was incalculable. The carnal impact of the film’s

sound track, lighting, compositions, camera movements, and performances may be dimly

evident in duped 16mm prints and on video, but the overall effect is like that of viewing a

great painting through several layers of gauze, or hearing a great symphony through

earmuffs.

Alas, Rosenbaum avows, “[T]his prophylactic experience is the only way our film heritage is

preserved for most people in the United States—which is another way of saying that it isn’t really
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preserved at all.” A decade later, he restated home video’s inadequacy when Chicago’s Gene

Siskel Film Center hosted a retrospective program for the Taiwanese director Edward Yang,

whose oeuvre was, in Rosenbaum’s words, “terra incognita in this country.” “Thus,” he warned

readers, “I can’t say that I know most of his films well because I’ve had to depend mainly on
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video copies to see them.” The same venue ran a program of films by the Soviet director

Alexander Dovzhenko in 2002 (several years after the introduction of DVD), and Rosenbaum

once more urged local readers to attend the screenings in lieu of watching at home: “[D]on’t

imagine that you can get the measure of any of these films without seeing a 35mm print on a big
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screen, a rare opportunity afforded only by this series.”

Film critics, cinephiles, and filmmakers alike also attacked the practices of colorization and

panning and scanning. In contrast to the fixed deficiencies in home video’s size and definition,

these practices voluntarily violated the sanctity of a film’s images and undermined the

intentions of its author(s), earning serious film culture’s righteous ire in the bargain. Most

infamously pursued by the media mogul Ted Turner, the former practice was a controversial

gambit to manufacture revenue in the post-theatrical market by adding color to black-and-white

studio classics, including the beloved It’s A Wonderful Life (directed by Frank Capra). Serious

film culture roundly lambasted colorization as an unconscionable affront to the integrity of the

nation’s cinematic archive, and the battle it waged prompted legislation to preserve film history
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and prevent anything like colorization from ever happening again. However, as film critic

Stuart Klawans shows in the iconoclastic essay “Rose-Tinted Spectacles,” the boiling rage over

colorization—no doubt encouraged by its marriage to home video—blinded serious film culture

to the fact that an ostensibly crass commercial pursuit had a hidden cultural benefit: pristinely

restored black-and-white 35mm prints were struck for films that would then only be colorized

on videotape. The “devilish colorizers,” Klawans wryly observes, “turned out to be supporters of
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film history in spite of themselves.” Something was lost as well as gained in the process,

Rosenbaum himself might have said.

To look for what was gained in the practice of panning and scanning would be a Sisyphean

chore. A flagrant insult to serious film culture’s sensibilities, panning and scanning

transmogrified a movie’s surface and structure in deference to the boxy 1.33:1 aspect ratio of

standard tube-based TVs. In the worst-case scenario, pan-and-scan versions of titles composed

in the more horizontal 2.35:1 aspect ratio could have a third of every frame eliminated and be

re-edited when shots with actors on either side of the frame were reconstructed as shot/reverse-
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shot sequences. In his review of Sleepless in Seattle, published by the Chicago Reader on June

18, 1993, Rosenbaum used the film’s appropriation of An Affair to Remember (directed by Leo

McCarey) as an occasion to repudiate panning and scanning:

[D]uring the movie’s initial release, you could still see An Affair to Remember in

CinemaScope—as you could at the Chicago Film Festival’s CinemaScope retrospective a

couple of years back, and as you probably still can in Paris today. In Sleepless in Seattle you

can catch only “scanned” clips of it on various TV sets, with about a third of the image

removed from both sides of the frame. Some marketing executives decided many years ago

that we all preferred to see films that way on TV, without the benefit of McCarey’s exquisitely

composed and measured framing; they assumed it was better to eliminate a third of the

image than to use a letterboxed format. Properly speaking, a better title for the movie as it
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now appears in Sleepless in Seattle would be An Affair to Remember Piecemeal.

Emblematic of the disgust provoked by the technique within serious film culture, this passage

connects the critique of panning and scanning with two signature themes in Rosenbaum’s

career, the politics of access and the conspiracies of capitalism. These themes factor into my
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analysis below, but I want to elaborate in the meantime on the allusion Rosenbaum makes to

letterboxing, the practical solution for the problem of panning and scanning.

At the cost of effectively shrinking TV monitors, letterboxing maintains a film’s proper

aspect ratio and precludes the need to re-edit by laying black bars over the top and bottom of the

image. Perhaps Rosenbaum is right that the origin of panning and scanning can be found in the

cynicism of “marketing executives,” an accusation he reprised as part of his angry reply to the

American Film Institute’s ballyhooed 1998 list of the 100 best American movies. “The lax

attitude that ‘anything’ can eventually be caught up with on video is a debilitating illusion,”

Rosenbaum cautions, “not only because it’s literally untrue, but also because none of these

masterpieces was ever designed to be seen that way, any more than any great novel was ever
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written in order to be skimmed or read with various pages torn out.” Here, his critique of

home video unites the nation’s moral imperative to recognize cinema’s legitimacy as a bona fide

art with an individual cinephile’s primary moral imperative in the age of home video—actually

going to a movie instead of waiting for it on video, as the saying goes. But general audiences

overwhelmingly preferred panning and scanning to squinting at their televisions (or at least they
120
did when VHS players and square TVs were the norm). Most people hardly noticed the

limitations of home video that drove serious film culture insane, as the massive success of pan-

and-scan videotapes confirms. Such “differences between film and video,” admits film historian

Stephen Prince, “involve image attributes that were sufficiently subtle that many viewers in the
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1980s did not perceive or care about them.” For Rosenbaum, though, it ultimately seemed that

nothing could absolve home video’s intrinsic lack of authenticity, which he made clear in the

aforementioned 1997 essay on Edward Yang: “Screen size, composition, and the relation of

sound to image are so central to Yang’s art that not even letterboxed videos can do his work
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justice.”
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This is not to imply that the preceding litany of home video’s shortcomings was a figment of

serious film culture’s wounded imagination. Theater screens were bigger than televisions,

though film critics have always been reluctant to pin down exactly how small is too small for a

screen and how big is big enough. Celluloid was richer in detail, though it has also been

impossible to measure celluloid’s silver halide as lines of resolution, as is done with television

monitors. It’s A Wonderful Life was a black-and-white movie, though colorizing it also produced

a better 35mm print of the original version. Pan-and-scan videotapes were unauthorized
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abridgements, though the process had no effect on celluloid copies of the abridged films. Yet

home video’s purported illegitimacy was greater than the sum of these tangible sins for serious

film culture, hence Rosenbaum’s belief that letterboxing made no difference in the end.

Moreover, his refusal to count his own experiences with home video as real experiences of the

films at hand—let alone cinema writ large—reflects the intellectual and phenomenological void

that had been engendered within serious film culture by home video. As Rosenbaum wrote in

“Cinema Via Videotape,” experiences with home video were like meetings with ghosts, the

spectral phantoms that haunted the Film Generation’s memories of a medium, and a passion,

seemingly lost forever.

Because videotape bore the brunt of serious film culture’s opprobrium, it is crucial to note

that Rosenbaum’s reconciliation with home video was not the result of technological changes to

any home video format. Thanks to its increased resolution, extensive use of letterboxing, and

cinephile-friendly “special features,” DVD is at the heart of his reconciliation with home video,

but Rosenbaum previously lumped VHS tapes, laser discs, and DVDs into the same awful

category. Never was this overarching judgment more palpable than in his comments on the
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“state of denial” over home video that allegedly afflicted film studies academics.

This critique runs throughout the book Movie Wars, published in 2000, and it stands as

Rosenbaum’s chief subject in the chapter “Communications Problems and Canons,” wherein he
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charges film studies academics with effectually capitulating to capitalism when they use home

video and neglect to educate students on the immutable distinctions between home video and
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film. In this chapter, Rosenbaum concedes that few professors have much choice in the

matter, as the “study of films on film” is fiscally infeasible at most universities—ergo, “[I]t would

be pointless to blame them” for resorting to home video as an “alternative” to film. “Where

denial comes into the picture,” he clarifies, “is in the commonly held pretense that watching a

video, laser disc, or DVD is essentially the same thing as watching a film.” Rosenbaum thus

praises the strident methods of his Chicago Reader colleague Fred Camper, who “refuse[d] to
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show films on video” in his classes.

But money was not the sole cause of what Rosenbaum labeled the “ongoing imposture” in

academic film studies (88). Two other ingredients conspired to exacerbate the problem. First,

American film culture was divided into three competing camps: “the mainstream, the film

industry, and academia” (80-1). “The splintering effect of these three separate

discourses . . . guarantees not only the absence of a single community with common interests,”

Rosenbaum avers, “but [also] the present impossibility of conceiving of such a community.

Instead of a public forum, what we all share is essentially the same multimillion-dollar ad

campaigns designed to move the same limited corpus of products” (81). Second, the American

academy no longer taught or defended a canon of agreed-upon masterpieces in any art form;

instead, canons were now “regarded with a great deal of suspicion.” This ideological pivot was

most acute, Rosenbaum reports, in “English and literature departments,” wherein “a mistrust of

canons devoted mainly to the works of ‘dead white males’ ha[d] clearly diminished the

possibility of teaching literature from a literary standpoint” (84). (It had also led to “the relative

disfavor in recent years of aesthetics in academic film study,” he adds [89].) Hollywood

publicity, Rosenbaum surmises, filled the discursive gap opened up by film culture’s internecine

bickering and academia’s abandonment of canons, glutting the national conversation with hype
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for every new release, and for Hollywood’s own half-baked canons, such as the American Film

Institute’s “corny hit parade” (96).

Even if a professor wanted to explore the issue, the “corpus of available written material”

was “too miniscule to make such an approach practical.” Other than untranslated essays on the

topic by French film critic Serge Daney, Rosenbaum struggled to cite applicable sources, and, a
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few notable exceptions aside, he was right. Serious film culture condemned home video, but

often only in passing. Such indifference sprung from a wider rhetorical pattern in popular and

academic film criticism, which have been governed by “formalist or object-centered approaches”

that answer the “question of what constitutes art cinema (or cinema in general)” without

accounting for “material, institutional, and industrial factors,” writes film historian Haidee
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Wasson. Films have therefore routinely been interpreted and ranked as though their meanings

and values exist in a vacuum of pure image and sound.

The indifference also stemmed from a bias against home video within serious film culture.

“[H]ome video has not been conceived as something independent and therefore worthy of

attention,” remarks Lucas Hilderbrand, author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape
129
and Copyright. Due to this indifference, serious film culture lacked what Rosenbaum sought:

“a theoretical or practical guide for coping with the differences between film and video.” Absent

such a guide, Rosenbaum deduced that “film teachers typically wind up circumventing and

ignoring most of those differences in order to concentrate on other matters,” and he predicted

that the subsequent cost of this evasion and ignorance would soon be monumental for film

culture: “In the not-too-distant future, when film may disappear entirely from what we now

refer to as movie houses and may survive only in museums and other specialized institutions,

the theoretical work done on the phenomenology and aesthetics of film throughout the

twentieth century may be ground underfoot in favor of less differentiated standards” (i.e., the

unequivocally lower standards of home video) (88-9).

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Steered by the quest for medium specificity, Rosenbaum is uncharacteristically conservative

in this debate. Usually, his film criticism is steeped in the leftist commitments he adopted in the

1960s, but his views on the academic skepticism toward canons are more in concert with the

irascible Blooms, Harold and Allan. Authors of, respectively, The Western Canon and The

Closing of the American Mind, these writers excoriated the “academic-journalistic

network . . . who wish to overthrow the Canon.” The former scholar named this cabal for

political correctness “the School of Resentment.” For him, true achievements in poetry and

prose stood the proverbial test of time, transcending identity and fashion; above all else, these
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achievements occurred in the realm of aesthetics, not “moral values” or social progress.

Accordingly, VHS tapes, laser discs, and DVDs were fine for Rosenbaum “as tools in analyzing

sequences,” but “their omnipresence in film departments as textual substitutions for film [were]

as crippling in some ways as using Cliff’s Notes instead of texts in literature courses,” he charged

(89). (Rosenbaum was not alone in consigning home video to the ghetto of mere utility. In

Movie Mutations, for instance, Raymond Bellour mocks the notion that he would “buy a film in

order to simply watch it . . . You buy a ticket, a seat in the dark, but not a film. Even if I was one

of the first to decide to study films on video,” Bellour reminisces, “it was always a pure

instrument of work, thus of re-viewing, and of theory. Television is not vision,” he decrees.)

Opposite serious film culture and its medium-specific purity were the American students

who, Rosenbaum exclaims, “can’t even identify what they’re watching as a projected film or a

projected video or laser disc” (90). Yet Rosenbaum was so committed to essentialism here that

he missed the glaring irony of his evidence: if students (and general audiences) were oblivious to

the differences between film and video, maybe the differences were not so meaningful after all.

Serious film culture’s insistence on such differences can thus be understood less as a way to

determine the essential distinctions between film and video, and more as a way to determine the

right kind of spectator, and the right kind of spectatorship—a rhetorical move not exclusive to
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debates about home video, or technological change. What I want to argue, then, is that serious

film culture’s denunciation of home video has revealed more about its own styles of thought and

structures of feeling than it has about home video’s ontology.

The most potent claims against home video’s ontology reduce cinema to the materiality of

celluloid and a corresponding set of effects the format is assumed to automatically create. In this

way, serious film culture’s debate about home video contains more echoes of the upper-

middlebrow response to the coming of sound. When synchronized sound and speech

momentarily restricted the camera’s freedom, Gilbert Seldes said that the fluid “movement” in

such films as The Last Laugh constituted the medium’s essence. When home video overtook

theatrical projection of celluloid prints as the dominant way to watch a movie, serious film

culture said that celluloid constituted the medium’s essence. So, for example, even though Stuart

Klawans was happy to correct serious film culture’s mistaken crusade against colorization, he

nevertheless remembered the Film Generation as an era in which “it wasn’t enough to see films.

You had to touch them, too,” as many cinephiles did at campus film societies that projected

16mm prints, and as many film critics and scholars did at editing tables that enabled close

textual analysis. The tactile component of the Film Generation’s cinephilia is, Klawans explains,

“one of the reasons [he] still cannot feel any respect for videocassette recorders. You don’t
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thread a VCR.”

Likewise, in Stephen Prince’s analysis of the inherent distinctions between film and video,

the barrier between medium and format dissolves while a conflict between taste cultures lurks

beneath the surface. As Prince writes in A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic

Rainbow, 1980-1989:

Videotape and film were, and are, quite dissimilar. Tape had virtually nothing in common

with celluloid, which contains on its surface the actual still images that come to life in the
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cinema. These images hold traces of the light that was originally in the scene before the

cameras. One can hold a strip of film and see these pictures, can reactivate these traces. By

contrast, the videocassette itself, as object, is uninteresting. Lightweight, encased in cheap

plastic, it contains no pictures, merely a magnetic signal that requires decoding. The

excitement that comes from holding the actual film image in one’s hands cannot be

replicated with video. Film is now more abundant on videotape, but it is not the same

medium and does not have the same emotional charge. This is due to the very different
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aesthetic experiences induced by film and video imagery.

Setting aside this comparison’s esoteric irrelevance for almost everyone—how many people have

ever held a strip of film?—Prince’s conclusion is a clear case of technological determinism. If

celluloid and magnetic videotape naturally “induced” a medium- or format-specific “emotional

charge,” it must be assumed that the general audiences who enjoyed home video suffered from a

communal delusion, a shared false consciousness. They would thus be figured as cousins to the

“millions of thoroughly satisfied spectators” chastised by Seldes for their enjoyment of the

earliest talkies, and Prince et al. would be cousins to the “sensitive people” like Seldes who knew

better.

That said, several attempts to redeem home video have also been made within serious film

culture. In the seminal 1996 Film Quarterly article “The Contradictions of Video Collecting,”
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Charles Tashiro disclosed his ardor for collecting laser discs. In the 2006 book Death 24x a

Second, Laura Mulvey defended home video on the grounds that its ability to stop, pause,
134
rewind, and replay affords cinephiles what might be called a kind of ecstatic utility. Lastly, in

the aforementioned 2011 book Inherent Vice, Lucas Hilderbrand celebrated videotape through

his work on the bootleg circulation of the 1987 film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Shot

on 16mm by indie director Todd Haynes and released to widespread acclaim, the film became a
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scarce object when copyright battles forced it underground. Hilderbrand thus ruminates on the

pleasures of collecting while granting VHS, even in the degraded form of “warped dub(s),” the
135
sort of “aesthetic reading” it had theretofore been denied. He discovers the “multiplicity of

personal meanings and sentimental values” such dubbed VHS tapes “represent for their
136
collectors,” himself included. In doing so, Hilderbrand challenges the theory of videotape’s

impoverished “emotional charge.”

Rosenbaum’s reconciliation with home video was not founded in the pleasures of collecting

and did not entail an aesthetic reading of any home video format. Neither has it been a type of

“videophilia,” a love for home video as a medium in its own right, nor a type of nostalgia for
137
shuttered mom-and-pop video stores and obsolescent VHS tapes. Rather, Rosenbaum’s

reconciliation with home video has its source in strains of continuity with his career-spanning

investment in auteurs, and in the collective access to their films. In the 2011 article “Watching

Kiarostami Films At Home,” for instance, Rosenbaum says almost nothing about watching

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s films at home. Instead, his more modest goal is to alert

readers to the Kiarostami films available on home video and write a few words about how they
138
fit into his oeuvre. Rosenbaum has taken the same approach in his columns for the website

DVDBeaver, and in Global Discoveries on DVD, his column for the Canadian magazine Cinema
139
Scope. In these venues, Rosenbaum has reviewed a bevy of new DVDs and Blu-ray discs,

emphasizing the releases that give cinephiles access to films that had once been difficult or

impossible to see. As he professes in the introduction to the 2011 book Goodbye Cinema, Hello

Cinephilia, “[F]ilm-viewing choices have expanded considerably, at least for those who care

about having such choices, and it’s been especially gratifying to me how many formerly

unavailable films written about in this book have become accessible while I’ve been assembling
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it.”
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Against the grain of “an absolutist either/or mentality . . . brought about by DVDs,”

Rosenbaum’s reconciliation with home video started with doubts about the prevailing

“presumption that ‘cinema’ is something that happens inside a theater, on a screen, which one
141
watches with other people after purchasing a ticket.” Now opposed to “an idealist model” that

is “no longer a practical description that applies to the experience of most people,” his newly

catholic and newly pragmatic thoughts and feelings about home video required him to explicitly
142
reverse his previous positions on celluloid’s primacy and home video’s inadequacy. He

therefore crafted a new definition of cinema as an “indeterminate space and activity where we

find our cinephilia stimulated, gratified, and even expanded,” a definition that ditches the

conservatism in Movie Wars for a pluralism that questions essentialist epistemologies. In a

2010 Cineaste article, Rosenbaum illustrated the terms and stakes of his new position on home

video by disagreeing with a sample of the mistaken absolutism that rules serious film culture.

The following comment appeared in an online forum connected to a roundtable discussion of

cinephilia, published by the journal Framework: “I think we’re all lying to ourselves,” Michael

Guillén writes, “when we analyze a film on DVD [and] we act as if we’ve seen it and we

haven’t. . . . [Y]ou are seeing a facsimile, sometimes a very good facsimile, but we’re fooling
143
ourselves that we’re seeing the real thing.” (In Guillén’s defense, he was only endorsing serious
144
film culture’s standard line, which Rosenbaum himself had stumped for repeatedly.)

Rosenbaum responds to this comment by revising a statement he had once used to articulate

celluloid’s superiority: “The first several times I saw Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, over roughly a

quarter of a century, the quality of both the sound and the image was so inadequate, regardless

of whether I was seeing the film in 16mm or (less often) 35mm, that I scarcely had a clue about

the film’s greatness before I finally saw a restored, new print during a Paris rerelease in the late

Eighties. And,” he continues, “it’s very important to add that seeing the Criterion DVD is much

closer to the latter experience than it is to the former.” Thus Rosenbaum ceased referring to
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home video’s access as strictly utilitarian and began to situate it on a continuum of authentic

cinematic materials and encounters.

More importantly, his reconciliation with home video was also predicated on a strain of

continuity in film history. That is, Rosenbaum had a new definition of cinema, but cinema as he

now defined it was not necessarily new. Before, home video’s emergence had marked a radical

break. In the introduction to the 1997 book Movies as Politics, for example, Rosenbaum

reprinted and endorsed comments he first wrote in 1985: “[W]e all feel that something is in the

process of ending—unless we feel that is has ended already. Something is also in the process of

beginning; but whatever we choose to call it, I don’t think we can call it cinema in the old sense.

The rapid spread of movies on video” and a series of other setbacks represented the “junking of

an already precarious film culture in the interests of short-term financial gains for big business.”

These changes, Rosenbaum contends, “suggest a historical period being sealed off, so that the

past isn’t only another country but a different planet, a different language, a different set of

aspirations. . . . [W]e can learn this new language well or badly and say all kinds of different

things with it, but we can’t use it to lead us back to cinema in the old sense (cinema, let us say,
145
that was still on speaking terms with the era of Griffith, Murnau, and Stroheim).” But he takes

the opposite view in the introduction of Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: “[T]ruthfully, the

subtitle of this book, Film Culture in Transition, could have been used during any or all” of the

years in a career that lasted three decades, “as well as during either of the two preceding decades

of [his] formative moviegoing. I daresay that for better and for worse,” Rosenbaum writes, “film

culture has pretty much remained in transition for all of its existence, and will continue to

remain so. That is an integral part of its mystery and magic and its continuing emotional hold on
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us.” As it did for Gilbert Seldes, technological change became a way for Rosenbaum to

understand what cinema had really been all along: “Those who insist that what was formerly a

communal activity has now become a solitary one are often committing the error of limiting the
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social experience of cinema to a particular set of viewing conditions when it has always been
147
more complicated than that.”

Finally, Rosenbaum’s reconciliation with home video recognized the persistence of

cinephilia. Looking back at the apocalyptic tone in Moving Places, Rosenbaum sees that he was

“already lamenting the end of a certain kind of cinema as well as a certain kind of theater, and a

certain kind of social interaction that went with both. But it would be vain and foolish to claim

that things of this kind ever end entirely,” he argues, “even if they change radically beyond our

childhood recognition of them.” At this juncture, the debate about home video boiled down to a

simple realization: “The basic point is that there are still cinephiles much younger than myself

who are full of excitement about films made even before the glory days of [such silent-era

directors as] Louis Feuillade and Yevgeni Bauer . . . ; and this situation isn’t ever likely to

change, even if the places and contexts where these films are seen and understood become
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radically transformed.” In his new conception of film history, changes—even “radical”

changes—overlapped with continuities, and cinephilia—the “certain kind of necessity” that

characterized serious film culture’s thoughts and feelings for Rosenbaum—was the glue that

kept serious film culture intact after a moment of major technological change. While

Rosenbaum could never be mistaken for a defender of popular culture like Seldes (or a populist

like Roger Ebert), his reconciliation with home video relinquishes the orthodox claims to

authenticity by fellow members of the Film Generation, and it extends a rhetorical olive branch
149
to cinephiles of the home video generation.

Throughout this chapter, I have explored the film criticism written by Gilbert Seldes and

Jonathan Rosenbaum as contributions to serious film culture’s dialectic of change and

continuity, but the other dialectics investigated in this dissertation were at play in their work as

well. Both figures vacillated between hope and disillusionment, the subject of chapter 5, and

Rosenbaum appears again in chapter 4, which reads his focus on access as a contribution to the
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dialectic of scarcity and plenitude. Each of these film critics also attempted to reconcile an

apparent loss of cinema’s specificity when a moment of major technological change blurred the

lines between media, so they might have featured in the next chapter, on the dialectic of

specificity and convergence.

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3

Specificity and Convergence

When Anthony Lane reviewed Melancholia (directed by Lars von Trier) for the November 2011

issue of The New Yorker, he had little to say about the film itself. Lane praised the prologue’s

remarkable images but admitted that he found the rest of Melancholia a disappointment. Rather

than review the film in a conventional sense, then, Lane focused on the fact that Melancholia

had been available through video on demand (VOD) a few weeks before it arrived in theaters. In

other words, one no longer needed to wait for it on video—digital technologies like VOD had
1
reversed key elements of film culture’s traditional temporality. Thrust into ironic

circumstances, Lane effectively begged readers to wait for a theatrical screening: “Even if you

loathe von Trier . . . and whatever the weather, please resist the lure of video on demand and go

see Melancholia where it belongs. As Justine’s mother says of marriage, and as the movie tries

to say of mortal life, so we should say of cinema: ‘Enjoy it while it lasts.’ ” Contrary to his mixed

assessment of the film, Lane espoused unequivocal views on VOD, and on cinema’s future.

While blockbusters might “continue to haul us off our couches,” he decried the likelihood that

on-demand formats would result in most new movies being “whittled down into just another

channel on TV.” “There’s only one problem with home cinema,” Lane concludes: “[I]t doesn’t
2
exist. The very phrase is an oxymoron.”

Within the discourses of serious film culture, this piece reflects the increased attention paid

to home video since the emergence of DVDs in the late 1990s, a period in which even the prosaic

rhetoric of week-to-week reviews can be interrupted by the urgent need to comment on home

video. But the recent debate about home video has also intersected with a larger debate about

the role digital technologies play in dissolving the barriers that once purportedly divided media

into discrete entities. Naming the new paradigm “convergence culture,” media scholar Henry
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Jenkins has described it as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the

cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media
3
audiences.” Careful to avoid determinism, Jenkins maintains that convergence should be

interpreted more as a “cultural shift” than a “technological process.” “Convergence does not

occur through media appliances, however sophisticated they may become. Convergence occurs

within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others,” he

asserts (3). Yet Jenkins nonetheless posits technological change as a chief determinant in the

move toward media convergence: “Digitization set the conditions for convergence,” he avows

(11). A product of technological change, corporate conglomerates, and fandom’s participatory

practices, convergence thus disrupts the “one-to-one relationship that used to exist between a
4
medium and its use,” and it displaces the older model of medium-specific study. Moreover,

Jenkins expounds, convergence pivots on an updated distinction between “delivery

technologies” and the media they deliver. While the former (e.g., CDs, MP3 files, 8-track

cassettes, celluloid) “become obsolete and get replaced,” he writes, the latter “evolve” (13).

So what is a medium? Jenkins answers that question by paraphrasing a fellow media

scholar, Lisa Gitelman. Her definition, taken from the 2006 book Always Already New,

stipulates that a medium is both a communication technology and “a set of associated ‘protocols’

or social and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology” (13). Concerned

primarily with the histories of recorded sound and the invention of the Internet, Gitelman

happens to illustrate the difference between delivery technologies and media by saying that

cinema “includes everything from the sprocket holes that run along the sides of film to the
5
widely shared sense of being able to wait and see ‘films’ at home on video.” Perhaps because she

is neither a popular film critic nor an academic film scholar, Gitelman seems free to take a Zen

approach to the technological changes that have affected cinema and rankled so many members

of serious film culture.

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Nevertheless, popular film critics and academic film scholars have also espoused the same

catholic attitude toward cinema’s technological foundations and its corresponding cultural

“protocols.” For example, in January 2008, film critic Nathan Lee participated in Slate’s annual

Movie Club, joining several fellow film critics to sum up the preceding year. Among other topics,

the Movie Club discussed the allegedly poor execution of most theatrical screenings, home

video’s value writ large, and the apparently disappearing boundaries between film, television,

and home video in light of the overwhelming influence of digital technologies. In general, Lee’s

strikingly optimistic entry exemplifies the texture and diversity of media consumption within

convergence culture, but it starts with an ecstatic memory of watching a celluloid print of a

canonical film at San Francisco’s famed Castro Theatre: “I submitted to the eye-popping, soul-

shattering sublimities of Vertigo, a film I knew, but didn’t really know at all, from pan-and-scan

VHS.” Consequently, Lee concurred with the panel about the “various inadequacies and

aggravations besetting a night at the movies in these impolite times, and, at the same time, the

incomparable wonderment of a flawless 35mm projection and the social pleasure of going to the

movies and talking them through with friends. All of us, critics and civilians alike,” he regrets,

“can agree that something is being lost in the dark.”

As the entry continues, however, it offers a dissenting opinion. “Yet I feel compelled to speak

up in defense of iThings, holo-pods, and the living room cinematheque,” Lee writes. Years

earlier, he relates:

I attended a press screening of The New World at an excellent multiplex in Manhattan. If

anything would seem to require, even demand, the largest possible screen, it was the

whispering raptures of Terrence Malick’s transcendental period piece. And it was, indeed,

gorgeous to behold on that big, bright screen—though an infinitely more ravishing

immersion came several months later when, on a flight from Los Angeles to New York, I
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squinted at the 12-inch screen of my mighty little PowerBook running The New World on

DVD. Maybe it was the headphone factor, the intensely private space created by an isolated

aural environment, or the gestural intimacy enabled by literally holding the film in your lap,

but my nervous system came alive to the movie in an entirely new way. For whatever reason,

it is this “diminished” viewing of Malick’s masterpiece, not the theatrical one, that ranks

alongside Vertigo at the Castro in my personal pantheon of cinematic amazements.

In tandem with the revelatory screening of The New World, Lee notices that the Movie Club had

thus far lavished two television shows, HBO’s The Sopranos and The Wire, with its “greatest

praise—‘narrative film of the decade.’ ” He also admits that any “honest list of [his] favorite

motion pictures in 2007, regardless of medium,” would include several YouTube videos, from

cell-phone footage of a subway break-dancer accidentally kicking a toddler to a 90-second

fanvid of a Daft Punk concert. Finally, though, Lee again celebrates a more conventional

pleasure for cinephiles, hailing a restored 35mm print of The Earrings of Madame de… as the

“single best thing, of any kind of thing” he saw that year. “Cinema is dead, long live cinema!” he
6
proclaims.

If Lee’s Movie Club entry suggests a path toward preserving serious film culture’s cinephilia

in an age dominated by home video and convergence, it also hints at the omnipresent danger

that cinema could vanish altogether. Film historian Tom Gunning has addressed this danger as

well in an essay on the efficacy and future of film studies as an academic discipline. Consonant

with Lee’s open-minded embrace of cinema’s varied technological manifestations, Gunning

seeks to square the medium’s leaky perimeters with the analytical fruits of insisting on its

specificity. On the one hand, Gunning “feel[s] that the tendency to assume one medium

displaces another, or the search for a generalized media theory that dissolves specificity, risks

losing precisely the aesthetic and historical insight that the focused study of film offers.” On the
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other hand, his own sketch of the medium is convergence incarnate: “Film as a medium owes its

aesthetic, social, and technological power to its porous and protean nature, its ability to swallow

up and integrate a number of other media, and its basic ecology of existing only in relation to the
7
diverse media that surround it.” Even celluloid’s disappearance, Gunning deduces, “can be
8
approached as a development in film history . . . , given the historically hybrid nature of film.”

In the remainder of this chapter, I contribute to serious film culture’s dialectic of specificity

and convergence by exploring three separate precursors for the current debate. To begin, the

following section examines Harry Alan Potamkin’s writing on the coming of sound. Like Gilbert

Seldes, Potamkin immediately rejected the transition to sound on ontological and medium-

specific grounds but ultimately reconciled with the change when he identified crucial sources of

continuity that crossed the divide. In doing so, Potamkin constructed an elaborate theory of

cinema as a “compound” medium born of the multiplicity inherent to modernity, and thereby

preserved the tenets of his cinephilia.

Through different lenses, the subsequent sections investigate the next form of convergence

to have a discernible impact on serious film culture’s characteristic styles of thought and

structures of feeling: the partnership between Hollywood and broadcast television. The first of

these sections looks at the career of Bosley Crowther, whose attitude toward television vacillated

over the course of three decades. Initially, Crowther abhorred the idea that television would

influence the American film industry, but he seemed to make peace with their convergence after

a formal announcement of collaboration in the early 1950s. Alas, his tenure as a film critic ended

with bitter recriminations toward the younger medium for its effects on film and film culture.

The second of these sections surveys the criticism of the Film Generation’s leading members.

At the peak of cinema’s convergence with broadcast television, such figures as Andrew Sarris

and John Simon presided over serious film culture but said less about the phenomenon than

might be assumed today. As cinema reached the apex of its cultural legitimacy, its escalating
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communion with television routinely failed to register as a concern for the Film Generation.

Moreover, I argue, the relative neglect of film and television’s convergence later informed the

reaction to home video as a radical break.

A return to these earlier junctures demonstrates that digitization is not the only moment of

major technological change to inspire serious film culture’s contemplation of cinema’s ontology

and specificity alongside questions of media convergence. As the careers of Gilbert Seldes and

Jonathan Rosenbaum indicated in the previous chapter, technological changes have done less to

alter the nature of media themselves than they have to alter serious film culture’s understanding

of what media have always been. Therefore, I contend, the technological, industrial, and cultural

changes that comprise media convergence did not end the era in which media were pristinely

distinct from each other, but instead ended the era in which the members of serious film culture

could still imagine they ever were.

Born in the Age of the Multiple

Harry Alan Potamkin converted to cinema’s cause relatively late in life. Before he became a

cinephile, Potamkin pursued a career in letters as a poet and publisher of a “little magazine.”

When he embarked on a European honeymoon at 26, Potamkin intended to absorb the literary

culture most Americans considered superior to theirs, but the artists and intellectuals he met

overseas surprised him with their passion for another art form—the movies. Upon his return

home, Potamkin devoted himself to a study of the young medium’s history. His first published

piece of film criticism, a profile of Alexander Bakshy, appeared in 1927 and exalted the fellow
9
film critic as cinema’s “prophet.” In doing so, Potamkin immediately set the template for a

career uniquely preoccupied with everyone else’s ideas and tastes, though he would be far less

kind to the numerous colleagues who subsequently received his withering scrutiny.
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Eventually, Potamkin acquired his own formidable reputation, highlighted by his

commitments to Marxism and a socially conscious brand of aesthetic critique. Potamkin’s

impact on film culture in the 1920s and 1930s was led by his film criticism but was shaped as

well by his membership in the Workers Film and Photo League, a nationwide collective of

amateur and professional documentary filmmakers with Communist underpinnings. In keeping

with the spirit of leftist activism that animated his film criticism and social ties, Potamkin

helped bring the model of the European ciné club to the United States; in keeping with the

contrarian spirit that marks his signature as a writer, he then launched an assault on the elitism
10
of the ciné clubs, seeking reform from within their ranks. When illness cut his work and life

short in 1933, obituaries hailed Potamkin as America’s most accomplished film critic. “No other

American film critic was his equal in technical knowledge, in sensitiveness to the fine qualities of

cinematic art, or in a profound feeling for the social significance of the motion picture,” said the

National Board of Review. Hound and Horn paid tribute, too: “It is safe to say he knew more

about the art of film than any one in this country, and except for the great Russian directors who
11
were his friends and admirers, as much as anyone in the world.”

Potamkin’s writing therefore remains key to obtaining a full picture of serious film culture’s

response to the coming of sound. Furthermore, his writing on sound is central to his current

reputation. For example, film scholar Dana Polan singles out Potamkin as “unlike many

modernist critics of his time in his not seeing the coming of sound as an inevitable impediment
12
to experimentation.” Opposed to serious film culture’s essentialist caterwauling against the

sound film, Potamkin imagined cinema’s ontology as an outgrowth of the Industrial

Revolution’s mechanical principles and the related multiplicity indicative of modernity. Rather

than perpetuate the belief that the silent film and talkies were heterogeneous media, he argued

that “cinema was born in the age of the multiple” and served as a kind of umbrella medium,
13
comprised of a potentially infinite number of subforms. Any film, he insisted, could
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incorporate ostensibly disparate forms so long as the result of their use met his demand for

artistic “unity.” By describing cinema’s boundaries as a permeable membrane, and by

transforming the question of medium specificity from a confining either/or rule into a liberating

both/and freedom, Potamkin’s response to technological change anticipates the dominant

critical discourse in the era of digital media convergence.

But Polan’s praise for Potamkin among “modernist critics of his time” is only completely

accurate if one begins with the appearance of the article “The Compound Cinema,” printed in

January 1929 by the English-language, British-edited, and Swiss-financed film journal Close Up,
14
a trendsetting outpost for the international defense of film as a bona fide art. Like a lot of peers

who entered the burgeoning profession of cultural criticism, Potamkin wrote for several

publications, from highbrow art journals to trade magazines, but he is most often associated

with Close Up. With respect to his reputation, the centrality of “The Compound Cinema” has

probably been encouraged as well by its placement at the front of Lewis Jacobs’s 1977 anthology

of Potamkin’s film criticism, a volume that also takes its name from this article. Despite its

depth and breadth, the anthology does not include an earlier article, “Radio Entertainment and

Talking Pictures,” published on May 26, 1928, in the Cincinnati-based periodical The Billboard.

This article was Potamkin’s first statement on the coming of sound, not “The Compound

Cinema.” Contrary to Polan’s assessment of Potamkin, it forwards an unquestionably negative

account of sound’s effect on film’s evolution as an art form, matching other jeremiads that

attacked the talkies on ontological and medium-specific grounds. Here, Potamkin dismissed

sound as incompatible with cinema because cinema was “the art of silent visual plastic fluidity.”
15
“Speech is a monstrosity in the movie,” he exclaimed. In other words, Potamkin was initially

very much like the other modernist critics who wrote on the coming of sound.

Restoring “Radio Entertainment and Talking Pictures” to the record of Potamkin’s film

criticism shows that his embrace of synchronized sound and speech was not a reflexive instinct
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but the product of a reconciliation in thought and feeling, mirroring the way that Gilbert Seldes

and Jonathan Rosenbaum also reconciled with technological change. Indeed, Potamkin quickly

overturned his preliminary censure of sound by locating sources of continuity across the

technological divide. The coming of sound was not a radical break in film history, then, but a

revelation in his understanding of what the medium had really been all along. Moreover, the

continuity Potamkin identified supported a theory of cinema as, in the words of Tom Gunning, a

“porous and protean” medium.

Its judgment on sound aside, “Radio Entertainment and Talking Pictures” established many

of the most important themes Potamkin explored throughout his career, including the influence

of Marxism on his film criticism and cinephilia; his complex (and sometimes contradictory)

views on cinema’s medium specificity; and his attitude toward cinema’s status as a “mechanical”

art form, which also revealed his attitude toward modernity. Through the lens of this brief but

rich essay, I detail below how these themes continued to manifest in Potamkin’s work. By

investigating this overlooked piece, I seek to uncover the context for Potamkin’s most distinctive

and celebrated contributions to American film criticism while tracing their development in light

of a moment of major technological change.

At the outset of “Radio Entertainment and Talking Pictures,” Potamkin juxtaposes the

talkies’ seemingly sudden arrival with radio’s surging popularity and the imminent prospect of

television. This was a common way for silent-era aficionados to comprehend the technological

change at hand, and the article’s ensuing remarks on capitalism’s part in the coming of sound

were also common. Specifically, Potamkin critiques a pair of figures—inventors and investors—

who were responsible for the economically motivated emergence of synchronized sound and

speech. Thereafter, these figures featured prominently in his film criticism and provided a

politically charged means for distinguishing the pure aesthetic motives of an artist from the

crass financial imperatives of a businessman. In a posthumously published article he worked on

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as late as 1933, the year he died, Potamkin added two figures to his list and damned the lot of

them: “The movie was born in the laboratory and reared in the counting-house. It is a

benevolent monster of four I’s: Inventor, Investor, Impresario, Imperialist.” The Investor and

Imperialist were the “guiding” forces: “They pilot the course of the motion picture. The course is

so piloted that it is favorable to the equilibrium of the ruling class, and unfavorable to the

working class.” These deplorable conditions, he surmised, were “truer in the realm of the film

than in the other arts” because film was “the art of the people” (243).

Redolent of the shift to an unmistakable Marxism that allegedly bifurcates Potamkin’s

career, the logic of this argument is also evident in “Radio Entertainment and Talking Pictures,”

written five years earlier. Thus Potamkin’s rebuke of the “counting-house” in 1933 only

reiterated the previous article, which had blamed the “heedless opportunism of commerce” for

the “failure” to understand the principle of medium specificity, leading to the “present impasse

in the theater, the waning of vaudeville, the collapse of burlesque and minstrelsy, and the

confusion in the motion picture.” As Dana Polan contends, the latter half of Potamkin’s career

does not constitute its own radical break from his former interest in film aesthetics; rather, it
16
extends that interest by emphasizing the interaction between aesthetics and the social.

Nonetheless, Potamkin’s Marxism bifurcates his career in another sense. Whereas the film

criticism he wrote from 1927 to 1930 exhibits the theoretical sophistication and professional

jockeying also present from 1930 to 1933, a new and severe lack of pleasure hangs over this later

work. The strongest impression Potamkin makes over the last half of his career is that the

movies were not only aesthetically and intellectually dreadful but also socially harmful. His

Marxism was a double-edged sword, then: it energized his film criticism with an urgent purpose

but sapped his love for actual movies.

Before the pleasure in his cinephilia waned, the coming of sound had been the thing that

energized Potamkin, inspiring the theoretical vision that helped him stand out in the
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increasingly crowded field of American film criticism. But his present reputation is incomplete

or misleading because “Radio Entertainment and Talking Pictures” has not been taken into

account. For instance, film historian Peter Decherney has applauded Potamkin for “frequently

object[ing] to the ‘absolute’ or ‘pure’ film’s quest for media specificity. Filmmakers and theorists

interested in isolating the unique properties of film, [Potamkin] often complained, engaged in a
17
dogmatic and socially irrelevant formalism.” Yet Potamkin did not just jettison the familiar

concern with cinema’s specificity—he fashioned a theoretical rationale to support a more flexible

definition, making it possible to stay committed to medium specificity without worrying it to the

bone. Perhaps Potamkin’s comparatively late discovery of cinephilia aided his rapid reversal on

the coming of sound and facilitated its underlining pluralism. With less time and cultural capital

spent on silent-era essentialism, Potamkin was well positioned to challenge the prevailing

dogma and test fresh theoretical justifications for accepting synchronized sound and speech.

As expressed in “Radio Entertainment and Talking Pictures,” however, his understanding of

medium specificity was conventional. Not yet a year removed from his first published article,

maybe Potamkin was still searching for his own voice. He might have kicked himself in

retrospect for momentarily sharing a set of ideas and tastes he later condemned as limiting,

retrograde, and ideologically suspect. At the time, though, he wrote: “To know best how to use

any medium of expression or conveyance—art or entertainment—it is first necessary to study

that medium to discover its qualities of distinctiveness and its limitations.” Potamkin applied

this norm to cinema and the latest electrical medium, radio, and it covered his speculations on

television, too. Adamant that the talkies had interrupted film’s evolution as a legitimate art

form, Potamkin kept an open mind about radio’s future because it still had a chance to become

an “independent” medium.

But film and radio were also situated on the precipice of huge impending changes. Potamkin

thought radio had “fallen too easily to the lure of advertising” and hoped the newer medium
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would learn from film’s missteps. The respective fates of these media hinged on their

independence and concomitant ability to resist detrimental “borrowings.” Radio gave

“indications of evolving as a medium of expression with its own peculiarities,” but Potamkin

warned its practitioners not to succumb to the circumstances that had befallen radio’s

“predecessor, the movie,” which was “wallowing in a confusion of borrowings from every other

medium.” His ire mounting, Potamkin asked: “This insistent plague of borrowing . . . why is it
18
necessary?” At this juncture, he deployed the word hybrid as a derogatory label for a movie (or

any other kind of artwork) that violated the productive “limitations” of its medium by stealing

from another. “The motion picture director at his best makes of the limitation silence a virtue

and of the flat screen the very basis for the movements of his players. Therefore, it is not the

business of an artist, in radio or marble or cinema, to decry the limitations of his medium or to

force that medium out of its own category by hybrid fusions with others. The limitations,” he

concluded, “should become the very substance of the form.”

The notion of a hybrid artwork was at the crux of the revised film theory Potamkin started

developing eight months later, beginning with “The Compound Cinema.” His pursuit of cinema’s

medium specificity endured but adopted an original guise. He now claimed that different

technological manifestations of the medium, sound film included, had their own particular

specificities. Potamkin gathered all of the extant and unrealized types of film art under one

banner and christened it “compound cinema.” In an unusual gesture of solidarity with a

colleague, he credited French film critic and theorist Léon Moussinac as an inspiration for his

new outlook. Potamkin drew the following “inference” from Moussinac and endorsed it: “There

are a variety of possible forms in the cinema. The flat silent film is but one form.” Unlike the

“young critic” who is “absolute, but never exact,” Potamkin stood with Moussinac and assumed a

pluralist stance: “The objection to sound cannot be absolute. It can only be an objection to the
19
compounding of it with a form intrinsically silent, the first form” (5-6). Likewise, Potamkin
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disagreed with the “Russian directors,” whom he otherwise revered, when they “expressed a

disinterest in the stereopticon and color films.” “It is like an objection to sculpture because it is

not painting, or to painting because it is not an etching. The depth film provides its own

category, the color film its own,” he asserted (7).

Synchronized sound and speech altered more than his understanding of film technology.

Cinema now also encompassed an endlessly multiplying series of individual movies, genres, and

national styles, each of which Potamkin would evaluate by a single standard—were they

compound or hybrid? True compounds were good because they married form and content into a

unified whole, and hybrids were bad because they failed to do the same. He stated the formula

succinctly in the September 1929 Close Up article “Phases of Cinema Unity: II”: “Unity

differentiates between a hybrid and a compound” (21). Compound, hybrid, and unity were

indissolubly linked in Potamkin’s film criticism; together, they acted as a map for navigating the

material realities of cinema’s technological and aesthetic changes, thus preserving the tenets of

his cinephilia and securing the basis for his discernment. If “movement” was the locus of

continuity that bound the silent film and talkies in Seldes’s film criticism, unity performed an

equivalent role for Potamkin. From Aristotle to twentieth-century film critics, cultural experts

have deemed artworks successful when their form and content culminate in a harmonious

balance, and Potamkin carried on the tradition.

Another significant point of overlap exists between Seldes and Potamkin: their mutual

unwillingness to champion radical aesthetic modernism and avant-garde practices. This shared

value speaks to the limits of Potamkin’s tastes, which reflect his place within the American

upper-middlebrow milieu. It also suggests an unresolved tension between his burgeoning

pluralism and the constant need to meet film criticism’s most basic requirement—setting a

standard and holding filmmakers to it. Along these lines, “Radio Entertainment and Talking

Pictures” decried the “contemporary tendency toward abstraction, as is present in cubist art,”
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and advocated for “controlling this tendency and utilizing it for greater ends, as is indicated by

the work of the great moderns.” (Apparently, cubists were not “great moderns.”) Later, he

disparaged Entr’acte (directed by René Clair) for its missing intention and unity. Potamkin

called it a “dissociative” film, a genre he connected with surrealism and Dada. He disliked

Entr’acte because “even a dissociative film must have an intention, [even] if it is only to convey

automatic ideas.” Against the grain of his own expanding pluralism, though, he then discounted

the dissociative genre altogether: “I oppose the entire principle of dissociation. . . . The task of

the artist is to establish, or attempt to establish, the relationship between the dissociations.

Baudelaire constantly transferred the categories and achieved a synthesis. He re-associated the

dissociations” (27-8).

Neither Seldes nor Potamkin were amenable to the random and discordant extremes

experimented with by European radicals and avant-gardists, in the fine arts or filmmaking.

Instead, they sought evidence of overarching conscious designs that created unity in a given

artwork out of its form and content. For upper-middlebrow film critics, speech in the earliest

talkies usually flunked this exam. It struck them as a mere “effect,” shamelessly grafted onto the

silent film as a commercial inducement. “Effects contradict unity,” Potamkin pronounced (23).

In the May 1929 article “Phases of Cinema Unity: I,” he found (and italicized) a statement of his

critical standards that reached back to Aristotelian unity and never wavered moving ahead: “The

entire film must be preconceived in anticipation of each detail! A curve or an angle, a close-up

or a face-out, must not be recognized as an isolated detail, but as an inevitable part of an

20
inevitable pattern. The whole disciplines the detail, the detail disciplines the whole” (14).

For Dana Polan, Potamkin’s film criticism anticipates structuralism in its focus on unity, and

in its conviction “that there were no such things as isolatable signifiers in a film, since

signification arose only from the final articulated result.” Polan, too, quotes the above passage

from “Phases of Cinema Unity: I” as he discusses the “criteria for aesthetic judgment” that
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bolstered Potamkin’s proto-structuralism: “Art, for [Potamkin], was not the literal

representation of reality,” Polan summarizes, “but a representation in which various artistic

21
elements were combined into significant totalities.” Although Potamkin admonished directors’

“literalness,” he was less rigid than Seldes on the issue of cinematic realism and thought reality

had a rightful place in film art (8). “Everything in life belongs to the cinema, if the cinema can

convert it into a functioning unity,” Potamkin confirmed (22). He even foreshadowed André

Bazin’s belief that cinema had ancient “origins” embedded in human cognition: “The cinema

was not born with the motion picture. It has its origins in the first experiences of mankind, and

its sources are all the manifestations of life” (284).

This ontological pluralism also compelled Potamkin to correct his position on cinema’s

specificity, especially with regard to intermedial “borrowings.” “If the sound film finds

something that can be borrowed and incorporated that is its prerogative,” he wrote (360). Thus

Potamkin clashed with Seldes et al. on the subject of cinema’s relationship to the stage.

“[C]inema is not so remote from the theater as dogmatists insist. The cinema has a source in the

theater, the theater has a source in the cinema. No category is isolated,” he avowed (25).

Modestly, Potamkin held that the contingencies of filmmakers’ artistic practices dictated

cinema’s contours and borders. In “Phases of Cinema Unity: III,” from June 1930, he argued:

“There is no single kind of motion, no one sort of dynamics, no only form of rhythm, no one and

only category of film. . . . I say here it is the creator of films who tells us how many kinds of films

there are, and not the critic” (33). The new film theory promised a more elastic set of aesthetic

preferences, but “Phases of Cinema Unity: III” also contradicted its own modesty when

Potamkin stressed that it was “time a criterion was established [by film critics], for without it the

artist wallows in a morass” (35).

What was his criterion, then? Broadly speaking, Potamkin’s demand for unity superseded

questions of ontology and specificity, but essentialist or prescriptive impulses always shadowed
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the pluralism he absorbed from Moussinac. According to Polan, Potamkin conquered this

lurking conflict: “While each film ideally developed its own appropriate structure and while

there therefore could be no a priori notion of the one right way to create cinematic art,

Potamkin’s structuralism did allow him criteria for aesthetic judgment.” As proof, Polan cites

Potamkin’s distaste for “modernist minimalism,” the “random assemblage” employed by

surrealists and Dadaists, and the use of odors in movie theaters, which could not be organized

into a unified whole because “smell did not form itself into precisely defined signs that could be
22
articulated in coherent fashion with other elements.”

The conversation about Potamkin’s suspicion of cinematic odors, a genre he called the

“smellie,” warrants further attention for a reason Polan neglects—Potamkin never saw a film

accompanied by smells released into a theater. The only sustained attempt he made to

adjudicate whether a smellie could be a true compound appears in the article “Phases of Cinema

Unity: II”; however, he based that analysis on a famed late-nineteenth-century French

production of Paul-Napoléon Roinard’s play The Song of Songs, which had an “accompaniment

of music and perfumes” (25). By combining reports about the play with his certainty that a

smellie would eventually be made, Potamkin decided odors could not “enter the structural unit

of the film” because they could not “be kept within an area coinciding with the image upon the

screen” (26). Consequently, he rendered the contingencies of filmmaking practice immaterial, at

least for the smellie. That is, Potamkin’s critique of the smellie was, pace Polan, an “a priori

notion of the one right way to create cinematic art.”

My aim here is not to quibble with Polan on what might seem like a minor point. The smellie

is hardly a major genre in film history, after all. As it stands, though, Potamkin’s speculative

critique of the smellie is germane to my larger argument for two reasons. To begin, he used it to

resolve a problem that was potentially embarrassing for his film criticism: how could he tell a

compound from a hybrid? As Potamkin began contemplating the smellie’s (theoretical)

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legitimacy, he asked himself a momentous rhetorical question: “Where does compounding

cease?” At first glance, his reply unfolds as an unsatisfying tautology—compounding ceased

“[w]here a unity is not creatable of the diversities” (25). But he clarified his reply by zeroing in

on “stylization” as the prime stumbling block for odors:

Stylization is possible only with defined and circumscribed forms. What cannot be stylized

has no form. Odors are diffusive, not contained within limited areas. They cannot be set in

counterpoint to the experiences of the sense of sight, as can be the experiences of the sense

of sound. From past experience we are assured that odors will be seized upon to intensify

visual sensations in the cinema, but this is again an enterprise of extraneous effects. The

problem is: can odors enter the structural unit of the film? They cannot. Sounds can. (26)

It matters little if one agrees with Potamkin that odors are “diffusive.” More pertinent is the fact

that he rejected the smellie on both ontological and medium-specific grounds. Odors were

naturally incapable of meeting the lone stylistic requirement Potamkin put down—they could

not be “set in counterpoint.”

This nod to the Soviets (verified as such when he correlated odors’ intrinsic shortcomings

with “the problem of ‘montage,’ as expressed by the Russian directors” [26]) is an example of the

wider impact montage had on Potamkin’s film theory and criticism. Apropos the desire for

“contrapuntal” sound in foreign film theory and filmmaking practice, “The Compound Cinema”

conjures a film “beginning in silence and a black screen [that] enters optically or visually into a

graphic moving image composition to which follows a counter composition of sound” (6).

Likewise, the June 1930 Close Up article “Phases of Cinema Unity: III” invokes Vsevolod

Pudovkin, from whom Potamkin had learned that montage was, for any given film, “the

construction of [its] unity.” “As such,” he wrote, montage “is no mere assembling of filmstrips,
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but is pre-conceived in the initial conception of the [film’s] theme” (33). That same month,

American Cinematographer published “Tendencies in the Cinema,” in which Potamkin

encapsulates cinema’s ontology and specificity in two sentences: “The cinema is, by nature of its

potential structure, a compound form. The Russians have established montage, the arrangement

of the images into a progressive structure, as the method of cinema unity” (43). None of this

indicates a film critic with “no a priori notion of the one right way to create cinematic art.”

Indeed, Potamkin told filmmakers they could achieve unity via montage so often that the two

words read like synonyms across his film criticism.

Potamkin’s critique of the smellie is also pertinent here because it shows how he dealt with

the dilemma of major technological change in both progressive and conservative ways. In light

of the coming of sound, Potamkin articulated a pliant critical pluralism that reconciled with the

present and could even accommodate future changes in film technology. “The futile defense of

the mute film evinces—or evinced, the defense being quite muted now—a failure to recognize the

inevitable nature of the cinema as a form of evolution,” he wrote (43). But Potamkin

simultaneously looked to the wisdom of antiquity, thereby grounding his film criticism in the

preference for Aristotelian unity. Moreover, while Potamkin’s endorsement of “counterpoint”

posited an alternative to classical Hollywood continuity and the “modulated” approach to

synchronized sound and speech, it also undermined the most liberal enunciations of his
23
pluralism by insisting on a solitary method for realizing the ideal of unity. Potamkin’s

rhetorical struggle resonates with the contemporary debate on the medium’s persistence during

an era of digital media convergence, wherein many film critics and cinephiles recognize that

cinema’s barriers are indelibly permeable but nevertheless maintain that something exclusively

cinematic survives.

Laid out in “Radio Entertainment and Talking Pictures” alongside his Marxism and his

understanding of medium specificity, Potamkin’s views on cinema’s status as a “mechanical” art

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form also demonstrate the contradictions and confusions that arise in moments of major

technological change. Despite denouncing sound in this article, Potamkin affirmed the early

upper-middlebrow defenders of the seventh art who had quarreled with highbrow critics and

genteel elites over the value of the mechanical. Ergo, his distaste for sound was not an innate

aversion to the mechanical: “We do not need to be told at this late day that the mechanical is not

necessarily the inartistic, or better, the nonartistic.” Cinema itself had “pigeonholed that fable of

the grossness of the mechanical in the crevice whither go all fallacies,” a discursive victory won

“after an hysterical warfare between the pseudo-aesthetes who were stricken by the monster,

Machine, and the equally pseudos, who inflated every contemporary manifestation as Art.”

Potamkin’s defiant attitude primarily sprung from disputes with cinema’s detractors, but he

also engaged its supporters within the field of American film critics. In August 1930, Bruce

Bliven had just become the film critic at The New Republic when Potamkin said his

“qualifications” for the job were “sentimentality, nostalgia for lost paradise and a naïve hate for

machines” (385). Two years later, Potamkin railed against film critics who clung to an outmoded

“machine-rancor” (228). But he must have had Seldes in mind when “Radio Entertainment and

Talking Pictures” called out the “pseudos” who “inflated every contemporary manifestation [of

the mechanical] as Art.” Of course, Seldes had been reluctant to do so in at least one case—the

coming of sound in Hollywood. Potamkin made no mention of Seldes’s reluctance to accept

synchronized sound and speech, but it undoubtedly informed Potamkin’s path to a distinct

position on the question of sound’s proper utility for cinema.

Writ large, Potamkin’s film criticism exposes his anxious need to separate himself within his

professional field. His writing has no straw men and routinely picks colleagues apart with
24
unrestrained relish, but Seldes is its bête noir. Potamkin accused Seldes of being childish and

immature, and of possessing an uncritical fondness for mass culture’s artistically

inconsequential detritus. For instance, he characterized Seldes’s love of cartoons as “precious

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25
kowtowing before the newspaper strip” (231). Potamkin is at his worst in this respect in the

essay “Motion Picture Criticism,” published by The New Freeman on March 4, 1931.

Joining his interests in the status of the mechanical, the field of film criticism, and America’s

class struggle, “Motion Picture Criticism” begins with a biting critique of the nation’s writing on

film up to 1910, which “consisted of prejudice and diatribe . . . discharged from the pens of

moralists and adherents of the theatre. . . . The movie was then a gurgling infant, and the

highbrow disdained it.” Willing to “forgive this limitation” as an artifact of its time, Potamkin

gave peers no quarter: “I have had the pleasure of being told by a populist weekly of sober

pretensions that I take the movie ‘too seriously. It is, after all, only a passing entertainment.’ It

has ‘potentialities, of course.’ Yet this journal has never examined these potentialities—one

needs, you know, to be serious for that” (47). His self-righteous sarcasm turned caustic as he

aimed his sights at Seldes and his purported circle, impeaching them for their collective bad

faith:

The chief characteristic of the American movie and of its criticism is its immaturity. In this it

reflects America. Immaturity is one of two things: a condition in the individual, or an

impasse in society. I believe it is the latter state which allows the immature individual—

whose immunity is by no means always a temporary thing—to exploit his own limitations as

those of the art.

The enthusiasm, more quasi than real, for the lowly or “lively arts” has been the effort of

young men who had been precocious and had missed the normal childhood intimacy with

the popular amusements. These young prigs, of a disintegrating class and of an unstable

group within that class, have sought to establish empathy between their antipathetic

environment and themselves. (49)

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Although Seldes bore the brunt of his lacerating meta-criticism, Potamkin obsessively

documented the entire field’s ideas and tastes, whether singular or representative. Currently

well-known writers are given equal consideration (and sometimes equal scorn) as those only

dimly remembered. Seldes, Bakshy, Vachel Lindsay, and Hugo Münsterberg get as much

microscopic dissection as Welford Beaton, B. F. Betts, Jean Lenauer, and the aforementioned

Bruce Bliven. In fact, Potamkin rarely signed an article without discussing another film critic

and typically proclaimed their ignorance on issues large and small (e.g., Beaton was a “novitiate”

Potamkin mocked for his “ignorance of aesthetics” [572-3]).

Such internecine squabbles may seem trivial on the surface, but underneath them lays an

important truth. Regardless of how accurate were their boasts, these squabbles are at the heart

of the ideas and tastes then attributed to Potamkin, or Seldes, or any other film critic. This

relational quality undergirded the singularity of Potamkin’s more sympathetic position on the

coming of sound, but it gave his film criticism a nervous intensity, too. More than any other

American film critic (save the early Pauline Kael or Jonathan Rosenbaum at any time),

Potamkin’s entire conception of cinema developed in contrast to his critical competition. No one

better represents than him the observation, made by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, that
26
cultural fields consist of their available “positions” and “position-takings.” Film criticism was a

pitiless battle and a zero-sum game for Potamkin, though he did implicitly admit a grudging

esteem for Seldes in 1933, listing him among a venerated group of “Possible Faculty,” a

component of his proposal for a “School of the Motion Picture” (591).

Given his attitudes toward cinema and the mechanical, Potamkin might be called a

modernist. Peter Decherney even says that Potamkin “must be considered a ‘radical
27
modernist.’ ” Judged by his political and social commitments, the label is appropriate, but

there remains something notably tentative about his film criticism’s modernism. On the one

hand, Potamkin made a sweeping claim for the medium’s significance as the solution to a
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longstanding quandary in the arts. In “Tendencies in the Cinema,” he wrote that artists had

“long been seeking to compound the simple,” and then announced that cinema had finally

delivered the technological and aesthetic tools necessary to achieve that goal. Imbued with the

polyvalent forces of modernity, cinema had an ontological advantage over older art forms—it

was “born in the age of the multiple,” Potamkin enthused. He certified this idea by invoking the

patron saint of literary high modernism, James Joyce: “What is the Joycean method if not a

desire for the compound?” “Years hence,” Potamkin predicted, “a Joyce will not think of

attempting his compounds with words. He will go to the cinema, which unifies the verbal and

the oral with the visual, and ultimately the spatial” (43). Potamkin thus resolved the conflict

between theory and practice through cinema’s ontology. The real Joyce’s compounds were the

result of a “method,” but the imagined Joyce would turn to cinema because it had been born a

compound form.

As film historian Ben Singer notes, “[M]ovies were the very emblem of modern life. . . .

Intertwined with modernity technologically, sociologically, and phenomenologically, cinema

seemed to epitomize and encapsulate modern experience more vividly than any other form of
28
cultural experience.” So standing with or against cinema also entailed weighing in on the value

of modernity itself, and Potamkin’s idea that cinema was “born in the age of the multiple”

directly addressed one of modernity’s most anxiety-inducing effects: multiplication. This aspect

of modernity horrified many turn-of-the-century American highbrows and genteel elites.

Modernity had produced a “multiplication of everything . . . multiplication with a vengeance,”

29
bellowed Henry James. By trumpeting cinema as an outcome of modern multiplication,

Potamkin distinguished himself from panicked cultural custodians like James. On the other

hand, his modernism was wedded to ideas and tastes that can be traced back to the Poetics. At

its core, then, Potamkin’s film criticism displays a continuous push and pull between

essentialism and pluralism, theory and practice, tradition and progress, past and present.
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Meanwhile, his rhetorical negotiation of these tensions generated some strange alliances

that further complicate any assessment of his modernism. For James, multiplication was

coupled with “fragmentation” as the most pressing cultural threats posed by modernity, and
30
Potamkin was no more tolerant of fragmentation than the famous novelist. Potamkin

complained about the earliest talkies for this very reason: “Totalities are not thought of in the

present ‘audible film.’ It is very fragmentary and possesses little structural plausibility” (90).

H. L. Mencken, arguably the best-known American enemy of cinema, silent or sound, also

abhorred fragmentation. In 1927, Mencken unfavorably compared the current cinema—thought

of by many as the medium’s artistic peak—to the first films ever made: “The first moving-

pictures, as I remember them thirty years ago, presented more or less continuous scenes. They

were played like ordinary plays, and so one could follow them lazily and at ease. But the modern
31
movie is no such organic whole; it is simply a maddening chaos of discrete fragments.”

Generically, Potamkin agreed that cinema was comprised of “discrete fragments,” but he

nominated unity as the way to tame and redeem the fragmentation that made these critics

bristle. As he said repeatedly, the artist must “re-associate the dissociations”; she must give

order and meaning to the fragments; she must give them unity.

Modernist? Radical modernist? High modernist? At the risk of exasperating the reader, I

want to introduce two more terms that better illuminate the ambivalence in Potamkin’s film

criticism. First, film historian Miriam Hansen has argued that “the postmodernist challenge”

was productive because it “open[ed] up a space for understanding modernism as a much wider,
32
more diverse phenomenon, eluding any single-logic genealogy.” She recommends treating

classical Hollywood cinema, for example, as a type of “vernacular modernism,” a neologism that

retains the word modernism while eliminating from the word classical the implication that

Hollywood’s signature film style is timeless or transcendent. Classical continuity is neither high

modernist nor avant-garde, though, as modernism also frequently implies. Modernity and
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modernism are thus historically and conceptually variegated—multiple, Potamkin would say.

Because it championed cinema as a product of modernity but often stopped short of embracing

high modernism or the avant-garde, upper-middlebrow film criticism itself might be considered

a type of vernacular modernism.

Or it could be an example of what Ben Singer calls “ambimodernity,” a term that accentuates

the “prominent counter-forces of antimodern sentiment that resulted from, and were

intertwined with, the dominant thrust forward” of modernity. As Singer writes (and as

Potamkin’s career amply attests), “ambimodern” film criticism “can be seen to pull in opposite
33
directions at the same time, often within the same works.” The inextricably connected concepts

in Potamkin’s film criticism—compound cinema, Aristotelian unity, and counterpoint—can be

understood as an ambimodern adaptation to technological change. This adaptation allowed

Potamkin to preserve vital components from the styles of thought and structures of feeling that

marked his prior understanding of and affection for the medium, while also allowing him room

to seek innovative theoretical territory that celebrated cinema’s invention amidst the

constitutive and unstoppable multiplication of modernity.

In the end, though, Potamkin’s compound cinema was only a metaphor of convergence.

Hypothetically, he could have written about the real convergence that took place across the film

and newspaper industries during the silent-era craze for serialized narratives, as Singer does in

the 2001 book Melodrama and Modernity. Through this relationship, intellectual properties

like The Perils of Pauline appeared as movies in neighborhood theaters and as stories in

national newspapers. While not called as much at the time, convergence is an accurate name for

this relationship. Even as a metaphor, however, Potamkin’s compound cinema is an important

precursor for serious film culture’s responses to subsequent cases of convergence, such as the

partnership between Hollywood and America’s television networks.

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A Naturally Expectable Thing

According to many upper-middlebrow film critics, the coming of sound disrupted the silent

film’s nearly complete path to aesthetic maturity. But it can be said with more certainty today

that sound’s arrival at least marked the beginning of a paradoxical act in the tale of cinema’s

cultural repute. After the arrival of synchronized sound and speech, cinema achieved substantial

forays into key institutions of artistic legitimacy, including the founding of MoMA’s Film Library

in the mid-1930s, an initiative spearheaded by Iris Barry and harkening back to Vachel
34
Lindsay. On the other hand, enthusiasm for the medium waned among its most vocal

defenders in the wake of the talkies’ ascendance, and cinema again came under attack from

critics around the globe and across the cultural spectrum. In Europe, intellectual heavyweights

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno launched a scathing indictment of Hollywood movies
35
as agents of capitalist mass manipulation akin to fascist propaganda. In the United States,

earnest middlebrow reformers fomented anxiety about the harm Hollywood movies had done to
36
America’s youth. Notwithstanding the more reverent James Agee, even the postwar era’s most

influential film critics, Manny Farber and Parker Tyler, were ambivalent about the medium’s
37
status as an art form and valorized their own critical creativity as the true locus of film art.

If Agee, Farber, and Tyler are this paradoxical era’s most influential American film critics, a

contemporary of theirs was decidedly more famous at the time: Bosley Crowther. Although

Crowther was the nation’s most prominent film critic at the peak of his long tenure with the

New York Times, he may nevertheless seem an odd figure to include in this study. His impact on

serious film culture has been negligible at best since the 1960s, when leading members of the

Film Generation used his stature as a springboard to establish their own voices within the field.

Pauline Kael, in particular, helped cement a lasting reputation for Crowther as an out-of-touch

fuddy-duddy, the hapless Mr. Magoo of movie commentary. For Kael, Crowther could “always
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38
be counted on to miss the point.” His “reverse acumen” was “invaluable” in the effort to grasp
39
any film’s real meaning, she cracked.

Crowther is not especially well known for his writing on film technology, either. He believed

in the medium’s profound power to persuade and made his name as an advocate for anti-
40
illusionistic realism. As film scholar Frank E. Beaver notes (in a rare complimentary analysis),

Crowther was a “social critic of the motion picture rather than a literary stylist or aesthetician”
41
and was deeply invested in “the roles and responsibilities of film in a free, democratic society.”

He championed such American films as Our Daily Bread, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Lost

Weekend, as well as the Italian neorealist classics Rome, Open City and Bicycle Thieves, which

he said rejected escapism and sought to deal more openly and honestly with the pleasures and

perils of contemporary everyday life.

An outspoken enemy of the Production Code, Crowther decried the principles of statutory

censorship and self-regulation that unduly prevented the content of Hollywood’s products from

becoming more adult and mature. He probably wished to be remembered for his instrumental

part in winning First Amendment rights for the medium, a career-spanning endeavor

highlighted by his impassioned defense of The Miracle (directed by Roberto Rossellini), which
42
the notorious Catholic Legion of Decency had condemned as “blasphemous.” But for Andrew

Sarris, the other Film Generation giant alongside Kael, Crowther was an avatar of the

sociological orientation that auteurism and mise en scène criticism were supposed to correct.

“Crowther’s most influential period in film criticism was the Forties when his social approach to

films coincided with the world-saving concerns of his readers,” Sarris wrote, as if the goal of

helping to save the world through film criticism were a less honorable pursuit than being more
43
attentive to the surface of the screen.

Despite his poor reputation and the primary interests of his film criticism, Crowther is worth

investigating here for three interconnected reasons. One, his renown as a film critic can shed
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light on the styles of thought and structures of feeling that characterized serious film culture in

the fallow interim between the coming of sound and the Film Generation’s rise. Two, his ideas

and tastes became a handy and reliable counterpoint to the positions and preferences espoused

by the Film Generation, as seen above and as I discuss at greater length in the final section of

this chapter. Lastly, his career overlapped with the emergence of broadcast television, an

industrial, technological, and cultural transformation that brought a young medium into

millions of American homes; threatened the survival of brick-and-mortar movie theaters; and

realized Edison’s vision of a domestic moving-image device for the masses.

My purpose in exploring his film criticism, then, is not to rehabilitate its reputation and

return Crowther to his rightful place in the pantheon of American film critics. Nor is it to

confirm the harshest critiques leveled by the likes of Kael and Sarris, which had little or nothing

to do with his writing on technological change anyway. Rather, I want to use Crowther’s film

criticism to enrich the current understanding of the dialectic of specificity and convergence

before the digital age. As a partisan witness to Hollywood’s competition and collaboration with a

new moving-image medium, Crowther grappled with the implications of film and television’s

unfolding relationship as communication media and as media industries. The terms in which he

made sense of film and television’s postwar convergence thus add an instructive chapter to the

history of American film criticism told by this dissertation.

Crowther began to discuss film and television’s relationship in the late 1940s, as the latter

transitioned in the United States from a dormant innovation into a burgeoning phenomenon.

His first remarks on the subject appeared on December 4, 1949, in the article “Video to Screen,”

a pan of the Milton Berle-vehicle Always Leave Them Laughing. Framed as a comment on film

and television’s brewing rivalry, the review interpreted the new release as a bad omen, “the first

really punishing blow that upsurging television has handed to the screen.” Worse, it signaled

both “the horrible possibility of some producers becoming so rash that they may borrow for the
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screen from television, rather than the other way around, just as they foolishly borrowed a great

deal from radio,” and “the terrifying hazard of some of the less sapient boys in Hollywood

forsaking the screen’s accomplished standards for the standards of video.” Crowther thus

echoed the medium-specific concerns of his silent-era predecessors in his a priori objection to

the mere prospect that cinema would borrow from TV the way that Always Leave Them

Laughing had when it cast Berle and exploited his televisual comic persona.

This review also indicated Crowther’s belief in the biological analogy of film’s progress as an

art form. “This sort of thing, extended to any sizable degree, could set back the fitful maturing of

the screen at least a dozen years,” he cautioned. “Imagine what we’d be in for,” Crowther

shuddered, “if the studios suddenly went whole hog for, say, The Goldbergs and Howdy Doody .

. . The next thing would be the ‘discovery’ of Hopalong Cassidy . . . by some Hollywood eager-

beaver in search of the stars of video.” The review then ended with one last dig at television,

mocking the social context in which it was commonly consumed: “Maybe a bit of reflection—and

the sobering example of this film—will convince Hollywood that television (and Mr. Berle)
44
should be left to homes and bars.”

Alongside Hollywood’s use of television personalities, movies started to depict the lives of

people who worked in television production, providing Crowther more opportunities to weigh

video’s impact on cinema. In My Blue Heaven, for example, Betty Grable played one half of a

married couple employed by a TV network while trying to have a child. Crowther dismissed the

film with a dash of glib sexism, but his column also repeated his prior views on video’s

potentially disastrous effect on the screen: “If contact with television is likely to have the effect

upon Hollywood picture-making that is now evident . . . let us pray that our movie producers

will shun their video sets as instruments of ruin.” He surmised as well that the film was “angled

at that audience which presumably gurgles and glees at the most elementary banalities that

occur on the video screen.” “[B]eyond that,” Crowther concluded, “we fear that My Blue Heaven,
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for all its actors and Technicolored class, is a way-below-average musical picture and a
45
dangerous surrender to video.” In other words, what bothered him most about the prospect of

the screen borrowing from video was that he considered the content of television’s programming

constitutionally inferior to the content of the individual films that comprised the cinema. As

Crowther navigated film and television’s convergence, such questions of content undergirded his

film criticism and repeatedly overshadowed more theoretical questions about ontology and

medium specificity.

In addition to judging both television’s content and its audiences inferior, Crowther

projected the two media industries to exchange personnel through a hierarchy that resembled

professional baseball’s labor structure—film would be the major leagues, television the minors.

In the June 11, 1950, column “Facing the Future,” Crowther speculated that struggling,

stubborn, and untalented filmmakers would either “expire” or take refuge from cinema’s higher
46
“standards” by retreating to television. His prediction reflected a widespread bias against the
47
“film programming” Hollywood began making for TV in the mid-1940s. An ambiguous phrase,

film programming could refer to original television programs, called “telefilms,” that had been

shot on celluloid or videotape by Hollywood studios, or it could refer to films first released in
48
movie theaters and then sold or leased for broadcast on TV. These moving-image properties

represented the two main ways that Hollywood (and its independent or foreign counterparts)

collaborated with television networks. (Hollywood also concomitantly tried to compete with
49
television through network ownership, theater television, and various pay-per-view services.)

At this juncture, however, Crowther was thinking only about telefilms, which had been

dismissed by veterans of each industry as pale imitators of the quality they associated with

feature-length theatrical releases and “live” television dramas. A 1953 article about telefilms in

the advertising trade journal Sponsor indicated that Crowther had been right about the way

talent would move between industries: “These top [advertising] agencies somehow got the idea
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that they had bought what constituted Hollywood. . . . They found out that what they had bought

in the main were a lot of out of work producers, directors, and writers—not the real genius that
50
had made Hollywood a world byword in entertainment.” Nonetheless, network executives

valued the telefilms because they were so cheaply produced. “Not inexpensive,” stressed
51
Frederick Ziv, producer of the telefilm The Cisco Kid, “but cheap.” To the further detriment of

their reputation, the telefilms’ relative cost was correlated with the disreputable genres (e.g.,
52
science-fiction, Westerns, situation comedies) in which their stories were typically told.

Some of the telefilms, such as I Love Lucy, were hit shows that have since entered the ranks

of television’s canonical programs, but Jack Gould, the era’s most prominent TV critic and a

colleague of Crowther at the New York Times, spoke for many peers when he bemoaned the

telefilm trend. For Gould, the telefilms not only failed to meet the standards of quality set by

Hollywood’s theatrical releases; they also more damagingly disregarded television’s medium-

specific essence. In the seminal 1952 article “A Plea for Live Video,” Gould said telefilms were

“the colossal boner of the year. On every count—technically and qualitatively—the films cannot

compare with ‘live’ shows and they are only hurting video, not helping it. . . . The supporters of

Hollywood films for TV are raising a false cry . . . if they think the uncertainties in a ‘live’ show

are to be avoided: they are what make true television,” he avowed. “No human being,” Gould

explained,

is letter perfect and no viewer expects everyone on television to be. The unforeseen

occurrence or the occasional mishap on stage are the best possible testaments of television’s

power to transmit actuality. Take away the actuality of television and there is lost the heart

of TV. To regard television merely as a variation on the neighborhood motion picture house
53
is to misunderstand the medium.
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In this way, Gould and likeminded proponents of the first so-called Golden Age of live TV

demonstrate that the initial technological impact of film and television’s convergence negatively
54
affected serious television culture more than it did serious film culture.

Indeed, Crowther often spoke optimistically, if somewhat ironically, about television’s

impact on Hollywood filmmaking and American film culture in the early 1950s (i.e., before the

major studios began selling the right to broadcast their past theatrical releases). Specifically, he

applauded Hollywood for rising to the challenges it faced in competing with a moving-image

medium that could be watched for free (or for a cost so low it felt free). In “Best Feats Forward,”

published on March 19, 1950, Crowther concurred with those in Hollywood who demanded
55
improved pictures as the ideal reply to television. When a new wave of economic insecurity hit

Hollywood several years later, he beat future revisionist historians to the punch by refusing to

blame television alone for the crisis. Crowther conceded that TV had been “the outstanding

reason for the distress of the old motion-picture industry,” but maintained that “other factors”

had “caused the strain” as well. Conversely, television had not “discourage[d] movie-going to the

extent that the manufacture of pictures was entirely unprofitable”; it had “simply brought about

radical changes in the public’s susceptibility to films exhibited in theatres.” Television shrunk

the theatrical market for “program” (i.e., “B”) movies, but “the response to exceptional pictures

became better, by and large, than it had ever been,” he enthused. “Pictures the public decided it

wanted to see, for one reason or another, were—and are—warmly patronized. Those with no
56
magic magnetism are stayed away from in droves.” In sum, Crowther often put a positive spin

on the demise of Hollywood’s oligopolistic control of the American film industry, a control that

had almost guaranteed profit no matter the quality of the product. Compelled by governmental

constraint and competition from television, Hollywood now had to sell its films using fresh

methods, differentiating them from each other, and from what television offered. Crowther

thought this set of external pressures had happily inspired the production of more Hollywood
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movies that eschewed illusion, escapism, myth, and phony heroism in favor of everyday realism
57
and social responsibility.

He also did an about-face on television’s own medium-specific qualities and aesthetic

potential in the summer of 1951. That year, Crowther reported on an announced merger between

United Paramount Theaters (Paramount) and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), an

arrangement film historian Kerry Segrave calls “the first formal link between [television]
58
broadcasting and the motion picture industry.” “Already this writer has been questioned from

several uneasy sides as to whether this tentative maneuver doesn’t forecast the movie theatre’s

doom and Hollywood’s sure capitulation to the sole production of films for video,” Crowther

recounted. But he did not number himself among “the worriers” who “wonder whether this isn’t

the beginning of the end of motion-picture exhibition as we’ve known it and the start of

unpredictable change.” Instead, Crowther cheered the merger as “an undisguised exploration of

a possible new realm of showmanship in which movies and television may be novelly [sic] and

happily combined,” and justified it on the grounds that film and television were ontologically

identical:

After all, both are screen entertainment, in a literal application of that phrase, in that both

are presented to the viewer through moving images projected on a screen. Whether that

screen is in a theater, a bar or a private home is a matter of mere location, so far as the

relation between image and eye is concerned. So it goes without too much saying that some

new way to achieve a commercial blend of these two techniques of screen entertainment is a
59
naturally expectable thing.

Setting aside the technically inaccurate description of television as being “projected on a screen,”

his reaction to the merger contradicted the curt dismissal he had submitted less than two years
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earlier, when he disparaged television’s exhibition in “homes and bars” as a marker of the

medium’s inherently poor quality. Whereas Harry Alan Potamkin had reconciled with the

coming of sound by fashioning a new film theory that embraced cinema’s porous boundaries,

Crowther collapsed the ontological barriers that stood between film and television as the two

forms converged. In doing so, he explicitly naturalized the relationship between the two media

and their respective industries.

While such a claim may have the ring of common sense to many observers today, the nature

of film and television’s relationship was rhetorically contested throughout television’s

experimental phase and into the early years of its postwar emergence. In these debates,

television could be cordoned off from other forms for the sake of its own medium-specific

essence—as Gould did—or it could be posited as an “adjunct to the radio,” not the cinema.

Robert E. Sherwood made the latter link in the 1929 essay “Beyond the Talkies—Television,” in
60
which he connected the coming of sound to the imminent prospect of television. “It is

significant that the movies should have learned to talk at this particular time, just when the

radio is threatening to cast off its cloak of invisibility,” Sherwood wrote (5). Indebted to radio for

contributing to the talkies’ invention, Hollywood would rapidly be “reduced to the position of a

‘subsidiary,’ ” churning out feature-length films for television. Live television broadcasts, he

conjectured, would continue to “issue the weather reports, stock market quotations, correct time

and baseball scores,” but most of television’s programming would be “recorded on celluloid” (6).

Sherwood was remarkably prescient in general, but another outcome of television’s creation

not imagined by him, yet pertinent for Crowther, also came to pass: theater television. Assuming

the Federal Communications Commission upheld the Paramount-ABC merger, Crowther saw

theater television as the most likely result of the corporate (and artistic) collaboration between

the two industries. Although film and television scholars rightly regard theater TV as a

manifestation of Hollywood’s competition with television networks, Crowther thought the move
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made sense for both industries because it would allow Hollywood to address the competition

from TV while also preventing Hollywood from usurping television’s chief advantage—

simultaneity. Again, though, he assured the “worriers” that movie theaters were not

disappearing anytime soon: “[U]ntil someone hits a sure-fire formula for making the home

television audience pay through something other than its purchases of advertised goods, the fate
61
of theatres appears not too dire.”

After the proposed merger, then, Crowther frequently took a more favorable view of

television, even going so far as to scoff at the quality and pretentions of Hollywood’s theatrical

output compared to what TV gave audiences free of charge. For example, his 1952 review of

Dreamboat defended television against the film’s satire of the upstart medium: “Hollywood’s
62
low opinion of TV is once more revealed with blithely superior derision and a lordly splurge.”

Crowther routinely chided Hollywood’s “low opinion of TV,” which became a pervasive theme in

the movies. Of one such film, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (directed by Frank Tashlin), he

said: “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones at their television sets, no matter

how scornful and superior they may feel toward video. The rocks may miss the vexing targets

and crash through their own fragile walls.” The film was “supposed to show the public how

much better movie entertainment is than that to be had on television. Look out for flying glass!”
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Crowther quipped.

But his praise for the 1955 film Marty stands as the prime example of his more open-minded

attitude toward television. Originally produced—and celebrated—as a live television program,

Marty was adapted by Hollywood and adulated by Crowther: “No matter what the movie people

may say or think about television, they have it to thank for Marty. . . . The transfer is worth a

tribute, for Marty makes a warm and winning film, full of the sort of candid comment on plain,
64
drab people that seldom reaches the screen.” Enamored with the film, Crowther devoted a

second column to it a week later, yet more than any theoretical discourse on film and television’s
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relationship, he again wanted to discuss how “downbeat” movies like Marty were a better

answer to Hollywood’s financial uncertainty than CinemaScope, 3D, and Biblical epics (i.e., the

types of narrative and technological spectacle the industry had already used): “With so many

films coming nowadays in the giant sizes and extended shapes, detailing substance that is too

often impersonal and spectacular, it sustains one’s faith in the simplicity and expressiveness of
65
the cinema form to have an occasional Marty. What an irony that it should come from TV!”

Marty exemplified his desire for movies that “displayed . . . an awareness of genuine people in

genuine situations—stories about human beings whose lives had scope that went beyond that of
66
Hollywood’s mythical characters.” Like many film critics committed to realism, Crowther

grounded his tastes in the ontological conviction that cinema could “reveal the realities of life to

mankind through the camera lens’s unique ability for showing things as they are,” but the

possible ramifications of the transmedial adaptation that brought Marty to the screen were
67
simply not a vital concern.

The above themes came to the fore in 1956 when a unique event happened in film and

television’s mutual history. On Sunday, March 11, the film Richard III (starring, produced, and

directed by Laurence Olivier) made its American debut in movie theaters and on television,

broadcast once by NBC in a three-hour block. The broadcast was an experimental novelty, as

were the New York Times co-reviews written simultaneously by Crowther and Jack Gould. In

fact, the cross-platform premiere of Richard III was so newsworthy that each critic wrote about

it twice. The first pieces ran on March 12; the second ran a week later. Crowther and Gould’s

public dialogue on the event spotlights their generation’s prevailing ideas about film and

television’s relationship and provides a privileged chance to speculate on how film and television

critics divided their respective terrains during this germinal phase of collaboration between the

two industries.
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Regrettably, the articles by Crowther are most notable in hindsight for saying so little about

the transmedial ramifications of the film’s American premiere. In the first article, he mentioned

that such a thing had never been done before; that only a few viewers could see the film in its

original color; that the film had been “slightly abbreviated,” losing “two or three minutes” of its

proper running time; and that all the financial interests were heavily invested in the gambit. Yet

he elected not to critique any of these features and spent the bulk of the article evaluating “the

quality of the portrayal of the title character,” which he called “the first consideration in a
68
production of Richard III.” His second article followed the same course and began with a list of

provocative theoretical and practical questions the cross-platform release strategy had raised:

Did the almost complete previewing . . . on small home screens begin to do justice to the

scope and color of the original? Did the inevitable informality of domestic surroundings

affect the attentiveness and the interest of the average home viewer for this essentially

theatrical film? And, either way, did the free showing, just a few hours before the American

premiere of the full-size film at the Bijou Theatre, affect future patronage? Has the public

been moved to want to see it—or has it been moved to stay away?

Rather than answer even one of these questions, though, Crowther demurred: “This corner will

not advance a judgment of the way the picture looked on TV. That is a service you will find

rendered . . . by Jack Gould. . . . Our present concern is how absorbing and rewarding the picture

is on the theatre screen. If it has its effect in that area that should cancel out the other
69
concerns.” In these more conventional terms, he judged the film a huge success, eventually

naming it the best of 1956. More importantly, both articles either deferred to Gould on the litany

of transmedial questions outlined by his own pieces or swept aside their potential scope,

significance, and consequence for filmmaking and film culture.

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Accordingly, Gould engaged with these questions more than Crowther but ultimately

subordinated them to the cultural implications of the enormous audience that had tuned in for

the broadcast. “Did the home viewer actually see Richard III as Sir Laurence intended?” Gould

asked. Based on the differences between a black-and-white TV and the “infant medium” of color

television, the answer was “no”: the “contrast . . . was so marked as to make a viewer wonder if

the difference between the large-sized theatre version and the TV version was possibly just as

great.” “On that score,” however, Gould deferred to Crowther, who had deferred to Gould,
70
meaning that neither answered the question. That said, Gould did imply that film and

television’s differences were not too damaging for the film, the viewer, or the potential cultural

impact of the broadcast. “No limitation of the home medium could or did obscure the many

rewards of Richard III; the film made for an absorbing afternoon. But this is not to say that, on

TV, the presentation was entirely satisfying,” he clarified. Its faults belonged equally to the film,

and to the home medium’s “limitation[s]”: “Richard III requires attentive viewing, and in a

number of spots the film is decidedly slow going. And three hours of concentrated looking at a

twenty-one-inch screen is a long time. The normal household distractions, such as a ringing

telephone or a wriggling child, are also less conducive to complete absorption than the

disciplined silence that prevails in a movie house.” Gould overstates the historical docility of

movie-theater patrons, who have been constantly censured for their behavior by middlebrow

reformers and elite cinephiles alike, but he also reveals the extent to which this understanding of

film and television spectatorship had become entrenched in postwar discourse. The heart of his

analysis has also been the bedrock of a longstanding assumption among popular and scholarly

media critics, who separate the immersive “gaze” of the moviegoer from the multitasking
71
“glance” of the distracted television-watcher.

Like Crowther, Gould leaned most on traditional critical discourses in his commentary on

Richard III. The murky medium-specific complications of the event were no match for the film’s
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probable cultural impact: “Intriguing as the distinctions between media may be, . . . the real

importance of the telecast . . . [is that] more people saw Richard III yesterday afternoon than

had witnessed all the stage productions since Shakespeare’s time.” “[T]his morning,” he

deduced, “Shakespeare undoubtedly is a national topic of conversation such as he never was

72
before. Could anything be more exciting?” In his second piece, the only further comment he

made on the transmedial implications of the broadcast was the punning justification he gave for

the commercial interruptions: “In three hours of television, the break every hour or so was not
73
unwelcome; it sure was a stretch of king-sized sitting.”

This exchange illuminates three larger conclusions I want to draw about the dialectic of

specificity and convergence in postwar American film criticism. One, the uncharted territory

explored by the transmedial release of Richard III was secondary for Crowther and Gould to

more conventional middlebrow concerns related to interpretation and evaluation. In Gould’s

case, this is compelling evidence of the priority such critics placed on certain definitions of

quality and the corresponding responsibilities that film and television had to serve the public

interest. For instance, in the article “ ‘Live’ TV Vs. ‘Canned,’ ” published just a month before the

broadcast of Richard III, Gould repeated his defense of live TV against the ubiquitous use of

videotape. He reiterated that television’s “fundamental nature” was unique because it

“remove[d] from an audience’s consciousness the factors of time and distance,” but telefilms, he

lamented, had drained the medium of its “humanness,” substituting the signature frisson of

television’s simultaneity with an “ersatz” perfection that eliminated any felicitous contingencies.

Betraying liveness was therefore “symptomatic of the fundamental lesson which viewers know

and the video industry still must learn: try to crossbreed media and likely as not the artistic
74
offspring only will be mongrel television.” In the case of Richard III, though, Gould’s analysis

suggested that cultural benefits had easily outstripped the ontological complications and

medium-specific appropriateness of using celluloid or videotape for television.

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Two, the professional courtesy Crowther and Gould showed one another entailed a de facto

media theory that also had practical significance for the rhetoric of film criticism going forward.

Whether by default or design, the debate about Richard III aligned the broadcasting of feature-

length films so closely with television that the era’s leading American film critic saw little need

to investigate the phenomenon. I believe such deference to TV critics then carried over into the

period that began shortly thereafter, when past theatrical releases began appearing throughout

the daily broadcast schedules of almost every available television channel. Consequently, film

criticism focused on movies as shown and seen in theaters, implicitly rendering television

broadcasts of “old” movies alien or inferior to the primacy and legitimacy of theatrical

experiences.

Finally, such deference also coincided with the disdain among film critics for television’s

original programming and the medium writ large, a disdain that only reinforced their relative

silence on television and its significance for filmmaking and film culture. From the particular

case of Richard III to the wider practice of showing past theatrical releases on TV, Crowther, his

contemporaries, and Film Generation critics said far less about film and television’s relationship

than might be assumed when looking back at their writing during an era marked by unavoidable

media convergence. As I discuss at greater length in the next section, it would be fair to say that

television was not just adjacent to their concerns but beneath their consideration, resulting in a

discursive absence where there might be a more robust debate about the practical and

theoretical consequences of film and television’s convergence.

Thus far, I have discussed what Crowther said about film and television’s relationship up to

the mid-1950s, concentrating on key examples of competition and collaboration between the

two media and their respective American industries. I have argued that Crowther gravitated

from condemning television to offering a more nuanced critique that even posited film and

television’s convergence as “a naturally expectable thing.” My attention now turns to his writing
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on the industrial practice and cultural phenomenon of broadcasting past theatrical releases, a

strategy that joined telefilm production as the two primary ways Hollywood collaborated with

TV. As I demonstrate below, Crowther’s analysis of television’s impact on filmmaking and film

culture shifted again during this latter stage of his career. Concerned not only with how

television treated old movies but also with the possibility that television had created an

aesthetically and intellectually stultifying monoculture, Crowther became increasingly

ambivalent about the artistic and cultural territory allegedly annexed by television. In both

respects, his commentary reflects the attitudes toward cinema that characterized the Film

Generation’s rise, and anticipates serious film culture’s subsequent responses to the dominance

of home video and other digital technologies.

Although Hollywood movies had been shown on television since the earliest experimental

broadcasts, television’s remediation of cinema was still very limited into the late 1940s and early
75
1950s. Television viewers—usually watching in the wee hours of the night—could occasionally

see American B movies or a handful of Alexander Korda-produced titles from England. But the

major studios guarded their pictures, declining to rent or sell them for broadcast. This tactic
76
perpetuated the impression that Hollywood “had closed ranks against television.” At least two

things had kept the major studios from making their libraries available. One, they wanted to

avoid angering or unintentionally bankrupting theatrical exhibitors, many of whom saw

television as a threat to their livelihoods. Two, they believed theatrical revivals could make more

money than the networks would pay for the right to broadcast old movies. Moreover, television

broadcasts could reduce the profits any revival might return, if not preclude theatrical revivals

altogether. Yet it was also unclear if anyone even wanted to watch (or re-watch) old movies on

TV. As television historian Derek Kompare notes, “The idea that viewers might actually enjoy
77
seeing older films did not seem to occur to television developers at the time.”
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The entire debate became moot when a desperate Howard Hughes sold the faltering RKO to

General Tire & Rubber Company in 1954. General Tire planned to use the studio’s catalog of

titles for broadcast on its unaffiliated New York television station, WOR. But it also rented the

RKO library, totaling more than 700 features and 1000 shorts, to television stations in other

markets, and the success of this strategy forced the formerly reluctant major studios to follow

suit. By 1958, all of the majors had either rented or sold their films made before 1948, a cutoff

dictated by union contracts that legislated the terms of residual payments for Hollywood

personnel. Suddenly, thousands of pre-1948 Hollywood movies appeared on television, airing

throughout the day. Some shown over and over again, inaugurating the era of “televisual
78
repetition.” For film historian Douglas Gomery, this shift marked “the most significant change
79
in the way Americans viewed films during the latter half of the twentieth century.”

So it may come as a surprise in retrospect that Crowther initially understood this

development through the same lens—how would the change affect the quality of Hollywood’s

future film production?—that had guided his previous commentary on film and television’s

convergence. As he had with the Paramount-ABC merger, Crowther wrote optimistically about

the announcement of RKO selling off its past theatrical releases, saying the move “may lead in a

short time . . . to certain positive effects in the realm of taste. And this, in turn, may considerably

condition the future characteristics of theatrical films—all of which will conduce to clarification
80
of the entertainment boundaries of the two forms.” But maybe the most striking thing about

this immediate response is that Crowther expressed neither excitement nor curiosity over the

chance to see old films on TV, films he may have cherished yet been unable to see for years,

perhaps even decades. Regardless of one’s opinion about the value of his criticism, such a

reaction is hard to fathom today but was, I argue, indicative of its time.

The following year, Crowther made a more evocative remark on the emerging phenomenon

of watching old movies on TV. Using the recent death of Humphrey Bogart to reflect on some of
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Hollywood’s current big-name stars and their precarious hold on the American psyche,

Crowther wrote: “To be sure, all the temporal old timers are being exposed these days by having

their famous old pictures exhibited on video. This practice may be an embarrassment to any of

them who are in vain, and it also may cause some confusion to the juvenile customers. There is

something bewildering about seeing a stalwart fellow tonight on TV and seeing that same man

looking twenty years older tomorrow on the theatre screen. This disturbs the emotional
81
apparatus of the viewer who wants to admire.” Evidently, watching old movies on TV could

unsettle a fundamental component of the Hollywood imaginary. If the Dream Factory had

specialized in creating regressive fantasies of immortality through the artificially enhanced

youthfulness and vitality of its stars, seeing those stars when they really were young and vital

produced an uncharacteristic and unwelcome awareness of death—for the stars, and for their

admirers. As I discuss in the next chapter, the link between mortality and watching old movies

on TV was a major theme in Pauline Kael’s thoughts and feelings on film and television’s

convergence, but Crowther let the subject stand as a tantalizing possibility for further inquiry.

Over the next decade, Crowther continued to hope that competition from television’s crass

but free programs would spur Hollywood onto greater heights of aesthetic realism and social

responsibility, but he also adopted a more ambivalent attitude toward the consequences of film

and television’s convergence. His principal concern shifted from the films Hollywood had yet to

make to the way that television treated (or mistreated) the films that had already been made. In

concert with the Film Generation, Crowther wrote that television had been a callous steward of

film’s history as an art form. For instance, in a series of articles on the rise of theatrical revivals

in the early 1960s, he attempted to measure the pros and cons of old movies being shown on TV,

by then a well-established practice. The successful theatrical revivals on which he reported had

defied Hollywood’s expectation that broadcasting old movies on TV would eliminate the desire

to see the same movies in theaters, but Crowther hesitated to give television credit for enriching
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film culture: “It hurts a bit to have to say so, but we film buffs can thank television for a lot of the

recent impulse toward revivals of old movies in theatres. . . . So we can, oddly enough, be

thankful to television for reuniting some of us with long-lost friends and for helping to make
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available to younger people a generous sampling of the treasures of the screen.”

A decade earlier, his hesitation could have been attributed to the fear that TV was in fact

film’s mortal enemy, intent on destroying its moving-image adversary. When Crowther returned

to the same topic in the article “Boom in Revivals,” though, he added that audiences were willing

to pay for theatrical screenings because they wanted to redress the way that television had

mangled the films it showed: “The explanation [for the boom] is simple . . . : people who see and

like these pictures in their cut-down versions, with commercial interruptions, want to see them

uninterrupted and without annoying cuts. This is a meaningful tribute to their artistry and

attractiveness. . . . Here’s a clear and most encouraging indication of a forward interest in the
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culture of films.” Thus whatever credit television deserved was again ironic in nature—by

disrespecting films, television had fostered an appetite for seeing them as they were meant to be

seen. Not without cause, complaints about commercials and cuts became the dominant form of

commentary on the practice of showing old movies on TV. For Crowther and the younger

members of the Film Generation, films deserved careful curating, and their protests helped

make it possible for something other than the calculus of profit margins to dictate how films

would be seen in homes.

If scholarly neutrality and unabashed pleasure were implicitly verboten, it was possible to go

the opposite way and voice concerns even larger than commercials and cuts. In the final

comment on the subject of watching old movies on TV that Crowther contributed to the New

York Times, published on April 16, 1967, he reviewed the Academy Awards broadcast for that

year and took umbrage with host Bob Hope, who had prefaced the reel of clips from the Best

Picture nominees with the following punch line: “We are going to run the clips from the
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nominated pictures, cut up and separated by commercials; so you can see how they’ll look when

they reach television.” Oddly, Crowther considered the joke too “cynical” but agreed that the

“technical staffs and production people” in film and television “think inevitably in interlocking

terms.” More worrisome than the cuts, commercials, and altered production methods was the

feeling that television had displaced cinema: “What I find disquieting, more and more, every

year, is the way the Academy Awards and the whole medium are being shadowed by The Box.”

A decade later, Crowther felt things had only gotten worse for film culture, and for American

culture in toto. In the foreword to his 1978 coffee-table book Reruns: Fifty Memorable Films, he

sounded an alarm:

We are facing a showdown situation in the art and culture of the screen that may end in the

virtual extinction of the kinds of movies remembered in this book. . . . The round-the-clock

competition of endless TV family comedies, violent crime melodramas, idiot game and

variety shows, sportscasts, spinoffs from popular movies, and badly butchered old theatrical

films has pulled the mass audience away from theaters . . . and has turned it back into its

dwelling places, where it is being methodically homogenized. Not just the mass audience,

either; it is leveling the minds of everyone.

For its viewers, argued Crowther, television “reduces all thinking to a sameness, contracts the

attention span, and destroys the ability of the viewer even to follow a simply story line,” and it

had the same effect on old films: television “diminishes them to dwarf size, distorts or drains the

color out of them, and fragments the story continuity with so many commercials that often it

doesn’t make sense. For all the seeming service TV does to keep old films alive, it turns right
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around and kills them to feed its own commercial appetite.” Crowther’s pessimism echoed the

mood among likeminded cultural custodians, who had soured on both media. Television’s
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former champions had long since acquired “a new cynicism about the commercial imperatives of

American television, the quality of federal regulation, and the cultural prestige and aesthetic

legitimacy of the medium.” The Golden Age of live anthology dramas was over, and television

critics now took their cue from the epoch-defining slander of the medium as a “vast
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wasteland.” Meanwhile, the Film Generation had also become more jaded, declaring the

demise of America’s serious film culture in the wake of Hollywood’s newfound blockbuster

mentality, apotheosized by the mega-hits Jaws and Star Wars. In short, jeremiads like the one

Crowther penned in Reruns are as cyclical as they are cynical.

This section has drawn attention to many of the instances in which Crowther discussed

television, but they still add up to a relatively small concern in his career, at least measured

quantitatively. For example, between 1956 and 1967, Crowther wrote six columns that are

primarily about old movies shown on TV, and half of them make an identical argument about

the spike in theatrical revivals. Conversely, he wrote three columns solely about Bonnie and
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Clyde in the year after its premiere. For Crowther, the convergence of film and broadcast

television consistently took a backseat to the routine practice of interpretation and evaluation.

Ergo, despite the panicked tone at the beginning of Reruns, the remainder of the book interprets

and evaluates the chosen films with little or no trace of the industrial, technological, and cultural

contexts that darken its foreword. However, when Crowther did write about film and television’s

convergence, he wrote with a sense of urgency and portent that belied the infrequency. As I

discuss in the final section of this chapter, the Film Generation’s leading critics exhibited an

even greater tendency toward neglect of film and television’s convergence.

An Over-All Serious View

In a 2012 blog post on the death of Andrew Sarris, David Bordwell fondly remembers the

personal impact Sarris had on him and points to a specific issue of the seminal journal Film
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Culture, for which Sarris was an editor and contributor, as key to the formation of his cinephilia.

“Issue 28 was a dangerous item to give to a kid,” Bordwell writes, because it contained the initial

draft of what became the trendsetting book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions,

1929-1968. For Bordwell, the lists that comprised Sarris’s canon were “packed with titles” he

had “never heard of,” but he also notes that broadcast television gave him the chance to “catch

up.” As Bordwell then matter-of-factly acknowledges, “Auteurism owes a good deal to the 1950s-

1960s equivalent of home video, the thousands of 16mm prints floating around local TV

stations.” In addition to recalling his own use of TV as a means to cross off titles from Sarris’s

massive compendium, a time-honored tradition for cinephiles since its publication, Bordwell

implies that Sarris himself might have used TV for research. In doing so, he singles out the 1956

Film Culture article “Citizen Kane: The American Baroque” for its close textual and narrative
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analysis, which presumably required Sarris to watch the film more than once. Bordwell

considers this article a central text in the history of auteurism and mentions that it appeared

“the same year that the RKO library began to be syndicated and Kane was reissued in theatres
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around the country.” Was the timing sheer coincidence? Had Sarris seen Citizen Kane on TV,

or had he watched (and re-watched) it exclusively in theaters?

Either way, Sarris’s article says nothing about the format on which he viewed and re-viewed

the film, thereby exemplifying the “formalist or object-centered approaches” described by

Haidee Wasson. That is, Sarris interpreted and evaluated the film without accounting for the

“material, institutional, and industrial factors” that enabled its circulation, in brick-and-mortar

theaters or anywhere else. Perhaps he wrote the article just before Citizen Kane and hundreds of

other RKO films could be seen on TV; if so, he would have had no reason to discuss television

and its relationship to Citizen Kane, or to cinema writ large. A decade later, though, Sarris did

feel compelled to explain in The American Cinema’s introduction that his survey had excluded
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“television films” due to “problems of historical classification.” The term referred to the
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expanding body of made-for-TV movies, however, not past theatrical releases shown on TV.

Sarris indicates his attitude toward the latter in a 1970 Village Voice piece on That Hamilton

Woman, one of the Alexander Korda-produced films shown on TV before the major Hollywood

studios opened their vaults. “I have seen That Hamilton Woman some eighty-three times at last
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count,” he recalls, “and that doesn’t include free television viewings.” In other words, watching

an old movie on TV did not count for Sarris, or was at least not worth counting in the same
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obsessive fashion by which he kept track of theatrical screenings.

Although it was possible in 2012 for Bordwell to casually and gratefully cite broadcast

television’s influence upon his cinephilia during its formative years, the same could not be said

about Sarris and his contemporaries between the article on Citizen Kane and the mid-1970s.

During this period, the leading American film critics valorized cinema with a renewed gusto and

enjoyed unprecedented levels of fame, but they had little to say about television, or about film

and television’s relationship, especially as in regard to the phenomenon of watching past

theatrical releases on TV. Despite the era’s rapid growth in professional opportunities for

writing about film, the subject of film’s convergence with television was a marginal concern in

the Film Generation’s criticism.

This relative silence betrayed their collectively hostile judgment of TV, but it is also

indicative of another rhetorical pattern in popular and academic circles. As film scholar Barbara

Klinger argues, the significance of cinema’s aftermarket has “not thoroughly penetrated . . . core
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areas” of these critical discourses. Correspondingly, I argue that the Film Generation’s silence

informed the subsequent critical receptions of home video and digital media convergence as

radical breaks. Not accounting at the time for the role that broadcast television played in

diminishing or bolstering the Film Generation’s cinephilia allowed home video and convergence

to seem newer than they really were, and thus as more of a threat to cinephilia’s survival. A

better understanding of what the Film Generation did (or did not) say about film and
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television’s convergence is therefore crucial to this dissertation’s analysis of American film

criticism in moments of major technological change.

While Klinger and several likeminded scholars have enriched the understanding of cinema’s

aftermarket within film studies, the discipline still lacks a useful picture of the actual discursive

record that rendered the aftermarket effectively invisible within American film criticism. The

Film Generation’s contempt for television is also well known, but almost no one has discussed

what its critics said about film and television’s convergence before the advent of home video in

the mid-1970s. This section begins to tell that story by searching for the instances when the Film

Generation addressed film and television’s convergence, giving special emphasis to its

commentary on the industrial and cultural practices of screening and watching old movies on

TV. Given the paucity of debate, I will also point to instances in which Film Generation critics

might have said more about these themes but evidently chose not to. Rather than explore the

work of a single writer, then, the remainder of this chapter investigates a variety of voices that

highlight the Film Generation’s characteristic styles of thought and structures of feeling. The

chosen examples show how the Film Generation replied to film and television’s convergence and

reveal its more frequent habit of ignoring the topic altogether.

In hindsight, the Film Generation’s formation looks unexpected. As World War II drew to a

close, American movies were more profitable than ever, collecting peak ticket sales in the

halcyon days of the 1946-1947 season. But the postwar audience’s enthusiasm for moviegoing

abruptly waned when television and the trappings of suburban domesticity drastically reduced
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box-office receipts, thrusting Hollywood into a fresh financial panic. Yet concomitant with

Tinseltown’s fiscal woes in the 1950s, ebullient college students and “urban counterculture

denizen[s]” renewed the nation’s interest in moviegoing when they flocked to a flood of foreign

imports that promised more innovative and mature (i.e., sexy) fare than could be matched by
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Hollywood’s old-fashioned morality, tired formulas, and past-their-prime talents. In a
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retrospective and representative memoir about being one of the Film Generation’s movie-

obsessed college students, essayist Phillip Lopate speaks for many fellow travelers who felt they

had “come of age during a period of phenomenal cinematic creativity.” “I like to think of the

early sixties as the ‘heroic’ age of moviegoing,” he declares, deploying the nostalgic tone
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common to memories of the Film Generation’s heyday. In this regard, Lopate echoed Susan

Sontag, who said that a “dazzling number of original, passionate films of the highest seriousness

got made” in this era. It was “the feverish age of moviegoing,” she reminisces, “with the full-time

cinephile always hoping to find a seat as close as possible to the big screen, ideally the third row
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center.”

Alongside the new breed of movies, this era saw a fresh crop of American film critics became

literary celebrities, with Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael at the head of the class, supposedly

locked in a mortal battle over the “auteur theory.” Although film critics had treated directors as

authors since Griffith trumpeted his own prowess, Sarris’s auteur theory, adapted from François

Truffaut’s la politique des auteurs, sparked a controversy by proclaiming that Hollywood movies

could express individual artistic visions. As Sarris wrote in The American Cinema, “Truffaut’s

greatest heresy . . . was not in ennobling direction as a form of creation, but in his ascribing
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authorship to Hollywood directors hitherto tagged with the deadly epithets of commercialism.”

Inspired by the affections of Truffaut, André Bazin, and the critic-filmmakers of Cahiers du

cinéma, Sarris helped pave a path for American film critics to write their own paeans to the art

of classical Hollywood cinema. In sum, though, the Film Generation’s attitude toward

Hollywood combined derision for the quality of its current output with reverence for the
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heretofore underappreciated achievements of its past.

By wielding popular films from Hollywood’s studio era “as a club against certain snobbish

tendencies in the French cinema,” Sarris said that Truffaut had also tapped into the “anti-
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Establishment ferment in England and America.” This newfound cinephilia mingled with a
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youth-oriented social atmosphere that was anti-authoritarian, anti-war, anti-corporate, pro-

love, and awash in popular culture. Nevertheless, Lopate sounds a droll note of caution when

generalizing about the Film Generation’s politics: “[O]ne should not confuse the early sixties

with the late.” “By 1968,” he clarifies, “the students at Columbia would have more important

things to argue about than the merits of Gerd Oswald’s Screaming Mimi. But in 1960-64, our
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politics were the politique des auteurs. We looked for morality in form.” (It must be noted as

well that the Film Generation’s criticism was never so progressive as to be devoid of elitism,

sexism, racism, and homophobia.)

Replicating another trend initiated in Paris, the Film Generation also encouraged an

American boom in published film criticism. This trend was marked by the 1958 collection Agee

on Film and a host of specialist periodicals, such as Film Quarterly, the short-lived English-

language version of Cahiers du cinéma, and the aforementioned Film Culture. The academic

discipline known as film studies also took root in the 1960s, buttressed by its own outlets for

publishing detailed analyses of individual films and genres, theories of the medium, and

histories of film as an art form or business. This surge of cinephilia registered in mass-market

outlets, too, as seen in such articles as the breathless 1963 Time cover story “Cinema: A Religion

of Film.”

Through its celebration of liberated movies and mores, however, the Time article also

suggests how cinema’s ascending cultural legitimacy overlapped with television’s proliferation in

the United States. “For in the decade since Hollywood came unstuck and television became the

reigning medium of mass entertainment, the movies have suddenly and powerfully emerged as a

new and brilliant international art, indeed as perhaps the central and characteristic art of the
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age,” Time concluded. John Simon, one of the Film Generation’s most prominent and divisive

critics, elaborated on the same claim four years later, adding a dash of historical context and a

serving of scorn for cinema’s moving-image counterpart:

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The age is eminently ripe for film to become a true art. For this is only possible when

something newer and more profitable exists to siphon off the most irresponsible, inartistic,

greedy elements from an older art. “It is unimaginable,” wrote Friedrich Dürrenmatt, “what

would have to be played on the stage nowadays if film had not been invented and the

screenwriters were turning out stage plays.” This statement can now be revised: It is

inconceivable what trash would be put on film these days if television had not been
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invented.

Here, Simon outlines a recurring cycle in the history of modernity, whereby the appearance of

new art forms or media, from the novel to the video game, justifies comparisons that transform

the cultural reputations of older arts and media. More recently, film scholar Michael Zyrd has

reiterated this claim with respect to the Film Generation. Borrowing from the work of sociologist

Shyon Baumann, Zyrd contends: “[I]f television had become what Baumann calls ‘the default

entertainment medium,’ then that meant that ‘film was eligible for redefinition and also

compared favorably to television as an art form.’ What film lost to television in audience,” Zyrd
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asserts, “it gained in status.”

Indeed, notions of “status” were fundamental to the Film Generation’s limited criticism on

film and television’s convergence. As cinema’s cultural reputation grew, the stature of

moviegoing grew in tandem. Film culture was aligned in this way with the everyday reality of

postwar American life. As film historian Barbara Wilinsky details, the nation’s economic

prosperity after its victory in World War II de-emphasized traditional class-based differences

and foregrounded cultural variables in their stead. Widespread literacy and a burgeoning middle

class intensified the role that cultural capital played in shaping America’s evolving social

hierarchy. Increasingly fine-grained distinctions of taste, in film and everything else, entered the
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lexicon of Americans’ daily conversations once the most severe sacrifices and deprivations of the

Great Depression and war effort had largely passed. “Therefore,” Wilinsky avows, “people’s

taste—including what films they chose to see and where they saw them—became a significant

element of how they viewed their place in society,” a self-awareness that also entailed knowing
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their place within or outside of the flourishing subculture of Film Generation cinephilia. Film

critics and cinephiles have subsequently distinguished themselves from each other, and the

mass audience, by stressing where, with whom, and how they saw a given film. “To be young and

in love with films in the early 1960s was to participate in what felt like an international youth

movement. We in New York were following and, in a sense, mimicking the cafe arguments in

Paris, London and Rome, where the cinema had moved, for a brief historical movement, to the

center of intellectual discourse,” writes Lopate, demonstrating how the Film Generation
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conceived of its distinction as the product of youth, education, and urbanity.

But the Film Generation’s metropolitan bias was also wedded to a rigid system that ranked

the authenticity of cinema’s multiple material and phenomenological manifestations. A new

Godard release at the New York Film Festival or a 35mm repertory screening at the Bleecker

Street Cinema represented the ideal. Renting a 16mm print of The Seventh Seal or a Samuel

Fuller movie for your campus film society was the next best thing. Conversely, the act of

watching an old movie on TV failed to confer any cultural capital whatsoever on Film Generation

cinephiles. Even the mere possibility of watching an old movie on broadcast TV often went

unspoken in the Film Generation’s criticism. For instance, in the introduction to his 1967 book

Private Screenings, John Simon discussed the unique challenges that confronted any

conscientious film critic who wanted greater access to films for analysis. Laying out the scant list

of available options for re-watching a film, Simon writes: “[E]ven if a [repertory] cinematheque

is at the critic’s disposal . . . he still cannot take the film home with him and ponder it at leisure.

True, some film lending libraries are beginning to be heard of,” he concedes, “but they are as yet
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only little more than a tantalizing promise, a drop in the bucket . . . To be sure, new inventions

may come along.” “In any case,” Simon reckons, “the critic will eventually need to have his own
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film library, just as today’s literary critic and scholar has his own essential books.” Broadcast

television, meanwhile, never merits Simon’s consideration, not even to immediately reject it as

an insufficient or inauthentic resource to re-watch past theatrical releases—it is simply invisible.

Broadcast television’s invisibility also becomes unmistakably pertinent when one re-reads

the 1966 Stanley Kauffmann essay that gave the Film Generation its lasting moniker. A newly

written piece included as the final chapter of A World on Film (a collection of Kauffmann’s

criticism from 1958 to 1966), “The Film Generation: Celebration and Concern” traces the origins

of a revolution hailed by the author as “the most cheering circumstance in contemporary

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American art.” According to Kauffmann, the Film Generation “was the first generation that

has matured in a culture in which the film has been of accepted serious relevance.” “Before

1935,” he qualifies, “films were proportionately more popular than they are now,” and the same

“escapist audience still exists in large number, but another audience, most of them born since

1935, exists along with it.” As opposed to the escapist audience’s support for mainstream

American movies and Main Street theaters, the new alternative film culture embraced

international “art cinema” and the homegrown cycle of “underground” films, both of which

could be seen in “art houses,” contemporary art museums, campus film societies, and ciné clubs.

“Even its appreciations of sheer entertainment films reflect[ed] an over-all serious view,”

Kauffmann stressed (415).

As the essay proceeds, Kauffmann elucidates the generative mechanisms behind the Film

Generation’s rise, and the full exegesis bears revisiting to underscore the weight of television’s

absence. Kauffmann begins by giving five “older, intrinsic reasons” for the Film Generation’s

formation. Film’s technological nature was emblematic of the “increasingly mechanized age” in

which the Film Generation lived; film’s ability to capture “surfaces and physical details”
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corresponded with a broader investment in “surfaces” as “the only dependable objective

correlatives,” an epistemology and aesthetic that Kauffmann also found in the French nouveau

roman (416); film was, more than the novel or stage, “particularly apt for the treatment of many

of the pressing questions of our time: inner states of tension or of doubt or apathy” (417); film

was “available to the whole world at once”; and film’s “youth” meant that it still had tremendous

room for artistic growth (i.e., Kauffmann subscribed to the biological analogy of film’s progress

as an art form) (418).

These factors predated the Film Generation and interacted with “other elements” to produce

the cultural transformation at hand. The influences that were external to the “film world”

included “the spurt in college education; political and social abrasions and changes; [and]

moral, ethical, religious dissolutions and resolutions,” all of which had “made this generation

more impatient and more hungry.” After the war, Kauffmann continues, there were also “some

important developments within the film world itself. These developments have been in content,

not in form. Three elements are especially evident: increased sexuality, an increase in national

flavor, and an increased stress on the individual.” He elaborated on the formal changes but

relegated the comment to a footnote: “There have been many technical film developments—wide

screens, stereophonic sound, color refinements—but so far they have largely been peripheral to

the art itself. They, and the improved hand-held camera and recorder, may affect the basic

language of film in [the] future; they have not yet markedly done so” (419). Neither at this

juncture, then, nor at any other in the rest of the essay did Kauffmann so much as write the word

television, let alone ponder how film and television’s convergence had affected the Film

Generation’s cinephilia.

When Film Generation critics did comment on film and television’s convergence, the most

typical remark came in the form of a unified complaint about the use of commercial

interruptions and unauthorized cuts in TV broadcasts of old movies, as was the case for Bosley
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Crowther. Yet even these complaints can provide evidence of the Film Generation’s broader

indifference to and longstanding silence about television. For example, a 1975 Film Quarterly

editorial that condemned commercials and cuts represented the magazine’s first substantial
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statement on film and television’s convergence—1975! But its author, Ernest Callenbach, was

well aware of the Film Generation’s strangely taciturn response to the problem:

It is puzzling that we . . . have so placidly accepted the constant commercial interruption of

films when they are televised. . . . A huge proportion of American televiewing is in fact the

viewing of movies . . . [and] a huge proportion of Americans profess disbelief of and

annoyance with commercials. Why then so profound and curious a silence on the issue? Why

has a proposal to confine commercials to the intervals between films never been on the

public agenda, with features pro and con in TV Guide?

Callenbach then joked that television might be “one of those ‘structuring absences’ we hear of

from Paris,” but he probably came much closer to the real explanation when he wondered, “Is

there something so inherently debasing to a film being shown on the little lined screen, that we
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become speechless in its defense?”

As Callenbach suspected, the cultural stain of cavorting with television was dark enough to

motivate claims of ignorance from some film critics about what happened to past theatrical

releases on TV. For instance, in 1965, Otto Preminger sued Columbia Pictures and its subsidiary,

Screen Gems, to gain (or regain) control of the 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder, which he had

produced and directed. Incensed by the changes imposed on the film, Preminger accused the

studio of violating a contract that guaranteed him “the right to determine the final form and

content of [his] film.” “I believe the commercial interruptions destroy the value of the picture,”

he protested. “Why should the picture be shown in mutilated form just because it is shown at
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110
home? It is to me an intolerable thing. It is grotesque. I really think it is uncivilized.”

Preminger was one of many Hollywood filmmakers to vent their frustration and disgust with

how television abused the films they had directed. “It makes me furious,” said John Ford. “It’s a

shame—your name’s on it but it isn’t the same thing you did.” After seeing High Noon on TV, its

director, Fred Zinneman, angrily concurred: “They butchered the thing. They cut large chunks
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out of it. I got so mad I turned it off.” Hearing the case, Judge Arthur C. Klein expressed his

sympathy for Preminger and pronounced himself a “great moviegoer.” “And I find also,” added

Klein, “that almost the only thing that is any good on television today is the showing of some of

these movies, and I have seen some horrible examples of what television stations, if they do it, or

whoever does it, do in cutting these pictures” (57).

So Preminger might have been confident as expert witness and New York Post film critic

Archer Winsten was called to testify. Ostensibly, Winsten would speak on Preminger’s behalf

about “the effect upon the quality of Anatomy of a Murder if during the course of its exhibition,

either in a theatre or on television, it was interrupted on twelve separate occasions and during

each interruption two or more commercial announcements were shown” (73-4). Before Winsten

had a chance to say anything, though, the opposing attorney doubted his qualifications on

medium-specific grounds: “I point out Mr. Winsten is a movie critic but not a television critic.”

More importantly, he said that whatever occurred in a movie theater should be “of no

consequence” in this case (74). When the judge finally let Winsten reply, the film critic

announced: “I have seen interruptions in a theatre and they are very damaging.” “Do you watch

movies on television?” Klein then reasonably asked. “Not if I can help it!” Winsten defiantly

answered (77).

Likely less confident after Winsten’s riposte, Preminger must have had mixed emotions

about his testimony. On the one hand, Winsten had sunk his own credibility as an expert by

confessing that he was unfamiliar with the practice of showing or watching old movies on TV.
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(Making matters worse for Preminger, Winsten later granted the possibility that unauthorized

cuts could hypothetically improve a picture [77].) On the other hand, Preminger surely agreed

with the spirit of Winsten’s reasoning: television’s treatment of cinema was a cultural

abomination and an artistic injustice, so why should a film critic watch movies on TV? It will not

come as a shock to hear that Preminger lost the case, but the more salient issue is Winsten’s

need for distance from the implication that he ever watched old movies on TV. He may have

done Preminger no favors, but he also had his own reputation to protect.

Winsten may only be a minor Film Generation figure, but his disavowal of television

complemented the attitudes of his more famous colleagues. In 1968, the recently formed

National Society of Film Critics commissioned several of them—including Hollis Alpert, Stanley

Kauffmann, Arthur Knight, Joseph Morgenstern, Andrew Sarris, Richard Schickel, and John

Simon—to participate in a kind of published conversation, entitled “The Future of Film: A

Symposium.” The symposium’s participants were given a series of questions that addressed the

most pressing topics for contemporary film culture in America:

• Is film “the most relevant art of our time”?

• “Are we standing on the brink of a radically different film age? What influence on future

film form and content do you expect from: cinéma vérité? the Underground film? mixed-

media? technical developments such as those emphasized at Expo 67? the psychedelic

subculture? what-have-you?”

• What does the future hold for the “American commercial movie”?

• Will “plot, characterization and meaning as those terms have traditionally been

understood” survive?

• “How much farther can the film go with sex and violence? Or do you think it has already
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gone too far?”
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I have paraphrased and quoted these questions at length to illustrate their depth and diversity,

while simultaneously wishing to again underline television’s absence as an explicit concern for

serious film culture. (The second question comes closest to intersecting with TV, but “mixed-

media” and the “technical developments” on display at Expo 67 did not refer to TV. Perhaps

“what-have-you” was a dry stab at TV, but that would only reinforce the extent to which TV was

beneath the Film Generation’s consideration.)

Despite the editorial guidance, almost all of the critics had something to say about television,

and what they said mirrored the cynicism Bosley Crowther felt over the final decades of his own

career. Moreover, the rare and minimal references to the appearance of past theatrical releases

on broadcast TV employed a remote affect quite unlike later responses to home video’s

dominance, which have routinely been charged with a sense of aggrieved cinephilia. In his

answer to the first question, for example, John Simon laid bare the disdain for television among

film critics at the time: “Film is clearly the most relevant art of our time; only television may be

more relevant, but it isn’t an art” (303). Likewise, when Arthur Knight turned his attention to

television in the final paragraph of his entry, he admitted to overlooking the medium: “If I have

omitted television from this discussion—commercial, educational, or pay-TV—it is because I still

think of it primarily as a means of transmission, not as an art. But should television ever take a

more creative turn, we may well find that it will also importantly affect the future of the film”

(295). Brendan Gill approached the issue in compatible terms: “[M]ovies may become the most

popular of the arts because TV threatens to become the chief means of communication and will

make increasing demands on movie-makers of all sorts to help keep the glop flowing.”

Television mattered for film culture, then, but the future looked bleak in Gill’s mind: “The

American commercial movie is going to be whatever TV chooses to make it be. The Paleys and

Sarnoffs of this world care about nothing except making the greatest possible amount of money
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out of air that doesn’t belong to them, and I assume that they will be glad to make movies much

worse than the ones that Louis B. Mayer used to make” (287). In his comments on the inevitable

development of home video technologies, Joseph Morgenstern extended Gill’s concerns about

television and the battle it pitched between artists and capitalists:

It takes a very slight effort of imagination to see the day when we will buy our movies as

freely and easily as we now buy long-playing records, and watch them at our leisure in living,

dancing holographic color. The prospect is enthralling until you realize that farsighted

businessmen—far more farsighted than most of the artists they will hire and consume—are

already at work on this future, laying it out, carving it up. (297-8)

In short, these critics could more or less ignore television because it was not a legitimate art

form and had not yet had a measurable impact on the art of film in their estimation.

Of the group, Richard Schickel offered the most significant engagement with film and

television’s convergence as it concerned watching old movies on TV. Specifically, Schickel

credited television as a source for the Film Generation’s impressive knowledge of movies

because it had functioned as an “easily available—if imperfect—archive,” and he imagined the

combination of interest and access would ensure that cinema’s “hold on us will only increase”

(300). But Schickel quickly shifted gears to relay his anxiety about the ontological and

phenomenological consequences he foresaw should television continue to expand its

appropriation of cinema. As opposed to the commercial novelty of the “gigantism” exploited at

Expo 67, where enlarged and multi-screen displays had momentarily amplified cinema’s

physical scale, Schickel worried over the persistent “miniaturizing effect of television.” “One’s

psychological set as he peers into a small screen in his living room is entirely different from what

it is looking at a large screen in a large room filled mostly with strangers,” he contended.
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Schickel was therefore skeptical about the aesthetic prospects of “films made directly for use at

home,” which he thought would be delivered to consumers through a “gizmo you can clip on

your television set in order to project through it films of one’s choosing.” Such films “would be

different” from their theatrical forebears, but “not better.” “No substantial improvement of an

art form has ever resulted from mere technological change; everything depends on the use to

which individuals put their new tools,” he cautioned (301).

Schickel’s defensive attitude countered the utopianism found in marketing hype from

Hollywood publicists and hardware manufacturers, but his comments also reveal how he

understood the potential consequences of this technological change through the same lens that

Crowther had used to ponder the imminent appearance of old movies on TV—how would it

affect the future practices of film artists? This orientation toward the future was informed by the

biological analogy of film’s progress as an art form and had been the default position for serious

film culture since the coming of sound. Serious film culture would not become fixated on the

way that technological change affected our thoughts and feelings about cinema’s past until the

emergence of home video in the mid-1970s.

While such film culture luminaries as Martin Scorsese and George A. Romero would later

champion broadcast television’s role as an electronic cinematheque, popular and academic film

critics have remained circumspect or aloof until recently. For example, in the following passage

from a 1990 Film Comment article published as part of a symposium on the state of film

criticism, Roger Ebert eulogizes the Film Generation and denigrates the mass appeal of home

video but never alludes to broadcast television:

That was a good time for the movies, as who needs to be reminded. . . . Revival theaters

flourished in the larger cities. Film societies did standing-room business on every

campus. . . . Now all of that is long, long ago. . . . The death of the repertory and revival
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houses in most cities has been appropriately mourned, but who is there to grieve the death

of campus film societies, which have shut down on one campus after another? . . . [C]lassic

and foreign film exhibition [on 16mm] on the campus is dying or dead, replaced by

videocassettes on big-screen TV. The campus auditoriums where once we saw Ikiru are

silent now on Sunday nights, but down in the lounge of the campus dorm, the kids are sitting
113
in front of the 50-inch Mitsubishi, watching Weekend at Bernie’s.

Whether compared to the coming of sound or the dominance of home video, film’s convergence

with broadcast television paled in magnitude for the Film Generation—its other concerns, from

the efficacy of the auteur theory to the hunt for cinema’s next masterpiece, were just more

urgent. The Film Generation’s esteem for film as an art form was coupled with its disdain for

television, making the latter nothing more than an afterthought against the backdrop of

cinema’s triumphant ascent.

Notwithstanding the above indifference, disavowals, and rejections, Film Generation critics

and cinephiles undoubtedly watched old movies on TV. That may sound like an obvious thing to

say now, but the situation was murkier back then. In his brief history of the period, Michael Zyrd

unintentionally hints at the conflict between the Film Generation’s public views and private

practices. As he illuminates the Film Generation’s cinematic tastes and movie-watching habits,

Zyrd writes that “[a]lternative cinema like European art films, documentary, and underground

films was not being shown on television—and indeed often the cinephile would not own a

television—so the [art house] theater could competitively reposition itself from B-house to elite
114
culture venue.” Two pages later, though, Zyrd seems to suggest that the opposite was true. In

an attempt to correct the way that current “discourses on cinephilia” claim an exclusive

authenticity for theatrical screenings, Zyrd retorts: “[T]he cinephile generation would likely have

seen as many if not more movies on television—especially films from Hollywood’s past—than in
 151
115
theaters.” Yet one would hardly know this basic fact from reading the Film Generation’s

criticism before 1975.

The unreconciled conflict within this historical account illustrates the paradoxical nature of

the Film Generation’s relationship to television: a vehement disgust for the medium precluded

its members from writing more about the vast quantities of old movies they nevertheless

watched on TV. More than their concerns about media ontology, matters of cultural status and

cultural capital dictated their responses to film and television’s convergence, and to the

appearance of past theatrical releases on TV. In the age of home video, however, questions of

format and access became paramount for serious film culture, as I discuss in the next chapter.
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4

Scarcity and Plenitude

In a 2012 Film Comment article, film scholar Nico Baumbach offers a summary of contemporary

cinephilia that places home video at the heart of a binary conflict caused by a moment of major

technological change. According to Baumbach, serious film culture is now bifurcated by

opposing viewpoints, described as either “a response to scarcity or a response to abundance.” As

befits a diagnosis of cinephilia, the divergent viewpoints also entail divergent feelings. The

former attitude, Baumbach writes, is a “way of loving a disappearing object—celluloid

film . . . projected in large dark theaters,” and the ardor of this backward glance generates

“nostalgia” for the postwar determinants that produced America’s “first great wave of

cinephilia,” including the influx of foreign films and the rise of such homegrown auteurs as
1
Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

Although many film critics and cinephiles have bemoaned the fact that digital video has

usurped celluloid in brick-and-mortar theaters, a different but equally nostalgic understanding

of scarcity has been more common. In the following passage, film programmer James Quandt

employs the dominant meaning of scarcity within serious film culture:

An autodidact and hopeless movie lover from a village in northern Saskatchewan with no

television (so no late night movies, the provenance of many nascent cinephiles), and long

before video recorders, much less DVD players, I took my holidays in New York to see the

Mizoguchi retrospective at the Japan Society, or in Toronto to see Angelopoulos or Godard.

Today, many of the same films I traveled hundreds of miles to see can be easily had, often

instantly, in the hinterland, even as the formats and systems by which they are delivered
2
grievously diminish the experience.
 153

Here, scarcity refers not to celluloid’s disappearance in the present but to its limited availability

in the past. Once scarce and therefore precious, Quandt insists, chances to see almost any given

film have become plentiful and therefore devalued in the age of home video.

Conversely, the latter attitude that Baumbach outlines celebrates the same circumstances as the

birth of a “digital utopia.” Thanks to the global reach of the Internet and the increased access to

film history that home video provides, the so-called New Cinephilia “incorporates everything

and everyone,” and thus rejects the alleged “elitism” of the Film Generation’s older brand of

cinephilia. No longer confined by various types of material scarcity, New Cinephiles embrace an

egalitarian cinephilia that “belongs to everyone” while rejoicing in the plenitude of access to

movies from the past. “The New Cinephilia . . . is a cinephilia for the age of iPhones, blogs, and
3
YouTube,” Baumbach attests.

Beginning in the late 1990s with the rise of DVDs and other digital technologies, the debate

about scarcity and plenitude has been central within serious film culture. And, as Baumbach

maintains, the debate seems to split serious film culture into feuding tribes, though more voices

have publicly decried the loss of precious scarcity and the hegemony of banal plenitude than
4
have stood on the opposite side of the spectrum. Yet the schism Baumbach helps to illuminate

is more nuanced and contradictory than he indicates. Not only does serious film culture lack

consensus on the respective values of scarcity and plenitude; it also lacks consensus on how to

define these terms and use them as measurements. It may sound obvious to credit home video

and digital technologies with swinging film culture toward a state of plenitude—especially in the

age of online streaming, file sharing, and blogging—but the dialectic of scarcity and plenitude

has been a stubbornly subjective discourse.

Consider, for instance, a Film Comment editorial that flips the conventional wisdom about

scarcity and plenitude on its head. Implicitly replying to the Baumbach article that was printed
 154
in the magazine’s previous issue, film critic Dave Kehr wistfully reflects on the past and

forwards an urgent plea to protect the future of film through a renewed emphasis on

preservation. For members of the Film Generation, Kehr avows, the “fruits of classical

Hollywood flowered widely, and could be plucked with a minimum of effort.” The bounty of

16mm and broadcast television joined the occasional screenings of archival 35mm prints to

make the venerated period one of enriching plenitude. This portrait of the Film Generation is

notable for reversing the more prevalent recollections of the era’s purported scarcity,

exemplified in the above lament by Quandt. Nonetheless, Kehr asserts, “All of that essentially

ended with the commercialization of home video in the late Seventies,” thereby planting himself

in the familiar territory that posits home video’s emergence as a radical break in film history and

film culture. But Kehr has another surprise in store as the editorial proceeds. “Only a small

percentage of the films that once circulated in 35 and 16mm made the transition to tape,” he

avers, “and with each succeeding technology—Laserdisc, DVD, Blu-ray, and now streaming
5
video—another huge swatch of Hollywood history has dropped out of distribution.” Ergo, home

video has been the cause of a detrimental scarcity, not a detrimental plenitude.

An analogous but incompatible reversal occurs in the 2003 book Screen Traffic: Movies,

Multiplexes, and Global Culture, written by media historian Charles Acland. In his

acknowledgments, Acland recounts the roles that broadcast television and film criticism played

in his discovery of cinephilia. “[E]very week I looked forward to Saturday morning when the new

television guide would arrive with the newspaper,” he reminisces. “Once I had it in my

adolescent hands, I would scour it to map out my movie watching for the week, taking a pencil

and circling the appealing films, with only the short blurb to help me in making that assessment.
6
Information on movies was,” he adds, “as scarce as the films themselves.” Whereas Kehr

gratefully remembers broadcast television for its plenitude, Acland extols the virtues of its

scarcity. “[P]lans had to be made to take advantage of one-time-only film events,” he notes, so
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“[l]ate-night broadcasts of The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, and The Longest
7
Day generated excitement of suitably epic proportions.” On the one hand, Acland’s account

reinforces the orthodox idea that true cinephilia is fostered and nourished by scarcity. On the

other hand, he joins Kehr in subverting the usual disregard for television within serious film

culture while questioning the widespread theory that plenitude is a fundamental component of

television’s medium specificity.

If Kehr and Acland complicate the values, meanings, and measurements implied by these

terms, their references to broadcast television also suggest that the dialectic of scarcity and

plenitude is not a sui generis response to home video. Indeed, the recent crisis in serious film

culture recalls even earlier attempts to grasp the consequences of technological change through

the same lens. As many critics and historians contend, the forces of modernity reconfigured

reality by altering the contours of scarcity and plenitude in a number of social and cultural

categories. Mass production and consumption, the rapid growth of cities, expanded voting rights

and gender roles, proliferating images and ads—modernity is said to have reshaped the textures,

mores, and practices of everyday life as it forged these new paradigms of scarcity and plenitude.

Cultural historian Jackson Lears succinctly evokes the plenitude of modernity when he labels
8
turn-of-the-century advertisements “fables of abundance.”

Likewise, the Industrial Revolution unsettled traditional views on the proper methods to

identify and appreciate fine art. In Walter Benjamin’s seminal formula, mechanical

reproducibility threatened the established standards that governed how people experienced and

evaluated art works. This potentially productive disturbance had troubled the sense that a

rarefied “aura” emanated from consecrated art works, and Benjamin saw cinema, in particular,

as a microcosm of the larger changes wrought by modernity. Beyond the “distracted” mode of

spectatorship made possible by its mechanical ontology, cinema’s ubiquity supplied audiences

with a novel wealth of aesthetic encounters. Benjamin was reluctant to declare these
 156
developments inherently good or inherently bad, but his inquiry is clear on the stakes

involved: the social, cultural, and technological changes characteristic of modernity had

upended the politics of access to art and transformed the emotional terrain of aesthetic
9
contemplation.

Before Benjamin’s speculations on modernity and cinema, a host of commentators hailed

silent movies as a democratic marvel, an Esperanto with the capacity to transcend the barrier of

language and communicate across vast distances. Yet movies were also excessively abundant

shortly after their invention. For instance, Vachel Lindsay famously saluted cinema “as a civic

institution that might implement American democracy on a universal scale,” but he also realized
10
that it had quickly become impossible to see every new movie. In 1922, Lindsay confessed: “No
11
one can pretend to a full knowledge of the films. They come faster than rain in April.” So he

proposed that his fellow Americans erect libraries and museums to curate, house, and exhibit

movies—a rebellious notion that counted cinema as a legitimate art form and asked for its

respect as such.

A decade after Lindsay articulated his dream for a film archive, Iris Barry and the Museum

of Modern Art helped make it come true. With the opening of the Film Library in 1935, Barry

and her MoMA compatriots put institutional weight behind their faith in cinema as a bona fide

art. Through the holdings, catalogs, and programs engineered by the Film Library, a nascent

canon started to solidify, but the Film Library also loaned its collection of 16mm prints to the

general public for personal, educational, and scholarly reasons. In doing so, Barry and the Film

Library fought a pervasive bias that dismissed movies as too culturally insignificant to classify,

preserve, and re-watch.

At the time, the desire to re-watch a movie was nearly as strange a concept to most
12
Americans as the claim that some movies deserved to be shown in museums. For many film

critics and cinephiles, though, the Film Library afforded a new opportunity to better study,
 157
analyze, and evaluate the medium. If movies used to “come faster than rain in April” and

vanish just as quickly when profits ran dry, the Film Library developed an alternative cycle of

consumption by supplying regular chances to see an individual title again and again, irrespective

of its broader commercial prospects. In the 1955 essay “Journal of a Film Fiend,” published in

the first issue of Film Culture, Richard Kraft remembers the Film Library as a gift to cinema

enthusiasts because it graced them with more access to movies and exposed them to the

affective pleasures of obsessive re-watching: “I’ve seen every film they’ve ever presented, not

once but, some of them, more times than I care to admit. If you think this denotes a type of
13
insanity, I cheerfully confess that I’m a nut.” Kraft and Barry may have scolded distributors

and exhibitors of 16mm prints for a variety of abuses (e.g., abridgements to a film’s proper run

time, silent films projected at the wrong speed), but the plenitude engendered by 16mm was

neither a problem nor a diminishment of cinema. To the contrary, it was a boon to serious film

culture’s cinephilia and the collective effort to write a more accurate history of the medium.

Alas, serious film culture did not harbor the same gratitude for the next technological change

to influence the balance of scarcity and plenitude: the exhibition of past theatrical releases on

television. Unlike the exhibition of 16mm prints, which shared cinema’s customary format

(celluloid), and often shared a similar set of social protocols (an audience paid to see public

screenings that took place in brick-and-mortar theaters), television was a broadcast medium,

free of charge and consumed in private spaces. Because it regarded television as an intellectually

and aesthetically inferior medium, serious film culture roundly rejected television’s

appropriation of cinema. More specifically, Bosley Crowther denounced television’s haphazard

and abundant exploitation of movies. In the 1967 coffee-table book The Great Films: Fifty

Golden Years of Motion Pictures, Crowther complained that cinema’s rival was guilty of re-

presenting movies “without any order or manifest taste.” “These daily and nightly fillings of the

popular craw, with films picked at random from many countries, many periods and many types,
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without any points of cultural reference and without, at least, the chronological flow of

techniques and topicality that prevailed at the time they were released, is causing a massive

indigestion,” he groaned. Yes, television had brought “millions of people . . . to a new awareness

and enjoyment of films,” but the chaotic nature of its access, in conjunction with the commercial

interruptions and unauthorized cuts that were “so damaging to the quality of the original

works,” meant that television had ultimately done film culture more harm than good. “What is

extended with the right hand is shattered with the left,” Crowther solemnly concluded.

For Crowther, such a contribution to the dialectic of scarcity and plenitude was more a

passing observation than a recurring theme, demonstrating both serious film culture’s disdain

for television and its relatively infrequent commentary on the medium. The fleeting nature of his

critique is indicative of a wider lull in the dialectic of scarcity and plenitude during the era of

broadcast television’s appropriation of cinema and prior to the emergence of home video and

cable in the mid-1970s. But it also hints at the existence of a discursive record, no matter how

meager in volume or minor in stature, that has been forgotten or neglected in serious film

culture’s current debate about home video. The response to home video’s plenitude thus mirrors

the response to media convergence in the digital age. In both cases, members of serious film

culture greeted a moment of major technological change as a radical break because they

overlooked the technical, social, and rhetorical precedents that informed the present.

In the remainder of this chapter, my critique of the Film Generation nostalgists and New

Cinephiles continues in two ways. First, I recover and explore a pair of important but

unheralded precedents for the recent focus on scarcity and plenitude: the inaugural series of

movie-watching guides for television-watchers, edited by Steven H. Scheuer, and the 1967 article

“Movies on Television,” written by Pauline Kael. Crucially, Scheuer and Kael frame their

respective thoughts and feelings about broadcast television’s appropriation of cinema within the
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dialectic of scarcity and plenitude, thereby challenging the belief that home video is solely

responsible for a shift in film culture from scarcity to plenitude.

Lastly, the final section of this chapter returns to the current debate and interrogates its

appraisal of home video as a moment of major technological change. By highlighting the

inconsistencies and conflicts across the debate, I seek to show how the dialectic of scarcity and

plenitude has been a dubious barometer for determining the value of film culture in the age of

home video. I argue instead that the dialectic of scarcity and plenitude is part of a greater

pattern of response to moments of major technological change, a pattern that characterizes the

entire history of cinema and undergirds the persistence of serious film culture.

A Previously Undreamt of Opportunity

For casual movie fans, the so-called capsule review is probably the most familiar type of film

criticism. As the label implies, capsule reviews trade in brevity. They range in length from a

single sentence to a robust paragraph. Some are condensed copies of full reviews found

elsewhere; some are born as capsules. Either way, capsule reviews summarize key story

elements and provide basic facts about a film, enabling pertinent comparisons to similar movies.

Lastly, capsule reviews evaluate movies, rendering their judgments through pithy prose or the

quantity of whimsical symbols they award (e.g., three-out-of-four dog bones). Here is the entire

one-and-a-half-star review of Invasion, U.S.A. from the 1969 book TV Movies, edited by

Leonard Maltin, the most famous capsule-reviewer of them all: “Unspecified enemy invades
14
Alaska; mild science-fiction.” Because serious film culture tends to regard capsule reviews as

second-rate criticism, little assessment of the genre qua genre exists; alas, an account of the

capsule review as a particular mode of film criticism is beyond my purview as well.

While the capsule review itself is not the focus of this section, the genre is at the heart of an

influential book series that sheds light on serious film culture’s current debate about home
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video. Published in 1958 and entitled TV Movie Almanac & Ratings, the inaugural volume

in the series supplied television viewers with hundreds of original capsule reviews to help them

choose the movies they should watch among thousands then available across the broadcast dial.

Subsequently called Movies on TV and revised for the final time in 1993, the series has also been

replicated by other movie-watching guides, such as Maltin’s best-selling franchise. The following

analysis, however, surveys the series from its premiere through the seventh edition, which

debuted in 1974 (i.e., amid the Film Generation’s heyday and before home video’s emergence).

More specifically, I investigate the prefaces that begin each updated version, which were written

by series editor Steven H. Scheuer.

Best known for the highlights of his career in TV criticism, Scheuer may seem another

curious choice for the study at hand. In 1953, he started the widely syndicated newspaper

column TV Key, which recommended upcoming programs and later inspired the format of his

movie-watching guides. In 1969, he began a dual role as host and producer of the pioneering
15
show All About TV, which discussed and critiqued television itself. His primary professional

identity as a TV critic likely informed his willingness and desire to write about movies on

television, a subject often ignored by leading members of the Film Generation. Yet Scheuer and

his movie-watching guides have had a much greater impact on mainstream American film
16
culture than has been recognized thus far. That said, it is not my aim to rescue Scheuer from

his relative anonymity among American film critics or measure the underrated impact of his

books. The corpus I consider below comprises is a small body of work undistinguished by its

insight and style (the clunky comma usage is sic). Moreover, Scheuer was just one of many

writers to pen the unattributed capsule reviews in his books, making it impossible to credit him

as anything more than their editor.

But Scheuer did sign every preface in the series, and he used them to celebrate the plethora

of past theatrical releases shown on broadcast television. Hailing this moment of major
 161
technological change as “a previously undreamt of opportunity,” Scheuer commended
17
broadcast television’s plenitude as a solution for the scarcity of access to celluloid prints. In

doing so, he not only filled a modest portion of the discursive gap created by the Film

Generation’s neglect of television; he also established a critical record that makes him an

unacknowledged precursor of the New Cinephilia. Although Scheuer’s appreciation for

broadcast television differed from the styles of thought and structures of feeling that governed

serious film culture at the time, the cinephilia espoused by his movie-watching guides

anticipates the way later film critics and cinephiles would celebrate the plenitude that

characterizes film culture today.

Correspondingly, the next section of this chapter posits Pauline Kael’s 1967 essay “Movies on

Television” as an unacknowledged precursor of serious film culture’s recent nostalgia for

scarcity. Despite their disagreement on its consequences, Scheuer and Kael both understood

plenitude as the central factor in the appearance of old movies on TV. Their respective

contributions to the dialectic of scarcity and plenitude therefore indicate that recent claims

about home video’s abundance—whether euphoric or defeated—are technologically determinist.

In the remainder of this section, I examine what Scheuer thought and felt about broadcast

television’s appropriation of cinema, and I demonstrate how his approach contrasted with the

Film Generation’s muted indifference.

TV Movie Almanac & Ratings immediately suggests a different attitude toward television

than the standard treatment it got from the Film Generation’s most recognizable critics.

“Students of American motion pictures are currently indebted to the upstart television industry

on two counts,” Scheuer contends in the preface’s opening sentence. The first reason echoed the

wisdom of Samuel Goldwyn and Bosley Crowther, stalwarts of an older generation who had

thanked television for its unintended but positive effect on Hollywood movies; they all agreed

that “competition” from TV had “forced the Hollywood braintrusters to make fewer and, on the
 162
whole, better pictures.” The second reason Scheuer gave shared the Film Generation’s belief

that cinema was a bona fide art but implicitly cast aside its demand for ontological purity:

“[T]elevision provides a previously undreamt of opportunity to examine virtually the entire

history of a major American art form.”

Before home video’s emergence in the mid-1970s, Scheuer revised the prefaces a number of
18
times, but he never removed the phrase “a previously undreamt of opportunity.” By 1971, for

example, he had dropped the reference to Hollywood’s rivalry with television and subtly

amended the terms he employed to describe the rewards of television’s plenitude:

Both serious cinema scholars and casual fans of the art of motion pictures are still indebted

to television for one continuing blessing—TV continues to provide a previously undreamt-of

opportunity to examine at one’s leisure, and with little expense, virtually the entire history of

a major American and international art form—an art form, furthermore, that has had a
19
profound impact on the habits and attitudes of audiences throughout the world.

After marking the rise of film studies as an academic discipline and noting the Film Generation’s

global tastes, Scheuer appended a hint of sociological interest that points to the larger purpose

he imagined for movies on television, and to the intended audience he imagined for his books.

Throughout the series, Scheuer framed the archive of movies on TV as a vital tool for

amateur historians who were curious about the way American popular culture had been

depicted on film. Viewers “concerned with American sex symbols” could use television to

“scrutinize Rudolph Valentino’s first silent films” and “dispassionately assess the lovemaking

techniques of such later practitioners” as Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Marilyn

Monroe. Likewise, he cheered the fact that “a whole new generation of movie enthusiasts were

seeing these films for the first time and getting a unique insight into the feelings and fashions of
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20
the 30’s and 40’s,” an era in film history he later called “a vast body of Americana.”

According to Scheuer, the younger generation’s elders had also greeted the “new ‘old’ films” with

unbiased curiosity. “The public seemed willing to momentarily suspend its critical faculties

when watching the old movies, a concession it was not generally inclined to extend so liberally to

other TV presentations,” he reckoned. “Then, too, Elvis’s rock n’ rollers didn’t find the lovely

Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals of the 30’s too ‘square’ and their parents got a painless

refresher course in the progress of American popular music and reveled in the nostalgia induced

by seeing such movies again.” Several years before the Film Culture article in which Andrew

Sarris launched his “auteur theory,” TV Movie Almanac & Ratings also applauded television for

granting everyone the chance to “appreciate the directorial accomplishments of such early titans

as Lubitsch, King Vidor and Renoir, or the refinements of such contemporary masters as

Huston, Ford, Kazan, Wyler, Lean, Reed, or Hitchcock.” (Future editions featured more names

from the roster of Film Generation favorites, including Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman,

Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and Francis Ford Coppola.)

Consequently, television’s plenitude offered a blessing, but it also required management and

discernment from all involved. As Scheuer admitted, viewers who wanted to reap the maximum

benefit from television’s riches needed “[c]areful planning and a carefree schedule.” Beyond the

leisure of wealth or a bohemian lack of worldly commitments, they also needed the “luck to live

in a community with one or more knowledgeable and dedicated TV program managers.” Ergo,

Scheuer was not the only tastemaker who influenced viewers’ choices. Indeed, television stations

imposed their own limits on the medium’s plenitude by taking certain films out of the broadcast

schedule. Somewhat defensively, Scheuer confessed that he had “not attempted to include here a

review of EVERY movie ever released for TV.” “Many of the poorest films of the 30’s are seldom

telecast today,” he continued, “because station program managers have better and more recent

products” at their disposal.

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When Scheuer produced an updated guide in 1966, the networks had since acquired

another deluge of newer titles, and pulled another batch of older ones out of rotation. Compelled

to make room in the series for fresh capsules, Scheuer moved the above disclaimer to the top of

the preface and explained why he had kept “fewer reviews of those venerable old films, originally

conceived and produced . . . during the years of the Depression, the New Deal and Monopoly.”

“With the exception of Monopoly,” he reasons, “they [i.e., the Depression and the New Deal]

belong to history and so, in a real sense do the films of the 30’s and 40’s. They have had their

hours of glory on TV and, with the exception of the greats and near-greats are gradually being

returned for good to the film vaults by their licensees. However most of the enduring and

worthwhile films of these two decades are described here because of their continuing

popularity.” Scheuer might have told readers the book could only be so long, forcing him to

excise reviews of films rarely screened on television; instead, he defended his editorial decisions
21
with a theory of value that expounded on the populist rhetoric in earlier iterations of the series.

But the populism he endorsed stood at odds with the guides’ stated mission, which had been

explicitly articulated for the first time in 1966. “As always,” Scheuer wrote, “we have one

principal object in mind: to make the viewing of feature films on TV easier and more enjoyable

by enabling film fans to be better informed and more selective.” On the one hand, Scheuer

trumpeted the expertise and taste of the critics he employed—their job was to mold readers into

more discerning consumers of movies on television. On the other hand, he seemed to imply that

criticism was effectively unnecessary. If popular approval justly determined the most “enduring

and worthwhile” films, why would anyone need the opinions or counsel of a film critic?

An unreconciled conflict of this sort is hardly uncommon in the criticism written by the Film

Generation’s more famous voices, but it nevertheless speaks to a crucial disparity between the

cinephilia Scheuer embodied and serious film culture’s characteristic styles of thought and

structures of feeling. The Film Generation’s most prominent writers routinely insisted that their
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criticism was more intellectually and culturally fibrous than mere reviews or consumer

advice. In the 1967 essay “A Critical Credo,” John Simon reflects their high-mindedness as he

diagnoses the “main trouble” film criticism faced at the time: “[M]ost intellectuals, even if

willing to concede that film is an art, would not consider criticizing it . . . a serious occupation,

perhaps because there are not enough serious film critics, or indeed serious films, around to get
22
a meaningful dialogue started.” Absent said dialogue, film culture was overrun with “the

commonest kind of bad criticism, which is not criticism at all but reviewing. Reviewing,” he

asserts, “is something that newspaper editors have invented: it stems from the notion that the

critic is someone who must see with the eyes of the Average Man or Typical Reader (whoever
23
that is) and predict for his fellows what their reaction will be.” But Scheuer happily situated

reviewing and consumer advice at the center of his books, fashioning a literal mass-market

facsimile of the Film Generation’s cinephilia—a paperback printed on the postcard-size pulp also

used to bind romance novels and espionage thrillers. In this respect, the movie-watching guides

even looked different than what readers had come to expect from books by the likes of Simon

and Sarris, whose work was collected throughout the 1960s and 1970s in bigger, sturdier “trade”

paperbacks that complemented the purported seriousness of their criticism. Conversely,

Scheuer wrote and edited his books for an audience of “buffs,” a class of enthusiast habitually

denigrated by serious film culture for its allegedly uncritical affection. A buff is, Simon sneered,
24
“the exact opposite of a critic.”

Although Scheuer saw film buffs as kindred spirits, mutually ecstatic over television’s

plenitude, his prefaces nonetheless register a few complaints and concerns about movies on TV.

The chief issue, of course, was the damaging effect of commercial interruptions and

unauthorized cuts. In 1958, for example, Scheuer notified readers that the time of day could

dictate their “enjoyment of certain films.” “You’re much more likely to see an uncut version of

any decent film during the late evening hours than you are if you tune in during the day or early
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evening,” he cautioned. “It doesn’t matter much whether a station signs off at 12:51 or 1:07

a.m. but it’s imperative that shows end on time during the rest of the broadcast day.” The

vagaries of television’s schedule had “subjected” viewers to “such indignities as seeing movies

from which some indolent film editor simply eliminated the first fifteen or 18 [sic] minutes.” But

the tone of his critique shifts abruptly as he recounts an anecdote about the real wages of these

“indignities”: “I recently settled a lively controversy between two film fans who inquired whether

or not William Gargan was in The Bells of St. Mary’s. The reason for the argument as it turned

out was simple. One of the embattled parties had seen the film on TV when every scene in which

Gargan appeared—and he had an important feature role—had been cut from the abbreviated TV

showing.” Rather than being the story of an artistic injustice, the case of Gargan’s disappearance

reads like a harmless bit of trivia for postwar film buffs to store in their mental encyclopedias.

By 1966, Scheuer implored readers to stop alerting him whenever the same thing happened to

other movies: “[I]f your local station perpetrates any of these indignities for reasons of time or

some other factor, complain to them, not us.”

Generally, Scheuer avoided the anxieties about cinema’s ontology and medium specificity

that constitute the bedrock of thought and feeling for serious film culture. In 1968, for instance,

he briefly addressed the increased prevalence of made-for-TV “movies,” a phenomenon fraught

with ambiguity, as connoted by his scare quotes. “[T]hese feature presentations are in reality

nothing more than two-hour TV shows that are first shown on TV,” Scheuer avows—then his

ontological inquiry suddenly ends. Quickly dismissing such films as “so mediocre that they are

seldom” afforded theatrical releases, he abandons the topic without answering the most obvious
25
question: will these movies be reviewed in his books? To the contrary, Sarris stipulated that he

had neither ranked nor listed “television films” in The American Cinema due to “problems of
26
historical classification.”
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Scheuer also bypassed the worries about television’s ontology and medium specificity

that had been disclosed by fellow TV critics, such as Jack Gould. In the first edition of the series,

Scheuer invoked the decline of “live” television dramas but laid the blame on “bland” programs

and insufficient skill, not the conversion to videotape. “The very qualities of immediacy, honesty

and literacy which distinguished much ‘live’ TV drama in its formative years were,” he

concluded, “increasingly disregarded in favor of the meretricious, the innocuous and banal.” His

lament contains a distant echo of the campaign against videotape but left no mark of its own on
27
the debate’s theoretical dimensions. In the second edition, published in 1961, Scheuer sounds

like Crowther when he reports that several of Hollywood’s “second rate talents” had “fled to the

beckoning TV industry.” As a result of the exodus, such “properties” as 12 Angry Men and

Patterns (written by Rod Serling) went “the complete cycle from original TV drama to theatrical

movie release and back to TV as a movie,” yet Scheuer once more neglected to say if the hybrid

origins had mattered for the inclusion of capsule reviews in his books, or for the evaluations

therein.

Given his positive outlook and scant investment in media theory, it comes as a surprise in

retrospect to see a host of barbed caveats about television’s appropriation of cinema injected

into the prefaces in the 1970s. Beginning in 1971, the penultimate paragraph of the preface

featured an unprecedented cry of angst as it gave readers “[o]ne final bit of advice”: “The film

reviews in this book were all written by myself and my associates, and are based upon the

original, uncut versions usually seen in movie theaters where they were intended to be watched

in the first place. I regret to say that all three commercial networks continue to unconscionably

butcher movies in the guise of censorship or ‘good taste.’ ” A partial draft of this passage had

first appeared in 1966, when Scheuer sought to outline the series’ methodology. Knowing that

television stations had carte blanche to alter films, Scheuer warned readers that the series’

reviews were “based upon the original, uncut versions,” which might turn out to be different
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than the version(s) shown on TV. In other words, the book did not review films in the

context of their actual presentation on TV (i.e., William Gargan would always get credit for his

role in The Bells of St. Mary’s). For pragmatic and ideological reasons, it reviewed idealized
28
versions of films that TV exhibited in unpredictable shapes and sizes. At this earlier juncture,

though, the warning about television’s misdeeds went no further.

In 1974, Scheuer built on the prior edition’s angst. Initially, the updated preface repeats the

idea that films of “comparatively recent vintage” had replaced older, inferior titles, but it also

inserts a parenthetical aside about the “substantial number of ‘lost films’ ” that had “disappeared
29
without leaving a single known complete print.” “[E]ven though some of these ‘lost films’ were

seen years ago by me and members of my reviewing staff,” Scheuer adds, they were not reviewed
30
in that edition of the series. “Lost” films had not duly vanished from the broadcast schedule

because they were unremarkable, and television’s plenitude could do nothing to solve the

problem of their disappearance. This preface also braves the series’ first genuinely political

critique when Scheuer lambasts “the former Nixon administration” for an “ongoing policy of

intimidating public TV while simultaneously starving” it of “programming funds.” Rooted in the

principle that television should serve the public interest, these comments led Scheuer to an

essentialist critique of movies on TV. With an annual budget of one billion dollars, he proposes,

public television could enrich America’s film culture by screening “many superior films ignored

by the commercial networks, and could show them without the mood-destroying commercials.

But even a billion dollars,” Scheuer exclaims, “won’t improve the quality of the picture and the

sound on a 21-inch screen, a viewing area much less than one percent of the size of the theater
31
screens for which the films were originally designed and conceived.”

The cynicism about television’s betrayal of cinema that Scheuer expressed in the 1970s was

out of character for him but compatible with the worsening mood among film (and TV) critics.

Yet Scheuer never stopped being a booster for television’s plenitude. Alongside his fears about
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cinema’s threatened ontology, Scheuer proclaimed his excitement over the promise of cable

TV and home video; these technologies made television’s “movie feast . . . ever more varied,” he
32
raved. As Movies on TV progressed into the 1980s, the cynicism fell away, and Scheuer went on

to champion television’s plenitude for the rest of his career. In 2003, for example, he and his

daughter, Alida Brill-Scheuer, co-wrote The Pocket Guide to Collecting Movies on DVD, a book

that harkens back to the first movie-watching guide in format and spirit.

Scheuer may ultimately stand outside of serious film culture because of the terms he used to

praise television’s plenitude, but something else about his film criticism seems even more

significant in hindsight. Unlike the present mourners for an erstwhile and purportedly essential

scarcity, Scheuer never thought or felt that films had to be scarce in order to be special. In the

following section, I begin to illuminate serious film culture’s nostalgia for scarcity through an

overlooked essay by the Film Generation’s most polarizing and galvanizing figure, Pauline Kael.

So Meaninglessly Present

In 1967, Pauline Kael wrote a pair of articles for The New Republic that were eventually sold to

William Shawn and published by The New Yorker, thus beginning the most auspicious union of

a film critic and a magazine in American journalism history. The first piece, “Movies on

Television,” appeared on June 3 and discussed cinema’s migration from the big screens of movie

theaters to the small screens of living rooms. Four months later, Shawn ran Kael’s Bonnie and

Clyde review. Needless to say, the latter immediately overshadowed the former, and still does.

“Movies on Television” seldom factors into accounts of Kael’s career, as exemplified by a recent
33
biography that devotes only a sentence to the article. The Bonnie and Clyde review secured

Kael’s job as a staff writer for The New Yorker and became a touchstone of 1960s American

culture.
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Despite its meager stature, “Movies on Television” is worth revisiting for two reasons.

First, the article can complicate and expand the current understanding of a central and

controversial voice within serious film culture. Given her distaste for re-watching movies and

her qualms about media theory, Kael was an unlikely candidate to author a pioneering article on

the marriage of film and television. Moreover, none of her most prominent peers (e.g., Stanley

Kauffmann, Dwight Macdonald, Andrew Sarris, John Simon) published an article like “Movies

on Television.” On average, Film Generation critics neglected or ignored TV because they had no

respect for it as a medium or as an industry, and “Movies on Television” reiterated the

consensus: “Movies are a combination of art and mass medium, but television is so single in its

purpose—selling—that it operates without that painful, poignant mixture of aspiration and effort

and compromise. We almost never think of calling a television show ‘beautiful,’ or even of

complaining about the absence of beauty, because we take it for granted that television operates
34
without beauty.” Yet Kael ultimately had no special or enduring interest in the questions about

media convergence that she raised in “Movies on Television.” She subsequently took advantage

of the market for movie-watching guides but hardly considered the issue again in criticism or
35
interviews. Therefore, “Movies on Television” cannot be easily assimilated into a summary of

her career, and her motives for writing it will probably always be a little mysterious. These

factors help explain the article’s obscurity and suggest its potential fascination for fans and

scholars alike.

Second and more importantly, “Movies on Television” is worth revisiting for the way it

speaks to serious film culture’s current debate about home video. In particular, the article

interprets broadcast television’s appropriation of cinema as a regrettable change that

transformed film culture’s model of material and experiential scarcity into one of plenitude.

Popular and academic film critics have since decried home video for the same reason. For

example, in a foreword he appended to the 1995 reprint of Moving Places, Jonathan Rosenbaum
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reports that he did not have a VCR when he wrote the book and contends that its “historical

address” would have been “less valuable” if he had. “For the mindset I was working from,”

Rosenbaum recounts, was “closely allied to what . . . Raymond Bellour [called] ‘the unattainable

text.’ This was what still gave movies much of their magic and pungency—the slim likelihood in
36
most cases that one would ever see them again.” Even though “Movies on Television” also says

that plenitude harmed film culture, it challenges the prevailing argument against home video by

indicating that such an argument is not an inevitable response to home video’s emergence, but

one that seeks to naturalize it as the origin of a radical break. Nevertheless, the similarity

between Kael’s outlook and the recent anxieties about home video reveals the longevity of

certain styles of thought and structures of feeling for serious film culture. In the remainder of

this section, then, I situate “Movies on Television” within the context of Kael’s career and

demonstrate how its refusal of television’s plenitude anticipates serious film culture’s recent

nostalgia for the scarcity of an era before and without home video.

“Movies on Television” establishes the terms of Kael’s analysis through a metaphor that

combines her signature brio with a surprising emphasis on autobiography. Although Kael’s

colloquial diction inspired intimate bonds with readers, she only sporadically divulged private

details in her criticism; the inaugural paragraph of “Movies on Television” is an exception to this

self-prescribed rule. Here, Kael recalls being a passenger in an airplane as it waited for landing

clearance by circling her native northern California:

[S]pread out under me were the farm where I was born, the little town where my

grandparents were buried, the city where I had gone to school, the cemetery where my

parents were, the homes of my brothers and sisters, Berkeley, where I had gone to college,

and the house where at that moment, while I hovered high above, my little daughter and my

dogs were awaiting my return. It was as though my whole life were suspended in time—as
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though no matter where you’d gone, what you’d done, the past were all still there,

present, if you just got up high enough to attain the proper perspective. (135)

At a glance, Kael’s reverie may sound rich with happy memories, but it soon becomes clear that

she wanted to make the opposite impression. Hovering over the past in its entirety had

demeaned her “sense of the passage of life,” a phrase she uses in the article’s conclusion (144).

Furthermore, Kael writes, she felt “a comparable sensation” to that flight when she “turn[ed]

from the news programs or the discussion shows on television to the old movies,” an experience

she also defined by the indiscriminate nature of its overabundance (135). Accordingly, watching

old movies on TV had a detrimental effect on her feeling for film history. The voracious recycling

of past theatrical releases on broadcast television, a practice that reached its zenith as Kael wrote

“Movies on Television,” made all films seem equally available, accessible, and valuable to her,

and thus not as meaningful or resonant.

In the article’s second paragraph, Kael starts to map the terrain of film culture’s newly

paradigmatic plenitude. Here, she enfolds the varied repercussions of plenitude into a novel and

discomfiting cultural horizon:

So much of what formed our tastes and shaped our experiences, and so much of the garbage

of our youth that we never thought we’d see again—preserved and exposed to eyes and

minds that might well want not to believe that this was an important part of our past. Now

these movies are there for new generations, to whom they cannot possibly have the same

impact or meaning, because they are all jumbled together, out of historical sequence. Even

what may deserve an honorable position in movie history is somehow dishonored by being

so available, so meaninglessly present. Everything is in hopeless disorder, and that is the

way new generations experience our movie past. (135)

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Measured against the breadth of Kael’s career, this diagnosis is odd. Its desire to fix the

meanings and values of old movies and shield them from new audiences is difficult to square

with Kael’s more common anti-pedagogical rebelliousness, just as its earnest worry for a canon

of “honorable” films contrasts with her usual aesthetic iconoclasm. Typically, Sanford Schwartz

maintains, Kael “reiterated and forthrightly explored tastes and emotions of hers that were
37
radically different from that of consensus thinking.” Likewise, Richard Combs attributes the

oppositional poses in her work to a temperamental orientation “against the house” of film
38
criticism’s reigning dogmas.

But Kael mounted a conservative defense of cultural elitism in “Movies on Television.” “In

the other arts,” she reckons, “something like natural selection takes place: only the best or most

significant or influential or successful works compete for our attention” (135). Conversely, film

and television’s messy union violated the principles of aesthetic “natural selection” as Kael

understood them. “[A]ccidents of commerce” resulted in movies being “sold in blocks or

packages” to the networks, and television executives then blindly exhibited “the worst with the

mediocre and the best, the successes with the failures, [and] the forgotten with the half

forgotten.” In Kael’s estimate, the ecology of value worked correctly for music and literature, but

cinema circumvented any such organic laws because audiences were too eager to embrace the

medium’s “fodder,” now readily available on television. “If it took some effort to see old movies,”

she conjectures, “we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the

good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that

audiences walked out on thirty years ago” (136).

The collective ability to discern the value of individual films and film art in general were

therefore at stake in what Kael regarded as television’s callous and bottomless appropriation of

cinema. She reacted to television’s plenitude by espousing the ancient belief that value is
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inherent to aesthetic objects, an axiology in conflict with the purported relativism for which

her more conservative peers had taken her to task. It would be more accurate, however, to say

that Kael had a fluid theory of value—her criticism swung from conventional elitism to full-

throated populism and back again. For her, the word art was an honorific label that only a few

films had earned, but she also thought lofty ambitions hampered most movies. Ordinary films,

and many of the films that gave her the most pleasure, were definitely not art, yet no apologies
39
were necessary for liking the superficial thrills in a good bit of “trash.” As she said with the

inimitable frankness of her upbringing in the American West, “Loving movies is a very peculiar
40
love-hate relationship. I mean, you love what they can be, but you also love the crap they are.”

When she thought a movie really was better than run-of-the-mill crap, Kael gushed: she

compared The Godfather Part II to Tolstoy, and Last Tango in Paris to Stravinsky.

Kael’s self-appointed role as a tastemaker puts a spotlight on the chief paradox of upper-

middlebrow cultural criticism. As Gilbert Seldes had before her, Kael tried to elevate popular

tastes, which sometimes required her to denigrate what was already popular. But she also tried

to dignify the mass audience’s own judgments, which sometimes required her to celebrate what

was already popular. No one combined biting superiority with populist cheek quite like Kael,

though she never reconciled the gap between these poles. At the outset of “Movies on

Television,” then, Kael proclaimed that film culture had lost its fortifying scarcity and gained an

alarming plenitude in the bargain—even the best films were “dishonored by being so available,

so meaninglessly present.” Broadcast television had allegedly provided a facile, disorganized

access to film history that degraded popular tastes, diminished cinema’s reputation as a
41
medium, and momentarily dampened Kael’s cinephilia.

Alongside its questions about film history, cinema’s ontology, and media spectatorship,

“Movies on Television” also considered aesthetic questions. The article’s predominantly negative

assessment of television’s effect upon cinematic style has since been echoed in American film
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criticism, which complains of, among other abuses, the way that television encouraged more

close-ups in films because they looked better on TV screens than wide or deep shots. And Kael

was just as annoyed as her successors would be with television’s cardinal sin: the way it

distorted the visual and temporal integrity of films in the service of its own traditionally square

aspect ratio and need for commercial breaks. “Big” movies, like The Robe and so many

anonymous Westerns, suffered from an ironic conversion back into a shape more suitable for

the small screen. “Not only the size but the shape of the image is changed, and, indeed, almost

all the specifically visual elements are so distorted as to be all but completely destroyed,” she

bemoaned (137). “There isn’t much for the art-cinema person on television” either, because his

preferred films “lose too much” (141). The films of the great stylists—Kael mentions Josef von

Sternberg, Max Ophüls, and Satyajit Ray—were “not as lively or as satisfying [on television] as

the plain good movies of lesser directors.” As seen on TV, The Magnificent Ambersons, for

instance, was “as lifelessly dull as a newspaper Wirephoto of a great painting” (138).

So it is certainly a surprise to also see Kael temper the article’s tone with a series of

exceptions that made re-watching movies on TV a compelling practice. Kael spoke for all Film

Generation critics when she said that past theatrical releases were indisputably superior to

television’s original programs, never mind how the small screen, commercial interruptions, or

unauthorized cuts had ravaged them. “[A]n old movie [is] more entertaining than almost

anything new on television,” she avers. Even minor films that had “good, fast, energetic talk

seem[ed] better than ever on television—still not great,” she qualifies, but “better than what is

great” among the shows made expressly for TV (137). It was a backhanded compliment to

television, but a compliment all the same.

More distinctively, Kael thought re-watching movies on TV had uncovered a secret history

contained within classical Hollywood cinema. Always intensely invested in actors, she now saw

their erstwhile performances as a record of cultural assimilation: “[T]hrough our window on the
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past we see the actors acting out other dramas as well. The Middle European immigrants

had children who didn’t speak the king’s English and, after the Second World War, didn’t even

respect it so much” (139). Informed by her focus on actors, Kael’s next exception recommended

re-watching movies on TV for the “glimpses of something really good even in mediocre movies—

the quickening of excitement at a great performance, the discovery of beauty in a gesture or a

phrase or an image.” A decade earlier, Manny Farber had made the same case for re-watching

movies on TV: “[O]ccasionally on TV one notices a Hollywood oldie that is haunting for the fact

that it is completely the product of quiet improvisation in the face of a miserable, pulpish story.

In such TV ‘repeats’ can be seen the amount of natural, uncompromised picture-making that has
42
been displaced by the new hack saws of artiness.” Seeing old movies on television consequently

gave viewers the freedom and opportunity to “make [their] own, admittedly small, discoveries or

rediscoveries,” Kael wrote (141). In other words, re-watching a movie on TV could have been the

basis for re-evaluation, a rare rhetorical event in her criticism.

But if re-watching a movie on TV did result in a revised opinion, Kael kept it to herself. Her

unshakable confidence in the judgments she made the first time around was another reason she

had no desire to re-watch movies. As one might imagine, such confidence tended to rankle her
43
peers. Thus Kael’s staunchest critics were also liable to guffaw at the most ecstatic exception

she made for re-watching movies on TV. “[S]ometimes the experience of reseeing is wonderful,”

she admits, because it can furnish “a confirmation of the general feeling that was all that

remained with us from childhood. . . . We re-experience what we once felt, and memories flood

back. Then movies seem magical [again]—all those madeleines waiting to be dipped in tea”

(138). To her skeptics, this would have been laughably predictable—Kael liked to re-watch old

movies on TV because they proved she had been right about them all along! Yet this exception

also reflected her ardent faith in childhood impressions, a longstanding conviction nourished by

her hatred of academicism in American culture. She explored this concept further in the widely
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read 1969 essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” As children, Kael reminisces, she and her

friends “longed for Saturday afternoon and sanctuary—the anonymity and impersonality of

sitting in a theatre, just enjoying ourselves, not having to be responsible, not having to be

‘good.’ ” “Perhaps the single most intense pleasure of moviegoing,” she insists, “is this non-

aesthetic one of escaping from the responsibilities of having the proper responses required of us
44
in our official (school) culture.”

Along these lines, the exceptions Kael outlined also sprung from her irreverent attitude

toward much of serious film culture. Throughout her career, Kael snatched every plausible

excuse to parody the most egregious pieties of the whole film-as-art Weltanschauung. In 1964,

she wrote, “Movies have changed in these [past] ten years, disastrously in the last few years;
45
they have become ‘cinema.’ ” Three years later, she said in “Movies on Television” that the

“educated person who became interested in cinema as an art form through Bergman or Fellini

or Resnais is an alien to me (and my mind goes blank with hostility and indifference when he

begins to talk)” (141). In “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” she lambasted leading members of the

Film Generation for propagating film-as-art discourses: “There is so much talk now about the

art of the film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not
46
works of art.” But the signature example of this irreverence is her relentless, hilarious

takedown of the 1960 book Theory of Film, written by the esteemed German émigré Siegfried

Kracauer. The obsession with medium specificity in Kracauer’s book struck Kael as misguided

pedantry, dangerously capable of draining cinema’s genuine vitality: “Who cares whether the

objects on screen are accessible or inaccessible to the stage, or, for that matter, to painting, or to

the novel or poetry? Who started this divide and conquer game of aesthetics in which the

different media are assigned their special domains like salesman staking out their territories—
47
you stick to the Midwest and I’ll take Florida?”
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Kael’s detractors may have correspondingly dismissed her understanding of the medium

as philistine, but her snarky swagger was complemented by a progressive theory of the medium

as a hybrid form, an ontology that made film a truly democratic art at its best. In “Trash, Art and

the Movies,” she argued: “Because of the photographic nature of the medium and the cheap

admission prices, movies took their impetus not from the desiccated imitation European high

culture, but from the peep show, the Wild West show, the music hall, the comic strip—from
48
what was coarse and common.” When Kael received a National Book Award in 1974, she

reaffirmed these comments and extended them to cover her critical ethos as well:

Movies are a hybrid, all-encompassing art and I suppose that what I’ve devised for dealing

with them is a mongrel form of criticism. But systematic criticism seems to me a violation of

the very qualities that make movies such a powerful art form. It’s an attempt to impose order

on a medium which incorporates the appeal of the circus, the wild-west show, the penny

dreadful, of theatre, opera, and the novel, a medium that bites off chunks of anthropology,

journalism, and politics, and a medium that is always, of course, the domain of eros. Movies

can take in so much from the other arts, and so much from the world, that the job of the
49
critic is to not close himself [sic] off.

Kael was a long way from the silent era’s medium-specific essentialism in this speech, yet

television was also conspicuously absent from her list of forms that contributed to and

comprised film art. Or at least its absence appears conspicuous today, after television has been

celebrated for its beauty and such terms as remediation and convergence have widespread
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currency. Kael happily scolded her colleagues for hanging onto outmoded ideas about medium

specificity, but to give television credit for contributing to film art was a step too far, even for

her.
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As articulated in “Movies on Television,” Kael’s largest doubts and fears about

television’s plenitude finally coalesced around the figure of the media-saturated adolescent

male. Kael is at her worst as a critic in the passage below, wherein she conjures a clichéd image

of isolated disaffection that mirrors the discourses of media panics spanning the last century:

There is a kind of young television watcher seeing old movies for the first time who is

surprisingly sensitive to their values and responds almost with the intensity of a moviegoer.

But he’s different from the moviegoer. For one thing, he’s housebound, inactive, solitary.

Unlike a moviegoer, he seems to have no need to discuss what he sees. The kind of television

watcher I mean (and the ones I’ve met are all boys) seems to have extreme empathy with the

material in the box (new TV shows as well as old movies, though rarely news), but he may

not know how to enter into a conversation, or even how to come into a room or go out of it.

He fell in love with his baby-sitter, so he remains a baby. He’s unusually polite and

intelligent, but in a mechanical way—just going through the motions, without interest. He

gives the impression that he wants to withdraw from this human interference and get back

to his real life—the box. (143)

Kael painted her portrait of the generation raised on TV with a broad brush, though she was

merely one of many cultural elites to contrast the alleged critical capacity possessed by

moviegoers with the supposed intellectual complacency of television-watchers. Fifteen years

later, she restated this appraisal, telling an interviewer, “Kids now watch television and when the

program’s over, or even in the middle, they turn to the next one. There’s always more television

going on on [sic] other channels so they never really talk about what they’ve seen in the same

way. It isn’t an intense experience that stays with them and they’re less likely to develop critical
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reactions.”
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Kael exploited her clout as a cultural authority to lash out at a relatively powerless avatar

of changing media-consumption habits, but she also empathized with these imagined boys,

making them all the more haunting as visions of America’s future. Through her critique of the

way they consumed film, television, and movies on TV, Kael pointed to analogous dispositions in

her own cinephilia. “If they can find more intensity in this box than in their own living, then this

box can provide constantly what we got at the movies only a few times a week. Why,” she

wonders, “should they move away from it, or talk, or go out of the house, when they will only

experience that as a loss?” “Of course, we can see why they should,” she answers, referring to the

wisdom of her generation. But the younger generation had no such wisdom. It was unable to

resist television’s vacuous plenitude and lacked an authentic relationship to the past, Kael

charged: “[T]heir inability to make connections outside is frighteningly suggestive of ways in

which we, too, are cut off. It’s a matter of degree. If we stay up half the night to watch old movies

and can’t face the next day, it’s partly, at least, because of the fascination of our own movie past;

[but] they live in a past they never had, like people who become obsessed by places they have

only imaginative connections with” (143).

That said, Kael admitted that moviegoers could also be seduced by the regressive pull of

television’s plenitude. “For some,” she surmises, “movies probably contribute to that self-

defeating romanticizing of expectations which makes life a series of disappointments. They

watch the same movies over and over on television, as if they were constantly returning to the

scene of the crime—the life they were so busy dreaming about that they never lived. They are

paralyzed by longing, while those less romantic can leap the hurdle” (143-4). Kael must have

counted herself among the “less romantic” about movies yet nonetheless felt hounded by a

creeping sense of self-recrimination for a life misspent at and with the movies, a perennial

hazard for film critics, from Alexander Bakshy to David Thomson. Indeed, Kael thought the very

pastness of movies—both their indexicality and their status as cultural artifacts—belonged

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precisely in the past. “[T]here is always something a little shameful about living in the past;

we feel guilty, stupid,” she asserts, “as if the pleasure we get [from movies] needed some

justification that we can’t provide” (143). This is why the sudden plenitude of film culture made

her uneasy, and why the sensation of flying above the accumulated signs of her personal history

disturbed her. Television’s plenitude not only upset Kael’s sensibilities as a self-described

“FOOF,” a Friend of Old Films; it also upset the control she could wield in writing the narrative

of her own life.

The ending of “Movies on Television” yokes these troubling threads into a candid expression

of betrayal and loss. To conclude the article, Kael briefly offers theories of photography, film,

and television, and combines them with reflections on human mortality and the psychological

necessity of accepting death. “When we see on television photographic records of the past,” she

attests, “they seem almost too strong for the box, too pure for it.” As captured by still

photographs, Kael professes, “The past has a terror and a fascination and a beauty beyond

almost anything else. We are looking at the dead . . . it’s an almost unbearable experience.”

However, she exclaims, “When our wonder and our grief are interrupted or followed by a

commercial, we want to destroy the ugly box.” Selling products—television’s raison d’être—

marred the ineffable, disquieting beauty otherwise generated by still photographs.

To counter her own critique of television’s painful misuse of still photographs, Kael disclosed

a last exception for re-watching movies on TV. When seen on TV, she allows, “Old movies don’t

tear us apart like that. They do something else, which we can take more of and take more easily:

they give us a sense of the passage of life.” How did they do that? They afforded a seemingly

unprecedented chance to observe actors across the arc of their careers. “Here is Elizabeth Taylor

as a plump matron,” Kael enthuses, “and here, an hour later, as an exquisite child. . . . Here is

Orson Welles as a young man, playing a handsome old man, and here is Orson Welles as he has

really aged” (144). For Kael, re-watching movies on TV was neither a vehicle for new evaluations
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and refined judgments, nor a resource for the type of close textual analysis that could make
52
film criticism more scholarly or “scientific.” Instead, re-watching movies on TV supplied her

the means to circumvent the false ideology of television’s plenitude and restore her “sense of the

passage of life.” By following an actress as she aged, magically grew younger, and then aged

again, Kael could confront the inescapable fact of her own mortality. And she needed the

reminder because television’s plenitude, which had also engulfed film culture, promised the

opposite: immortality through its infinite presence.

In the article’s final paragraph, then, Kael sounds a last caution about the way that “[o]ld

movies on television” had served as a “gigantic, panoramic novel that we can tune in to and out

of.” “People watch avidly for a few weeks or months or years and then give up; others tune in

when they’re away from home in lonely hotel rooms, or regularly, at home, a few nights a week

or every night,” she writes. Amidst television’s regime of access and plenitude, “The rest of the

family may ignore the passing show, may often interrupt, because individual lines of dialogue or

details of plot hardly seem to matter as they did originally” (145). With her feeling that these

precious “details” had been rendered insignificant or obsolete by television’s ever-running flow,

Kael foreshadowed Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard’s overlapping diagnoses of

postmodernity as a condition that signaled the loss of affect and history, a condition for which
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television was the ultimate emblem. Although she frequently tried to ensure that cinema never

drowned in pleas for its aesthetic legitimacy, Kael just as often laid bare the fact that she loved
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movies “beyond all reason.” As a cinephile, or as whatever term she preferred to describe her

love of movies, Kael cared deeply about the medium, and about the details that evidently had

little meaning or value for a younger generation.

These themes can also be found in Kael’s oft-quoted program note for a repertory screening

of the 1947 film Shoeshine (directed by Vittorio De Sica), in which she humbly confesses to

seeing the film upon its release “after one of those terrible lovers’ quarrels that leave one in a
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state of incomprehensible despair.” Her grief compounded as she exited the theater and

“overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend” about the film’s

failure to match its critical acclaim. Kael then slipped into despondency, “crying blindly,” she

writes, “no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness

I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of

Shoeshine. For if people cannot feel Shoeshine,” she asks, “what can they feel?” Coincidentally,

her lover had also seen Shoeshine that night and “emerged in tears” from the theater: “Yet our

tears for each other and for Shoeshine did not bring us together. Life, as Shoeshine
55
demonstrates, is too complex for facile endings.” This is the kind of passion that Greil Marcus,

one of Kael’s most ardent admirers, counted as one of her greatest strengths: “The result [of

reading Kael] isn’t admiration or envy. It can be a kind of wonder: what would it feel like to
56
write like that—to feel that alive?”

Kael’s passion fueled her sensitivity to life, and to movies, so she bristled at the insensitivity

of the young woman leaving Shoeshine, and at the insensitivity of a younger generation for

whom a “movie on television is no longer just a drama in itself; it is part of a huge ongoing

parade.” “To a new generation,” she lamented, “what does it matter if a few gestures and a

nuance are lost, when they know they can’t watch the parade on all the channels at all hours

anyway?” (145). As media scholar Jeffrey Sconce remarks, a key component of television’s

“liveness” is the audience’s knowledge that the medium marches on without them, “even when
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the set is turned off.” Or, in Kael’s words, “The television generation knows there is no end; it

all just goes on” (145). Television was thus the electronic incarnation of plenitude, and Kael

declared that cinema had submitted itself to television’s ontological and cultural hegemony.

Broadly speaking, Kael’s preoccupation with cinema’s history throughout “Movies on

Television” marks a crucial difference between the reception of movies on broadcast television

and the critical receptions of prior technological changes, the coming of sound foremost among
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them. When silent-era aficionados contemplated the prospect of synchronized sound and

speech, they looked to cinema’s unrealized future, not its actual (or even its idealized) past.

Television and home video, on the other hand, have been accused of trampling on the history of

an art form that had already won huge victories in its bid for legitimacy. Rather than being seen

as threats to its tantalizing promise, these technological changes have been greeted by serious

film culture as affronts to cinema’s glorified past. Moreover, serious film culture has routinely

cited plenitude as the cause for cinephilia’s demise in the decades since “Movies on Television”

appeared. Kael’s article is thus most relevant now for the way it exposes the technological

determinism behind the claims against home video’s plenitude, and for the way it anticipates

serious film culture’s recent nostalgia for scarcity, which I discuss at greater length in the next

section.

But the author and her article can also pose one more challenge to serious film culture today.

Setting aside any valid protests about Kael’s prohibition on re-watching movies, an element of

this idiosyncratic stricture still possesses the power to unsettle some of serious film culture’s

foundational assumptions, a legacy that would undoubtedly make her proud. Through her

conviction that movies should be pinned permanently to the instant of their creation (or,

perhaps, to the instant in which a cinephile first encounters them), Kael rejected the allure of

ahistorical nostalgia and dreams of immortality. She wanted everyone to move forward without

pity or regret and never demurred from the stance that movies, and our memories of them,

should recede into the past. Her unconventional cinephilia might therefore serve as a bracing

tonic for decades of brows furrowed by cinema’s purported fragility. While serious film culture

agonizes over the potential disappearance of celluloid and the random role home video plays in

the preservation of film history, Kael’s “Movies on Television” invites cinephiles to think more

profoundly about the possibility that they cling too tightly to the movies, and to the technologies
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used to create, distribute, and exhibit them. In doing so, though, Kael never asks any

cinephile to forego her love of movies, which she herself never relinquished.

Special Because It Was Rare

Triggered by a moment of major technological change, “Movies on Television” set out to

diagnose an urgent malady in American film culture, but its message failed to register with

fellow critics and cinephiles. The article’s doubts about the abundant and unorganized

appearance of past theatrical releases on broadcast television had little or no effect on the Film

Generation’s collective ardor for cinema. The medium was in the midst of its cultural

ascendance, and TV could be easily dismissed as nothing more than a nuisance. Meanwhile,

Pauline Kael herself seemed to rapidly recover from the ennui she fought in “Movies on

Television.” Throughout the 1970s, she heralded a succession of new releases, including Mean

Streets (directed by Martin Scorsese) and Nashville (directed by Robert Altman), for their

escalating achievements in film art. Of the groundbreaking eroticism in Last Tango in Paris,
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Kael exclaimed: “The movie breakthrough has finally come.” Ultimately, her cinephilia

withstood the peril of broadcast television’s plenitude, a peril never felt as keenly by the rest of

serious film culture.

“Movies on Television” had no discernible impact on the Film Generation, yet the article’s

primary concerns about plenitude have reappeared in serious film culture’s current debate

about home video. Since the mid-1990s, the rise of DVDs and other digital technologies has led

many film critics and cinephiles to reject home video’s plenitude in ways that recall Kael’s fears

about TV. For her successors, home video’s plenitude introduces several of the same

consequences she attributed to broadcast television. In both accounts, plenitude weakens the

capacity for discernment, tarnishes cinema’s stature, and signals the end of cinephilia. Due in
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part to the lack of interest in “Movies on Television,” these parallels have gone unnoticed by

serious film culture.

However, the current debate about home video has also revolved around a central

preoccupation not found in Kael’s article. In place of her idea that broadcast television’s

plenitude distorted the linear march of time, another idea has been proposed: home video’s

plenitude robs cinephilia of its essence, an essence said to be located in the former scarcity of

access to celluloid prints. This idea has been the bedrock for a surge of nostalgia within serious

film culture, chiefly felt among the film critics and cinephiles who lived through the Film

Generation’s peak years. Their nostalgia for scarcity departs from Kael’s desire to preserve her

“sense of the passage of life,” but it otherwise matches the anguished tone she adopted in

“Movies on Television.” Together, these worried responses echo the silent-era aficionados who

met the coming of sound with alarm and despair, thus demonstrating an element of continuity

in serious film culture’s styles of thought and structures of feeling across distinct moments of

major technological change.

In the remainder of this chapter, my analysis focuses on a few key examples of the nostalgia

for scarcity, starting with a short but influential article, Susan Sontag’s “The Decay of Cinema.”

Although its cynicism made this article a cousin to Kael’s polemical piece, “The Decay of

Cinema” was unlike “Movies on Television” in that it immediately became a touchstone to

members of the Film Generation who shared Sontag’s bleak assessment of cinema’s present and

her bleaker outlook for cinema’s future. Most significantly, the article offered a eulogy to

cinephilia that cited two main causes for its death: the prevalence of non-theatrical formats, and

the plenitude of moving images in daily life. “The Decay of Cinema” has subsequently ushered in

a series of likeminded critiques that borrow its tone while combining the causes it cites for

cinephilia’s death into a single disease—home video’s plenitude.

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But the influence of Sontag’s jeremiad has gone in the opposite direction as well. As I

discuss below, “The Decay of Cinema” has also been a lynchpin for film critics and cinephiles

who reject its nostalgia and champion the various kinds of plenitude that characterize film

culture today. In this respect, the current debate about home video recalls the brand of

cinephilia embodied by Steven H. Scheuer and promoted by his movie-watching guides. This so-

called New Cinephilia mirrors the enthusiasm Scheuer expressed for broadcast television’s

plenitude and follows his attempt to make information about the movies more readily available.

By highlighting the unacknowledged similarities between these replies to separate moments of

major technological change, I seek to challenge the belief that home video’s plenitude represents

a radical break in film history and film culture. In doing so, I also wish to challenge the belief

that the dialectic of scarcity and plenitude can be used to determine the value of serious film

culture, past or present.

Published by the New York Times Magazine in 1996, “The Decay of Cinema” defined and

epitomized a mood of millennial discontent that gripped serious film culture as the twentieth
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century turned into the twenty-first. In the article, Sontag uses cinema’s centennial anniversary

to rehearse the biological analogy of its progress as a medium, and to announce its impending

death: “Cinema’s 100 years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady

accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline.”

Sontag saw proof of the medium’s decline in the rash of “astonishingly witless” films that

constituted the “commercial” cinema of the day. These “bloated, derivative” movies, with their

“assaultive” visual style and “unprincipled manipulation of images,” were also a disappointment

“to their cynically targeted audiences,” indicating to Sontag that cinema was now “a decadent
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art.”

Yet the article likely would not have been so resonant had it merely bemoaned the dreadful

quality of contemporary movies. Its opinions in this regard were neither original nor contrarian,
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and even the article’s grander proclamations on cinema’s imminent demise just repeated

older eulogies for the medium. But this is not to say that no one valued Sontag’s aesthetic

judgments. As one of America’s leading public intellectuals in the 1960s, she contributed to

cinema’s broader esteem through her love for the medium and became a hero to younger
61
cinephiles. Though Sontag was not a film critic per se, she often wrote about the movies, and
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her film criticism has been an indelible feature of the Film Generation’s legacy.

Rather, “The Decay of Cinema” struck a chord within serious film culture because it had also

declared the death of cinephilia. “Perhaps it is not cinema that has ended,” Sontag conjectures,

“but only cinephilia—the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired.” To support

her claim, Sontag gives the reader a swift history of film that juxtaposes the enraptured audience

at the first screening of the Lumières’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station with the inferior

experiences granted to spectators of television and home video. “Everything in cinema begins

with that moment, 100 years ago, when the train pulled into the station. People took movies into

themselves,” she writes, “just as the public cried out with excitement, actually ducked, as the

train seemed to move toward them.” Cinema then enjoyed a half-century of unrivaled psychic

attraction:

Until the advent of television emptied the movie theaters, it was from a weekly visit to the

cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to walk, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to

grieve. . . . Even more than what you appropriated for yourself was the experience of

surrender to, of being transported by, what was on the screen. You wanted to be kidnapped

by the movie—and to be kidnapped was to be overwhelmed by the physical presence of the

image. The experience of “going to the movies” was part of it.

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As opposed to the power generated by this allegedly extinct mode of experience, television

and home video delivered a feeble, ersatz travesty of cinema. “To see a great film only on

television isn’t really to have seen that film. It’s not only a question of the dimensions of the

image . . . The conditions of paying attention in a domestic space are radically disrespectful of

film. . . . To be kidnapped,” Sontag concludes, “you have to be in a movie theater, seated in the

dark among anonymous strangers.”

If Sontag had hesitated at the outset to sign cinephilia’s death certificate, her uncertainty

evaporated as the article proceeded. “No amount of mourning will revive the vanished rituals—

erotic, ruminative—of the darkened theater,” she decrees. “If cinephilia is dead, then movies are

dead, too,” she adds, “no matter how many movies, even very good ones, go on being made.”

Her point was implicit but unambiguous: the actual survival of brick-and-mortar theaters was

irrelevant because the true spirit of cinephilia had already perished. Here, Sontag distinguishes

serious film culture’s styles of thought and structures of feeling from commonsense

understandings of and popular affections for the medium. As her commentary reflects, the
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death-of-cinema meme is and always has been more metaphorical than literal. From the

coming of sound to the dominance of home video, talk of cinema’s death has served as a

referendum on the medium’s potential as an art form, and on the authenticity of a given

generation’s cinephilia.

So Sontag maintained that the plenitude of moving images in daily life, not the poor quality

of the movies themselves, had done the greater harm to cinema’s cultural value. “Images now

appear in any size and on a variety of surfaces: on a screen in a theater, on disco walls and on

megascreens hanging above sports arenas. The sheer ubiquity of moving images,” she laments,

“has steadily undermined the standards people once had both for cinema as an art and for

cinema as popular entertainment.” Sontag thus treated plenitude as if it were a new paradigm,

fostered by technological change. Thanks to this paradigm shift, she could “hardly find anymore,
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at least among the young, the distinctive cinephilic love of movies that is not simply love of

but a certain taste in films.” Meanwhile, the movies had become just “one of a variety of habit-

forming home entertainments.” Three decades earlier, though, Kael had decried plenitude for

the same reason. In “Movies on Television,” she regretted how the bounty of past theatrical

releases on broadcast TV had obviated the need to make “some effort to see old movies,”

spawning a generation of couch-bound zombies. The sudden wealth of access led to inertia and

the loss of discernment: “[P]eople sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty
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years ago,” she avowed.

Kael and Sontag leveled their complementary critiques against unique moments of major

technological change, but their missives also reiterated some of the earliest critiques leveled

against modernity. For many artists and critics alike, mechanical reproducibility, consumer

culture, and the growth of cities had conspired to produce a plenitude of images and sensations

whose volume and pace provoked discomfort and dismay. In the 1888 novel Looking Backward,

for example, Edward Bellamy has his protagonist recoil from the onslaught of advertisements

that overwhelmed the urban landscape: “[H]ere the walls of the buildings, the windows, the

broadsides of the newspapers in every hand, the very pavements, everything in fact in sight, save

the sky, were covered with the appeals of individuals who sought, under innumerable pretexts,

to attract the contributions of others to their support.” The plenitude of advertising images was a

“horrible babel of shameless self-assertion and mutual depreciation,” a “stunning clamor of

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conflicting boasts, appeals, and adjurations,” and a “stupendous system of brazen beggary.”

Likewise, the German sociologist Georg Simmel argued that an excess of “nervous

stimulation” had compromised the capacity for discernment among city dwellers. In the seminal

essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” published in 1903, Simmel described the indifference

created by the speed and busyness of urban experience: “There is perhaps no psychic

phenomenon which has been so unconditionally reserved to the metropolis as has the blasé
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attitude. The blasé attitude results first from the rapidly changing and closely compressed

contrasting stimulations of the nerves.” Most pertinently, Simmel asserts, “The essence of the
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blasé attitude consists in the blunting of discrimination.” This is precisely the attitude that Kael

and Sontag later bemoaned when the plenitude engendered by different moments of major

technological change made it impossible to be a cinephile—impossible because a cinephile could

never be blasé about cinema.

Conversely, “The Decay of Cinema” has also been at the forefront of a fresh wrinkle in the

dialectic of scarcity and plenitude. Since the article appeared, film critics and scholars have

frequently agreed with Sontag that cinephilia is dead but have transferred the blame to another

cause. Instead of an overarching protest about the “sheer ubiquity of moving images,” they have

mounted a more specific protest about home video’s plenitude. Access to celluloid prints used to

be scarce, they pronounce, but home video’s plenitude has made it too easy to see almost any

film. Such reports consequently accuse home video’s plenitude of violating the essence of

cinephilia and marking a radical break in the history of serious film culture.

With his work on Hollywood’s relationship with home video, for instance, film historian

Stephen Prince mirrors the tenor of Sontag’s article but narrows the scope of its critique. In a

chapter of the book A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980-1989,

published in 2000, Prince tells the story of home video’s journey to economic and cultural

prominence. Initially, the upstart technology stood as a threat to copyright and profit for the

established filmmaking industry. When Hollywood later embraced home video, the erstwhile

opponent transitioned from an ancillary source of revenue into the highest grossing component

of Hollywood’s business. On the one hand, Prince takes a measured approach to this narrative of

competition and collaboration. Much as the revisionist historians of sound had done before him,

Prince enumerates the real changes caused by home video while also emphasizing areas of

continuity. Within the American film industry, home video had increased the risk of piracy,
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momentarily opened the door to more independent producers, and vastly expanded the

market for pornographic films, but theatrical ticket sales were stable throughout the 1980s, the

rental and purchase of hit movies on videotape reinforced the blockbuster mentality, and the
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pursuit of profit stayed an intrinsically unpredictable venture. Accordingly, Prince debunks the

widespread “myth” that “home video or cable could rescue a production from landing in the red”

(140). Revenue from non-theatrical outlets has never guaranteed financial success, he notes:

“Film production has always been a difficult enterprise from which to secure net profits, and this

axiom retained its relevance in the age of the ancillaries. . . . [N]et profits remain as elusive as

ever” (141).

On the other hand, Prince evokes the essentialism of the silent-era aficionados as he weighs

home video’s repercussions for serious film culture’s cinephilia. At first, though, his appraisal of

home video’s import in this realm seems neutral, perhaps even celebratory. Home video “made

movies far more accessible to viewers and has greatly affected their viewing habits,” he observes.

“These developments may be difficult to appreciate now when so many movies are available in a

host of nontheatrical formats and so much viewing occurs in these contexts. Before the advent of

video,” he stipulates, “one either saw movies in current release at local theaters or on broadcast

television,” a timeline that joins the appearance of past theatrical releases on broadcast TV with

the scarcity of access to celluloid prints. Prince then sketches the terrain of home video’s

plenitude: “Neither outlet, though, offered viewers systematic access to films of different

periods, styles, or countries. In the 1980s, by contrast, one needed only to walk into a reasonably

well stocked video store to be confronted with a dizzying array of home viewing choices . . . This

abundance gave viewers immediate access to film history, an unprecedented universe of films,

and it gave these films greater and more sustained cultural visibility than ever before.”

Setting aside the hint of judgment in the phrase “confronted with a dizzying array,” non-

cinephiles or casual movie fans might read the above passages and assume that home video’s
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“abundance” had been an unexpected boon for film scholars and cinema enthusiasts. To the

contrary, Prince lays out his case for the detriment of plenitude in the next paragraph. Beyond

its commercial success and mass appeal, home video’s intervention “had a down side: film

became devalued as a consumer item.” Furthermore, he insists, home video’s plenitude had

eliminated the material conditions that cinephilia required:

Before video, when access to individual films was more restricted, the opportunities to see or

screen them were more privileged. A chance to see Citizen Kane or Seven Samurai or A Star

is Born was special because it was rare, and value was based in scarcity. By contrast, with

access to nearly any film on video, one’s encounter with an individual title, no matter how

fine or special that title, grew more unremarkable. . . . The low-priced mass-produced

videocassette tended to trivialize the medium because cassettes were so plentiful, so small,

and so disposable, and because they were viewed on television sets. In this way . . . , video
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subjected film to the television experience. (124)

This assessment of home video and the plenitude it afforded exhibits the signature hallmarks of

serious film culture’s styles of thought and structures of feeling. To renounce home video for its

status as a cheap commodity, to renounce technological change for its crimes against canonical

films, to renounce convergence for its betrayal of cinema’s medium specificity—these were all

familiar positions. But the notion that any given film had been “special because it was rare” had

only just emerged in the discourses of serious film culture. Before unpacking this notion any

further, I want to explicate how another writer employs it to link home video’s plenitude with

the death of cinephilia.

In The Virtual Life of Film, published in 2007, film theorist D. N. Rodowick discusses the

state of film studies as an academic discipline in light of the technological changes that
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drastically reduced celluloid’s role in the production, distribution, and exhibition of motion

pictures. His principal aim is to “explore the philosophical consequences of the disappearance of

a photographic ontology for the art of film,” and foremost among the consequences for him is
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the crisis of conscience within film studies. Given that celluloid is now nearly obsolete, film

studies faces a fundamental question about its own legitimacy because of its previous

investment in celluloid as an inextricable component of cinema’s medium specificity.

As Rodowick formulates an answer to the question, he accentuates the strains of continuity

with the past that undergird film and film theory today, though the strains he identifies are

ironic in nature. “While historically many important debates in film theory have based

themselves in a certain materiality,” Rodowick summarizes, “it is nonetheless a historical

actuality that film has no persistent identity.” Hence, he deduces, “[T]here is no medium-based

ontology that grounds film as an aesthetic medium” or ensures that film studies has the right to

“exist as a humanistic discipline” (23). Indeed, the continuity that binds film history together

comes from the pattern of ceaseless changes since the medium’s invention: “Throughout the

twentieth century, the technological processes of film production have innovated constantly, its

narrative forms have evolved continuously, and its modes of distribution and exhibition have

also varied widely.”

In addition to these ironic types of continuity, Rodowick contends, something else “has

persisted” as well, what he calls “a certain mode of psychological investment—a modality of

desire if you will,” which refers to the tradition of inquiry and inference that constitutes the

discourse of film theory (22). This tradition has been “one of the persistent attractions of film for

intellectuals,” Rodowick proclaims, securing film theory against the anxiety that digital

technologies have precluded the field’s scholarly legitimacy (24). Thus the first section of The

Virtual Life of Film testifies to Rodowick’s optimism that film theory can and should persist no

matter what happens to the medium’s foundations.

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The second section, entitled “What Was Cinema?,” accentuates the wages of

technological change. To begin this section, Rodowick echoes Sontag’s cynicism but applies it

directly to the tenures of his professional peers, who “gained acceptance for a new field of

research by defending an object that no longer exists.” “The question is not whether cinema will

die,” he affirms, “but rather just how long ago it ceased to be.” “By ‘cinema,’ ” Rodowick clarifies,

he means “the projection of a photographically recorded filmstrip in a theatrical setting,” a

definition that also eliminates animation and non-photographic avant-garde films, rendering

them the collateral damage in a rhetorical battle with digital technologies.

As his recollection unfolds, Rodowick echoes Prince’s critique of home video’s plenitude and

his corresponding nostalgia for scarcity. At this juncture, I want to quote Rodowick at length

because the ensuing testimony encapsulates both the terms and the stakes of serious film

culture’s current debate about home video:

In the 1970s, it was still possible to believe in film as an autonomous aesthetic object because

the physical print itself had to be chased down in commercial theaters, repertory houses, and

film societies. Film history was a pursuit founded on scarcity, for any film not still in its

commercial run was difficult to see, and the only way to see a film was to see it projected.

Those of us who ran film societies could talk for hours about the location, provenance, and

comparative conditions of various prints with a level of connoisseurship rivaling that of the

most demanding art historian. The materiality of the cinematic experience was tangible.

I mark my personal experience of the end of cinema around 1989. It was some time in

this year that on entering my local video store in Hamden, Connecticut, I saw that [Pier

Paolo] Pasolini’s entire oeuvre was available on videocassette. Five years earlier, I might

have prioritized my life around a trip to New York to fill in the one or two Pasolini films I

hadn’t seen, or to review en bloc a group of his films. For when would I have the chance
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again? That evening, I’m sure I passed on Pasolini and moved on to other things, for

opportunity and time were no longer precious commodities. There was time. For film

scholars, only a few short years marked the transition from scarcity to an embarrassment of

riches, though at a price: film had become video. (26)

Here, Rodowick seems to resemble the critics who neglected or ignored the presence of

broadcast television during the Film Generation’s heyday. For them, film was still an

“autonomous aesthetic object” because the past theatrical releases shown on TV did not really

count.

A couple of pages later, though, Rodowick does mention film’s convergence with broadcast

television. He admits that his “generation might owe a certain historical attitude toward film to

the functioning of broadcast television as a film museum,” exemplified by the “serial

presentation of Citizen Kane as the ‘Million Dollar Movie’ on WOR-TV in New York, surely one

factor in making it the best-known and most-studied film for several generations of American

film scholars” (28-9). “For many of us,” Rodowick remarks, “television was our first repertory

theater, and to television we owe strategies of programming by genre and close analysis based

on repetitive viewing” (29). In other words, when Rodowick says above that the “only way to see

a film was to see it projected,” he means that this was the only authentic way to see a film.

Absent the “materiality of the cinematic experience,” broadcast television was illegitimate as a

platform, but its plenitude of access could be useful for criticism and scholarship. The same

hierarchy of authenticity and utility pertains to home video as well. Even though Rodowick

blames home video’s plenitude for cinephilia’s death, he concedes that “videotapes and DVDs

are precious analytical and pedagogical tools that most of us would hate to do without” (29). But

how were broadcast television and home video different from each other?
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Despite the overlap between these alternatives to celluloid prints, the plenitude

furnished by home video represents a radical break because it can be accessed on demand.

Whereas broadcast television’s plenitude had been constrained by the financial strategies of

Hollywood studios, the programming whims of local station managers, and the average tastes of

American viewers, home video’s plenitude is seemingly unlimited and, most importantly, always

available at the discretion of the user. This grievance about the freedom of choice enabled by

home video’s plenitude supersedes the demand for medium-specific purity, but it also appears

to contradict the litany of objections that serious film culture has lobbed at the corporate and

governmental agents responsible for making some films far too scarce.

Nevertheless, for the scholars, critics, and cinephiles who concur with Rodowick and Prince,

the ease of access supplied by home video’s plenitude is much too great. It promises that anyone

can become a film expert and thereby undermines the record of labor, sacrifice, and refinement

that imbued the Film Generation with cultural capital. Ergo, as Rodowick depicts that fateful

night in Hamden, he recounts how the access bestowed by home video’s plenitude made him

feel indifferent, not excited. Handed the chance to watch any title from the complete collection

of Pasolini’s films, Rodowick suddenly felt blasé. Standing amidst the medium’s accumulated

history on videotape, he realized that film had become, in Kael’s words, “so meaninglessly

present.”

By looking closely at the logic that underpins the nostalgia for scarcity, I do not mean to

suggest that celluloid prints and home video formats are identical as materials, or as platforms

for the exhibition of moving images; nor do I mean to suggest that home video’s plenitude is

identical to the plenitude provided by broadcast television. But I do want to interrogate another

aspect of the debate. Over the course of my research for this dissertation, I have scoured the film

criticism written before home video’s emergence, trying in vain to confirm the claim that

scarcity was the essence of cinephilia for the Film Generation. If that were in fact the case, it
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evidently never occurred to members of the Film Generation to say as much, at least not in

print. What I have found instead are two threads of discourse that defy the purported bond

between scarcity and the Film Generation’s cinephilia. On their surface, these comments may

seem trivial or mundane, but they become more compelling when situated within the dialectic of

scarcity and plenitude.

The first of these discursive threads suggests that access to celluloid prints was often

sufficient and sometimes plentiful. Consider, for example, a 1959 review of Pather Panchali

(directed by Satyajit Ray), in which Arlene Croce celebrates the film’s surprising popularity. In

spite of preemptive rumors that pegged the import as “a long dull Indian film all about nothing,”

Pather Panchali was “well into its fifth month at the Fifth Avenue Cinema” when Croce reviewed
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it for Film Culture. Before proceeding with her assessment of the film, she compares its box-

office success to the prevailing trends in foreign-film distribution: “More often than not, for

those who must keep up with foreign titles, the price of attendance is eternal vigilance. The two

[Juan Antonio] Bardem films that have been shown here . . . opened and shut like traps. I don’t

know anyone who managed to catch Raices while it was playing, but then, I don’t know anyone
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who hasn’t seen Pather Panchali.” As Croce’s review details, the window of access to celluloid

prints was restricted for some films and ample for others. Toward one end of the continuum,

Croce sensed that everyone in her neck of the woods had seen Pather Panchali, yet the film itself

was no less special or significant for its ubiquity.

With a sufficient window of access, members of the Film Generation also had the chance to

see a movie more than once. On a small scale, the period’s film criticism contains countless

reviews of new releases wherein the author notes that he or she had already seen the film two or

three times before sitting down to write the review. Critics did so to bolster the credibility of

their reviews, but they also left a trace of the access they enjoyed along the way. On a larger

scale, memories of the period reveal as well how a certain ease of access made it possible to
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watch a favorite film repeatedly. This was especially true for the lucky and obsessive Film

Generation cinephiles who lived in or near New York City, such as Andrew Sarris.

In 1998, Sarris alluded to the prior access at his disposal when he revisited the

circumstances that led him to slot Billy Wilder into The American Cinema’s most sarcastic

category, “Less Than Meets the Eye.” Sarris’s re-evaluation was “motivated by rueful memories”

of being persuaded to distrust his own “instinctive enthusiasm for [Wilder’s] films. Whereas the

moviegoer in me traipsed back [to them] again and again. . . ,” he writes, “the film critic in me

was always heard clucking that Wilder was too clever and cynical for his own and everyone else’s

good.” The release of Sunset Boulevard in 1950 was pivotal for the “evolution” of his “conflicting

responses” to its director. As he bickered with a friend that year over the “relative merits” of

Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve, Sarris felt “defensive” but “stuck to Sunset through thick

and thin,” a devotion that also entailed seeing the film “about twenty-five times during its first
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run at the Radio City Music Hall.”

Similarly, Jonathan Rosenbaum has routinely relayed his penchant for re-seeing movies

during the Film Generation. In the following passages, he ties the depth of his cinephilia to the

access that facilitated his moviewatching habits:

Nineteen years ago, when I was a high school senior making one of those boring, difficult

adolescent transitions—from being a social outcast in my hometown in the Deep South to

being a social outcast as a southerner at a New England prep school—I had the good fortune

to discover John Cassavetes’s Shadows at the New Embassy at Broadway and 46th. It was

near the beginning of my spring vacation, which meant that I could return to this movie

again and again, during the same week or so when I was getting my first looks at Breathless,
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The Rules of the Game, Room at the Top, Spartacus, The Misfits, and Take a Giant Step.
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The first [Robert] Breer film I had the opportunity to become familiar with was A Man

and His Dog Out for Air, which was shown with Last Year at Marienbad during the latter’s

initial New York run at Carnegie Hall Cinema in 1962. Returning to Marienbad again and

again, I inadvertently wound up seeing the two-minute Breer short just as many times over
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that nine-month period.

I took a bus all the way from New York to Philadelphia on March 23, 1968, when I was

twenty-five, to see La Chinoise at a film club screening two weeks prior to its New York

opening, when it ran for just a single week. Part of the reason why I went to such lengths was

that Godard was scheduled to appear with the film in Philadelphia; in fact he never turned

up, but I never regretted making the trip as a consequence. . . . It’s also worth adding that

during the week’s run of La Chinoise that started at New York’s Kips Bay Theater on April 3,
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my friends and I went to see it more than once.

At the time, such experiences were widely shared across serious film culture. Yes, it mattered if

you resided in a city or in the sticks, and the exact measure of your desire for re-seeing any given

film might differ from the insatiable desire of cinephiles like Sarris and Rosenbaum. But there is

nothing notably unusual about the portrait of American film culture painted by these accounts,

and no one who feels nostalgic for scarcity would disagree—they had the same experiences

themselves. Nonetheless, I believe these comments pose a valuable challenge to the nostalgia for

scarcity. Against the grain of the all-or-nothing arguments that dominate the debate, the above

testimony indicates that access to celluloid prints was not solely defined by scarcity, and that

plenitude and cinephilia were not mutually exclusive for the Film Generation.

That said, a caveat to this challenge is in order. The sufficient or plentiful access described by

these accounts was available for films that had been recently released to exhibitors.
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Notwithstanding the titles that had never been recirculated and those that had been lost

forever, it had always been easiest to see a film shortly after its theatrical premiere. Along these

lines, D. N. Rodowick quietly tempers his thesis on scarcity and cinephilia with the admission

that access to celluloid prints was not scarce in every context. “Film history,” he contends, was a
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“pursuit founded in scarcity, for any film not still in its commercial run was difficult to see.”

Rather than being a feature of film culture writ large, then, scarcity was most applicable for

anyone who wanted to watch or study celluloid prints of “old” films. Rodowick thus allows for

ambiguity between the extremes of scarcity and plenitude, but other critics and scholars who are

nostalgic for scarcity often conflate the market for new releases with the Film Generation’s

appreciation for older movies. In A New Pot of Gold, for instance, Stephen Prince calls Citizen

Kane, Seven Samurai, and A Star is Born “rare,” yet it is unclear what kind of access he has in

mind. “Before the advent of home video,” Prince explains, “one either saw movies in current

release at local theaters or on broadcast television,” but his account not only fails to recognize

the ways that new releases and TV broadcasts could be plentiful; it also ignores the possibility of

plenitude in the repertory screenings programmed by museums, art houses, ciné clubs, and

campus film societies.

Whether it sought access to celluloid prints for pleasure or research, scarcity was

undoubtedly a real component of the Film Generation’s experience, and, to use Charles Acland’s

phrase, it must have “sweetened the deal” for cinephiles who got the chance to see an elusive

title at last. (Assuming, of course, that they liked or admired the rare film in question. Did

anyone cherish the frisson of scarcity for an unremarkable film?) But not all old films were

equally scarce. The catalogue of titles owned by distributors, the market for repertory

screenings, the canon upheld by serious film culture—these factors made some films relatively

easy to see after their initial commercial runs drew to a close, while other films remained

inaccessible or obscure.
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Moreover, it is hard to square the Film Generation’s famous hunger to watch movies

over and over again with the implication that cinephiles almost preferred the affective jolt of

scarcity to the fruits of greater access. As Sontag wrote in “The Decay of Cinema,” the Film

Generation had a “vast appetite for seeing and reseeing as much as possible of cinema’s glorious

past,” so its cinephilia was never confined to the indisputable thrill of finally seeing a film you

had only been able to read about and imagine. In short, an accurate history of the Film

Generation would recognize that the era’s balance of scarcity and plenitude was more fluid than

fixed. Hypothetically, the recognition of this fluidity could result in less angst over the supposed

loss of scarcity.

But even in more historically self-conscious accounts of the period, home video’s plenitude

can still provoke anxiety about the death of cinephilia. For example, in a brief 2008 article,

published by Cineaste as part of a critical symposium on “cult cinema,” media scholar Jeffrey

Sconce delineates some of the conditions that have shaped the balance of scarcity and plenitude

since the Film Generation’s emergence, yet he concludes on a cynical note all the same. Drawing

on his own “experience in cinematic enslavement” to define cult films (or film cults), Sconce

remembers when he and a group of friends attended a midnight screening of Eraserhead

(directed by David Lynch) for seven consecutive Saturdays. According to Sconce, this experience

happened within “a finite window in the history of cinephilia and exhibition . . . when film

culture itself was growing in the 1970s/’80s and yet access to certain films remained somewhat

limited.” Cult “thrived” in this window, an interregnum between the waning of the Film

Generation and the start of home video’s reign. “Midnight movies were one sacrament in this

religion,” Sconce writes, but so was “dutiful attendance at the local rep house. Seeing Godard’s

late-Sixties oeuvre (yes, that’s a cult too, let’s face it) used to require proximity to a university or

film society and required a certain work ethic in service of the cinema as whole. Schedules had

to be cleared. Laziness and torpor overcome (Will Letter to Jane ever screen again in this
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municipality? Better not chance it!).” His hindsight may be marked by irreverence, but

Sconce’s memories are in perfect accord with the nostalgia for scarcity explored throughout this

chapter.

As the article continues, Sconce offers a tongue-in-cheek justification for his compulsive

consumption. “Back in 1977, having no insight into the future media platforms on the horizon, I

stupidly thought I would actually have to go to a theater to see Eraserhead,” Sconce quips,

adding that he knew he “had better do so as much as possible before Attack of the Killer

Tomatoes or some other lame stoner fare displaced it on [his] local screen.” So his

“enslavement” to Eraserhead was less a once-in-a-lifetime event than a ritual that occurred

within the gray area between absolute scarcity and absolute plenitude. Sconce had managed to

see a celluloid print of the film seven times that year, but home video’s plenitude exceeds the

access he once exploited, undercutting the rituals and rewards of cult practices: “In its original

form, then, ‘cultism’ evoked an esoteric sense of social, cultural, and esthetic exile, a type of

distinction difficult to maintain once every film became available to every viewer, and once
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domestic viewing replaced theatrical screenings as the privileged form of spectatorship.”

Because of home video, Sconce avers, cultism morphed from an “intense fetishization of a

single film” into “an obsessive mastery over an entire genre or subgenre” (48-9). This

transformation, which he considers “symptomatic of a larger crisis in cinephilia,” began with

home video’s plenitude and will end with cinephilia’s probable death. “On the one hand,” Sconce

confesses, “I can’t imagine that I would ever care as much about a movie as I did about

Eraserhead in 1977. To see a film on a big screen in 35mm seven weeks in a row, with a full

week separating each individual screening to facilitate reflection and anticipation, presents a

type of textual engagement that is now rare if not completely impossible. On the other hand,” he

grants, “the idea that one can now use DVDs to reconstruct the entire exhibition history of a long

defunct Alabama drive-in is nothing less than amazing.” Consequently, Sconce sees the present
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“cultist challenge” as the need “to prevent this new plenitude from damning the cinema to

the cruel fate of music in the era of the iPod—songs and albums often reduced to little more than

data, more important as potential examples of certain types of music than as music itself.” “I

probably don’t need to see Eraserhead again,” he demurs, “but I do sometimes worry the day

will come when I’ll have the sick realization that I’ve never had access to so many movies in my

life, and yet cared so little about any of them” (49). Again, the possibility that cinema will

become “so meaninglessly present” haunts the dialectic of scarcity and plenitude within serious

film culture.

To Sconce et al., then, plenitude is a problem that plagues serious film culture. In contrast to

this contemporary complaint, however, I have found another discursive thread that defies the

purported bond between scarcity and the Film Generation’s cinephilia. This thread is comprised

of the opposite theme: complaints about scarcity. Directed at both the limited release of new

foreign films and the lack of access to older titles, these complaints suggest that scarcity was a

thorn in the Film Generation’s side, not the foundation upon which its cinephilia was built. For

instance, in the 1968 essay “Some Notes on a Year with Blow-Up,” Stanley Kauffmann says that

the film’s wide American release, which differed from the “usual slow-leak distribution of

foreign films,” was a productive phenomenon for serious film culture, and his article surveys the

negative aspects of scarcity that Blow-Up overcame:

So this was the first time in my experience that a new film had been seen by virtually

everyone wherever I talked about it. Usually the complaint had been (by letter) after a

published or broadcast review, “Yes, but where can we see the picture?” Or, after a talk at

some college not near New York, “But it will take years to get here, if ever,” or “We’ll have to

wait until we can rent a 16-millimeter print.” With Blow-Up, people in Michigan and South
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Carolina and Vermont knew—within weeks of the New York premiere—the film that was

being discussed.

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Around the country, moviegoers had the chance to see Blow-Up “at the local Bijou.” “Before,”

Kauffmann avouched, “many of them had seen (say) Antonioni only in film courses and in film

clubs,” but they saw Blow-Up “between runs of How to Steal a Million and Hombre” (274-5).

“To some degree,” this broader access “alleviated culture-vulturism and snobbism; everyone in

Zilchville had seen Blow-Up, not just the elite; so, happily,” Kauffmann approved, “there was no

cachet simply in having seen it” (275).

Alongside Kauffmann and his populist defense of increased access to foreign films, Jonathan

Rosenbaum has been one of the Film Generation’s most vehement critics of scarcity. Over the

course of his career, Rosenbaum has used his film criticism to advocate on behalf of the movies

that struggle, for one reason or another, to land American distributors or reach American

audiences. This advocacy is the cornerstone of his book Movie Wars, published in 2000 and

subtitled How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See, but it dates back to

the period before home video’s dominance. For example, in the book Film: The Front Line,

1983, Rosenbaum chronicles his exasperating efforts to see the movies signed by the Belgian

director Chantal Akerman: “Due to the relative scarcity of her films in the U.S., keeping up with

her work has not been easy. While I’ve managed to see all six of her features, I’ve had to do this
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in five separate countries.” If you accept the claim that scarcity is a prerequisite of cinephilia,

the circumstances Rosenbaum portrays must be understood as a good thing. But Rosenbaum

abhorred the local scarcity of access to Akerman’s films, which he admonished as part of the

“primitive state of circulation that perpetually keeps important work beyond our reach” (29).

(By late 1982, none of her films had received a proper commercial engagement in the States. In
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1983, Rosenbaum reported, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

opened in New York—eight years after its European premiere [31].)

The problem of scarcity did not just disappear in the age of home video. In 2002,

Rosenbaum complained about scarcity in an article on The Phenix City Story, published by The

Oxford American. In the article, Rosenbaum ponders the film’s veracity as a document of life in

his native Alabama, circa 1955. His personal connection to the film made it especially poignant

for him, but it was virtually invisible to the rest of film culture. “The Phenix City Story isn’t

available for sale or rental on video, and it’s not out on DVD, so you have to take my word for

it . . . Maybe this movie qualifies as history, but if it isn’t out there on the market,” Rosenbaum
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attests, “it no longer belongs to history in any practical sense.” For the reprinted version of the

article included in the 2004 book Essential Cinema, Rosenbaum appended an endnote to the

above passage that expounds on the problem of scarcity: “I can’t summon up much patience for

fellow film reviewers who hold forth on ‘the state of cinema,’ foreign or domestic, because most

things are always unavailable. The fact is, much of what’s available is arbitrary, because the

studios and distributors handling this stuff don’t generally know what they have; they tend to

buy and sell several titles in bunches, regarding individual films the way other wheeler-dealers

might regard separate lengths of pipe” (145). Three years later, in the 2007 Film Quarterly

article “Film Writing on the Web: Some Personal Reflections,” Rosenbaum complained again

about the former scarcity of access to celluloid prints as he defended online film culture against

the Film Generation’s nostalgia: “I find it tougher to feel nostalgic about film criticism before the

Internet, because . . . the choices of what you could lay your hands on outside a few well-stocked

university libraries were fairly limited. Similarly, the choices of what films you could see outside

a few cities like New York and Paris before DVDs were pretty narrow, and possibly even more
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haphazard than what you could read about them.”
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For Rosenbaum and any of the Film Generation’s other globetrotting cinephiles, seeing

a rare film undeniably yielded the “cachet” outlined by Stanley Kauffmann, so their complaints

about scarcity also presented a noble excuse to disclose the depth and breadth of the cultural

capital they possessed. Put simply, though, it is unimaginable that such statements about

scarcity would be written before the age of home video and submitted as positive testaments to

the necessary preconditions for cinephilia. Yet that is exactly what has happened in response to

home video’s plenitude. Like broadcast television, an institution reviled by most cultural critics

until the dominance of cable and the Internet, scarcity seemed golden when film critics and

cinephiles began to believe that it had been vanquished by plenitude. Articulated retrospectively,

the purported bond between scarcity and cinephilia is thus the disillusioned flipside of the

rhetorical maneuver that Gilbert Seldes and Harry Alan Potamkin executed as they reacted to

different a moment of major technological change. While these silent-era aficionados redefined

what cinema had been all along in order to reconcile with the coming of sound, the nostalgists

for scarcity have redefined the origins of their cinephilia in order to reject home video’s

plenitude. But this ex post facto logic also contains a crucial paradox. If the former scarcity of

access to celluloid prints made cinema special, and, as Rodowick writes, the “experience of

cinema and the experience of film are becoming increasingly rare,” then the present state of film

culture should be a gift to cinephiles (28). With access as scarce as it can be without vanishing

altogether, the pleasure of cinephilia should be at its most potent today, when the chance to see

a celluloid print of any film—new or old—is exquisitely rare.

Surely, none of the nostalgists for scarcity feel this way, but my churlish parody of their

position intersects with serious film culture’s longstanding difficulty in proving that celluloid is

inherently superior to any other moving-image format. In the 1991 book The Future of the

Movies, for instance, Roger Ebert applauds the advances in “high def projection” that would

soon give “consumers an approximation of a home movie screening room,” but quickly
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dispenses with the idea that any format could go toe-to-toe with celluloid: “And yet . . . good

as it is, does high def compare with the old standard of light through celluloid? I don’t think so.
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Film is still the best medium for conveying moving visual information.” The conversation then

ends abruptly, leaving celluloid’s supremacy an a priori article of faith. In The Virtual Life of

Film, Rodowick explicitly leans on a hunch about celluloid’s supremacy as he tries to decipher

the core difference between film culture’s analog past and its digital present: “I would also insist

on holding on to the specificity of theatrical film viewing, because for me, intuitively, electronic

images and screens are not ‘cinema’; that is, they cannot produce the social and psychological

conditions of a certain pleasurable spectating. . . . One feels or intuits in digital images that the

qualitative expression of duration found in photography and film is missing or sharply reduced”

(33, 118).

Between the complaints about scarcity and the inability to prove celluloid’s supremacy, a

space existed within the discourses of serious film culture to express a different attitude toward

home video’s plenitude. In the aptly titled book The New Cinephilia, film blogger extraordinaire

Girish Shambu shows how the same technological changes that have caused so much grief for

the Film Generation have simultaneously spurred the emergence of a new cinephilia. To frame

his analysis of these developments, Shambu makes a move common to recent discussions of

cinephilia: he contrasts the tenets of New Cinephilia with those of the cinephilia charted by “The

Decay of Cinema.” “In comparison to Sontag’s,” Shambu dissents, “this is a more expansive

cinephilia: it includes the ‘art cinema’ that was primarily her taste but also many other kinds of

cinema, and it includes the traditional theatrical viewing experience of the era she mourned but

also many other kinds of viewing situations. Further, it is an internationalist cinephilia, not just
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in terms of the films but, equally importantly, in terms of the cinephiles themselves.” Thus

“enabled by new media technologies of the digital revolution and the Internet,” New Cinephilia

refutes “the implication that we have lost not just cinema but the possibility of transformative
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cinephilic experiences,” an implication derived from Sontag’s article and the host of film

critics and cinephiles who have seconded its nostalgia and cynicism (4, 42). Rather than finding

a narcotized younger generation insensitive to the achievements of cinema’s past, Shambu

“see[s] proof of the existence of . . . young, globally dispersed cinephiles who frequently possess

a wide-ranging taste in cinema that spans multiple genres, nationalities and periods. We

encounter them daily on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, online magazines and journals and other

websites,” he writes (4).

New Cinephilia feasts on the plenitude of home video, and the plenitude of online film

culture. Indeed, Shambu’s own participation in serious film culture evinces New Cinephilia’s

embrace of plenitude in both respects. On January 30, 2015, for example, he posted the

following “status update” to his Facebook page: “Wow. I’ve waited years to see Thom Andersen
84
and Noel Burch’s Red Hollywood—and now it’s streaming on Netflix.” The comment garnered

dozens of “Likes” and a handful of equally exuberant replies. For the New Cinephiles, home

video’s plenitude has not only alleviated some of the prior scarcity in film culture; it has also

made it easier to deepen their cinephilia through repeat viewings. “[T]he widespread availability

of films from cinema’s history on digital media and streaming makes it possible to return to

them more easily and frequently,” Shambu contends. “This allows us not only to refresh our

memory of the specific material details of a film, it also permits us to examine films closely, at

our own pace” (9). Moreover, DVDs have put “new capabilities in the hands of film viewers” (3).

Through the shared digital ontology of DVDs and the Internet, home video’s plenitude unites

with the plenitude of online film culture, manifesting in an incalculable number of GIFs, frame

grabs, Tumblr blogs, and YouTube clips.

This activity speaks to New Cinephilia’s fervor and reflects another transformation from

scarcity to plenitude within film culture. According to Shambu, “Pre-Internet film culture was

characterized by a particular economy of production and consumption: there were relatively few
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critics writing for large numbers of cinephile readers. But the number of both readers and

writers has exploded on the web—and, along with them, the dizzying, accelerated frequency of

their mutual interactions. The Internet has thus made possible a new, large and active

community for mutual teaching and learning,” a community comprised of professionals and

“passionate generalists” (i.e., amateurs) who write film criticism as a hobby (20-1). Likewise,

Jonathan Rosenbaum has also fought the Film Generation’s nostalgia and cynicism by

applauding the plenitude of film criticism circulated online: “The growth of film writing on the

web—by which I mean stand-alone sites, print-magazine sites, chatgroups, and blogs—has

proceeded in tandem with other communal links involving film culture that to my mind are far

more important than the decline in the theatrical distribution of art films and independent
85
films.”

Despite the stark differences in how the Film Generation nostalgists and New Cinephiles

value these changes, they agree that a radical break from the past has occurred. As Shambu

notes, “Work on twenty-first century cinephilia has tended to emphasize its uniqueness and

novelty, paying special attention to what distinguishes and separates present-day cinephilic

practices from older ones.” He concurs with this analysis, declaring that “today’s Internet

cinephilia constitutes a sea change from older forms of cinephilic practice.” These changes

subsequently demand “an expanded and spacious view of cinema and cinephilic experience,” yet

Shambu also identifies a “powerful continuity between new cinephilia and the classical

cinephilia that blossomed in France in the 1940s and 1950s. Specifically, this continuity has to

do with the centrality of the role of conversation in cinephilic life” (4-5). In the spirit of the

cinephilia that characterized the Cahiers du cinéma during André Bazin’s tenure at the

magazine, Shambu believes that the New Cinephilia continues the “larger project of dialogue

and debate among writers on subjects related to the cinema and beyond” (6).
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Such optimism for the future of serious film culture is certainly a product of Shambu’s

persona as a cinephile. Whether encountered in the virtual realms of the Internet or the real-

world settings of academic conferences and international film festivals, his enthusiasm for

cinema is indefatigable and infectious. But his enthusiasm for the plenitude of home video and

online film culture also carries with it an unintended echo of the enthusiasm that Steven H.

Scheuer expressed for broadcast television’s plenitude, which fueled his own mission to provide

more information to America’s film culture through the movie-watching guides he edited.

Although my sympathies in this fight align with Scheuer and Shambu, the clash between Film

Generation nostalgists and New Cinephiles is ultimately most important for illustrating that the

technologies addressed above cannot dictate an automatic and unilateral response. In general,

though, the line that connects Scheuer to Shambu and the new cinephilia represents a path

seldom taken in the history of serious film culture. Moments of major technological change have

been much more likely to provoke expressions of disillusionment than hope. The dialectical

tension between these poles is the subject of the next and final chapter of this dissertation.
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5

Hope and Disillusionment

For countless film critics and cinephiles, the dominance of home video has signaled a radical

break from the past with grave consequences. Since the emergence of DVDs and other digital

technologies, members of “serious” film culture have proclaimed and lamented the twinned

deaths of cinema and cinephilia. Throughout this dissertation, however, I have outlined how

such replies echo responses to prior moments of major technological change. In doing so, I have

argued that this discursive pattern challenges the belief that any of these technological changes

stands as a radical break in film history, or in the history of film culture. I have argued as well

that “serious” film culture’s ongoing disputes about these changes reveal that the technologies

themselves do not and cannot dictate how film critics and cinephiles respond to them.

Yet the tendency to greet moments of major technological change with alarm and despair

may only be part of a wider tendency within “serious” film culture toward eventual

disillusionment with cinema. Alongside moments of major technological change, anxiety about

the broader cultural value of the medium among film critics and cinephiles often leads to lost

faith in cinema’s legitimacy and its artistic potential. Consider, for instance, the disillusionment

confessed by David Thomson in a revised edition of his influential Biographical Dictionary of

Film, published in 2002. “This was a book conceived and first written in the early 1970s, when it

was easy to be in love with cinema. So many exciting things were going on. Time and again,”

Thomson remembers, “I was lifted by the exhilaration of a new film seen the night before.” “That

soaring is harder to manage now,” he admits. “I am so much more conscious of the things films

can’t do now—or of things they don’t try to do. . . . [T]o the state the obvious,” Thomson
1
concludes, “this is a book, and I think I have learned that I love books more than films.”
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The age of home video has seen more than its fair share of such confessions, but anxiety

about cinema’s cultural value marks the entire history of “serious” film culture. Indeed, the first

generation of cinephiles could never simply enjoy the movies; they also sought to guarantee the

medium’s reputation and secure their own cultural capital in the bargain. Prominent

screenwriter and film critic Robert E. Sherwood provides a typical example of this conflicted

discourse in the following passage, written in 1922: “For the self-conscious high-brows who

know nothing about motion pictures, and dismiss them with a sneer, I have no respect whatever.

When they discuss this subject, contemptuously or patronizingly, they are talking through their

official hats. One does not judge literature in terms of Elinor Glyn, or the drama in terms of
2
Avery Hopwood, or art in terms of cover designs on the Smart Set.” Even as they refuted the

cultural custodians who judged cinema in toto for the quality of individual movies, the silent-era

aficionados paradoxically fought for the medium’s inclusion in the prevailing pantheon of bona

fide arts.

Against the backdrop of this rhetorical struggle for cinema’s legitimacy, the coming of sound

intensified “serious” film culture’s anxiety. This moment of major technological change seemed

to undermine cinema’s previous artistic achievements as well as the discursive gains made on

the medium’s behalf by its earliest defenders, such as Gilbert Seldes. Although Seldes had in

part built his own reputation as a cultural authority through his defense of cinema’s

unpretentious pleasures, the coming of sound amplified his worry over “the debatable art of the
3
movies” and encouraged him to say that the medium suddenly needed “salvation.” Seldes

managed to reconcile with the coming of sound, but he felt nostalgic for the silent era and

disillusioned with cinema near the end of his career. Meanwhile, some of his peers never

accepted the talkies. In the 1932 book Know Your Movies, for instance, Welford Beaton

repudiated synchronized sound and speech with an air of resignation: “I like screen

entertainment. For a quarter of a century I sought it out, but now I have had enough. Box-office
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conditions in all parts of the world show that what the talkies have done to me they have
4
done to hundreds of millions of other people.” As it turned out, Beaton misinterpreted the

reason for Hollywood’s financial woes—the rest of the world had not rejected talkies.

Nonetheless, cinema’s cultural stature was indisputably precarious before, during, and

immediately after the transition to sound.

Decades later, in a period that otherwise represents the apex of cinema’s cultural value,

“serious” film culture’s leading voices still had doubts about the medium’s legitimacy. In 1968,

for example, Manny Farber mocked the Film Generation for being secretly insecure about

cinema’s real worth: “One of the desperate facts about being part of movies today is that every

thirtieth word might be ‘Truffaut-Moreau-Godard,’ a depressing, chewed-over sound, and that a

heavy segment of any day is consumed by an obsessive, nervous talking about film. This is often

a joyless sound that couldn’t inspire anybody, but it suggests that modern moviegoers are trying
5
to possess the film or at least give it a form or a momentousness which it doesn’t have.” Two

years earlier, Dwight Macdonald had quit his Esquire column on film to write about politics

instead. His farewell film column regrets that cinema’s “postwar renaissance” peaked between

1958 and 1964, a decline exemplified by the “falling off of the recent work of almost all the major

directors.” Worse, Macdonald declared, “serious” film culture shared responsibility for the

decline: “One cause may be the adulation that bathes [these directors] continually . . . ; I refer

not to the humble efforts of press agents but to the unpaid touting by serious writers in serious
6
little magazines.” As he signed off, Macdonald invoked the central theme of “serious” film

culture’s tendency toward disillusionment: cinema’s unfulfilled medium-specific capacity. “I

have been accused of ‘not liking movies,’ which is nonsense: my difficulty,” he clarified, “is I like

them too much so cannot bear to see the medium’s wonderful, infinite possibilities not used to

the utmost; I still think as I did in the twenties that the cinema is the great modern art—
7
potentially.”
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The Film Generation’s concerns about cinema’s cultural value and its untapped

potential were also exacerbated by moments of major technological change. In addition to

Farber and Macdonald’s cynicism over the intrinsic merits of the medium and film-as-art

discourses, Pauline Kael recoiled from the plenitude of past theatrical releases shown on

broadcast television. Due to the abundant but disorganized access to film history supplied by
8
TV, Kael exclaimed that movies had become “so meaninglessly present.” As the Film Generation

wound down in the late 1970s, the arrival of home video compelled Jonathan Rosenbaum to

wonder if the “analytical relation to films” afforded by the new technology would uncover the

fact that cinema had never been “worth all the bother.” Moreover, he feared that “the

competition between film and video” would consolidate the two forms, resulting in “a kind of
9
visual Muzak.” For Kael and Rosenbaum, separate moments of major technological change had

the same effects: they diminished cinema’s reputation, promised to expose the medium’s

specificity as a myth, and threatened to obliterate cinephilia’s foundations. Triggered by

technological changes, these existential crises added to “serious” film culture’s tendency toward

disillusionment.

This tendency is strong enough that even one of “serious” film culture’s greatest advocates

for the benefits of technological change finished his career by denouncing cinema. When the

coming of sound commenced, Alexander Bakshy celebrated its arrival, defying the alarm and

despair expressed across “serious” film culture. Whereas most of his peers spurned the coming

of sound for disrupting and distracting the silent film on the cusp of its perfection, Bakshy

claimed that cinema needed every tool available to fulfill its medium-specific capacity, so he

looked forward to synchronized sound and speech as well as the other technological changes

(e.g., 3-D, color, “enlarged projection”) soon to follow. But his optimism for the utility of new

technologies was dashed by the most persistent and pernicious impediment to the medium’s

progress, the Hollywood mentality. That said, Bakshy did not merely despise Hollywood. By the
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end of his career, Bakshy no longer believed that cinema warranted comparison to the

standards and accomplishments he attributed to other art forms, especially the novel and the

stage. Ultimately, then, his contempt for the Hollywood mentality was just an aspect of his

disillusionment with the medium.

To better understand how such disillusionment resonates across the history of “serious” film

culture, this chapter proceeds with a brief discussion of the 2007 essay “Movies: A Century of

Failure,” written by media scholar Jeffrey Sconce. With this essay, Sconce has offered the most

important survey to date of “serious” film culture’s tendency toward disillusionment. According

to his analysis, a variety of factors have fomented disillusionment among film critics and

cinephiles, but he points to the nature of “serious” film culture’s cinephilia and to the nature of

cinema itself as the primary causes. The former factor allegedly leads to disillusionment because

it encompasses “the melancholy and seemingly unwavering idea that film can never be simply

what it is but must instead be gauged against some imaginary ideal of a film or cinema that
10
never was or, indeed, could never be.” Combined with serious film culture’s unrealized dreams

of an ideal cinema, the latter factor purportedly leads to disillusionment because the initial force

of the medium’s indexicality unavoidably withers over time: “Movies move us, thrill us, scare us,

arouse us, scandalize us—but eventually there is only the photographic record of obsolete

strategies for moving, thrilling, scaring, arousing, or scandalizing. As they and we get older, it

becomes increasingly difficult to sort out artistic power from personal memories of their former

power,” Sconce writes (292). Consequently, he implies, the path from hope to disillusionment is
11
an inevitable trajectory for the film critics and cinephiles who comprise serious film culture.

While my subsequent study of Bakshy largely confirms Sconce’s analysis, the last section of

this chapter counters its pessimism by examining a recent shift in the meaning of hope for

serious film culture. Rather than dreaming of an ideal cinema, many contemporary film critics

and cinephiles wish for the medium’s persistence, and for the persistence of serious film
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culture’s styles of thought and structures of feeling. Epitomized by the resilient faith in film

and film culture that characterized the career of Roger Ebert, the revised meaning of hope

entails an embrace of new technologies and suggests that disillusionment with cinema is not

inevitable for the members of serious film culture. Therefore, I argue, hope and disillusionment

constitute another dialectic in serious film culture’s continued debates about the value of cinema

and the significance of technological change.

An Often Melancholy Pursuit

Despite the notable highlights of his career, Alexander Bakshy is an obscure figure in the history

of American film criticism. During his life, Bakshy worked in the shadows cast by more

prominent peers, and his notoriety as a film critic still lags behind theirs. Today, the Russian-

born émigré is best remembered for a pair of articles he authored sixteen years apart, each of

which pivots on his hope for cinema’s future.

With “The Cinematograph as Art,” published by The Drama in 1916, Bakshy became one of

the first cultural commentators to champion film’s aesthetic legitimacy. In doing so, he

juxtaposed his own faith in the medium’s potential to the haughty sneers of the “well-

intentioned dilettantes,” who dismissed “as utter vulgarity the modern moving pictures as well

as photographs, gramophones, and most other products of the over-resourceful mechanical

genius of our time.” Bakshy confessed that early film practice had produced some “most

appalling results,” but he asked that these failures “not be taken as proof of the inartistic nature

of the medium.” Opposed to cinema’s shortsighted enemies, Bakshy boasted that he could “see

beyond the conventions of the moment” and announced his optimism for the “future of the
12
cinematograph.”

With “The ‘Talkies,’ ” published by The Nation on February 20, 1929, Bakshy again
13
distinguished himself through his optimism for the future of film art. Before he declared his
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enthusiasm for the coming of sound in this article, Bakshy connected the scornful welcome

it had received to the scorn heaped upon the entire medium at its birth: “It is a sad reflection on

the limitations of intellectuals and artists all over the world to see history repeat itself in the

contemptuous resentment with which they are greeting the arrival of the talking picture. Just as

twenty years ago when the silent movies began to stir the world, so today the patrons of art and

the theater refuse to see in the talking picture anything but another vulgar product of our
14
machine civilization.” For his part in the debate, Bakshy had long ago drafted an answer to the

“vexed question of mechanical art” (217). Regardless of their ostensible purpose, he avowed in

“The Cinematograph as Art,” machines could never be operated without the labor of human

hands, so no such thing as an “absolutely automatic mechanism” existed (218). Thus the silent

film met this traditional prerequisite for status as a bona fide art because its mechanical nature

always had to be activated by the creative agency of autonomous practitioners. Bakshy then

applied the same principle to synchronized sound and speech, leading him to proclaim in the

closing line of “The ‘Talkies’ ”: “[T]he spoken drama of the screen will obviously and inevitably

develop into something original and non-stagy—something that will be instinct [sic] with the
15
dynamic spirit of the movies.”

Bakshy wrote “The ‘Talkies’ ” in the midst of his second year as The Nation’s first regular

film critic and went on to hold that post throughout the transition to sound in Hollywood. Like

many of his fellow silent-era aficionados, then, Bakshy is known for his rebellious support of the

medium in its infancy, and for his response to the coming of sound. Unlike the rest of serious

film culture, though, he responded to the talkies with exuberant optimism for their own

prospects as an art form, and for the way technological change could help fulfill cinema’s

medium-specific capacity. Moreover, this optimism encouraged a critical approach to the talkies

that further distinguished Bakshy from his peers and later became central to his minor
16
reputation among film scholars.
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Yet his hopes for cinema and technological change dissolved over the course of his

career, a decline ultimately marked by intractable contempt for the Hollywood mentality and

utter disgust for the medium. Almost twenty years after he penned “The Cinematograph as Art,”

Bakshy submitted his last article for The Nation and retired from the business of film criticism.

As the next section of this chapter demonstrates, the end of his tenure at The Nation therefore

reflects serious film culture’s wider tendency toward eventual disillusionment with cinema. To

establish the context for my study of Bakshy, the remainder of this section briefly explores the

history of serious film culture’s tendency toward disillusionment. Through the lens of Jeffrey

Sconce’s analysis, I show how the dialectic of hope and disillusionment relates to the styles of

thought and structures of feeling that characterize serious film culture.

In the essay “Movies: A Century of Failure,” Sconce’s analysis of the tendency toward

disillusionment begins with the emergence of a thoroughly dismissive attitude among

contemporary film critics and cinephiles. As he notes, this attitude is part of a larger cultural

phenomenon known as “snark.” Broadly speaking, Sconce avers, snark signifies the “love/hate

relationship of the pop connoisseur to the contemporary media landscape”; within American

film culture, it connotes the fatalistic presumption that “cinema’s unending compromises have

finally produced a complete and irreversible artistic collapse” (275-6). This fatalism entails the

belief that “derisive irony and disengaged contempt” are the only “viable modes for engaging the

vast majority of contemporary cinematic product.” Hence, Sconce contends, “[T]here would

seem to be an audience today that appears to go to the movies, not out of an expectation of

actually being moved, engaged, or even remotely entertained in any conventional sense, but

rather to wallow in the cinema as a faltering medium in a failing culture” (276). As an example,

he cites the crowds who “gleefully went to the theater to see” the Halle Berry-vehicle Catwoman

precisely because they knew it would be a “train wreck.” “They were not disappointed,” Sconce

quips (277).
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Alongside the jaundiced affect behind such moviegoing habits, snark has also

manifested in the discourses of American film criticism. The tenor of this discourse is (or, more

accurately, was) exemplified by an outlet Sconce mentions, the now-defunct website Mr. Cranky.

A prime hub for snarky commentary, Mr. Cranky used a rating system for new releases that

presupposed their awfulness. The system ranged from the pinnacle of awarding a movie one

bomb on a four-bomb scale, which meant it was “Almost tolerable,” to the nadir of brandishing a

movie with an endlessly exploding mushroom cloud, which meant it was “Proof that Jesus died

in vain.” (Alas, the quality of the wit is beside the point.) For Sconce, the website’s tone

represents a new mode of “cine-cynicism” that “might be thought of as camp without the

empathy or historical distance, a once playful dandyism decayed, through years of despair and

disappointment, into the giddy nihilism of the bored libertine.” Crucially, he adds, even though

cine-cynicism is predominantly directed at mainstream detritus like Catwoman, it condemns

“classic” and “experimental” films as well, encompassing the whole medium in its withering gaze

(278).

Sconce is chiefly concerned with the current brand of cine-cynicism, but he finds traces of its

disillusionment throughout film history. In his account, the most proximate precursor for the

present cine-cynicism is a global wave of discontent that unfolded in the late 1960s, an “era that

saw a revolutionary Jean-Luc Godard pronounce the end of cinema in the closing frames of

Weekend and a bored Pauline Kael champion AIP’s goofy teen-pic Wild in the Streets over
17
Stanley Kubrick’s seriously important 2001: A Space Odyssey” (274). Indeed, Sconce attests,

Kael was only one of America’s “many film critics” to “rais[e] the white flag of surrender.” These

“canaries in a cultural coal mine” had succumbed “at last to a long-brooding disillusionment

over the gap between film’s historical promise and its actual year-to-year practices” (275).

However, the disillusionment expressed by the prevailing cine-cynicism is not just an echo of

the disgruntled voices from the 1960s; rather, Sconce suggests, it is the logical result of serious
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film culture’s styles of thought and structures of feeling. Whereas “[m]ost people probably

have no real complaints as to the state of film art,” he asserts, the opposite is true for film critics

and cinephiles, who “have a profound, even perverse attachment to the movies” (278-9). “No

doubt those who continue to find the cinema a source of constant disappointment are the very

same people who have (or once had) the highest hopes for the medium. . . . At their core,”

Sconce deduces, “many cinephiles have long been haunted by a sense of loss and failure in the

cinema, making film history, criticism, and theory an often melancholy pursuit.” In other words,

the cinephile’s melancholia requires that he first possess an inordinate feeling of optimism for

the medium’s potential, an optimism subsequently dashed over and over again.

Correspondingly, Sconce recounts, the path from hope to disillusionment has been a recurring

cycle for serious film culture, experienced by critics and cinephiles in “[w]hatever period of film

history one cares to explore” (279). “Almost from the origins of ‘film culture,’ ” he summarizes,

“cinephiles have measured film’s seemingly unlimited potential against the ceaselessly

depressing reality of its achievement” (280).

According to Sconce, four main factors have contributed to the cinephile’s tendency toward

disillusionment. First, cinema’s precarious cultural stature places an extraordinary burden on

the cinephile’s psyche. Although Sconce concedes that “all arts have their critics, pessimists, and

outright misanthropes,” he says that cinema “seems especially cursed in the gap that separates

potential from achievement, history from future, and idealization from reality.” “After all,” he

remarks, “we rarely critique literature for the novels that should have been written, or the art

world for the paintings that should have been painted. We expect television to be crap, so it is

never in a position to disappoint us. But movies,” more than any of these other forms, “continue

never to live up to their promise” (283-4). Thanks to its meteoric rise in cultural stature since

Sconce wrote his essay, audiences may no longer expect so little of television, yet the shift in
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television’s esteem merely reinforces his principal claim about cinema’s inability to deliver

on its promise.

If the art forms that preceded cinema have benefitted from a lack of comparison between

their imagined potential and their actual achievements, it may also be the case that film critics

and cinephiles hold cinema to a higher standard because they believe the medium possesses

intrinsic advantages. Beyond its ability to borrow from and synthesize key aspects of other

media, cinema seems to attract and galvanize the attention of spectators with relative ease, but

its facile allure ushers in lofty expectations that actual films routinely fail to meet. Film critic

Stanley Kauffmann succinctly encapsulates this double-edged facet of cinema’s specificity in a

review of the 1978 film Days of Heaven:

From Edison onward, film has, in a serious aesthetic view, been handicapped as well as

helped by the powers of photography. Any film, no matter how rotten, will hold us briefly

just because it’s a film. Whether it’s a sales film in a shopwindow or someone else’s home

movies, it takes at least a few moments for tedium to overcome the raw mystique of sheer

moving pictures. Other arts have to work to get your attention; films begin with your

attention. But then they have to hold it. That’s the burden: having grabbed you so easily,
18
films have to justify their extravagant powers.

Cinema’s precarious cultural stature is thus a product not only of the medium’s need to measure

up to its precursors among the bona fide arts, but also of the outsized expectations that follow its

medium-specific assets.

As Sconce illustrates in his essay, cinema’s precarious cultural stature has been intimately

tied to the second and third factors in the tendency toward disillusionment: the medium’s birth

in a capitalist economy, and the impact of technological change. “Born of modernity’s new
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technologies, modes of production, and mass cultural logic, the cinema has always

confronted the paradox of linking expanded artistic potential with increasing expenditures of

capital,” he writes. “It has thus long been a medium of compromise, reenacting again and again

that age-old conflict between directors and studio bosses, screenwriters and producers, geniuses

and philistines, art and capital” (284). One has hardly needed to be a died-in-the-wool Marxist

like Harry Alan Potamkin to bemoan the corrosive influence of money on cinema’s artistic

potential.

In tandem with the compromises imposed by capitalism, technological changes (and a host

of other transformations) have provoked declarations of cinema’s death. Ergo, Sconce details,

“The cinema has died many times now—the advent of sound, the Paramount Decision, the

coming of television, the opening frames of George Lucas’s Star Wars, the proliferation of

digital imaging and effects, the triumph of spectacle over narrative, producers over directors,

marketing over execution” (283). As I discuss at greater length below, the path that Alexander

Bakshy traveled from hope to disillusionment offers an ironic twist on the typical link between

technological change and cinema’s supposed demise. After distinguishing himself in the field of

American film criticism through his optimism for technological change, Bakshy later mirrored

the most despairing of his peers when he lamented the coming of sound as a wasted opportunity

to fulfill cinema’s medium-specific capacity. Either way, it seemed that technological change

would exact a price on serious film culture.

While my dissertation emphasizes the impact of technological change on film critics and

cinephiles, Sconce’s essay posits cinema’s indexicality as the single biggest factor in serious film

culture’s tendency toward disillusionment. In this respect, Sconce maintains, the medium’s

initial magic turns into soul-crushing monotony when the images, codes, and gestures at

cinema’s disposal become inescapably familiar to the cinephile. “As an art form created from

immutable photographic windows on the ever-accelerating culture of the twentieth century,” he

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describes, “the cinema has always been a paradox: living, immediate, real, and immersive,

and yet historical, fading, and obsolescent.” This paradox simultaneously contains the spark of

affection that ignites cinephilia and the ensuing ennui that secures the cinephile’s

disillusionment. As Sconce professes, “Once motion pictures lose their ability to transport

viewers, to take them to another diegetic time and place, they simply become photography.

Diegesis must always eventually yield to documentation as representational codes lose their

power, leaving nothing but the naked strategies of shaping reality that only decades, years, or

even weeks earlier still held the power to suspend disbelief” (291). In sum, disillusionment

appears inevitable for the members of serious film culture, an outcome guaranteed by the nature

of their cinephilia and the nature of cinema itself.

At this juncture in his essay, Sconce concludes the overview of serious film culture’s

tendency toward disillusionment and lays out his reasons for endorsing cine-cynicism. In

Sconce’s estimate, cine-cynicism discards serious film culture’s naïve investment in cinema as

an art form and corrects its myopic focus on medium specificity. By treating every film “not so

much as a rarefied piece of art, but as an over-determined symptom of a more diffuse cultural

logic,” cine-cynicism adopts “a much different approach to close textual analysis than that

practiced in the cine-culture of previous decades” (298-9). “Moving beyond the often narrow

concerns of formal analysis and aesthetic value,” Sconce affirms, cine-cynicism “present[s] a

more politicized engagement of the cinema as a cultural institution,” one that deserves to be

“continually attacked, resisted, and mocked in guerilla skirmishes of wit, snark, and sarcasm”

(301-2). As it “revels in both high irony and a ludic nihilism,” cine-cynicism purportedly eschews

serious film culture’s outmoded discourses and sets the framework for an alternative “poetics,” a

poetics “that no longer brackets off the cinema from the entire field of cultural production” (302,

305).
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“If the cinema is to be ‘saved’ ” from its “frustrating history of perpetual failure,” Sconce

recommends in the final passages of his essay, “it will be by finally and forever reframing it as

practice,” à la the purveyors of cine-cynicism. Although the scare quotes around saved hint at

his own snarky mockery, Sconce is undoubtedly sincere in his preference for cine-cynicism’s

critique of cinema as a cultural practice. Nonetheless, his essay struggles with the ubiquitous

challenge of sorting out the medium from the movies. By isolating cinema’s indexicality as an

inexorable source of boredom, Sconce’s theory of the medium undermines his endorsement of

cine-cynicism. If cinema’s nature plays such an important role in fostering disillusionment, then

focusing on medium specificity is not only be justifiable; it may also be unavoidable.

Setting aside whatever problems this unresolved conflict poses for the thrust of Sconce’s

essay, it serves my purpose here as a segue to Bakshy and his struggle with the same

conundrum. At the outset of his career, Bakshy forgave the flaws in actual movies because of

cinema’s youth: “I am not so much concerned with what [the medium] actually is as with what it

might be,” he explained in “The Cinematograph as Art” (217). When synchronized sound and

speech arrived, he again tempered his judgments in deference to the medium’s potential. Once

their “numerous technical imperfections” were “removed,” Bakshy predicted, talkies would
19
gravitate “away from the stage and toward a new, authentic motion-picture drama.” As he then

gradually outlined a vision for how cinema could fulfill its medium-specific capacity, Bakshy set

a standard for actual movies that all but ensured his disappointment in them while paving the

path to his eventual disillusionment. Beset by the perceived distance between what the medium

might be and what it really was, his film criticism became a melancholy pursuit of an ideal

cinema he never saw realized.

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We Ask So Little of Them

On January 18, 1933, The Nation published its last column by Alexander Bakshy. A few months

shy of his sixth anniversary at the magazine, Bakshy kicked off the bitterly titled article “More

Celluloid” with an attack on cinema and a lament for the tedium of life as a film critic:

If you do not like the kind of literature that is published in the so-called pulp magazines, you

just do not like it, and that is the end of it. You do not rush into print to expose the pathetic

ineptitude of these weekly or monthly outpourings. With films, unfortunately, the situation

is different. Not only are there woefully few that are worthy of serious consideration, but if

you happen to be a film critic you are obliged to stop and analyze the incessant flow of bilge

issuing from the film factories of Hollywood and elsewhere as if it were really to be measured

by the standards of intellectual and artistic achievement. The whole procedure becomes

unspeakably grotesque, resembling in a way what the Russians describe as shooting

20
sparrows with cannon balls.

Loyal readers of his column would have recognized the insult Bakshy hurled at Hollywood as the

latest in a career full of such insults. Indeed, nearly every article he submitted to The Nation

slandered Tinseltown. In one of his earliest pieces for the magazine, Bakshy worried about the

detrimental impact Hollywood had exerted on the actor Emil Jannings: “This very serious,

inquiring, and gifted actor is succumbing to the slick efficiency of the rubber stamp and the
21
perverse incompetence which seem to pervade the Hollywood studios.” In 1930, he joked that

Hollywood’s personnel “suffer[ed] from some strange mental disease.” “Taken individually,”

Bakshy wrote, “they seem to have the normal quota of intelligence, technical competence, and

even imagination. In any collective effort, however, they almost invariably sink to sheer
 227
22
puerility.” A year later, he claimed that the “mysteries of the Hollywood mind [were]
23
beyond human probing.”

Loyal readers would have also recognized the disillusionment with cinema Bakshy expressed

in “More Celluloid.” Unlike his contempt for the Hollywood mentality, however, disillusionment
24
had only recently been a feature of his film criticism. Moreover, it stood in stark contrast to the

hope for cinema he espoused twenty years earlier, and to the hope for technological change he

announced upon the arrival of synchronized sound and speech. Bakshy began his career with the

faith that cinema would fulfill its medium-specific capacity, and the coming of sound only

seemed to reaffirm his faith. Against the grain of serious film culture’s styles of thought and

structures of feeling, Bakshy counted on technological change to propel cinema toward its

rightful place in the pantheon of bona fide arts. But his optimism started to fade when it

appeared that Hollywood had squandered the opportunity afforded by sound.

While Bakshy primarily faulted the Hollywood mentality for the failure to realize cinema’s

destiny, my analysis illuminates the other factors that informed his disillusionment with the

medium qua medium. Over the course of his career, the contempt Bakshy felt for Hollywood

intersected with his hope for technological change, his demand for medium specificity, and his

anxiety over cinema’s cultural value. When the coming of sound brought the arts of the stage

and screen closer together, Bakshy urged filmmakers to stress cinema’s medium specificity yet

himself struggled to draw a bright line between the two forms. Although he always insisted on

the principle of medium specificity, Bakshy ultimately wanted cinema to replicate the essential

quality that underpinned his prior understanding of and affection for the stage, a quality he

described as the “direct contact” between an actor and his audience. Cinema fell short of this

goal for Bakshy and thus betrayed the faith in the medium upon which he had staked his

reputation.
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The path that Bakshy traveled from hope to disillusionment therefore highlights both

the logic and the risks of serious film culture’s focus on medium specificity. On the one hand,

this focus reflects the special affinity for the medium among film critics and cinephiles, an

affinity that fuels their engagement with cinema in writing and conversation alike. On the other

hand, this focus can also make them defensive about the medium’s cultural value and render

their cinephilia vulnerable to technological change. The remarkable body of work Bakshy left

behind could not have been written, I contend, without the fervor of his cinephilia and its

corresponding demand for medium specificity. Yet these features of his outlook on cinema also

opened the door for the disillusionment that marked his retirement from film criticism.

Bakshy offered his first significant statement on the coming of sound in the article “The Future

of the Movies,” published by The Nation on October 28, 1928. At the time, Bakshy reserved his

greatest concern for the fate of the silent film, but he also predicted that the talkies’ impending

commercial dominance would benefit their cinematic predecessor as well as the “theater of

living actors.” Thanks to the fundamental similarity between these media as vehicles for

storytelling, Bakshy believed the talkies could absorb the burden of delivering narrative

entertainment to a mass audience, opening the door for aesthetic experiments away from the

watchful eyes of businessmen. “The industrialization of the popular forms of drama will,” he

enthused, “leave the artist free to concentrate on those qualities of the medium which contribute

most to the creative potency of his work.”

Happily, Bakshy reported, the coming of sound coincided with the emergence of an

alternative film culture in America. Bolstered by the labor of independent producers,

distributors, and exhibitors, the alternative film culture operated outside of the mainstream and

competed with the Hollywood films designed to satisfy the “lowest common denominator of the

movie-consuming intelligence.” “[L]eadership in the art of the movies,” Bakshy stated, “seems to

be definitely passing into the hands of the smaller producers who meet with ever-growing and
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already ample support of cultured people all the world over, because the standards of

quality, and not those demanded by the word ‘boobery,’ are the standards governing their
25
work.” A month later, Gilbert Seldes mirrored these sentiments in “The Movies Commit

Suicide.” He, too, wished that the talkies’ financial success might allow the silent film to reach its
26
destiny as the “plaything of amateurs.”

In addition to its praise for the independent filmmakers who eschewed the Hollywood

assembly line, “The Future of the Movies” highlights two other aspects of the alternative film

culture that gave Bakshy hope: the development of “home movies” and the rise of “little

theaters.” Contemplating the prospect of movies watched at home, Bakshy envisions cinema as a

medium free from the anchors of a single material base, exhibition site, or viewing platform.

“Judging by the trend of the present development,” he speculates, “it is quite likely that the

future movie will be largely an entertainment at home obtainable either through a broadcasting

station or, for the more discriminating, through a film library supplying films, probably printed

on paper by the collotype or photogravure process, and at prices only a little higher than those at
27
which books are sold or hired today.” This prediction reflects the catholic attitude toward the

medium’s technological foundations that set Bakshy apart from his peers, yet it also assured

cinephiles that they could still acquire cultural capital from the refinement displayed in their

personal film libraries, and that cinema itself could acquire prestige from the proposed bond

with a venerated cultural object—the book.

Likewise, cultural capital played a key role in the rise of little theaters. After he briefly

mentioned them in “The Future of the Movies,” Bakshy discussed little theaters at greater length

the next year. In the article “Free Lances,” published on March 13, 1929, he applauds the circuit

of little theaters that had cropped up in New York since 1925, when the Film Arts Guild was

founded. These venues catered to “people who resent[ed] the effects of Hollywood” and craved

“motion pictures of a superior artistic and intellectual appeal.” To combat the dreadful quality of
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Hollywood movies, Bakshy wrote, little theaters introduced cultivated American audiences

to “a number of foreign pictures of outstanding merit,” including The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
28
Battleship Potemkin, The End of St. Petersburg, and Ballet mécanique. Consequently, he

avowed, little theaters met the “principal need” of “[f]ree lances like [Ferdinand] Léger and

[Dudley] Murphy,” the directors of Ballet mécanique: “an outlet for their work.” “Thus the more

little theaters, the more chances for the free lances—and the cycle will be complete. Hollywood
29
beware!” Bakshy exclaimed.

According to many silent-era aficionados, such independence represented the medium’s best

opportunity of escape from the limits imposed by the Hollywood mentality. That said, Bakshy

never relinquished his discernment. Independent artists and little theaters contributed to his

hope for cinema’s future, but he always balanced his support of their efforts with skepticism

about their results. In tandem with the encouragement it supplied, his film criticism contains

harsh critiques of little theaters in general, and of the individual films shown therein. For

instance, although “Free Lances” celebrates the “remarkable achievements” little theaters had

presented to their sophisticated patrons, the article also charges them with “foist[ing] on the
30
public as genuine masterpieces works puerile and utterly inept.” Later that year, Bakshy

singled out Nana (directed by Jean Renoir) as proof that Hollywood did “not hold a monopoly

on cinematic ineffectiveness,” and that subpar “foreign importations” could “find refuge” in little
31
theaters. As 1929 drew to a close, he noted that silent films had “withdrawn” to little theaters

and regretted the sanctuary unduly granted to most of them: “Even pictures heralded here as

great achievements of cinematic art turn out to be, in the majority of cases, extremely
32
disappointing.” In sum, Bakshy maintained, the final value of little theaters would “depend on

the artistic policy pursued by [their] sponsors,” who had to exercise their own discernment to
33
counter Hollywood’s “standardization of form and the resulting moronization of content.”
 231
Bakshy tried to employ the same principle to assess the coming of sound, though his

pursuit of distinction in support of the talkies also nudged him toward a hopeful absolutism.

Absent the a priori judgment of sound common among his peers, Bakshy conceived of it as

nothing more than a “mechanized tool,” the significance of which should depend upon its use.

“[B]ut,” he protests in “The ‘Talkies,’ ” “the Hollywood manufacturers of films represent

34
mechanized brains.” Rather than the technology of sound itself, then, the Hollywood mentality
35
constituted the true “danger of the talkies.” Ergo, when Bakshy started to evaluate actual

talkies in the winter of 1929, he echoed his prior defense of the silent film and forecasted the
36
younger medium’s “inevitable evolution . . . in accordance with the laws of its own nature.”

“[B]etween the incompetence of the commercial entertainer and the superior self-righteousness

of the intellectual,” Bakshy cautioned, “the talking picture is apparently doomed to grope blindly

for several years before it reaches anything that may be properly described as an original form of

drama. That it will reach this goal eventually does not seem to me in the least doubtful,” he
37
insisted.

Optimism for the other technological changes augured by the coming of sound also

distinguished Bakshy from his peers. Whereas most members of serious film culture responded

to sound with alarm and despair, Bakshy responded by looking ahead to a bevy of new

technologies that could help cinema fulfill its medium-specific capacity, as he did in the article

“A Year of Talkies,” published on June 26, 1929: “The technical improvements forecast by the

talkies, such as the enlarged projection and effects of color and depth, are also sure to redound

to the benefit of the silent picture whose means will thus be enriched for the conquest of forms
38
of expression which are no less fascinating than the flat monochrome of the film of today.” By

March of 1930, the silent film seemed like a lost cause to Bakshy, but a talkie he reviewed that

month had vindicated his trust in color. “Even if we concede considerable merit to the story,

dialogue, and acting in The Vagabond King . . . ,” he proclaimed, “it is its color that makes this
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picture so different from others and so vibrant with dramatic sentiment and pictorial

loveliness.” The film’s effective use of color rebuked the “naïve enthusiasts who have been

denouncing color in favor of black and white as the only ‘art’ form of the movies.” To the

contrary, Bakshy declared, “There can be no question that color is one of the most important
39
means of cinematic expression.”

His hope for the utility of technological change differed from serious film culture’s

overwhelming tenor, but it also signaled consensus in one crucial respect. As the coming of

sound commenced, Bakshy and his fellow silent-era aficionados agreed that cinema had not yet

fulfilled its medium-specific capacity. Along these lines, Gilbert Seldes spoke for most upper-

middlebrow commentators when he said that the coming of sound had interrupted the silent

film on the cusp of its perfection. In “The Movies Commit Suicide,” Seldes retroactively

nominated The Last Laugh as the first film to have “completely and exclusively expressed itself

in cinematic terms,” which meant to him that it “should have been the beginning of the art of the

movies.” “It seems, however, to have been the end,” he bemoaned, “for almost simultaneously

with its appearance there came to the moving picture houses the first examples of the tonal

picture which is today precisely in the infantile stage of the silent picture of about twenty years
40
ago.” To preserve the silent film’s purity, Seldes et al. wanted to protect it from technological

change. Conversely, Bakshy wanted the medium to use every tool imaginable, so he welcomed

technological change in the quest for cinema’s destiny.

Instead of leaving Bakshy equipped to navigate the upheaval promised by the coming of

sound, his progressive stance on technological change only fomented his disillusionment with

cinema. On this count as well, the contrast between Bakshy and Seldes is instructive. When the

latter greeted sound with alarm and despair, he unintentionally established the terms for a

potential reconciliation with the talkies. Seldes had immediately rejected the new technology

because the earliest films to use synchronized sound and speech lacked the fluid camera
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movements he admired in The Last Laugh. Their immobility compelled him to concentrate

on “movement” as the essence of cinema’s specificity, but Seldes reconciled with the coming of
41
sound as soon as the erstwhile fluidity was “restored.” As he later decided, technological

change had not permanently broken the medium. Audiences flocked to the talkies “for precisely

the same reason” they had always gone to the movies—they went “because the moving picture
42
moves.”

Opposite the assurance Seldes found, Bakshy saw continuity as a dispiriting sign of stasis.

Because he expected technological change to transform cinema for the better, Bakshy

necessarily adopted a different outlook on continuity. The disparity between his burgeoning

disillusionment and Seldes’s palpable sense of relief can be seen in the sarcastically titled article

“As You Were,” published by The Nation on January 22, 1930. In the following passage, Bakshy

chastises Hollywood for resuming business as usual after the coming of sound:

Last winter . . . , Hollywood was all in a state of turmoil as it peered anxiously into the future

and made frantic efforts to adjust itself to the new conditions. Today, to judge by its recent

films, it must again be enjoying the comfortable feeling of restored stability, in fact, of being

back where it was before all this rumpus began. There is indeed something almost uncanny

in the ease with which the new medium has been turned to the old uses and the whole

industry placed back on its accustomed rails. After all the talk about the revolution that the

talking picture was going to make in the art of the cinema, one is startled to find that the

Hollywood talkie of today is barely distinguishable from its familiar silent

predecessor. . . . [I]n refutation of the early fears that dialogue is bound to slow up action,

one finds the talkie just as fast moving as the silent picture ever was. Side by side with this

undeniably positive achievement Hollywood has succeeded in retaining practically all the

other features which characterized its typical product. . . . [I]t still glories in the straight
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photography which refuses to look for anything but the obvious. Its treatment of

character and dramatic situation is still as impersonal as it is in a news reel. And in its choice

of subject matter, with a few rare exceptions, it clings stubbornly to the kind of story that is
43
best appreciated by juvenile intelligence.

Four decades later, a generation of film scholars would unearth the strains of continuity that

Bakshy had already enumerated, though he did so with an air of defeat.

To be disappointed with continuity in the wake of technological change was and is atypical

for a member of serious film culture, but the source of that disappointment could not have been

more commonplace. As Jeffrey Sconce contends, serious film culture has long been locked in a

frustrating cycle, whereby its dreams of an ideal cinema are perpetually stymied by the

medium’s servitude to capitalism. No one complained about this purported effect of the

Hollywood mentality more than Bakshy. In “Free Lances,” for instance, he claims that cinema’s

contradictory status in modern society precluded its growth as an art form. Yes, Hollywood had

built the “making of motion pictures” into an “industry,” and, Bakshy remarks, “[W]e must

admit that it is in accord with all modern developments; if we have machine-made and

standardized homes, clothes, food, newspapers, and radios, why not also movies?” “On the other

hand,” he groans, “there are the obvious drawbacks of industrial standardization: banned is

artistic and intellectual culture; banned, independence of outlook and originality of treatment.
44
The resultant product is inevitably bilge.”

These complaints gesture toward real cases of artistic compromise enforced by Hollywood’s

bottom line, but they also evoke legends about the rugged individualists who refused to be

tamed by the industry. Since the beginning of his career, Bakshy had assumed that cinema’s

destiny could only be reached through the talents of gifted mavericks. In “The Cinematograph as

Art,” for example, he called upon “men of genius” to rescue the medium “from its present
 235
degradation” with their “great intelligence and insight” (238-9). But Hollywood’s reliance

on formula eroded his faith in cinema’s legitimacy and crushed his hope for the medium’s

future. By the fall of 1932—three months before he left The Nation—Bakshy accused Hollywood

of irreparably warping America’s standards and tarnishing cinema’s reputation in turn: “When

one comes to think of it, the movies are really one of the privileged arts. We ask so little of them,

and are so greatly pleased when we get that little.” “But when a moving picture breaks away

from the time-worn clichés of Hollywood,” he wisecracked, “our hearts leap with joy and we feel
45
like acclaiming the courageous piece of work as a masterpiece of art.”

Of course, Bakshy had never asked “so little” of the movies. Before disillusionment

extinguished his optimism, he had deemed the medium’s future to be “as great as any art form

of artistic drama can hope to attain” (213). Such visions of the medium’s future have routinely

portrayed cinema as an art form “always on the verge of realizing some unspoken and yet

continually thwarted potential,” Sconce attests (283). In this regard, however, Bakshy is an

exception to serious film culture’s tendency toward disillusionment. While he certainly shared in

the dreams of an ideal cinema, Bakshy forwarded a particular notion for how to fulfill the

medium’s capacity—the movies needed to create “direct contact” between the spectator and the

screen through the use of “dramatic accent.” In the remainder of this section, I reveal how this

idea guided Bakshy throughout his response to the coming of sound, and I elucidate how the

attempt to adapt it from his previous commentary on the stage challenged Bakshy to square his

desire for direct contact and dramatic accent with his demand for medium specificity. In the

end, I argue, his blueprint for reaching cinema’s destiny proved no less elusive than the

“unspoken” visions that have forever haunted so many members of serious film culture.

Within the film criticism Bakshy wrote for The Nation, direct contact and dramatic accent

receive their first substantial treatment in “The Future of the Movies.” At this juncture in his

career, Bakshy enlisted the former term to help delineate the discrete medium-specific goals
 236
that independent artists could pursue when talkies began to rule the box office. On the

stage, they would “emphasize the direct contact between the actor and the audience.” With the

talkies, they would “develop the combination of speech and picture in which the dramatic effect

will depend on the unique and complementary qualities of both.” And with the silent film, “the

movie in the strict sense of the word,” they would “continue to express” themselves “through the
46
various forms of visual movement.”

In the introduction to his 1918 book The Path of the Modern Russian Stage, however,

Bakshy presented a version of direct contact as the way to define art in toto, and as an aesthetic

standard for the judgment of individual art works: “It is only when [a spectator] projects his

sensations and invests them with a reality that is independent of, and distinct from himself, that

the work he observes earns its title to be regarded as ‘art.’ It follows that the phenomenon of art

arises neither in the work itself, nor in the spectator, but just between them, in that line of

contact and division, which is established by their reaction one upon the other,” he wrote (xiii-

xiv). Furthermore, the phenomenological component of this union seemed to render medium

specificity a secondary concern for him. “Since the form of a work of art is determined by the

interaction between the work itself and the spectator,” Bakshy expounded, “it is futile to look for

specific forms of artistic expression, unless both the medium used and the changing attitudes of

the spectator are studied in their mutual relationship” (xv). That is, a cultural critic should work

backward from a genuine encounter with art to investigate how the medium at hand had

contributed to the experience.

The “forms of visual movement” exploited by the silent film were then central to the

meaning of the second term. To define dramatic accent, Bakshy begins with a critique of the

films produced by William Randolph Hearst. Allegedly, these films committed the familiar sin of

overemphasizing mundane details to attract audiences with banal historical fidelity. For

instance, Bakshy mocks the “goodly fortune” Hearst had spent “in providing real Irish lace and
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real this and that, as if it mattered two pins whether they were real or not.” Instead of this

mistaken method, he exhorts, Hearst should have relied upon the “sensationalism” and “drama”
47
exploited by his newspapers. Nevertheless, Bakshy thought this “case of genius misapplied”

could serve as a lesson for the independent artists who would be liberated by the talkies’ box-

office ascent: “The silent motion picture, which cannot shriek and cannot bang, must learn to

shriek and bang with silent images. . . . It must learn the uses of emphatic statement, of dramatic

accent . . . [T]o give dramatic accent by changing the form and the position of the visual image

on the screen—this would be the way of sensational makeup in the newspaper, and the way of

drama on the screen.”

Thus far, Bakshy surmised, dramatic accent had not been fully realized in the silent film, but

he did list a host of movies that typified some facet of the ideal, especially through the various

types of cinematic movement they deployed. The Big Parade and Battleship Potemkin had

“skillfully and forcibly exploited” the use of “independently moving objects” in front of the

camera. Meanwhile, The Last Laugh and Sunrise had devised “a certain fluidity of the visual

world” by moving the camera itself. Yet Bakshy also “demand[ed] an emotional or dramatic

progression” that unified “all the basic movements of the medium . . . into a single dynamic
48
pattern,” so movement for its own sake never equaled dramatic accent. Three years later, for

example, he recoiled from the “preference for discordance and distortion” in The Beggar’s

Opera (directed by G. W. Pabst). “There is unrelieved morbidity in this picture,” Bakshy cried,

“and it jars on one’s mind through its gruesome theme, its mixture of styles, and its persistent
49
effort to appear different by pictorial and psychological attitudinizing.”

Alongside these traditional elements of film style, “The Future of the Movies” requests a

fresh orientation toward the architectural dimensions of the screen in the effort to fulfill

cinema’s capacity. In the article, Bakshy conjures a future movie theater wherein the screen will

be much bigger and “used for effects of movement obtained by changing the position of the
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picture, by changing its size, and, finally, by employing simultaneously a number of separate
50
subjects.” Again, he had already seen “many evidences pointing in this direction.” The Crowd

had tested multiple exposures to depict the “thoughts passing through one’s head.” Old

Ironsides and Chang had utilized the “magnascope” to uncover “the dramatic possibilities of

mere enlargement.” And Napoleon had “obtain[ed] the effect of overwhelming grandeur by
51
using a triptych screen with a simultaneous projection of three films” during its famed finale.

In short, the film style Bakshy championed matched the preference for cinematic fantasy among

his upper-middlebrow peers, while his dreams for a malleable movie screen more closely aligned

with the experimental ethos of the avant-garde.

To then conclude its outline for achieving dramatic accent in cinema, “The Future of the

Movies” refers to the prospect of “another possible development”: using the screen “in its bodily

form” to create “pure cinematic entertainment.” In hindsight, though, it appears that Bakshy

misspoke. This “development” was not one more thing for cinema to do but what he later settled
52
on as the very definition and purpose of dramatic accent. As I demonstrate below, Bakshy

clarified the unique phenomenological component of his film theory in subsequent articles,

which explicitly posit dramatic accent as the way to foster direct contact between the spectator

and the screen. Nonetheless, the closing lines of “The Future of the Movies” illustrate that

Bakshy wanted the stylistic techniques and architectural innovations he had just laid out to

culminate in the fulfillment of cinema’s medium-specific capacity: “When the motion picture

reaches this stage of complete liberation from aiming at effects of illusionistic representation,

and proclaims itself openly as a means of dramatic entertainment, it will stand revealed before

the admiring spectator as the wonderful mechanism in which profound experiences are given

almost tangible form through the magic combination of lighted objects, the camera, the film, the

projector, and the screen.” “Such will be the final glory of the silent movie drama,” Bakshy
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foresaw, “unless the latter be killed in its coming fight for existence by its quickly growing
53
and rapaciously inclined little brother—the talking picture.”

Bakshy thus suggested that his hope for dramatic accent applied exclusively to the silent

film. Yet this concept can also be traced back to his previous commentary about the stage,

complicating his later demand for dramatic accent as the way to fulfill cinema’s medium-specific

capacity. The Path of the Modern Russian Stage underlines the paramount achievement of

theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, whom Bakshy credited with “uniting the audience and the

stage” (62). In his estimate, Meyerhold had accomplished this feat by discarding the dominant

“naturalistic” acting style in favor of a frankly “conventional” style that “followed from the

assumption that the actor—a real human being freed from the bondage of decorative scenery—

shared with the audience the task of realizing the subject of the play, the one in action, the other

in imagination” (66). “Instead of attempting to give a representation (objective or subjective) of

the world set out in the play,” Meyerhold had inserted “an agent-intermediary in the shape of

the actor . . . between the play and the audience, to present the piece through his natural prism

of ‘theatricality’ ” (68-9). By using this self-conscious style, Bakshy explained, Meyerhold’s actor

became a conduit through which the play and its audience could fuse together, fashioning a true

work of art in the medium of theater.

If The Path of the Modern Russian Stage implies that Bakshy had a flexible attitude toward

medium specificity, his response to the coming of sound defies any such implication. When

synchronized sound and speech further blurred the line between the stage and the screen,

Bakshy proceeded to judge each new movie by its adherence to the principle of medium

specificity. On April 30, 1930, for example, he called Journey’s End (directed by James Whale)

“remarkable” for the way it “preserved the dramatic qualities that went into the making of the

original play,” but he stopped short of declaring the film a “cinematic masterpiece, for it never

attempts to assert its independence of the stage and to express itself entirely in terms of the
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54
cinema.” Four months later, Bakshy praised Holiday (directed by Edward H. Griffith) in

the same qualified terms: “Of cinematic values expressive of its own medium Holiday has none.

It has hardly a scene to suggest the searching power of the camera. The development of its plot

is borne entirely by its dialogue, and no attempt is made to indulge in cinematic embroidery on
55
the principal theme of the film.” Accordingly, he hailed Applause (directed by Rouben

Mamoulian) as “one of the most significant talking pictures” because it possessed “the artist’s

touch, a quality which proclaims a cultured and sensitive mind attuned to the medium of its

expression,” and because it had offered a “convincing demonstration of the ability of the talking

picture to create drama which is not modeled after the stage.” In particular, Bakshy was

impressed by the film’s “opening sequence,” which “show[ed] a desolate street with bits of paper

blown by the wind, then a solitary dog running this way and that, then groups of excited children

and, finally, as a climax, the street parade of the burlesque troupe, with the volume of sound
56
rising from scene to scene until it swells to a cacophonous blare of the actors’ trumpets.”

For Bakshy, Applause exemplified the aesthetic heights of cinema’s “conventional” mode,

which accentuated the intrinsic elements of fantasy that supposedly separated cinema from the

realism of the stage. In doing so, the film also confirmed his initial faith in the talkies’ artistic

potential, a faith that sprung from his understanding of the main difference between these

forms. Upon the arrival of synchronized sound and speech, Bakshy anticipated that the talkies

would move “away from the stage and toward a new, authentic motion-picture drama.”

Moreover, he thought the journey would be “dictated by the inner logic of the medium.”

“Analogies between the stage and the screen assume that they deal with the same material. But

they don’t,” Bakshy wrote in “The ‘Talkies.’ ” “The material of the screen is not actual objects,”

he reasoned, “but images fixed on the film. And the very fact that they have their being on the
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film endows these images with properties which are never found in actual objects.” Here, his

film theory recalls the concept of photogénie, defined by the French filmmaker Jean Epstein as
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“any aspect of things, beings, or souls whose moral character is enhanced by filmic
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reproduction.” But Bakshy chiefly had in mind cinema’s “extraordinary power of handling time

and space.” Due to this power, he decreed, the “motion picture can never be content with
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modeling itself after the stage.”

Even though Bakshy argued that cinema’s progress would be “dictated” by the medium’s

ontology, he worried constantly about Hollywood blocking cinema’s aesthetic development. The

conflict between his belief in the art form’s “inevitable evolution” and his cynicism about the

Hollywood mentality begs a question that pervades the entire period’s film criticism—would
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filmmakers invent the medium, or would they discover it? Bakshy proposed his own answer to

this question in “The Cinematograph as Art,” which charged filmmakers with the responsibility

“to find out what actually constitutes the peculiar properties of the medium, and how these

properties should be managed to achieve the highest artistic effect.” “[T]he problem can be

solved only by practice and experiment,” he determined (225). In this way, cinema was like a

block of marble, and filmmakers were like sculptors. Through “practice and experiment,” they

would reveal the hidden yet preexisting contours of the medium. But Hollywood’s unwavering

dependence on formula made the industry antithetical to solving the mystery of cinema’s

specificity. As Bakshy put it elsewhere, “So great, indeed, are the possibilities of . . . cinematic art

that it is to be hoped Hollywood will have the imagination and daring to tolerate . . . originality
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in its more gifted directors.”

So Hollywood took the lion’s share of the blame for cinema’s shortcomings, but Bakshy also

noticed that the talkies suffered from an apparent ontological deficit. He first mentioned the

enigmatic problem in the summer of 1929. “For reasons which it is difficult to discern,” Bakshy

confessed, “the total effect of the talking picture is generally thin, lacking in substance. Strange

as it may appear, a silent picture seems to be freighted with sensory appeal. A picture like The

Last Laugh is a veritable ‘eye-full.’ In the talkies,” though, “much as you may be moved by the
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drama,” he observed, “you feel it is a drama in a world of ghosts.” This problem continued

to inform and shape his evolving theory of the sound film. When Bakshy analyzed it again a few

months later in the article “Talkies and Dummies,” published by The Nation on November 13,

1929, he approached the problem as a matter of cinematic realism. Labeling the sound film a

“curious medium,” Bakshy said that synchronized sound and speech had “given the screen a

degree of realism which in its silent form it never had” but added that the talkies somehow still

seemed more artificial than their cinematic cousins. “Instinctively,” he conjectured, “we become

aware of something checking the complete illusion of life. The characters, natural as they are,

appear to lack the essential warmth, material solidity, and individual isolation of real people.”

Undaunted, Bakshy once more looked forward to the technological changes that would solve

the problem. Improved synchronization, as well as the introduction of color and 3-D, would
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soon allow “realistic plays on the screen” to rival their “counterparts on the stage,” he averred.

Thus Bakshy thought technological change would enhance the quality of the “illusionist” films

preferred by Hollywood. Though he was never an enemy of the illusionist mode, Bakshy joined

his fellow silent-era aficionados in their belief that cinema’s highest aspirations as an art form

could only be reached in the conventional mode. This idea, too, was rooted in the prior

commentary Bakshy had written about the stage, and, as he searched for a theory of the sound

film, his preference for so-called conventional movies also led him back to his desire for direct

contact and dramatic accent. Along the way, Bakshy constructed an idiosyncratic film theory

while unwittingly laying out the terms for his eventual disillusionment with cinema.

Bakshy began to explicitly adapt the idea of dramatic accent for the talkies in the article

“Screen Musical Comedy,” published on February 5, 1930. “It scarcely needs pointing out,” he

wrote, “that the conventions of musical comedy derive whatever meaning they have from being a

frank entertainment on a stage that is physically connected with the audience.” However,

Bakshy griped, the “screen imitators of musical comedy seem to be ignorant of this essential
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relationship between the actor and the spectator. They place their characters in perfectly

natural surroundings, introduce them as perfectly normal people, and then make them behave

as if they were escaped lunatics.” The issue, then, was not that a “highly conventionalized” acting

style was “impossible on the screen.” Rather, it was that such a style must “spring from the

peculiar properties” of cinema, “not from those of the stage.” So, Bakshy reiterated, filmmakers

needed to understand how the screen itself could facilitate this style:

Today the screen . . . is merely a neutral surface for carrying images, and only helps to

emphasize the gap which divides the picture from the audience. But it is the only possible

link between the two, and to make this link perform its liaison service the visual images must

be hitched to the screen. In other words the screen must become a physical reality in the

eyes of the audience, a part of the theater building which provides the graphic frame of

reference for the very being of characters in space, as well as for the form in which they are

presented to view. By this means a motion picture will not merely be demonstrated, but will

actually be performed before the spectator, and a basis will be supplied for conventionalized
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acting of every kind, including that of musical comedy.

By echoing both the outline of dramatic accent that he had sketched in “The Future of the

Movies” and the definition of art he provided in The Path of the Modern Russian Stage, this

passage may appear to abolish any meaningful differences between the stage and the screen. To

the contrary, Bakshy thought he had identified the most fundamental difference, a difference

that revolved around the living body of the actor in each medium.

Building on the framework furnished by the above analysis, Bakshy returned to these

concerns in a pair of articles that formalized his theory of the sound film. On October 1, 1930,

The Nation published another piece by Bakshy entitled “Screen Musical Comedy,” in which he
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repeated his claim that only a film’s director could muster the “power of direct contact with

the audience.” While the “artistic justification of musical comedy on the theater stage lies in its

frank emphasis of its staginess,” Bakshy recounted, “no actor on the screen can make the
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audience accept him as an actor. He is and will always remain a character.”

What might have been a temporary problem caused by the growing pains of adopting a new

technology now appeared to be a permanent feature of the sound film. Three months later, in

the article “New Dimensions in the Talkies,” Bakshy unambiguously demanded that the movie

screen become a substitute for the absent body of the stage actor. One of the longest pieces he

wrote for The Nation, “New Dimensions in the Talkies” tried to establish the key distinctions

between the stage and the screen, which entailed a deeper understanding of the two modes

available to each medium, illusionist and conventional. Understanding the distinctions between

these media and narrative modes also required understanding the following principle: “The

stage illusion and the film illusion are two distinct things, and so are the stage convention and

the film convention; what is more, in no possible combination do the four mix.” As Bakshy

detailed, the crucial difference between the illusionist and conventional modes on the stage was

their respective abilities to foster a physical communion with the audience:

The illusionist stage strives to make the audience feel as if by some miracle it were watching,

not a theatrical performance, but the actual life of a group of people in their natural

surroundings. On the contrary, the conventional stage lays particular stress on those

elements of acting and setting that reveal most strikingly the fact that the characters are

merely actors performing on a stage in front of an audience. Again, the world of an illusionist

play is separated from the world of the audience by an impassable gulf. No contact exists

between the actor and the spectator. They are on two different planes. But when the play is
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frankly a stage performance, its very form depends on the presence of the spectator and
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the continuous contact maintained between him and the actor.

Bakshy then noted that each mode in each medium had its own particular techniques and

“effects,” but as he began to say how the conventional mode in the talkies could fulfill cinema’s

medium-specific capacity, he drew a direct line from the stage to the screen. On the stage, the

conventional mode was defined by the “contact maintained between [the spectator] and the

actor,” and the “same relationship between the audience and the picture characterize[d] the

conventional film.” Whereas the actor was the conduit for dramatic accent on the stage, the

screen itself was the conduit in cinema. In the conventional film mode, the screen “may become

an active medium proclaiming its existence through the position occupied by the image on its

surface.” Bakshy said that this had been achieved in the Silly Symphonies and Mickey Mouse

films, which he called “artistic achievements of surpassing excellence,” but among “ordinary,

that is, natural, photographic” films, he cited no examples and instead conjured an imaginary

film that could achieve dramatic accent:

Instead of a single image the screen may carry a continuously changing pattern of several

interrelated images. A picture could, for instance, open with an image creeping slowly from

the bottom corner of the screen, then leaping to the top corner, then moving to the center

and swelling to the limits of the screen, when it would fade out and give place to groups of

images flitting across the screen now in one direction, now in another, or spacing themselves
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in a pattern of images placed side by side.

It is fitting that Bakshy resorted to an imaginary film here for two reasons. One, he was more a

film theorist than a film critic; his film criticism is most remarkable for its ideas about cinema,
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not its observations about individual films. Second and more pertinently, this gesture

underlined his belief that dramatic accent was a goal cinema had not yet fully realized.

Curiously, Bakshy made no mention in this article of the problem he had noted before about

the talkies seeming to exist “in a world of ghosts,” but that problem soon emerged for him again.

In May of 1931, he named this problem “the shrinking of personality.” Bakshy began his

discussion of this problem by noting that he had recently seen a number of films that starred

actors whom he had seen on the stage before their film careers began, including George Arliss,

John Barrymore, and Constance Bennett. On film, though, they failed to connect: “None of the

popular actors I saw stands out before me as a personality with whom I had a direct and all but

physical contact. I know that on the stage some of these actors and others of equal gifts were and

are able to escape the shell of the characters they represent and to fill the entire theater with

their own beings, so that one feels as if one almost touched them.” In the only instance of

nostalgia for the silent film in his career, Bakshy continued: “More phantom-like, but no less

expansive and penetrating, were the personalities of the famous stars that radiated from the

silent screen.” Such stars as Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford had “transcended

their screen characters and came into a direct contact with the audience.” In the talkies, though,

the “personal magnetism of the actor ha[d] lost its force.” “His entire personality has shrunk to

something that is only a little more than the character he represents,” Bakshy complained.

However, the fault was not the actor’s but “the curious effect that the addition of mechanical

speech has had on the relationship between the screen actor and the audience.” “The change in

the actor’s position has been made in two diametrically opposed directions,” Bakshy wrote.

On the one hand, he has returned to the stage methods of acting and storytelling. On the

other hand, he has stepped beyond the conventional stage settings into the world of natural

surroundings. The same world existed in the silent picture. Yet only the addition of speech
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has taken it right out of the theater building, away from immediate contact with the

audience, and placed it in a space of its own. Bound to his surroundings the actor, too, has

become more remote, with the consequent loss in intimacy, in direct contact, and in the

unobstructed flow of the magnetic force that conveys to the spectator the actor’s power and

stature.

Bakshy still seemed to think that the talkies might figure things out if filmmakers (and actors)

could only understand cinema’s specificity. In conclusion, then, he noted the failure of John

Barrymore’s performance in Svengali. On the stage, Barrymore’s “acting has an unmistakable

rhythmic quality,” Bakshy described, but it was “obvious that a rhythmic pattern built on the

stage cannot be transferred bodily to the screen. In fact, it must be completely rebuilt in

obedience to the entirely different principle of screen rhythm.” Alas, “No such attempt was

made” in Svengali, and it would soon seem to Bakshy that no such attempt would ever be
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made.

In the article “Concerning Dialogue,” Bakshy complained yet again about the way the talkies

were content to ape the stage. In doing so, it appears that his theory of the two media had

undergone a reversal: he now saw the stage as fundamentally unrealistic, and cinema as

fundamentally realistic. Indeed, film historian Robert Spadoni points to this shift in Bakshy’s

film criticism as indicative of the wider shift in film culture toward a belief in cinema as
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fundamentally realistic in the wake of sound. While I agree with Spadoni’s analysis, Bakshy

had always been interested in realism. Although he preferred conventional films, Bakshy was

never an enemy of illusionistic films, and, because they traded in realism, Bakshy wanted them

to be as realistic as they could be. Moreover, it is even possible to see how a greater investment

in realism might have preserved the tenets of his film theory and his cinephilia. In his review of

the nature documentary Bring ’em Back Alive, Bakshy detailed the strength of his response to
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the film’s sheer realism. “It may be proper to inquire whether the fact that this film is

essentially a record of actual life has not also contributed something to its appeal. Unhesitatingly

we say that it has. Facts as such are not necessarily interesting. But unfamiliar facts are. And

after the reels of stereotyped fiction that make up most of the films, it is a decided relief to see

something that springs straight from life and has preserved its natural form and color,” Bakshy
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wrote. No aesthetic design or unity were necessary. Furthermore, his response suggests a

bridge between the impact of this film’s realism and the ideal of dramatic accent. In “The Future

of the Movies,” Bakshy stressed the feeling of a “tangible” bond between the screen and the

audience, and the realism of Bring ’em Back Alive produced a similar bond between Bakshy and

the screen. Alas, his praise of the film was ultimately the set-up for one more punch line at

Hollywood’s expense.

More importantly, nothing had changed about Bakshy’s desire for dramatic accent and his

demand for medium specificity, except, perhaps, his hope for cinema’s future. In the end,

Bakshy still most wanted to see a conventional film achieve dramatic accent, which is why the

realism of the talkies only changed the means, not the end, as he revealed in the final passage of

“Concerning Dialogue”: “More could be said of the use of dialogue as an element of a purely

conventional screen art, an art that without violating the essentially realistic nature of its

material, would provide means for establishing an intimate contact with the audience, and

would rival the stage in imaginative interpretation of life. But this would require a radical

change in the accepted form of the motion picture, and the prospects of any such revolution in
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Hollywood are too remote as to call for immediate consideration.”

If we take Bakshy at his word, then, the Hollywood mentality is to blame for cinema’s

inability to realize its destiny, but I think something else was at work in his path from hope to

disillusionment. Although The Path of the Modern Russian Stage suggested that all art was

defined by its ability to create direct contact, I suspect that Bakshy derived this theory of art
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from his understanding of and affection for the stage, epitomized by his esteem for

Meyerhold’s achievements. Consequently, Bakshy effectively asked cinema to replicate the most

cherished aspect of his prior experience with the art of the stage, but the absence of the actor’s

body proved fatal to cinema’s chances of satisfying him.

By asking cinema to recreate the phenomenological frisson shared between himself and

performers on stage when they reached the pinnacle of their form, Bakshy asked for the

inanimate screen of the cinema to replicate a feeling he had previously experienced. At a

minimum, this seems like an improbably high bar to set. In this way, then, Bakshy was

ultimately very much like the colleagues whom he had otherwise distinguished himself from.

While they dreamed of an ideal cinema that might have been if not for technological change,

Bakshy dreamed of an ideal cinema that would replicate his past relationship with the stage.

Despite all of his efforts to look forward to what cinema might become, it was his desire to

return to the past that guaranteed his disillusionment with the medium.

Confronted with the prospect of “shooting sparrows with cannon balls,” he chose to retire

instead. But it seems that an ember of cinephilia might have kept burning. After he wrote his last

column for The Nation, Bakshy continued his career as a journalist, writing primarily about the

theater but also about Russian art and society. But two years after his last column for The

Nation, he also wrote one final piece of film criticism, published in The New York Times. In this

article, Bakshy returned again to his favorite genre, the musical comedy, and suggested once

more that the development of the split-screen technique might fulfill the medium’s destiny
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through its most conventional genre. In this way, too, Bakshy seems to exemplify Sconce’s

description of serious film culture. According to Sconce, “All cinephiles, despite their constant

depression over a cinema that is lost or never was, ultimately cannot let go” (283). As I discuss

in the final section of this chapter, though, a shift in the definition of hope for the members of

serious film culture suggests an alternative to inevitable disillusionment.

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A Machine That Generates Empathy

After a long and public battle with cancer, Roger Ebert died on April 2, 2012. Around the world,

news of his death quickly led to an outpouring of grief and appreciation from journalists,

celebrities, devoted readers, and fellow film critics. Countless articles, obituaries, Facebook

status updates, blog posts, and tweets remembered and celebrated Ebert first and foremost for

his infectious and enduring cinephilia. Today, the website he founded is adorned with a banner

that features an image of four stars, a black-and-white photo of Ebert giving his trademarked

approval—a thumb up—and a simple tribute: “In Memoriam 1942 – 2013 | ‘Roger Ebert loved

movies.’ ”

In hindsight, it may seem that Ebert was destined to finish his prolific career as the greatest

and most enthusiastic champion of cinema’s popular appeal. Indeed, the central themes of his

work and reputation were already evident when Time magazine published a brief article about

him in March of 1970. At the time, Ebert had only been the chief film critic at the Chicago Sun-

Times for three years, yet the profile succinctly captures the attitude and style that subsequently

distinguished him throughout his career. Against the implied elitism of the Film Generation’s

leading voices, Time applauded Ebert for his “unabashed populism.” “[H]e is not, as he

disdainfully phrases it, ‘an emissary from some outside theory of taste.’ He prefers ‘movies’ to

‘films,’ and laments the fact that the Princess Theater in Urbana, Ill., has been renamed The

Cinema.” Likewise, the piece continues, “The comforts of critics’ screenings are not for him; he

favors the ‘democracy in the dark’ afforded by a packed theater where he finds himself happily

ensconced as often as ten times a week.” The article also admired how his preference for seeing

movies with general audiences extended to the evaluations in his reviews. Along these lines, it

points to Ebert’s review of two recent films about race, Putney Swope and tick…tick…tick, as an

example of the way he would buck the critical consensus: “I know Putney Swope is the currently
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fashionable put-down of the Establishment. . . . [B]ut just the same,” Ebert wrote, “you

should have been there in the Roosevelt Theater Saturday night. There wasn’t an empty seat.

The audience accepted tick…tick…tick with joy, laughter and applause. And the laughter was

affirmative; not that whining, angry, cruel laughter you hear during Putney Swope.”

But his enthusiasm also engendered criticism. As the article noted, “Ebert’s detractors
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accuse[d] him of liking second-rate films more than he should.” This complaint followed Ebert

throughout his career, and his tendency toward generosity only increased when he returned to

work after his first round of chemotherapy treatments. In 2008, Ebert addressed this critique in

a blog post entitled “ ‘You Give Out Too Many Stars.’ ” After using the review aggregator site

Metacritic to confirm that he did in fact rate movies more highly than the average critic, Ebert

posed himself a rhetorical question: “What inclines me to tilt in a more favorable direction?” “I

like movies too much,” he answered. “I walk into the theater not in an adversarial attitude, but

with hope and optimism (except for some movies, of course). I know that to get a movie made is

a small miracle, that the reputations, careers and finances of the participants are on the line, and

that hardly anybody sets out to make a bad movie. I do not feel comfortable posing as
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impossible to please.” In his 2011 memoir Life Itself, Ebert explained his enthusiasm in the

following terms: “I am beneath everything else a fan. I was fixed in this mode as a young boy and
75
am awed by people who take the risks of performance.”

Ebert offered these explanations near the end of a career that spanned five decades, but the

Time profile had again already suspected that his cinephilia was uniquely inexhaustible. Tallying

up his work load—five reviews a week, a weekly think piece, profiles he wrote for such

publications as the New York Times and Esquire—the article attempted to reveal the “secret of

his movie mania” by “[r]eading between the lines of one recent review,” in which Ebert had

written: “There once was a time when movies were real. By that I mean they absorbed you so

completely that you ceased to exist as an individual and literally became the hero of the movie
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you were watching. But that age passes when you’re perhaps ten.” “For most reviewers, it
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does,” the article replies. “Apparently not for Ebert.” In direct contradiction of what Ebert had

explicitly written, the Time article took the sum of his response to the movies and declared that

he still possessed the capacity to be thrilled by the magic of the movies. This hunch about Ebert

panned out. In 2003, he responded to a question about the consequence of watching so many

movies with the following answer: “Some critics, like my hero Dwight Macdonald, finally tired of

the dreck and retired from reviewing. When I first got my job I thought five years was about as

long as anyone could do it. But I have never tired of going to the movies, and even in a bad one

you can see people trying and failing, which can be almost as interesting as seeing them trying
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and succeeding. When a truly great movie comes along, it cheers me up for weeks.”

Ebert never became bored or jaded with the movies, as is all but expected will happen to a

daily reviewer, yet his cinephilia was threatened by moments of major technological change. As I

demonstrate below, the emergence of home video and the transition to digital projection

provoked alarm and despair from Ebert, mirroring the usual pattern in serious film culture’s

tendency toward disillusionment. However, Ebert managed to stave off disillusionment, and

new technologies played a role in the optimism that sustained his cinephilia. In particular, Ebert

thought that digital home video technologies helped support the “independent” filmmakers he

championed, and that the Internet helped support the kind of film culture he cherished.

As a result, Ebert’s career is indicative of an alternate meaning of hope within serious film

culture, a meaning that has become more prevalent in recent years, especially as a response to

the alarm and despair about home video and digital technologies. As Sconce outlines, the prior

definition of hope centered on cinema’s aesthetic development according to the medium’s

specificity. The meaning evident in Ebert’s career centers on a different hope: the desire to see

film and film culture survive. To a certain extent, this new meaning of hope mirrors the

assumption that underlies David Thompson’s disillusionment: the belief that the movies made
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during the Film Generation represented the medium’s aesthetic peak. As Ebert wrote in

1997: “The early 1970s were the last ‘golden age’ in American cinema. The careers of Scorsese,

Altman, Coppola, and others were on the rise. Young directors wanted to make the Great

American Film. Then came the blockbuster mentality of the post-Jaws and Star Wars era, and
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the new directors all wanted to make the Great American Hit.” Consequently, the new meaning

of hope often entails a feeling of nostalgia for an ideal cinema (and an ideal film culture) already

achieved. As it did for Jonathan Rosenbaum, for example, the new meaning of hope exists

because film critics and cinephiles can identify crucial sources of continuity between the Film

Generation’s heyday and the present. Ebert seemed to find the same continuity after he began

writing his blog in 2008, which led not only to a late-career surge in his reputation, but also to

his renewed faith in the persistence of serious film culture.

Ebert’s hope was also sustained by the generality of his understanding of cinema’s

specificity. Unlike Alexander Bakshy, whose idea for how cinema could fulfill its medium-

specific capacity contained a very particular understanding of cinema’s specificity, and unlike

many of his peers who claimed that the materiality of celluloid was part of the medium’s

essence, Ebert’s theory of the medium never forwarded a particular style or format as the

medium’s bedrock. Instead, his theory of the medium was always wedded to his populism. In

the introduction to the 1991 book The Future of the Movies, for instance, Ebert offered the

following definition of the medium: “The movies are the most involving artistic medium ever

invented, the one that can temporarily preempt even our sense of self, and give us the vicarious

experience of being someone else, somewhere else. Most of us have our first moviegoing

experiences at a young age, and our responses to the movies often echo that first orientation. We
79
sit passively in the dark and are told a story.” The passivity was important, which is why Ebert

rejected “interactive” movies, as was the storytelling, which is why Ebert’s criticism seldom

remarks upon non-narrative avant-garde films.

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But most important was the way that movies uniquely encouraged empathy. In 2005,

upon being honored in Chicago for his career, Ebert said:

We all are born with a certain package. We are who we are. Where we were born, who we are

born as, how we were raised. We’re kind of stuck inside that person. And the purpose of

civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people.

And, for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a

little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams, and fears. It helps us to identify
80
with the people who are sharing this journey with us.

Key to the experience of empathy was that movies should be watched with an audience in a

public space, which helps explain why home video was a greater threat in Ebert’s mind than the

transition to digital projection. As he wrote in the essay “Thoughts on the Centennial of

Cinema,” audiences were part of the medium’s specificity:

Books and plays can provide us with stories. But the movies uniquely create the impression

that we have had an experience. The key word is “we.” I have seen a lot of movies by myself,

but the experience is not the same as seeing a film with a large group of strangers. The

greatest moviegoing experiences of my life—the premieres of Apocalypse Now and Do the

Right Thing, both at the Cannes Film Festival—were great not just because of the movies but

because nowhere else do more people gather in the same theater to see them. Together, we—

a cross-section of humanity—had an experience, and because it mirrored our shared

81
humanity, it was somehow spiritual; we were giving witness.
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Especially in relation to this passage’s inclusion of plays, which are also seen by collective

audiences, Ebert’s definition of the medium reveals the partisanship of his cinephilia and points

to the partisanship of all cinephilia. While Ebert’s definition of the medium is much easier to

quibble with than the definitions of theorists who insist on celluloid’s preeminence and whose

positions can be consistent (while also being fatalistic), that fuzziness was also crucial to his

ability to adapt to technological change and preserve his hope in the fight against

disillusionment.

Ebert’s career therefore exemplifies the way that members of serious film culture have either

relaxed their definitions of the medium to preserve the styles of thought and structures of feeling

that define serious film culture, or succumbed to disillusionment by drawing a line in the sand

that posits the death of film and film culture, whether as a result of aesthetic bankruptcy or the

violation of technological change. In the remainder of this chapter, I show how Ebert navigated

the aforementioned technological changes, in both cases initially feeling the threat of

disillusionment and then subsequently proving the resilience of his cinephilia. In this way,

Ebert’s career suggests that disillusionment is not inevitable for the members of serious film

culture, and allows us to understand how hope and disillusionment also constitute a dialectical

response to technological change in the discourses of serious film culture.

Ebert’s first significant statement on home video appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1980.

In the article, Ebert reports on a conference on the future of film, presented by the American

Film Institute and hosted by the Aspen Institute. While the article eventually reports on the

conference itself, it begins with a theory of cinema’s specificity and how it differs from

television:

Like most other people whose tastes began to form before television became the dominant

entertainment medium, I have a simple idea of what it means to go to the movies. You buy
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your ticket and take a seat in a large dark room with hundreds of strangers. You slide

down in your seat and make yourself comfortable. On the screen in front of you, the movie

image appears—enormous and overwhelming. If the movie is a good one, you allow yourself

to be absorbed in its fantasy, and its dreams become part of your memories.

Television is not a substitute for that experience, and I have never had a TV-watching

experience of emotional intensity comparable to my great movie-going experiences.

Television is just not first class. The screen is too small. The image is technically inferior. The

sound is disgracefully bad. As the viewer I can contain television—but the movies are so

large they can contain me. I can’t lose myself in a television image, and neither, I suspect,

can most other people. That is why people are forever recreating movie memories in great

detail, but hardly ever reminisce about old TV programs.

I believe, then, that to experience a movie fully you have to go to the movies. . . . If a

movie is good enough to stay up late for, it’s too good to be watched through the dilution of

television. I’ll catch it later at a revival theater or a film society, or, if I never catch it again at

least I’ll think of it as a movie and not as late-night programming.

In addition to the way this passage establishes the populism at the heart of Ebert’s theory of the

medium, it reflects the way that the Film Generation not only rejected television but also

disavowed the notion that they watched films on TV. As I discuss below, it would be still be

decades before Ebert indicated that he both watched movies on broadcast television, and that

they informed his cinephilia.

At the time, though, Ebert was concerned with the discussion at the conference on how

movies would be sold to ancillary markets moving forward. “[D]istrubed” by these reports, Ebert

concluded the article with a dire warning:

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What is clearly happening is very alarming.

A superior system of technology—motion pictures—is being sold out in favor of an

inferior but more profitable system—pay video hardware/software combinations. The

theatrical motion picture, which remains such a desirable item that it’s used to sell home

cassette systems, is in danger of being held hostage. Truly daring and offbeat film subjects

will become increasingly risky because they can’t easily be presold for showing through other

‘windows.’

The two edges that movies have enjoyed over television are greater quality and impact of

image, and greater freedom of subject matter. Now television is poised to absorb and

emasculate the movies, all in the name of home entertainment. It will serve us right, as we

sit in front of our fuzzy giant-screen home video systems ten or twenty years from now, if

there’s nothing new or interesting to watch on them.

Much as Jonathan Rosenbaum had done just a few months earlier in the pages of American

Film, Ebert worried about the possibility that convergence would dissolve cinema’s specificity

and thus damage film culture. Likewise, Ebert and the rest of serious film culture complained of

the lower quality of television and video images, which, in Rosenbaum’s words, entailed a loss in

the “level of visual ambiguity, complexity, and nuance that require[d] a certain size and

definition in order to be seen and responded to.” For Rosenbaum, this reduced size and

resolution was a crime against the canonical films that possessed these visual qualities, while

Ebert expressed an adjacent concern above about the way that television’s inferior visual quality

and the need to pre-sell movies to television audiences would preclude the production of “[t]ruly
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daring and offbeat” movies.

Ebert made the above comments about home video as the format was only beginning to find

its footing. His next significant statement appeared in the midst of home video’s burgeoning
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ascendance. In 1985, Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion was published, building off of

the generic precedent established by Steven H. Scheuer and the commercial success of Leonard

Maltin’s books. Such an annual was published every year for the rest of Ebert’s career, and their

introductions became a place for him to chime in on the status of contemporary film culture. In

the first edition, though, Ebert was primarily concerned with addressing an apparent

contradiction implied by the very existence of the book. After offering such a harsh assessment

of home video in the past, Ebert felt compelled to rationalize the publication of a book aimed at

home video consumers:

Have I changed my mind? Not at all. I still believe that the best way to see a movie is in a

large, darkened room, with a giant screen at one end of it, and strangers all around. The

strangers are especially important, because they set up a democracy in the dark; their

massed response to the movie makes it easier for us to join the communal experience, to

enter into the film-going reverie and shut down our awareness of self.

Recalling when he saw Swing Time on a 16mm print in a campus film society at the University

of Illinois, Ebert continued his defense of celluloid and public screenings: “If I had seen Swing

Time for the first time on a videocassette, would my experience have been as intense? I doubt it.

The spontaneous applause in the audience that night gave me confidence in my own reaction,

and, since I never took a film class, it might have been the lessons from all the audiences I was a

member of that started me along the path to film criticism.” “I still believe that nothing can

replace the experience of seeing a movie with an audience in a theater, and,” Ebert added,

“although the logistics would be easier for At the Movies if we could occasionally review a film

after seeing it only on cassette, we insist on big-screen viewings and have reviewed cassette

versions of films less than half a dozen times in ten years.”

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“And yet I own a VCR, and I use it,” Ebert conceded, echoing the tenor of serious film
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culture in his lack of enthusiasm for the format. His qualms noted, Ebert proceeded to make a

case for home video’s utility. Whereas he had previously worried that only certain kinds of films

would get made if the American film industry were held “hostage” to home video, cable, and

pay-per-view outlets, he now praised home video as the “only way most people have of seeing
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the offbeat, innovative, noncommercial films.” This was the “best reason to own a VCR.” The

situation was not without worry, though, as Ebert still feared that movies released to theaters

would be made exclusively for teenagers, and he also complained about the tendency among

video stores to reinforce the blockbuster mentality, so he made a plug for mail-order services,

the precursors to Netflix, which would ship VHS tapes and laserdiscs to costumers across the

country, allowing them to see much more than the recent box-office hits.

Perhaps most importantly, Ebert also noted that the success of the home video market had

not eliminated the desire to attend theaters. In fact, surveys suggested that VCR owners were

more likely to attend the theater, “apparently because cassette viewing has made them more
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interested in new movies in general.” While home video itself still offered an inferior and

illegitimate experience, its greatest potential threat to film culture—the disappearance of movie

theaters, which provided the essential facet of a public reception—had been overstated. This

revelation allowed Ebert to conclude the introduction with hope that film culture would get to

enjoy the best of both worlds, a future in which movie lovers could still go to the theater while

one day soon enjoying top-of-the-line home theater equipment:

Someday, I know, they will perfect TV screens the size of walls. You will be able to order the

film of your choice, and it will arrive in your home via cable. The sound will be in perfect

stereo. Even the subtitles will be readable. When that day comes, I know I’ll want the

miraculous new equipment, so I can summon up Casablanca and hear Sam claim yet once
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again that he doesn’t remember how to play that song. But when that day comes, I know

I will still want to see new movies in real movie theaters, with real audiences, whenever I
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can. Who says you can’t have it both ways?

For some members of serious film culture, it must have seemed that Ebert was either talking

out of the side of his mouth or capitulating to industry forces and popular tastes. In retrospect,

though, it seems that a passage such as this is just part of Ebert’s persona as a film critic and

cinephile. Though he grappled with the threat of disillusionment throughout his career, he

always landed on a hopeful note. Nonetheless, he kept home video at arm’s length. His account

thus suggests that, for those who were serious about movies, experiences with home video were

inauthentic and predominantly joyless. Home video may have no longer seemed like a dire

threat to film and film culture, but neither did it offer the same thing that could be had with a

celluloid print projected in a public theater.

Alongside his print criticism, Ebert’s views on home video were also expressed on his

television show. Here, too, he offers an ambivalent attitude underlined by pragmatism. In

general, the show treated home video as an inevitable part of the reason that audiences would

tune in: they wanted to know what movies they should rent when they went to the video store,

whether they were making mental notes about the new releases they would “catch up” on with

home video, or were looking to hear about the older or more obscure recent titles that Ebert and

Gene Siskel recommended. In addition to the reasons he laid out in his first anthology, then,

Ebert recommended home video as a way to appreciate a film that felt too difficult on a first

viewing, as he did for King of Comedy (directed by Martin Scorsese). As Scorsese’s most ardent

supporter, Ebert was especially grateful for the opportunity to reconsider this film because he
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gave it a lukewarm review the first time around. In the 1988 version of the show’s annual

“Holiday Video Gift Guide,” Ebert offered one of his most enthusiastic defenses of home video
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when he took the audience on a tour of his man-cave basement, decked out with the latest in

home theater technology. As he shows off his big screen TV, laser disc player, two VHS decks,

and surround sound speakers, Ebert exemplifies what film scholar Barbara Klinger calls the

“hardware aesthetic.” Referring to laserdiscs as “beautiful,” Ebert turns one over in his hands to

let the light catch its reflective surface and describes how the interactive features of the laserdisc
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player allowed him to savor and unlock the movie magic in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

But the show also approached home video as a problem for film culture. With “What’s

Wrong with Home Video?,” Siskel and Ebert devoted an entire episode of the program to

outlining the ills of home video. In particular, they critiqued panning and scanning, the legibility

(or lack thereof) of subtitles, and the extension of the blockbuster mentality to video stores.

Ebert was especially proud of such episodes. In this episode and similar episodes, such as the

special on colorization, which attacked that practice as well, the benefits of practicing film

criticism on television are amply evident. Through clips that offered clear contrasts, the show

could demonstrate the consequences of panning and scanning, unreadable subtitles, and

colorization. While these positions went without saying among the members of serious film

culture, the show brought these issues to general audiences in ways that helped serious film

culture eventually claim victory against each of these problems. In doing so, though, the show

also addressed these issues in tangible terms. Siskel and Ebert critiqued the aspects of home

video that could be fixed but said nothing about more abstract concerns, such as the possibility

that intrinsic differences existed between celluloid and video images, and that the use of home

video could draw a line between the “true” supporters of the art form, as Ebert, for example,

would do in print. In this way, the show reflected the consumer-friendly intentions of its original

design and resulted in a subtle split between Ebert’s television persona and his work in print, a

difference not unlike the alleged dichotomy between the film criticism James Agee wrote for

Time and The Nation.

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While Siskel and Ebert routinely insisted on their desire to offer serious film criticism

within the constraints imposed by television, they faced criticism on this ground. For example,

in the film Life Itself, Jonathan Rosenbaum accused the show of implicitly supporting

Hollywood’s hegemony: “I think they were conscientious about trying to do what they were

doing as well as they could and as seriously as they could, but, invariably, a show like Gene and

Roger’s show becomes a part of that mainstream system. And, by and large, the purpose of

mainstream reviewing is not just to valorize films that get multimillion dollar ad campaigns, but

to eliminate everything else.” Perhaps the most prominent criticism came from Richard Corliss.

Early in 1990, Film Comment published Corliss’s scathing critique of the show in the article “All

Thumbs, or, Is There a Future for Film Criticism?” For Corliss, the show represented a larger

trend in American film culture, a trend toward dumbing down film criticism and offering

nothing more than subservience to corporate agendas: “The long view of cinema aesthetics is

irrelevant to a moviegoer for whom history began with Star Wars. . . . Movie criticism of the

elevated sort, as practiced over the past half century by James Agee and Manny Farber, Andrew

Sarris and Pauline Kael, J. Hoberman and Dave Kehr—in the mainstream press and in

magazines like Film Comment—is an endangered species. Once it flourished; soon it may perish,
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to be replaced by a consumer service that is no brains and all thumbs.” The reference to

thumbs was, of course, a direct blow to Siskel and Ebert, whose finger-based evaluations of

movies had helped make the show and its hosts famous, marketable, and easily legible. But

Corliss also critiqued the show in more explicit terms: “This is, shall we say, no film university of

the air. The program does not dwell on shot analysis, or any other kind of analysis. It is a sitcom

(with its own noodling, toodling theme song) starring two guys who live in a movie theater and

argue all the time. Oscar Ebert and Felix Siskel. ‘The fat guy and the bald guy.’ S&E&TM is every
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kind of TV and no kind of film criticism.” To be fair, even Siskel and Ebert’s colleagues
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understood them as a kind of comedy duo with a broad style, so Corliss’s critique was not

without merit.

But Corliss also made a caricature of the show that Ebert was quick to defend, even though

he shared many of Corliss’s concerns about the quality of contemporary film culture, especially

in the age of home video. In the subsequent issue of Film Comment, Ebert responded to Corliss,

saying first that his colleague was “generally correct in his discussion of new developments in

popular film criticism. The age of the packaged instant review is here, and lots of moviegoers
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don’t have time to read the good, serious critics—the Kaels and Kauffmanns.” And, Ebert

confessed, “I am the first to agree with Corliss that the Siskel & Ebert program is not in-depth
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film criticism, as indeed how could it be, given our time constraints.” This was a constant

source of anxiety for Siskel and Ebert, who both began their careers as proud newspapermen

and worried about the seriousness of television in general and their own show in particular. For

example, in its early years, the show had a recurring feature called Spot the Wonder Dog, which

highlighted the worst-reviewed movie in that episode and featured a real live dog, about which

Ebert later said: “Gene and I used to ask each other, ‘Do you think Pauline Kael would appear on
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television with a trained animal?’ ”

Ever the populist, though, Ebert defended the show for the way it reached general audiences

while also disputing the premise that film criticism was in decline. According to Ebert, the show

pointed audiences to movies they would otherwise never hear about and brought them ideas

about the movies they would otherwise never hear. “The program reaches audiences in nearly

200 cities, and from some of the smaller markets come letters like one saying, ‘None of these

movies ever play within 50 miles of here, so thanks to your show at least we know what we are

missing,’ ” Ebert proudly remarked. “When we review a film that is not being released

simultaneously on 1,600 screens,” he continued, “our review is the only local exposure that film
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receives in many cities.” “What Corliss does not realize,” Ebert argued, “is that this is an
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improvement, not a deterioration, of the situation as we both found it in the mid-1960s

when we started in the business of writing about films. That was a time when there was no

regular film criticism on national or local TV. Film magazines did not exist on the newsstands,

and although Film Quarterly and Film Comment were being published, few outside academia

and the film industry knew about them. Variety was the showbiz bible, with the emphasis on
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biz. As a matter of policy, most daily newspapers did not publish film reviews.”

Yet this counter-intuitive (self-)defense of contemporary serious film culture did not stop

Ebert from expressing feelings of nostalgia for the Film Generation’s heyday. “In the days of my

youth and Corliss’s, the film societies and art houses provided the environment where a serious

film community flourished,” Ebert opined. While he then granted that some young people may

have been serious in the same way, he also lamented that “a young person seriously interested in

film has little sense, these days, that he is part of a community. The collapse of campus film

societies is the single most obvious reason for this. Serious discussion of good movies is no
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longer part of most students’ undergraduate experience.” What was to blame for the decline?

“[W]hy are the movies not as exciting as they used to be, and why are there fewer

unconventional ones, and why is there no audience for repertory, revival, and campus film

societies?” Ebert asked. “Because (1) home video is killing 16 mm exhibition and all the film

communities and programming that revolved around it, and (2) modern marketing techniques

have consolidated exhibition patterns, so that movies can be block-booked onto thousands of
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screens at once, and sold in a media blitz.”

While Ebert blamed technological changes in part for the aesthetic and social consequences

he decried, new technologies would soon play a role in making him more hopeful about the state

of contemporary film culture. At this juncture in Ebert’s career, it becomes impossible to

disarticulate his discussions of three interrelated changes: the rise of DVDs, the emergence of

digital projection, and the prominence of the Internet. Beginning in the late 1990s, Ebert
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simultaneously supported DVDs and fought against digital projection. Eventually, he would

come to see both of these formats in a hopeful light as the means to enrich film culture through

greater access to movies made outside of Hollywood’s blockbuster mentality. And the Internet

would play a pivotal role in Ebert’s optimism as well, especially through the community he

discovered and fostered with his blog.

First, DVDs seemed to resolve the problems introduced by VHS while also vastly exceeding

the commercial success of laser discs, which never reached a wide enough audience for film

critics like Ebert to think that they exerted a positive influence on film culture writ large.

Initially, DVDs were most significant for the respect they showed to older movies and the

opportunity they presented for new audiences to encounter the film canon. This mission was at

the heart of Ebert’s Great Movies column and was complemented by DVDs, as he wrote in the

introduction to the 2005 book The Great Movies II: “The DVD has been of incalculable value to

those who love films, producing prints of such quality that the film can breathe before our eyes

instead of merely surviving there. The supplementary material on some of them is so useful and

detailed that today’s audiences can know more about a title than, in some cases, their directors
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knew when they were made.” The praise he offered DVDs in this volume represented a rapid

change in his understanding of the format’s potential. In the first collected volume of his Great

Movies column, published in 2002, Ebert still seemed ambivalent about home video and

doubted that it had brought general audiences to new independent films and stalwart classics:

In theory home video should be a godsend for lovers of great films, and indeed most of these

titles are available on video in one form or another, and that is how most people will have to

see them. But when you enter the neighborhood video chain store, display boxes near the

door push the latest ‘new on video’ Hollywood blockbusters, and you have to prowl in the

shadows to find ‘foreign films’ and ‘classics’—often a pitiful selection. Independent and local
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video stores and Web-based operations like netflix.com [sic] and facets.org give access
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to a much larger range of films, but does the average moviegoer ever find them?

By 2009, the answer to that question had become a resounding yes. In the blog post “The Light

in the Tunnel,” Ebert lamented Hollywood’s continued reliance on blockbuster movies and slick

ad campaigns, but he also said that film culture had entered the “best of times” for the “films

that make their own way in the world.” “People download films (legally, I hope). They view via

streaming video. They buy or rent DVDs. They use VOD. They check the cable schedules. They

can make amazing discoveries in places like TCM, with its access to studio archives of long-

format films.” Alongside this activity, Ebert added, audiences went “to theaters when and where
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they can.” A year later, he reiterated this enthusiasm:

I can’t prove it, but I have the feeling that more different people are seeing more different

movies than ever before. With the explosion of DVD, Netflix, Red Box, and many forms of

Video on Demand, virtually all movies are easily available to virtually all North American

moviegoers. This has created a huge potential audience. When people tell me how many

titles they have in their Netflix queues, I reflect that until recent years they’d been telling me
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how many movies never even played in their town.

Alongside his praise for DVDs and other forms of access provided by home video, Ebert also

celebrated the way that digital projection had been helpful in providing access to and fostering

the production of better new films. In “Light in the Tunnel,” he also credited digital projection

with allowing audiences to see more films made outside of the studio system, and, in doing so,

began to soften his prior insistence on celluloid. “This is a good time for me to declare a cease-

fire in my long war against digital projection,” Ebert wrote. “For years,” he continued,
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I said it was not as good as light through celluloid, and for years I was correct. I still believe

that in principle. But digital projection has become very good indeed, to the point that most

people aren’t aware if they’re watching it. In fact, the other day a 35mm print wasn’t

delivered to a Chicago screening room, and we watched a DVD screener of the same film,

and it looked just fine.

Much more to the point, 35mm prints are expensive to manufacture and ship, and if you

want to open in 100 theaters on the same day you need 100 prints. A digital version can be

distributed by internet or disc at a fraction of the cost, and that represents the future of the
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kinds of films we’re looking for.

Given his career-spanning insistence on the public dimension of cinema’s specificity, it is no

surprise that, having found a way to situate home video within the styles of thought and

structures of feeling that characterize serious film culture, Ebert was also able to eventually

adapt to the reality of digital projection as a replacement for celluloid prints in most theaters.

But like his praise for DVDs and home video more broadly, Ebert’s praise for digital projection

nonetheless represented a significant change of heart and mind. When he first began to

comment on digital projection, Ebert joined the chorus of voices in serious film culture who

decried the impending loss of celluloid. However, his response differed from many in serious

film culture in that he presented the case against digital projection as one primarily founded in

the difference in quality of the image, and secondarily founded in the possibility that our brains

processes information differently between celluloid and video images.

This is the case he tried to make in the 1999 essay “Celluloid vs. Digital: The War for the Soul

of the Cinema.” In the essay, Ebert predicts that the “new digital gizmos” will be defeated by a
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technical advance more in keeping with the tenets of “traditional cinema.” The advance in
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question was the MaxiVision48 system, which shot and projected film at 48 frames per

second, achieving a higher resolution than either standard 35mm film stock or the digital

projection of the day could offer. Much as he had done before, Ebert rejected the alternatives to

celluloid because they offered audiences a worse image. That said, he also speculated about

another possible difference between celluloid and video, one that emphasized format-specific

properties. “Hollywood has not spent a dime, for example, to research the intriguing question,

do film and digital create different brain states? Some theoreticians,” Ebert explained, “believe

that film creates reverie, video creates hypnosis; wouldn’t it be ironic if digital audiences found

they were missing an ineffable part of the moviegoing experience?” “At the end of its first

century,” he concluded, Hollywood “shouldn’t be so cheerful about throwing out everything that
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‘film’ means. And it should get over its infatuation with the ‘digital’ buzzword.”

He did not, however, focus on the claim that celluloid had unique indexical properties. This

distinction between Ebert’s defense of celluloid and the defenses offered by prominent peers

within serious film culture can be illustrated by contrasting responses to The Phantom Menace.

Both shot and projected digitally, The Phantom Menace was seen by many film critics and

cinephiles as a bellwether for the future of the medium, and most of them considered that future

dire. For example, J. Hoberman’s review of the film put the question of celluloid’s indexicality at

the heart of its wider significance. Furthermore, the combination of political and theoretical

discourse in the following passage also indicates that Hoberman imagined a different audience

for his criticism than the one that Ebert’s criticism imagined:

As the spectacularly alienated aerial battle that ended Star Wars predicted video and

computer games to come (not to mention the sanitized air war of Desert Storm), so The

Phantom Menace demonstrates the history of the future—literally. Years ago, Siegfried

Kracauer linked the development of historicist thinking to the mid-nineteenth-century rise

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of photography: “The world has become a photographable present and the

photographed present has been entirely eternalized.” History was the attempt to

“photograph time” and photography was memory made material.

But, infinitely malleable, digital imaging does not share photography’s indexical

relationship to the real—it doesn’t produce a document (admissible as evidence) but rather a

fiction. Will this mastery over the photographic record inspire a new historicism or inspire a

continually “improved” past? . . . Purists screamed when Casablanca was colorized, but Star
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Woids were thrilled when Lucas digitally added Jabba the Hutt to the Star Wars reissue.

For Ebert, on the other hand, the primary problem was the way the movie looked when

projected digitally, which was compounded by George Lucas’s efforts to encourage the entire

industry to convert to digital. Ebert weaved The Phantom Menace into his larger critique of

digital projection in the introduction for the 2000 edition of his annual anthology, now entitled

Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook:

Maybe this doesn’t belong a yearbook aimed at video viewers, but I believe the whole

universe of film is at a dangerous crossroads.

It is taken as an accepted fact in some circles that film projection will be replaced in

theaters by digital video projection, sometime in the next five years. Texas Instruments has

the best projection system, and has won good reviews for its test screenings of Phantom

Menace. Most viewers agree it is somewhere between 85 percent as good as film, and “about

as good” as film.

Splendid, right? Especially since satellite delivery of movies would save the studios the

cost of making and distributing prints?

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Well, maybe not so good. Because satellite delivery would involve compression, so

the picture quality might not be as high as in those Phantom Menace demos, when the

projection booth was stuffed with Texas Instruments acolytes, fine-tuning their custom

installation.

And maybe not so good for theaters, because satellite distribution might create the odd

situation of low-paid projectionists being replaced in the booth by expensive computer

systems engineers, who could expect salaries larger than the theater managers—or, in some

cases, the owners.

And maybe not so good because this would further the tyranny of mass bookings. And

because movies would start exactly on time, even if the lights were still on and the audience

filing in.

And especially not so good because the movie industry as devoted zero research to the

crucial question of whether film and video are the same thing. Some experts in the

psychology of perception believe that film and video affect the mind in fundamentally

different ways. Film creates an alpha, or reverie, state. Video creates a beta, or hypnotic,

state. It may be that a video picture, no matter how “good,” would not affect the

subconscious in the same way—that a video movie in a theater would somehow subtly not

reach us emotionally in the same way that film does. In that case, theatrical video projection

could destroy the intangible relationship between the viewer and the screen.

Meanwhile, why settle for video “about as good” as film, when a new film projection

system promises a picture more than twice as good? MaxiVision48 uses forty-eight frames a

second, not twenty-four, and has a picture area 32 percent larger (it recaptures the unneeded

space used by the analog sound track). It incorporates existing technology, so is much

cheaper than video projection. I’ve seen MaxiVision and video projection and, believe me,
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there’s no comparison.
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In keeping with the differences between his own print and television criticism, though, Ebert

devoted an entire episode of the show (during the brief period after Siskel’s death in which Ebert

was the sole host) to the release of The Phantom Menace and had nothing but praise for the film

and its director. The entire litany of problems for film culture that were signaled for Ebert by the

film, and by Lucas’s crusade for digital projection, never factored into the show’s coverage of the

movie.

While Ebert continued to insist throughout much of this discussion that celluloid and a

public theater were still the best ways to see a movie, there are also hints of authentic

experiences with the new digital technologies. The access these technologies provided was

crucial, though his praise for this benefit only reinforced what he had said about the benefits of

VHS. Thus it is significant that Ebert also described authentic experiences while watching DVDs.

In the introduction to The Great Movies II, for instance, Ebert writes: “I delayed a Great Movie

review until new DVDs were available and felt with both The Rules of the Game and Children of

Paradise that the prints had been so wonderfully restored that I was essentially seeing the
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movies for the first time.” In “Light in the Tunnel,” he recommended a dozen films to his

readers and then added: “By the way. I’ll let you in on a professional secret. All of those 12 films

got rated either three and a half stars or four stars from me. And I viewed every one on a DVD
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screener.”

More poignantly, DVDs also played an important role in his recovery from cancer treatments

and surgical procedures. As Ebert recounted in the introduction to his 2010 Yearbook: “The

focus of my work life has always been seeing movies and reviewing them, and that hasn’t

changed. In the early days of my recovery, my wife, Chaz, brought me a DVD of a movie she

thought I might enjoy, The Queen, with Helen Mirren. She was correct. I took out a yellow legal
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pad and wrote my first review in a few months.” This is classic Ebert in the first respect—he
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happily admits his admiration for a movie that many film critics and cinephiles might

dismiss as Oscar-bait. But I want to stress the centrality of home video in this account as a spark

for reinvigorating Ebert’s cinephilia. This spark seems to lead to an even more profound

experience, as recounted in Life Itself. After returning home from the hospital, Ebert writes,

I began to watch Bergman movies. I began with the Death of God trilogy (Through a Glass

Darkly, The Silence, Winter Light) and continued through The Passion of Anna and Hour of

the Wolf. These were on DVDs from the Criterion Collection, playing on an HD television,

and although I’d seen them all at least two or three times, I had never seen such a clear

picture. . . . I froze frames, advanced slowly, noticed the care with which [cinematographer

Sven Nykvist] controlled the light on human faces to a precision of fractions of an inch. The
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films of the trilogy were more than ever things of beauty.

His pleasure in re-watching the Bergman films was a microcosm of his capacity to take joy in

re-watching, even obsessive re-watching. Indeed, Ebert’s career is an implicit rejoinder to the

claim that scarcity is an essential component of cinephilia, especially through the practice of

watching a film frame by frame and allowing audiences to yell out “Stop!” at any moment for

discussion, which Ebert did as a teacher in Chicago and across the country, most famously at the

Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, Colorado, an event named Cinema Interruptus. Ebert

saw some films dozens of times this way. Cliché as it may sound, his favorite film was Citizen

Kane, and his body of work is full of references to what he considered the inexhaustible mystery

and pleasure the film had to offer. Though he never dwelled on this point, he noted how much

easier this practice was with home video technologies, another benefit that must have reinforced

for him the notion that home video could be a vital aspect of serious film culture.
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Alongside his optimism about DVDs, Ebert’s experiences online also informed his

optimism. Most significantly, the success of his blog suggested that the feared death of serious

film culture had been announced prematurely. Perhaps home video did play a significant role in

changing where cinephiles gathered for conversation, and those changes may have also

legitimately led to a lull in the vitality of serious film culture. But Ebert’s blog suggested to him

that the values he associated with serious film culture were not only alive and well but thriving:

I started this blog in May, and it has enriched my life. I have been astonished by the high

quality of the comments received. I have also been educated, amused, moved, corrected,

encouraged. I personally read all the comments that are submitted, and after four months I

have received not one obscene message, not one illiterate message, not one hostile

message. . . . Your comments have provided me with the best idea of my readers that I have

ever had, and you are the readers I have dreamed of. I was writing to you before I was sure

you were there. You are thoughtful, engaged, fair, and often the authors of eloquent prose.

You take the time to craft comments of hundreds of words. Frequently you are experts, and

generous enough to share your knowledge.

Moreover, Ebert discovered through the community he found online that film history and

contemporary cinema were still vital: “[A]mong the group of you I believe you have seen just
111
about every film worth seeing, and some of you remember them in minute detail.” Serious film

culture had survived all along, and the Internet had also given rise to a new “golden age for film

criticism.” “Never before have more critics written more or better words for more readers about

more films,” Ebert enthused. In this way, Ebert’s blog and website mirror the way his TV show

expanded the technologies of film criticism. As Jonathan Rosenbaum contends in Life Itself,

Ebert was at the forefront of online film culture: “Right now, there’s an argument about the
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Internet. Some people say film criticism is at the end, the art of cinema is at the end. Roger

sees it in a much more positive way. It’s a renaissance. It’s a renaissance in film appreciation and

film criticism. The roving reporters that he uses on his blog is giving a critical berth to lots of

other points of view.”

This is not to suggest, however, that Ebert’s responses to these changes were either a linear

progression toward an enlightened viewpoint or an entirely consistent contribution to the

debate. In the summer of 2011, for example, he reacted strongly to the way that 3-D lenses had

resulted in several movie theaters showing 2-D films without sufficient brightness, which he

considered an insult to the medium and its supporters. He seemed both prickly and despondent

in the blog post “It’s Going to be a Bumpy Night,” which appeared on June 2:

For myself, I am a reactionary purist. I dislike 3D. I also disliked interactive movies, Smell-

O-Vision, and the now-forgotten Sensurround . . . My needs are few. I hope to see a good

movie, well projected, with decent sound, on a good-sized screen, in the company of people

who are generally in sympathy with the film. . . . The only choice for a reasonably intelligent

grown-up, I begin to feel, is to seek out what are called art or independent theaters, where

the projection quality is likely to be more closely monitored, and the audience is likely to be

civilized. Yes, I’m told, there’s no theater like that within 100 miles! Then do the best you

can. Or wait for the DVD. It hurts me to say that. I feel as if I’m abandoning movie theaters,
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which I love. Or are they abandoning me?

Likewise, on March 9, 2011, he wrote: “I have never watched a movie on my iPhone, nor will I
113
ever. I love movies too much to do something like that to one of them.” A year later, though, he

was asked by a reader: “Is watching a movie on a cellphone an artistic crime?” Ebert replied:
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Probably, and I’ve never done it—but then I remember that as a budding movie-lover I

grew up watching classic cinema on a small portable black and white TV. That’s where I fell

in love with Citizen Kane, Sergeant York, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Casablanca and all the

other Hollywood classics. I was 10 or 11, and I couldn’t have cared less about aspect ratio or

poor lighting. All I cared about was decent reception and sound—and if I had that, then I

have to say that at that time and that age I had as fine an artistic experience as I could have

hoped for. The story, the performances, the script, the allure—all those most important

elements can very definitely come through a tiny screen if you’re an alert and interested

viewer who yearns for a good story. Didn’t Scorsese grow up the same way—watching

afternoon movies on the tube? Didn’t we all?

Watching a movie on your cellphone, with stereophonic sound (if you use headphones) is

actually probably a step up from what I had then. If you handed me an iPhone and a Netflix

or Hulu Plus subscription in 1974—I would have thought I had died and gone to

heaven! . . . By all means I think you should see a movie on a big screen with a fantastic print

and superior sound—that’s the ultimate experience—but if a cellphone is all you have to
114
work with, go for it.

He even wrote a blog post worrying that the Internet had given him a short attention span and

had ruined his ability to read at length.

But the final image film culture has of Ebert mirrors the image that Time painted of him only

three years into a career that lasted more than forty. In March 2010, exactly forty years after

that Time profile, another profile of Ebert shaped his reputation by reinforcing the image of his

resilient cinephilia. For this profile, Ebert appeared on the cover of Esquire in a photo that

revealed the damage that had been done to his appearance by illness. Thus the profile was a

celebration of Ebert’s human resilience as well. As the profile’s author, Chris Jones, notes, there
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was an inherent risk in finding wisdom in Ebert’s work. “We have a habit of turning

sentimental about celebrities who are struck down [and] transforming them into mystics,” he

cautioned. But he nonetheless found a valuable lesson about our humanity in Ebert’s

indefatigable love of movies. To demonstrate that love, Jones concluded the profile with a

passage from a review Ebert had just written of the film Broken Embraces: “Pedro Almodóvar

loves the movies with lust and abandon and the skill of an experienced lover. Broken Embraces

is a voluptuary of a film, drunk on primary colors, caressing Penélope Cruz, using the devices of

a Hitchcock to distract us with surfaces while the sinister uncoils beneath. As it ravished me, I
115
longed for a freeze-frame to allow me to savor a shot.” What I want to take away from this

passage is the sense of the way that “traditional” and contemporary modes of film experience

combine to make an ecstatic feeling of cinephilia. Even as Ebert experiences the theatrical

moviegoing experience that he most preferred, including its unspoken contract to receive the

film passively, he also longs to disrupt the movie’s flow and use the technologies most

commonly associated with home video to enhance his experience of the movie. In this way, this

review, and his film criticism writ large, illustrate how the styles of thought and structures of

feeling associated with serious film culture are not necessarily threatened by new technologies,

and that they can even offer ways to extend those traditional features of serious film culture.

Much as my studies of Gilbert Seldes, Harry Alan Potamkin, and Alexander Bakshy show us that

a career-spanning investigation reveals silent-era critics who were (eventually) attuned to

continuity, this section’s study of Ebert reveals how disillusionment is not necessarily a switch to

be turned on or off and may occur at various points along the way in a career that is nonetheless

predominantly considered hopeful. In this way, my study of Ebert’s career also questions the

terms in which Sconce claims that film critics and cinephiles persist in hoping for an ideal

cinema even after declaring their disillusionment. For Sconce, the persistence of hope after

disillusionment is evidence of a pathology, a “regressive dream” he hyperbolically (and

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sarcastically?) compares to the psychology of a serial killer “who keeps corpses in the

basement for ritualistic abuse and sad comfort” (283). Even absent the desire for an ideal

cinema, Ebert sometimes expressed feelings of nostalgia for the Film Generation and

corresponding disillusionment with the present, so perhaps Sconce would argue for the presence

of a latent serial-killer mentality in Ebert’s resilient cinephilia, but I will not. Instead, I argue

that Ebert’s career indicates a dialectical tension between hope and disillusionment.

Ebert’s populism made him skeptical of academic film critics and their theories, thus leading

him to a very general theory of film, which, at the time, certainly would have contrasted with the

various theories academics pursued, and also contrasted with the very specific understanding of

the medium laid out by Alexander Bakshy. By the end of his career, though, this general theory

of film would seem more aligned with academic theories, from Lisa Gittelman’s definition of a

medium to Tom Gunning’s sense of the protean nature of cinema. Perhaps the greatest

testimony to Ebert’s achievement as a film critic is to note the way his theory of film overlapped

with his impact on serious film culture. As the film critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky wrote upon

Ebert’s death: “When I learned that you’d died, I had just filed a review for your website. I was

about to start wrapping up one for this site—a pan of Simon Killer. I no longer feel like working

on that review. I don’t feel like writing about bad movies at all. I want to write about good
116
movies and good people.” If the movies were “a machine that generates empathy” to Ebert, his

film criticism became just such a machine for his readers.

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Conclusion

In the 1974 essay “Why I’m Not Bored,” film critic Stanley Kauffmann answered two of the most

common questions posed to the members of his profession: “How many films do you see a

week?” and “Don’t you get bored with going to films?” Kauffmann replied to the first question by

saying that he typically saw three films a week. “[M]ost of the time when I’m asked the

question,” he added, “I can’t really remember how many times I’ve gone in the previous week or

two, it all seems so natural.” Having therefore quickly dispatched of the query about quantity in

the opening paragraph of the essay, Kauffmann devoted the remainder of the piece to

addressing the query about quality. The answer he offered to this question resonates with the

concerns explored throughout The Awkward Ages and serves as a springboard for my

concluding thoughts on film criticism, technological change, and cinephilia.

Matching the spirit of his response to the first question, Kauffmann announces that the

answer to the second “is a firm no. A happy no.” “To salute the obvious,” he clarifies, “this

doesn’t mean that I never see boring films or that I am unborable. . . . But the idea of going to
1
films is never boring.” Kauffmann is then careful to distinguish his appetite for movies from the

possibility that he might enjoy all moving images to the same degree. Noting that his editor at

The New Republic “once generously suggested” that he write about television as well,

Kauffmann declares: “The prospect of merely crossing the living room to switch on television

dramas was numbing” (432-3). What accounted for the difference?

Kauffmann outlined three features of cinema that distinguished it from other art forms and

ensured his interest in the medium. “To begin with, there is the elemental kinetic aspect,” he

writes. “As with billions of people throughout the world since 1900,” Kauffmann continues, “the

mere physical act of filmgoing is part of the kinesis of my life—the getting up and going out and

the feeling of coming home, which is a somewhat different homecoming feeling from anything
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else except the theater (and which is totally unavailable from television). . . . To have my life

unpunctuated by the physical act of filmgoing is almost like walking with a limp, out of my

natural rhythm.” In this way, then, Kauffmann combines ideas about cinema’s specificity with

the awareness that its role in our lives is always connected to habits and rituals that are

fundamentally social.

Along these lines, Kauffmann links the social consumption of movies with a kind of

collective unconscious. Amongst the “billions” of moviegoers, he contends, there exists the

experience “of being in a group dream, a group reality.” Yes, Kauffmann concedes, this

communal aspect was true of the stage, too, but with cinema “there is a paradox: because of the

greater darkness there is, even in the middle of a group, the sense of private ownership of the

occasion.” That sense of ownership went both ways—the movies belong to us, but at least a part

of us belongs to them. “No one can go to a film theater without taking with him his parents and

childhood friends and the first grapplings of romance in the balcony. And no one can sit in a film

theater without acknowledging, however secretly, that this is where some part of his psyche

originated,” Kauffmann asserts. The popularity of cinema thus seemed to count as a difference

in kind between art forms. “Messenger boy or mogul, peasant or Pope, there can hardly be

anyone alive whose secret fantasies, controlled and uncontrolled, have not in some measure

been made by film. This has never been so widely true of any other art. My guess,” Kauffmann

hazards, “is that it is not yet true of television, [and] may never be true in quite the same way”

(433). Again, what accounted for the difference? “The size of the film screen in itself plays a part

in its sacerdotal function; it ministers down to us,” Kauffmann attests, “while the television

screens upward, smaller than we are, vulnerable to switches and dials. (If films ever really

become principally available through television cassettes, as has been prophesied sporadically

for years, whole psychic orders will have to be deployed) (433-4).”

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Beyond these matters of cinema’s specificity and its place in the fabric of our daily lives,

Kauffmann concludes by stating the “chief reason” for his freedom from boredom. “[B]oredom

is incompatible with hope,” he avers, “and hope is more of a constant in film than in virtually

any other art in America. . . . [N]o art is more persistently, almost irritatingly, pulsing with

prospects than the film.” Kauffmann did not mean to suggest that all films were good, only that

the medium remained flush with potential: “Nothing rotten that happens in film—and most of

what does happen is rotten—can negate the fact that it is still an avenue of possibilities, an

expanding nebula of aesthetic mysteries, a treasury of aptness for our time” (435). Even as many

around him insisted that the Film Generation was already in decline, Kauffmann saw signs of

vitality, in the audience for movies and in the movies themselves. Thus he ends the essay on a

sweeping defense of cinema that I would like to quote at length:

To me this combination of views is hard-headed, with no touch of Pollyanna—unless there is

also a touch of Pollyanna in the human race’s general insistence on survival. Concurrent with

our lives runs this muddied, quasi-strangulated, prostituted art, so life-crammed and

responsive and variegated and embracing, so indefinable no matter how far one strings out

phrases like these, that to deny it seems to me to deny the worst and the best in ourselves, a

chance to help clarify which is which, and which is in the ascendant on any particular day.

No matter how much I know about a film’s makers or its subject before I go, I never really

know what it’s going to do to me: depress me with its vileness, or just roll past, or change my

life in some degree, or some combination of all three, or affect me in some new way that I

cannot imagine. So I like being asked whether filmgoing gets boring: it makes me think of

what I don’t know about the next film I’m going to see. (436-7)
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While Kauffmann’s optimism sprung from the style and content of the movies, I want to

borrow from it to close The Awkward Ages with my own expression of optimism for the

intertwined futures of cinema and cinephilia. Following Kauffmann, I argue that a similar

dynamic obtains in relation to cinema’s varied technological and social manifestations. In doing

so, I want to indulge again in the kind of personal testimony familiar not only to cinephilic

writing, but also to writing about technological change more broadly.

During my first year as a PhD student, I borrowed a VHS tape of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

from the university library. Like most members of serious film culture, I considered myself an

admirer of the films directed by John Ford, but I had not yet seen this particular film, and, for

reasons I can scarcely recall now, my expectations for the film were modest. To my surprise,

though, I adored the film—its vibrant colors, narrative rhythms, and charming wit left me

exhilarated. A few months later, I got the opportunity to see the film again. Not only would the

second screening be on 35mm; it would take place in Chicago’s venerable Music Box Theatre, a

1920s picture palace that has served the city as an art house venue for decades. Although my

training in cinephilia suggested that this screening would be the one that truly counted for me, it

is that first screening I most cherish. The celluloid print I saw at the Music Box was well

preserved, but the experience of seeing the film on 35mm could not unseat the affective primacy

of that original home video screening.

If my two screenings of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon indicate that home video’s inadequacy

has been overstated, my aim is not to suggest that the standard defense of celluloid and the big-

screen experience is a sham. In fact, another screening of a John Ford classic stands as a

testament for me to the lasting power of the traditional theatrical experience. Not long after I

saw the former film on 35mm, I had the chance to see The Searchers on 35mm at Block Cinema,

located on the Northwestern campus. Though I had already seen the film on DVD, it was not

until I saw this pristinely restored print that I felt I understood how the audience was meant to
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react to the film’s opening shot, and thus how we were supposed to react to the whole film.

As the film began that evening and Ethan strolled toward the Edwards homestead, the entire

audience gasped at the beauty of the landscape and the movement of the frame. Seen this way,

The Searchers became not only a better film in my mind, but also a different film than the one I

had seen on DVD.

At its most extreme, the defense of celluloid and the theatrical experience denies the rich

variety of experiences that cinema has to offer in all of its technological and social

manifestations. Much as Kauffmann declared that his faith in cinema derived from the

unpredictability of his response to each new film, I contend that the same dynamic of

uncertainty and possibility applies to the context in which each new film is watched. Such

contingencies, I argue, are at the mysterious heart of cinephilia. Indeed, as I have documented

throughout The Awkward Ages, one film critic or cinephile may insist that seeing a particular

film on television or an iPhone, for example, constitutes a betrayal of the medium’s essence,

while yet another insists that the same film seen on the same formats appeared as a revelation of

the medium’s potential. This argument—that cinema and cinephilia are not and never were

confined to particular technological and social manifestations—situates The Awkward Ages

within a recent tradition of scholarship that insists upon the medium’s heterogeneity.

This argument also stands as the original impetus of The Awkward Ages, but the project

inevitably evolved over the course of its long gestation. When I began this dissertation almost a

decade ago, I felt the need to make an intervention into serious film culture’s existential crisis

over digital technologies, especially as it manifested in rejections of home video as an

inauthentic or impossible outlet for the kind of cinephilia that I associated with serious film

culture. At the time, I was driven by the desire to stamp out the essentialism that sought to

justify claims about the death of cinema and the death of serious film culture. I still hope that

The Awkward Ages makes a compelling case for why we should refuse such essentialism, but
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my primary focus eventually shifted toward a different sort of polemic when my research

deepened and the crisis itself dissipated. As I explored and documented serious film culture’s

thoughts and feelings across several distinct moments of major technological change, I became

less interested in illustrating the flaws that afflict essentialist logic and more interested in the

presence of rhetorical patterns within the discourses of serious film culture. By demonstrating

the persistence of serious film culture’s thoughts and feelings despite a century of concern about

their allegedly imminent disappearance, I want to dispel some of the anxiety that routinely

characterizes such moments for film critics and cinephiles. In other words, I want to show that

serious film culture’s latest crisis was just that—neither an end to the history of cinema nor to

the history of cinephilia but another chapter in the ongoing story of a mercurial medium and the

affections of its most ardent admirers.

If this project therefore seems to favor continuity—as well as convergence, plenitude, and

hope—I want to make it clear that my aim has not been to so narrowly take a side in these

debates. To the contrary, my point has been to illuminate the historical co-presence of the four

terms studied in this dissertation, and to correspondingly argue that such co-presence indicates

that the moments of major technological change studied herein do not constitute radical breaks

in the history of cinema and cinephilia. Instead, these moments belong to the continued

tradition of thought and feeling that I have called serious film culture.

Within the discourses of that tradition, moments of major technological change have been

habitually met with alarm and despair, but The Awkward Ages makes a case for the value of

these changes in reaffirming serious film culture’s cinephilia and serving as a motor for the

intellectual and affective responses that distinguish serious film culture from other ways of

relating to cinema. Rather than being a death knell, then, moments of major technological

change have actually been a source of serious film culture’s vitality, compelling film critics and

cinephiles to reimagine their most fundamental assumptions about the medium and their
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affections for it. These responses are a coherent tradition of thought and feeling unto

themselves, and they testify to the existence of a bond between cinephiles and the cinema that

has survived a century of technological changes. While I do not mean to imply that all cinematic

technologies and all generations of cinephiles are identical, The Awkward Ages argues that

contemporary cinephiles are the brothers and sisters of their celebrated predecessors, from the

silent-era aficionados to the Film Generation enthusiasts.

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Notes

Chapter 1
Introduction

1. Stewart may have been holding an iPod Touch, not an iPhone. Chuck Tryon has also written about this
routine and refers to the device as both an iPhone and an iPod Touch, demonstrating the difficulty of
distinguishing between them (Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence [New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009], 61). For the joke’s purposes, however, the difference
between the two is immaterial.

2. Joe Morgenstern, “ ’Pod People,” The Wall Street Journal, February 23, 2008, http://www.wsj.com/
articles/SB120372124413686875.

3. Tryon, 61.

4. Manohla Dargis, “The Revolution Will Be Downloaded (if You’re Patient),” New York Times, March 18,
2007.

5. I am borrowing this phrase from Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 4.

6. Tryon, 73.

7. Stephen Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980-1989 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002); D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007).

8. Prince, 124.

9. Fortunately, debates about Allen as a director, or as a human being, are not germane to this
dissertation.

10. Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006), 54-5.

11. Stanley Kauffmann, A World on Film: Criticism and Comment (New York: Delta, 1966), 415.

12. Ibid., 428.

13. Keathley, 2. Subsequent citations appear in text.

14. Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Frémaux, “La Cinéphilie ou L’Invention d’Une Culture,” Vingtième
Siècle 46 (April-June 1995): 133-42.

15. See, for example, Christian Keathley, “La caméra-stylo: notes on video criticism and cinephilia,” in
The Language and Style of Film Criticism, eds. Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan (Routledge: New York,
2011), 176-91.

16. Christian Keathley, “Preface: The Twenty-First-Century Cinephile,” in Cinephilia in the Age of Digital
Reproduction: Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture, vol. 1, ed. Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb (New York:
Wallflower Press, 2009), 3.

17. Ibid., 1.
 286

18. Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935), ed. Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert
K. Merton, trans. Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 142.

19. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2005), 26.

20. Fleck, 100.

21. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.

22. Gilbert Seldes, An Hour with the Movies and the Talkies (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company,
1929), 138.

23. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton,
Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 15.

Chapter 2
Change and Continuity

24. Indeed, Denby is no stranger to the former genre. See, for example, “The Moviegoers,” The New
Yorker, April 6, 1998; and “Whatever Happened to Movies for Grownups?” Culture Beat (blog), The New
Yorker, October 2, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/10/whatever-
happened-to-movies-for-grown-ups.html.

25. David Denby, “Big Pictures,” The New Yorker, January 8, 2007, 58. Subsequent citations appear in
text.

26. Terrence Rafferty, “50 Years of Dizzy, Courtesy of Hitchcock,” New York Times, May 11, 2008.

27. For an example of the way that later historians repeated the idea that synchronized sound and speech
constituted a radical break from silent movies, see Alexander Walker, The Shattered Silents: How the
Talkies Came to Stay (New York: William M. Morrow, 1979).

28. See Douglas Gomery, “The Coming of Sound to the American Film,” (PhD diss., University of
Wisconsin-Madison, 1975); David Bordwell, “The introduction of sound,” in The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960, Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985); and Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition
to Sound, 1926-1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

29. David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 43.

30. Gilbert Seldes, The 7 Lively Arts (1924; repr., New York: Sagamore Press, 1957), 17. Subsequent
citations appear in text.

31. Gilbert Seldes, “The Movies Commit Suicide,” Harper’s, November 1928, 706. Subsequent citations
appear in text.

32. For a discussion of public debates on the social and cultural value of cinema, especially with regard to
gender, see Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New
York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).
 287

33. George Jean Nathan, The Theater, the Drama, the Girls (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 134.

34. I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924; repr., New York: Harcourt, Brace, Janovich,
1985), 202-3.

35. Alexander Bakshy, “The Cinematograph as Art,” The Drama, May 1916, 269-70.

36. For an excellent history of the film criticism of this period, see Myron Lounsbury, The Origins of
American Film Criticism, 1909-1939 (New York: Arno Press, 1973).

37. Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1915, 1922; repr., New York: Modern Library, 2000),
30.

38. Ibid., 34-5.

39. On the History of Film Style, 12-35.

40. Gilbert Seldes, “Theory about ‘Talkies,’ ” The New Republic, August 8, 1928, 306. Subsequent
citations appear in text.

41. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994), 1-105.

42. Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1994), 23.

43. Musser defines “cinema” as “projected motion pictures and their sound accompaniment.” Cinema is
thus related to but distinct from the history of “screen practice,” which includes devices such as the magic
lantern; and the history of “motion pictures,” which includes cinema but also “forms of exhibition that did
not involve projection,” with peephole viewing the “most important” among them (The Emergence of
Cinema, 1).

44. According to Kristin Thompson, technological changes were largely invisible to the general public and
journalists in the popular press by 1920. For example, the shift from orthochromatic to panchromatic film
stock was important to cinematographers but went unnoticed outside of the industry (“Major
technological changes of the 1920s,” in The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 281-5).

45. Michael Kammen, The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the
United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 7.

46. Lounsbury, xviii.

47. For an excellent history of the “little theaters,” especially as they relate to broader concerns of class
and taste, see Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

48. Gilbert Seldes, An Hour with the Movies and the Talkies (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company,
1929), 95. Subsequent citations appear in text.

49. Russell Lynes, The Tastemakers (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1954); see also “The Tastemakers,”
Harper’s, June 1947, 481-91; and “Highbrow, Middlebrow, Lowbrow,” Harper’s, February 1949, 19-28.
 288

50. For an excellent history of these developments, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The
Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

51. The Tastemakers, 320.

52. Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class
Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 114.

53. Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1992), xvi.

54. The Tastemakers, 311. Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (New York:
Ballantine Books, 1983) is also a useful, if more savage, source on the taste-based anxieties of the
middlebrow.

55. Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2001), esp. 172-82. As Everett also suggests, the styles of thought and structures of
feeling common among black Americans at the time likely made them less worried about technological
change in general: “Whereas much has been written about the antimachinery Luddite tendency among
many white Americans, who were anxious or hostile in the face of employment competition from machine
technologies that impelled the modern industrial age, many black Americans, it seems, did not share that
same anxiety about the machine technologies’ usurpation of their employment opportunities. Perhaps this
attitude can be explained by blacks’ incredulity that technology could plunge them any lower than their
present positions at the bottom of America’s racially stratified civil society. Thus, after more than three
hundred years in bondage, it is easy to imagine that news of technological progress would not necessarily
represent the same threat for blacks as it might for working-class whites” (53).

56. Max Dawson, “TV Repair: New Media ‘Solutions’ to Old Media Problems” (PhD diss., Northwestern
University, 2008).

57. On the History of Film Style, 9.

58. Ibid., 9-10.

59. Tom Gunning, “The Attraction of Motion: Modern Representation and the Image of Movement,” in
Film 1900: Technology, Culture, Perception, ed. Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier (New Barnet,
UK: John Libbey Publishing, Ltd., 2009), 166.

60. Quoted in Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2005).

61. Lindsay, 28.

62. Gilbert Seldes, Movies for the Millions: An Account of Motion Pictures, Principally in America
(London: B. T. Batsford, Ltd., 1937), 3. Subsequent citations appear in text.

63. For a discussion of Seldes and American exceptionalism, see Kammen, ch. 8, “In Defense of
Americanism.” For a discussion of Emerson’s influence on Lindsay’s thinking, see Peter Decherney,
Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2005), 13-40.

64. Harry Alan Potamkin, The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin, ed. Lewis
Jacobs (New York: Teachers College Press, 1977), 53.
 289

65. Gilbert Seldes, “Talkies’ Progress,” Harper’s, September 1929, 455. Subsequent citations appear in
text.

66. Kammen, 217.

67. Crafton, 312.

68. Ibid., 269.

69. Mordaunt Hall, review of Napoleon’s Barber, directed by John Ford, New York Times, November 26,
1928. Quoted in Crafton, 282.

70. Quoted in Crafton, 287.

71. See, for example, Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957); René
Clair, quoted in David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 4th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004),
225-6; and Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov, “Statement on Sound,” in The
Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. Richard Taylor and William Powell (London: BFI, 1998),
80-1.

72. Robert Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 8-30.

73. Seldes even wondered if he had placed too much emphasis on directors: “The idea that the director is
the central figure in making the movies is not a popular one with financiers, writers, players or cutters. It
is a favourite idea with critics, and as one of those who began to sense the importance of the director some
twenty years ago, I am so familiar with the idea that I am beginning to be suspicious of it” (Movies for the
Millions, 72-3).

74. Crafton, 140.

75. Clifton Fadiman, review of A Night at the Opera, directed by Sam Wood, reprinted in American Film
Criticism From the Beginnings to Citizen Kane: Reviews of Significant Films at the Time They First
Appeared, ed. Stanley Kauffmann and Bruce Henstell (New York: Liveright, 1972), 322-3. The entire
parody is worth quoting at length for the way it characterizes Seldes’s critical reputation: “Just to remove
that frightened, I-think-I-hear-Gilbert-Seldes look from your face, allow me to issue at once these flat
statements: 1. No attempt is herein made to trace the origin of the Marx Brothers’ humor to the commedia
dell’arte of the sixteenth century. 2. Their impertinent treatment of the social properties is not construed
either as a revolt against the constrictions of American life, or as proletarian propaganda. 3. Groucho’s
intransigent attitude toward his lady stooge, and Harpo’s conception of a woman as merely something up
which to clamber, are not explained as symbols of frustrated American manhood crying out against
female domination. 4. There will be no witty references to Marxists.” Seldes might have been thinking of
Fadiman’s teasing when, several years later, he wrote the following description of his own preferred
critical methods: “I have myself been so often reproached for being serious about the movies that I
hesitate to reproach others for the same (honorable) attitude; but when [Mae West’s] comedies are said to
reflect the insecure and frustrated lives of their heroes and heroines and their popularity is taken as
indicating some deep disappointment or disturbance in American life, I retreat. I will not use a
complicated explanation when a simple one covers the available facts” (The Public Arts [New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1956], 2o).

76. Kammen, 93.

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77. For more on the significance of the commercial success of The Singing Fool, see Douglas Gomery, The
Coming of Sound (New York: Routledge, 2005), 55-62. For more on the success of both films with critics
in the trade and popular presses, see Crafton, 275.

78. For the seminal discussion of how early film critics and theorists treated sound recording as
intrinsically realistic, see Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and
Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 1-41.

79. Gilbert Seldes, “The Mobile Camera,” The New Republic, October 30, 1929, 298. Subsequent citations
appear in text.

80. Mordaunt Hall, “Vitaphone Stirs as Talking Movie,” New York Times, August 7, 1926.

81. Mordaunt Hall, “Amazing Invention Coupling Sound with Screen Images Stirs Audiences,” New York
Times, August 15, 1926.

82. Emphasis in original.

83. Movies for the Millions, 89-100. Nineteen years later, he reiterated the point: “[T]he one thing the
enthusiasts for the silent picture were sure of was that with sound the movies could no longer set before
us people larger and greater than life itself. We thought then, whether we said it or not, that instant
communication from the screen to the subconscious would be interrupted by sound and that common
words, spoken as we speak them in our everyday errands, would be an obstacle between the half-unreal
figure on the screen and the half-buried instinctive responses in ourselves. It didn’t happen because in the
end the essence of the moving picture—its movement—survived the coming of sound” (The Public Arts,
22-3).

84. Andrew Sarris makes this case for Ferguson in his foreword to The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson,
ed. Robert Wilson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1971).

85. See André Bazin, What is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1967 and 1971).

86. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” (1970), reprinted in
Movies and Methods: An Anthology, ed. Bill Nichols, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1985), 531-42.

87. Gilbert Seldes, review of The Film Till Now, by Paul Rotha, Films in Review (July-August 1950), 30.

88. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

89. Consider, for example, the presentism in film theorist D. N. Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007): “Only the transition to sound generated a comparable
critical discourse of enthusiasm and loss in equal measure. In retrospect, however, the key difference was
that the medium of the movies was not transformed. Previously occurring in a separate performance
space, sound was initially incorporated as part of the photographic medium. But the emergence of digital
filmmaking and, more radically, of digital image synthesis might mean that the very nature of the medium
is changing—in short, becoming something that is no longer film in the ordinary sense of the term” (31).

90. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995), 1. Subsequent biographical information is adapted from Placing Movies and other
sources cited below.
 291

91. See, for example, “Trafficking in Movies (Festival-Hopping in the Nineties),” in Jonathan Rosenbaum,
Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See (Chicago: A Cappella
Books, 2000), 143-73.

92. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film: The Front Line, 1983 (Denver, CO: Arden Press, Inc., 1983), 58.

93. As Lucas Hilderbrand notes, the covers of Newsweek and Time heralded a “revolution” in 1984 when
the Supreme Court made “off-air taping” of television broadcasts legal (Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories
of Videotape and Copyright [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009], 44-5.)

94. Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Cinema Via Videotape,” American Film, November 1979, 24. Subsequent
citations appear in text.

95. For Rosenbaum’s dismissal of his work for American Film, see Placing Movies, 203.

96. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (1980; repr., Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995), ix. In the original version of Moving Places, Rosenbaum had already put the Film
Generation’s despair in the starkest possible terms: “What the movie was no longer exists; what it did is
done. . . . To some degree, that’s what this book is about: something that no longer exists. Most people
would say that film is undergoing a profound transformation. Maybe it is, but where do you draw the line
between profound transformation and extinction? What appears to be the survival of movies, at least in
this part of the world, is an illusion created by advertising, ‘distinguished critics’ whom you can read in
magazines sold in supermarkets enacting their weekly rounds of slavery, and a few lonely theaters in
shopping malls that already seem haunted on the day they open—places to buy expensive buttered
popcorn whose empty tublike containers rattle under the seats afterward” (43).

97. As I discuss at greater length in the next chapter, these biases made the broadcasting of past theatrical
releases largely invisible in the Film Generation’s criticism before the age of home video. Despite the
obvious affinities between the two formats and modes of spectatorship, and despite the fact that the Film
Generation watched an awful lot of movies on broadcast TV, I argue that this rhetorical gap contributed to
the perception of home video as a radical break.

98. Barbara Klinger, “Cinema’s Shadow: Reconsidering Non-theatrical Exhibition,” in Going to the
Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema, ed. Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes, and Robert
C. Allen (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2007), 284.

99. Jonathan Rosenbaum, “DVDs: A New Form of Collective Cinephilia,” Cineaste 35, no. 2 (Summer
2010). Rosenbaum makes the historical link explicit in the preface to Movie Mutations: The Changing
Face of World Cinephilia (London: BFI Publishing, 2003), wherein he celebrates a renewed sense of
global cinephilia: “It’s that growing community that really interests me, in part because it reminds me of
the film community I saw being formed between, say, New York, LA, London, Paris and Rome during the
early 60s; and I’m enough of an old fogey now to feel nostalgic for those links” (viii).

100. “DVDs: A New Form of Collective Cinephilia,” 16.

101. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press), 5-6.

102. That said, Rosenbaum is the only living figure among popular film critics studied at depth in this
dissertation. In other words, he could change his mind again.

103. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 37.
 292

104. Frederick Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2001), 196. Subsequent citations appear in text.

105. Oddly, Caetlin Benson-Allott thanks Wasser for “the important observation that ‘film has lost
medium specificity’ ” in the age of home video (Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship
from VHS to File Sharing [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013], 216; see also Wasser, 198n52).
As I hope this dissertation has already demonstrated, such worries about medium specificity have their
origins in the earliest film criticism and have been repeated in moments of major technological change
since the coming of sound.

106. For an alternative to Wasser, see Charles Shiro Tashiro, “Videophilia: What Happens When You Wait
for It on Video,” Film Quarterly 45, no. 1 (Autumn 1991): 7-17. Tashiro, who produced laser discs for the
Criterion Collection, discusses the “videobility” of any given film as it goes through the “film-to-video
transfer,” and his account focuses more on the visual characteristics of individual compositions. He does
not measure a film’s videobility based on its genre. For example, he writes, “[F]ilms photographed in a
low-key or contrasty manner might be said to have low videobility because of the difficulty in reproducing
their visual styles” (9).

107. For more on the idea of the home theater as a “fortress,” see Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex:
Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), esp. 50-2.

108. Movie Mutations, 8.

109. David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-
1979 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 396.

110. For more on the history of the video nasties, see Kate Egan, Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the
Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

111. For more on the format wars and stunning commercial success of VHS, see Wasser, 48-75; and
Margaret B. W. Graham, RCA and the VideoDisc: The Business of Research (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1986).

112. Placing Movies, 117.

113. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2004), 340.

114. Ibid., 400.

115. For more on the practice of colorization and the attendant controversy, see Stephen Prince, A New
Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980-1989 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002), 130.

116. Stuart Klawans, “Rose-Tinted Spectacles,” in Seeing Through Movies, ed. Mark Crispin Miller (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 168.

117. For more on the practice and consequences of panning and scanning, see Prince, 126-30.

118. Movies as Politics, 92. In “Videophilia,” Tashiro says of panning and scanning, “[U]seful analysis of
films on video cannot be performed when 43 percent of the image has been cropped, and certainly no one
can claim to have seen the film on video under such circumstances” (14).
 293

119. That said, Rosenbaum has been no more immune to unexplained contradictions than was Gilbert
Seldes. For example, at another juncture in Movie Wars, Rosenbaum uses the same analogy but gives it
the opposite connotation, the one he categorically rejects in the essay about the American Film Institute.
Reporting on an imminent retrospective of hard-to-see films by the director Harun Farocki, Rosenbaum
also notes that “some of Farocki’s work has already come out on video in the United States. At long last, I
conclude, it will become possible to catch up properly” (162-3).

120. In addition to the higher resolution and wider aspect ratio of HDTV, DVD replaced the either/or
model of VHS tapes by providing both pan-and-scan and letterboxed versions of a film on a single disc.

121. Prince, 130.

122. Essential Cinema, 343.

123. Moreover, theatrical aspect ratios have historically been more fluid than fixed. As Tashiro notes, “[I]t
is the rule, not the exception, that there is no single ‘correct’ aspect ratio for any wide-screen film”
(“Videophilia,” 13).

124. Movie Wars, 87. Subsequent citations appear in text.

125. Interestingly, the chapter begins with Rosenbaum’s praise for the release of Les vampires (directed
by Louis Feuillade) on VHS. His praise was tempered by the format but nonetheless palpable: “And even
though the likelihood remains remote of this leading to the availability of actual prints of Feuillade serials
in the United States, it’s heartening to discover that such a major cultural gap can eventually be filled”
(80). The remainder of the article goes on to excoriate film studies academics for their use of home video,
but Rosenbaum’s commentary on the Les vampires release anticipates the terms of his later reconciliation
with home video.

126. Camper outlines his position in the 1985 essay “The Trouble With Video,” wherein he objects to home
video primarily on aesthetic grounds, offering a definition of cinema that was incompatible with video’s
lower resolution: “Cinema, when it functions as art, depends upon the precise articulations made between
frames, and different areas of light within the frame. Video, by effacing the differences upon which cinema
depends, renders the rich complexity of a film masterwork as an inarticulate haze.” And, in his rebuke of
film studies academics, Camper stresses the way that serious film culture should demand medium- or
format-specific purity. “Film viewers must remember to view films, not TV. With schools increasingly
exhibiting films on TV, and with new video exhibition possibilities opening up . . . , and with supposedly
serious ‘film buffs’ increasingly viewing all types of films on cable TV and VCRs, it is all the more urgent to
remain true to one’s medium,” he proclaimed (http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Video.html).

127. In addition to the Camper article, Rosenbaum might have cited such academic sources as Roy Armes,
On Video (New York: Routledge, 1988); Sean Cubitt, Timeshift: On Video Culture (New York: Routledge,
1991); and Peter Kramer, “The Lure of the Big Picture: Film, Television, and Hollywood,” in Big Picture,
Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television, ed. John Hill and Martin McLoone (Luton,
UK: University of Luton Press, 1996), 9-46.

128. Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 27.

129. Hilderbrand, 35.

 294

130. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Riverhead Books,
1994), 4. See also Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed
Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).

131. Klawans, 169. The next sentence in the essay encapsulates the Film Generation’s belief that its brand
of cinephilia was dead, as well as its begrudging appreciation for the access provided by television: “But,
like everyone else who partook of the now-vanished mystery cult, I feel some gratitude toward television”
(ibid.).

132. Prince, 124.

133. Charles Tashiro, “The Contradictions of Video Collecting,” Film Quarterly 50, no. 2 (Winter 1996-
1997): 11-8. Tashiro’s “exaggerated preference for discs over tapes” was founded on “a technological
definition of quality. This technical ‘reason’ serves as perfect rationalization, and through it I stake an
emphatic claim to the importance of picture and sound over story and character, to those technical
aspects of film best served by laser disc reproduction,” he writes (13). As Barbara Klinger has shown in her
work on the “hardware aesthetic,” the same preference for discs—alongside high-end home theater
equipment—is also prevalent among audiences that might normally be located outside of serious film
culture (Beyond the Multiplex, 17-53).

134. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books,
2006).

135. Hilderbrand, 176, 6.

136. Ibid., 185.

137. For examples, see the 2013 documentary Adjust Your Tracking: The Untold Story of the VHS
Collector (directed by Dan M. Kinem and Levi Peretic); and Joshua M. Greenberg, From BetaMax to
Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008).

138. Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Watching Kiarostami Films At Home,” Frontline, January 4, 2011,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2011/01/watching-kiarostami-films-at-
home.html.

139. See, for example, Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Some More Auteurist & Non-Auteurist Shopping Tips,”
Cinema Scope, Fall 2012; and “Great 30s Movies on DVD (…and a few more that should be),”
DVDBeaver, http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/articles/great_30s_movies_on_dvd.htm.

140. Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia, xii.

141. “DVDs: A New Form of Collective Cinephilia,” 16.

142. Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia, 3.

143. Quoted in “DVDs: A New Form of Collective Cinephilia,” 16.

144. For instance, in Movie Mutations, Rosenbaum writes: “All over the world today, critics, teachers and
students frequently watch films alone on video and then write or talk about these films as if they saw them
collectively in a cinema. It’s a casualty of living through a transitional period, and it often involves a kind
of imprecision and a certain imposture regarding our own relation to these films. That is, when we say
what a film is or attempt to describe it we generally regard it as an object abstracted from its performance
 295

and reception, yet the circumstances of that performance and reception often mold our perceptions of the
film as an object” (52).

145. Movies as Politics, 1-2.

146. Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia, xiv.

147. “DVDs: A New Form of Collective Cinephilia,” 15. Emphasis mine.

148. Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia, 7.

149. In Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia, Rosenbaum aligned himself more with the younger
generation’s optimism than with the declension espoused by his peers: “It’s a strange paradox that about
half of my friends and colleagues think that we’re currently approaching the end of cinema as an art form
and the end of film criticism as a serious activity, while the other half believe that we’re enjoying some
form of exciting resurgence and renaissance in both areas. How can one account for this discrepancy? One
clue is that many of the naysayers tend to be people around my own age (sixty-six) or older, whereas many
of the optimistic ones are a good deal younger, most of them under thirty. I tend to feel closer to the
younger cinephiles on this issue, but I can sympathize with certain aspects of the other perspective as
well” (ix).

Chapter 3
Specificity and Convergence

1. Thanks to Hollywood’s run-zone-clearance system, it must be noted, cinema’s temporality included

periods of waiting for some spectators and choosing between a more expensive ticket now, or a cheaper
ticket later, long before broadcast television and home video. For more on the run-zone-clearance system,
see Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999), 16.

2. Anthony Lane, review of Melancholia, directed by Lars von Trier, The New Yorker, November 7, 2011.

3. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York
University Press, 2006), 2. Subsequent citations appear in text.

4. Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1983), 23. Quoted in Jenkins, 10.

5. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 2006), 8.

6. Nathan Lee, “I See a Darkness,” Slate, January 7, 2008, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/

the_movie_club/features/2008/the_movie_club/i_see_a_darkness.html.

7. Tom Gunning, “Film Studies,” in The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis, ed. Tony Bennett and John
Frow (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008), 186.

8. Ibid., 188.

9. Harry Alan Potamkin, The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin, ed. Lewis
Jacobs (New York: Teachers College Press, 1977), 547.
 296

10. Biographical information on Potamkin is adapted from Jacobs, “Introduction,” xxv-xliii. See also
Myron Lounsbury, The Origins of American Film Criticism, 1909-1939 (New York: Arno Press, 1973),
271-305; Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U. S. Study of Film (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007), 236-62; and Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite:
How the Movies Became American (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 88-96. See Decherney,
in particular, for more on Potamkin’s connection to and critique of the ciné-club model and all it entailed.

11. Both obituaries quoted in Jacobs’s introduction to The Compound Cinema, xxv.

12. Polan, 255.

13. Harry Alan Potamkin, “Tendencies in the Cinema,” American Cinematographer, June 1930, reprinted
in The Compound Cinema, 43. Subsequent citations of works reprinted in The Compound Cinema appear
in text.

14. For a discussion of Close Up’s overall significance, see Anne Friedberg, “Introduction: Reading Close
Up, 1927-1933,” in Close Up, 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg,
and Laura Marcus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 1-26.

15. Harry Alan Potamkin, “Radio Entertainment and Talking Pictures,” The Billboard, May 26, 1928, 43.
Subsequent citations of this article would be identical and are therefore not included in the text or the
endnotes.

16. Polan, 252.

17. Decherney, 95.

18. Ellipsis in original.

19. Potamkin’s use of the word “compounding” here needs clarification. Later in “The Compound
Cinema,” it becomes clear that Potamkin sees “compounding” as a method. If done successfully, the result
is a true “compound” form. If unsuccessful, the result is a “hybrid.” For example, Potamkin discusses a
number of “premature compoundings,” including “the musical accompaniment which attempts to render
every point in the film, in the lecture-movie combination . . . , in the German kino-oper, in the American
presentation, etc.” He then added that “Max Reinhardt has suggested that possibly the presentation [of a
film with synchronized sound and speech] indicates a compounding of stage and film,” by which he took
Reinhardt to mean a misunderstanding of cinema’s medium specificity. He thus retorted, “Why not, if the
compounding is planned as a unit with one harmonious end in mind, a rhythmic pattern? The
combination is hybrid now, because two separate units are being used,” but Potamkin insisted that sound
was not precluded from legitimate cinematic uses (The Compound Cinema, 7).

20. Indeed, Potamkin made the connection to Aristotle explicit in this article, writing: “The Aristotelian
law of unity was not the absolute that academicians would have us believe, but a disciplinary ideal” (The
Compound Cinema, 18).

21. Polan, 256-7.

22. Ibid., 257.

23. For example, later in “Tendencies in the Cinema,” Potamkin described an evolution in the “logic of
cinema construction,” which he said began with “continuity.” Griffith then “created the ‘flash-back,’ a
diverting of the progression [of continuity] by means of a subtraction or fractional intrusion; but, since
the American film, remaining muscular, literal and sentimental, could not see the structural significance
 297

of this device, it remained as merely a part of the practice of ‘cutting.’ Russia, re-studying the film as its
source, developed the Griffith technique and established montage as cinema construction” (The
Compound Cinema, 45).

24. Indeed, Potamkin pursued distinction so fiercely that it even compelled him to bite the hands that fed
him. Kenneth Macpherson, co-editor of Close Up, was initially an adamant opponent of sound films. In
particular, Close Up championed the production of independently made British films and abhorred
Hollywood’s imperialist impulses, a politically informed position that Potamkin supported. However,
when Macpherson altered course on the talkies’ prospects with the release of Blackmail (directed by
Alfred Hitchcock) in a talking version featuring British voices (famously dubbed in the case of the film’s
Czech-born star, Anny Ondra), Potamkin doused the journal’s excitement: “The English are inflating the
importance of the film. It has no real meaning and is poor suspense-filming. . . . Its competence is only
competence after all, for Hitchcock is not a singularly inventive mentality[!]” (The Compound Cinema,
93). For more on this debate among the contributors to Close Up, see Genevieve Abravanel, “Britain’s
Hollywood: Cinema and Close Up,” Modernist Cultures 5.1 (2010): 145-61.

25. See also the first two entries in a series of articles Potamkin wrote for Close Up, entitled “New York
Notes,” which were so egregiously centered on discrediting Seldes they might more fairly be called
“Gilbert Seldes Is a Fucking Asshole” (The Compound Cinema, 358-76).

26. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

27. Decherney, 88. Decherney is using Alan M. Wald’s definition of the term in The New York
Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1987), ch. 3.

28. Ben Singer, “The Ambimodernity of Early Cinema: Problems and Paradoxes in the Film-and-
Modernity Discourse,” in Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture, ed. Annemone Ligensa and Klaus
Kreimeier (New Barnet, UK: John Libbey Publishing Ltd., 2009), 38.

29. Henry James, The American Scene (1907), quoted in Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The
Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 171.
Levine is an excellent source for a history of turn-of-the-century responses to the effects of modernity,
including multiplication, by American highbrows and genteel elites, especially ch. 3.

30. That is, at least not as it appeared in any given artwork. Interestingly, Peter Decherney argues that
“fragmentation” was central in Potamkin’s proposed film-school curriculum. In this context, Potamkin
himself would create the fragmentation as a pedagogical tool, breaking up individual films into clips,
allegedly fracturing their ideological coherence and supposed function in the marketplace. Decherney
writes: “Looking at fragments rather than at films in their entirety disrupts films’ ability to circulate as
distinct commodities. The fragmentation of films to uncover national and institutional connections
worked to interfere with the commercial market for films” (95). Rather than being a contradiction of
Potamkin’s film theory, though, these opposite approaches to the question of fragmentation demonstrate
the different roles he imagined for filmmakers and film critics/teachers.

31. H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: Sixth Series (1927), reprinted in American Movie Critics: An Anthology
From the Silents Until Now, rev. ed., ed. Phillip Lopate (New York: The Library of America, 2008), 35.
Taken at face value, Mencken’s recollections suggest a fascinating, if tenuous, challenge to the “modernity
thesis.” (For an excellent overview and critique of this debate, see Ben Singer, Melodrama and
Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts [New York: Columbia University Press, 2001],
101-30. David Bordwell, who can be credited with coining the term, responds to Singer in Figures Traced
In Light: On Cinematic Staging [Berkeley: University of California Press], ch. 6). The leisurely,
 298

contemplative, almost boring atmosphere Mencken describes implies that the so-called modernity thesis
overstates the degree to which audiences found early cinema shocking, arousing, or disorienting. Or
maybe it just suggests that Mencken never really liked movies anyway.

32. Miriam Bratu Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular
Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6.2 (April 1999): 59.

33. “The Ambimodernity of Early Cinema,” 38.

34. For more on Iris Barry and the Film Library, see Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of
Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Decherney,
Hollywood and the Culture Elite, ch. 4.

35. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (1944;
repr., New York: Continuum, 1997).

36. I am thinking of the Payne Fund Studies here. For an excellent history and critique of the Payne Fund
Studies, see Nicholas Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American
Child, 1930-1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

37. Greg Taylor makes this argument about Farber and Tyler in Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and
American Film Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

38. Pauline Kael, I Lost It At the Movies (1965; repr., New York: Marion Boyars, 2007), 206.

39. Ibid., 84.

40. As Barbara Klinger writes, Crowther belonged to a group of postwar American film critics who
promoted a realist canon that resisted Hollywood’s “perceived proclivity for effect (the giddy spectacle of
artifice) over substance (mature content with social relevance).” He approvingly labeled such films
“downbeat” and admired how they “substitute[d] grim realism for romance and prove[d],” when they
succeeded with audiences, “that all is well that ends bad” (Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture,
and the Films of Douglas Sirk [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994], 73); and Bosley Crowther,
“Hollywood Accents the Downbeat,” New York Times, March 16, 1952.

41. Frank E. Beaver, Bosley Crowther: Social Critic of the Film, 1940-1967 (New York: Arno Press, 1974),
3-4. In addition to analyzing his film criticism, Beaver also cites a personal interview he conducted with
Crowther, in which Crowther said he never thought of himself as a “high brow,” but instead “considered
himself a critic of rather average intelligence, writing for [New York] Times readers with similar average
intelligence. Stylistically,” Beaver adds, “Crowther’s film criticism was clearly ‘middle brow,’ ” and
“characteristically more descriptive and informative than analytical” (17).

42. For more on Crowther’s criticism of the Production Code and The Miracle case, see Beaver, 69-111.

43. Andrew Sarris, The Primal Screen (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 120.

44. Bosley Crowther, “Video to Screen,” New York Times, December 4, 1949.

45. Bosley Crowther, review of My Blue Heaven, directed by Henry Koster, New York Times, September
16, 1950.

46. Bosley Crowther, “Facing the Future,” New York Times, June 11, 1950.
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47. Curiously, Crowther filed another report on Hollywood’s telefilm production more than a decade later
but described it as a “notable” development (“Noted in Hollywood,” New York Times, May 3, 1964).

48. William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1990), 140.

49. For more on the history of Hollywood’s various attempts to collaborate and compete with broadcast
television, see Christopher Anderson, Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1994); Douglas Gomery, “Theatre Television: The Missing Link of Technological Change in
the U.S. Motion Picture Industry,” The Velvet Light Trap 21 (Summer 1985): 54-61; Douglas Gomery,
Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1992), 247-62; Michele Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); William Lafferty, “Feature Films on Prime-Time Television,”
in Hollywood in the Age of Television, ed. Tino Balio (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 235-56; Kerry
Segrave, Movies at Home: How Hollywood Came to Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company,
Inc., 1999); and Timothy R. White, “Hollywood’s Attempt at Appropriating Television: The Case of
Paramount Pictures,” in Hollywood in the Age of Television, 145-63.

50. “Have TV Show Costs Reached Their Ceiling?,” Sponsor, September 21, 1953, 106. Quoted in Boddy,
71-2.

51. Interview with Frederick Ziv, quoted in Morleen Getz Rouse, “A History of the F. W. Ziv Radio and
Television Syndication Companies, 1930-1960,” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1976, 119. Quoted in
Boddy, 72.

52. Ibid. In “Barroom Western,” published in the New York Times on June 9, 1957, Crowther reviewed
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and attributed the increase in theatrically released Westerns to the genre’s
prominence on television. The new entry was a “second-rate specimen,” leading Crowther to reprimand
Hollywood: “Whether this sort of entertainment sets the medium back or ahead is not the question with
the Hollywood people. It draws the customers. So, thank you, TV.”

53. Jack Gould, “A Plea for Live Video,” New York Times, December 7, 1952. However, as Michele Hilmes
argues, television’s liveness was hardly sui generis; rather, it “stemmed from its legacy in radio, where the
networks had always insisted on the superiority of live over recorded radio programs,” and was also “an
attempt by the [television] networks to hold off the threat of film industry domination as much as [it was]
a positive aesthetic choice” (“Cinema and the Age of Television, 1946-1975,” in The Wiley-Blackwell
History of American Film, vol. 3, ed. Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundman, and Art Simon [New York: Blackwell
Publishing Ltd., 2012], 589-607).

54. In 1962, for example, Gilbert Seldes used stark and dour terms to summarize the impact of telefilms
on television as an art form: “The dominant factor in the creation of the techniques of television at the
start was that whatever was shown on the screen appeared to be a moving picture with sound. It could be
compared to newsreel, to drama or comedy, to documentary—but in every case the movies had done and
were doing substantially the same thing. The new element was the immediacy of television, the sense it
gave of the instant, actual presence. Until the coming of video tape it could be said with assurance that the
major error of television production was the decision to compete with the movies instead of exploiting the
element of immediacy. In one sense the competition was inevitable; the quality of the picture, the
refinement of the gray scale, the attempt to achieve the excellence of a professional halftone—all these
were as necessary as the improvement in the steadiness of the picture on the screen. But in a more
important respect, television had a chance to go a separate route and did not choose to do so” (“Beg,
Borrow—or Annex,” in The Eighth Art [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962], 105). For more on
the decline of “live” TV and the corresponding crisis in television criticism, see Boddy, esp. 187-213.
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55. Bosley Crowther, “Best Feats Forward,” New York Times, March 19, 1950. Perhaps Crowther had been
influenced by Samuel Goldwyn’s sunny forecast in the New York Times essay “Hollywood in the
Television Age,” published on February 13, 1949. Goldwyn had also predicted that competing with
television would sort Hollywood’s wheat from its chaff. Guided by the belief that film and TV were
fundamentally similar, Goldwyn figured audiences would not “pay to see poor pictures when they can stay
home and see something which is, at least, not worse. . . . It is going to require something truly superior to
cause them not only to leave their homes to be entertained, but to pay for that entertainment.”
Furthermore, he encouraged Hollywood to collaborate with TV networks and thought the “two industries
[could] quite naturally join forces for their own profit and the greater entertainment of the public.”

56. Bosley Crowther, “Communiqué From Hollywood and Vine,” New York Times, February 3, 1957. It is
worth noting that Crowther did not discuss in this article the appearance on television of Hollywood’s past
theatrical releases, which had been shown with regularity in the preceding year. I discuss this issue at
greater length later in this section.

57. That said, it can be hard to generalize about such judgments as made by daily reviewers, who
themselves often generalized in contradictory ways when they made large, synthetic claims in response to
a small sample of recent and current films. Two years later, for example, Crowther stayed true to the
demands he always made of Hollywood but gave the impression that things had gotten much worse in
terms of quality: “In this writer’s studied opinion, the future of the motion picture lies in dynamic and
thoughtful dramas, in witty, imaginative comedies and in other forms of graphic entertainment prepared
for the theatre screen. They will have to be more intelligent, artistic and generally mature than the present
run of pictures made for theatres—and they will certainly have to be vastly superior in these qualifications
to the stuff that is dished up free on the television screen” (“Looking Ahead,” New York Times, December
6, 1959).

58. Segrave, 43.

59 Bosley Crowther, “Anybody’s Guess,” New York Times, June 3, 1951.

60. Robert E. Sherwood, “Beyond the Talkies—Television,” Scribner’s Magazine, July 1929. The phrase
“adjunct to the radio” is Sherwood’s (2). Subsequent citations appear in text.

61. Crowther, “Anybody’s Guess.”

62. Bosley Crowther, review of Dreamboat, directed by Claude Binyon, New York Times, July 26, 1952.
Crowther might have also used this review as an early opportunity to discuss the practice and experience
of watching old movies on television, but he did not. In the film, Clifton Webb plays an English professor
who is also a forgotten matinee idol of the silent era. Forgotten, that is, until his students discover his old
films by watching them on television. Now a stereotypically effete snob who is embarrassed by the
revelation, Webb’s character sues for an injunction to stop the broadcasts.

63. Bosley Crowther, review of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, directed by Frank Tashlin, New York
Times, September 12, 1957.

64. Bosley Crowther, review of Marty, directed by Delbert Mann, New York Times, April 12, 1955.

65. Bosley Crowther, “The Little Picture,” New York Times, April 17, 1955. Beaver quotes this passage as
well but omits the final sentence and does not otherwise discuss Crowther’s writing on film and
television’s convergence (60).

66. Beaver, 37.

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67. Ibid., 152.

68. Bosley Crowther, review of Richard III, directed by Laurence Olivier, New York Times, March 12,
1956.

69. Bosley Crowther, review of Richard III, New York Times, March 18, 1956. Emphasis mine.

70. With regard to Richard III, Crowther had evoked theoretical questions about film and television’s
relationship only to abandon them, but his career was not entirely absent of such discussions. His
comments on a few intriguing products of film and television’s convergence strike a more ambivalent tone
than the claim he made in 1951, when he called the merger of these media and their respective industries
“a naturally expectable thing.” In 1964, for example, Crowther praised the “film” Point of Order!, a
documentary about the Army-McCarthy hearings comprised entirely of kinescopes from television
broadcasts. In doing so, he argued against the objections of a straw-man purist: “[W]hy is such a venture
considered a legitimate motion picture anyhow? Well, in the first place, it is novel that anyone should take
footage originally shot for television and make it available for theater screens. This is like trying to make a
silk purse out of the ear of a female pig. One doesn’t do it in ‘our business.’ Whoever heard of such a thing!
It’s perfectly all right for television to avail itself of an excess of old films, but to reverse the traffic is—hey
why not? What’s so different about television film as documentary material? Not a thing!” (“Trying
Anything,” New York Times, January 19, 1964). A year later, in the appropriately titled article “Something
Like Television,” Crowther considered a range of new moving-image objects that were exhibited in movie
theaters and overlapped with other art forms. An Evening With the Royal Ballet was, for instance, “not a
conventional motion picture” but “simply photographed ballet.” He also said “there was little cinema” in a
similar production of La Boheme, which “creaked of stage sets and conventions.” “[I]t cannot escape the
inevitable inconsistencies of filmed stage ballet, which reveal the embarrassing conflict of the aesthetics of
the two art forms,” he continued. “The complex and flowing compositions of the choreographers are
smashed every time the film director cuts from a long shot to a close or concentrates on individuals within
the total aesthetic design.” Placing a much greater emphasis on style as the definition of cinema than was
typical for him, Crowther nevertheless called this group of moving-image productions “a sensational
attraction in the contemporary culture stream,” and one that he hoped would find an appreciative
audience. “[T]hese admittedly hybrid films—this cultivated feeling of a high-class television show—is a
perilous advantage for them. Without the particular pull of a currently voguish attraction or one or two
currently ‘in’ stars, the desire of the public to leap for a limited chance to see is in doubt” (New York
Times, December 12, 1965). Perhaps influenced now by the Film Generation’s preoccupation with style,
Crowther also exhibited the limits of his willingness to admit television into film culture when a
telefilm(ed) production of Othello, starring Laurence Olivier, won several Academy Award nominations in
the acting categories for 1965. Crowther took umbrage with the nominations, exclaiming that the
Academy had “completely overlooked the fact that [the nominees] are acting in a film which simply
cannot be classified and analyzed as an achievement in genuine cinema.” This version of Othello, “as
exciting or disturbing as it may be, is not a cinematic motion picture; it reflects the contrivances and
techniques of the stage, even down to its rigid confinement within a few ordinary stage sets. It has the
standard form of the stage play . . . , and its actors play scenes in stage fashion, with exits and entrances.”
Their work consequently bore “no comparison to the kind of acting that is done when cinema—the
creative use of the camera—is the controlling technique in a film.” Crowther thus bristled at the idea that
these objects, which he labeled “enlarged television shows,” deserved the honor of an award from the film
community (“Tearing a Passion To Tatters,” New York Times, March 6, 1966).

71. However, as William Boddy shows, commentators on television in the 1930s and 1940s made the
opposite assumption, saying that television would also require and induce great attention and
concentration from spectators, thus suggesting again that the purported differences between film and
television are more cultural and discursive than ontological and technological (19-20).

72. Jack Gould, review of Richard III, New York Times, March 12, 1956.
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73. Jack Gould, “Richard’s Rating,” New York Times, March 18, 1956.

74. Jack Gould, “ ‘Live’ TV Vs. ‘Canned,’ ” New York Times, February 5, 1956.

75. Derek Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (New York: Routledge,
2005), 39-40.

76. Lafferty, 236.

77. Kompare, 41.

78. Ibid., 46.

79. Gomery, 247.

80. Bosley Crowther, “In a Year of Decision,” New York Times, January 8, 1956.

81. Bosley Crowther, “What’s in the Stars?” New York Times, January 20, 1957.

82. Bosley Crowther, “Old Film Friends,” New York Times, June 10, 1962.

83. Bosley Crowther, “Boom in Revivals,” New York Times, June 21, 1962.

84. Bosley Crowther, Reruns: Fifty Memorable Films (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978), 9, 11.
Reruns was the final volume in a trio of books (from the same publisher) that also included The Great
Films: Fifty Golden Years of Motion Pictures (1967) and Vintage Films (1977). Each book offered a brief
introduction, followed by new criticism from Crowther on a collection of old films he had chosen. It is
worth noting that the tone of the introductory remarks in Reruns is markedly different from its
predecessors. While the first two volumes broached the subject of watching old movies on TV, they
quickly made the familiar juxtaposition between disrespect and increased access and then moved on.
Conversely, the foreword to Reruns is panicked and distraught—a stark contrast to the book’s ostensible
purpose of celebrating film history.

85. Boddy, 2.

86. In 1967, Crowther reviewed Bonnie and Clyde for the New York Times on August 7, August 14, and
September 3. He also wrote about the film in two other Times articles that year: “Style and the Filmic
Message” (November 12), and “Of Color, Crime and Punishment” (December 17). For more on his
controversial assessment of the film and its alleged role in his departure from the Times, see Beaver, 144-
51.

87. Andrew Sarris, “Citizen Kane: The American Baroque,” Film Culture 2, no. 3 (1956): 14-6.

88. David Bordwell, “Octave’s hop: Andrew Sarris,” Observations on film art (blog), June 24, 2012,
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/06/24/octaves-hop-andrew-sarris/.

89. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968 (1968; repr., New York:
Da Capo Press, 1996), 16.

90. Andrew Sarris, review of That Hamilton Woman, directed by Alexander Korda, The Village Voice,
October 22, 1970.
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91. In the 1987 article “The Color of Money,” Sarris commented on colorization and suggested a stronger
feeling of gratitude for broadcast television’s role in his cinephilia: “In those days a film enthusiast took
what he could get when and where he could get it. And for a time television was pouring out the product
helter-skelter. When you have stumbled up to attics and down to cellars and hunched over film institute
moviolas around the world, you could become almost maudlin over catching a hitherto unseen Garbo or
Sullavan in the relative comfort of your living room” (The Village Voice, February 24, 1987). Quoted in
Stuart Klawans, “Rose-Tinted Spectacles,” in Seeing Through Movies, ed. Mark Crispin Miller (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1990), 169.

92. Barbara Klinger, “The Aftermarket: Film, Television, and Immortality,” (paper presented at the
annual meeting of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Los Angeles, March 18, 2010).

93. For a succinct history of this period, see Schatz, 329-52.

94. Michael Zyrd uses the phrase “urban counterculture denizen[s]” in “ ‘The Rise of a Film Generation’:
Film Culture and Cinephilia,” in The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, vol. 3, 368.

95. Phillip Lopate, Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: Essays and Criticism from a Lifelong Love Affair with
the Movies (New York: Anchor Books, 1998), 3.

96. Susan Sontag, “The Decay of Cinema,” New York Times, February 25, 1996.

97. The American Cinema, 28.

98. As Michael Zyrd writes, Film Generation “cinephiles’ rejection of most of contemporary Hollywood
did not preclude an interest in historical Hollywood” (“ ‘The Rise of a Film Generation,’ ” 363). Lopate is
useful on this count as well: “In retrospect, I may have undervalued the American studio films of the early
sixties. At the time, having just lived through the Eisenhower fifties, I was impatient with what seemed to
me the bland industrial style of most Hollywood movies (then symbolized by the much-maligned Doris
Day); I could spot Art much more easily in foreign films, with their stylized codes of realism (sex,
boredom, class conflict, unhappy endings) and their arty disjunctive texture. It took a certain
sophistication, which I did not yet have, to appreciate the ironies behind the smooth-crafted surfaces of
the best Hollywood genre movies. Our heroes in the French New Wave explicitly credited Hollywood films
with the inspiration for their own personal styles, of course, but I accepted this taste partly as a whimsical
paradox on their part without really sharing it, except in the case of rebels like Samuel Fuller or Frank
Tashlin, whose shock tactics made them ‘almost’ European” (10).

99. The American Cinema, 28-9.

100. Lopate, 14.

101. “Cinema: A Religion of Film,” Time, September 20, 1963.

102. John Simon, Private Screenings: Views of the Cinema of the Sixties (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 9.

103. Zyrd, 366. See also Shyon Baumann, Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 46.

104. Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001), 82.

105. Lopate, 9-10.

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106. Private Screenings, 12.

107. Stanley Kauffmann, A World on Film: Criticism and Comment (New York: Delta, 1966), 428.
Subsequent citations appear in text.

108. Although accurate, this statement needs to be qualified. Callenbach offered the first significant
statement about television’s appropriation of old movies since the magazine’s name had been changed to
Film Quarterly in 1958. The magazine first appeared in 1945 as Hollywood Quarterly, then it continued
as The Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television until it became Film Quarterly. As suggested by these
changes, the magazine shifted its focus across these incarnations. Before 1958, it featured commentary on
film, radio, and TV in more or less equal measure, including a few discussions of film and television’s
convergence vis-à-vis showing old movies on TV. In its life as Film Quarterly, the magazine narrowed its
focus to exclusively cover film, reflecting both the Film Generation’s rise and the enhanced reputation of
film as a medium. In keeping with the times, the first issue of Film Quarterly also added reviews of new
theatrical releases, a portion of the magazine that grew throughout the 1960s. In the mid-to-late 1970s,
film reviews lost ground to interviews with filmmakers and academic articles on film theory. For more on
the history of the magazine before it became Film Quarterly, see the anthology Hollywood Quarterly:
Film Culture in Postwar America, 1945-1957, ed. Eric Smoodin and Ann Martin (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002).

109. Ernest Callenbach, “Editor’s Notebook,” Film Quarterly 29, no. 2 (Winter 1975-6).

110. Quoted in Lillian Ross, “Anatomy of a Commercial Interruption,” The New Yorker, February 19,
1966: 44. Subsequent citations appear in text.

111. Quoted in Segrave, 92-3.

112. Film 67/68: An Anthology by the National Society of Film Critics, ed. Richard Schickel and John
Simon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), 282-3. Subsequent citations appear in text.

113. Roger Ebert, “All Stars, or, Is There a Cure for Criticism of Film Criticism?,” Film Comment,
May/June 1990, reprinted in Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2006), 404.

114. Zyrd, 367.

115. Ibid., 369.

Chapter 4
Scarcity and Plenitude

1. Nico Baumbach, “All That Heaven Allows: What is, or was, cinephilia?” Film Comment, March/April
2012, 51.

2. James Quandt, “Everyone I Know Is Stayin’ Home: The New Cinephilia,” Framework 50, nos. 1 and 2
(Spring and Fall 2009): 206-7.

3. Baumbach, 51.

4. For more on the success of DVD as a new consumer technology, see Bryan Sebok, “Convergent
Hollywood, DVD, and the Transformation of the Home Entertainment Industries” (PhD diss., University
of Texas at Austin, 2007).
 305

5. Dave Kehr, “Editorial,” Film Comment, May-June 2012.

6. Charles Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2003), ix.

7. Ibid., x.

8. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic
Books, 1994).

9. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New
York: Schocken Books, 1969).

10. Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005), 14.

11. Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1915, 1922; repr., New York: Modern Library, 2000),
125.

12. Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005).

13. Richard Kraft, “Journal of a Film Fiend,” Film Culture 1, no. 1 (January 1955): 53.

14. Leonard Maltin, ed., TV Movies (New York: Signet, 1969), 231.

15. William Yardley, “Steven H. Scheuer, 88, Innovator in Television Criticism,” New York Times, June 8,
2014.

16. Jerry Roberts is an exception. In his popular-press history of American film criticism, he calls Scheuer
the “grandfather of the mass-marketed capsule-review form” (The Complete History of American Film
Criticism [Santa Monica, CA: Santa Monica Press, 2010], 146).

17. Steven H. Scheuer, ed., “Preface,” TV Movie Almanac & Ratings (New York: Bantam Books, 1958).
The preface for this edition is unpaginated, so additional citations are indicated in text.

18. Logically, Scheuer removed the phrase once cable TV and home video were widely available.

19. Steven H. Scheuer, ed., Movies on TV, 6th ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), viii.

20. The latter quote first appeared in Steven H. Scheuer, ed., “Preface,” TV Key Movie Guide, 3rd ed.
(New York: Bantam Books, 1966). The preface for this edition is unpaginated, so additional citations are
indicated in text.

21. By 1981, he had in fact simplified the rationale: “For reasons of space, and to permit the inclusion
of . . . three thousand new reviews, I have omitted some of the undistinguished films of the thirties,
forties, and fifties. Also for reasons of space,” Scheuer adds, he “eliminated the critical comments on some
of the worst films of the past decade” but kept the production info and star rating (“Preface,” Movies on
TV, 9th ed. [New York: Bantam Books, 1981]).

22. John Simon, Private Screenings (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 6.

 306

23. Ibid., 3.

24. Ibid., 11.

25. Steven H. Scheuer, ed., “Preface,” Movies on TV, 4th ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1968).

26. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968 (1968; repr., New York:
Da Capo Press, 1996), 16.

27. In 1961 and 1966, Scheuer called the bad programs “filmed shows” and “filmed TV series,”
respectively, but he did not explain the term’s significance in either edition (“Preface,” TV Key Movie
Reviews & Ratings, 2nd ed. [New York: Bantam Books, 1961]). The preface for the 1961 edition is
unpaginated, so additional citations are indicated in text.

28. In later editions, however, the reviewers “tried to note important changes in the television and video
versions of movies, an increasingly difficult task as movies are shortened and even sped up in order to
cram them into briefer time slots and onto shorter tapes.” Apropos the “colorization furor,” Scheuer
continued, they “also noted when a film has been restored to its original form” (Movies on TV and
Videocassette, 16th ed. [New York: Bantam Books, 1991], viii).

29. Steven H. Scheuer, ed., Movies on TV, 7th ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), vii-viii.

30. Ibid., viii.

31. Ibid., ix.

32. Ibid.

33. Brian Kellow, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (New York: Viking, 2011), 101.

34. Pauline Kael, “Movies on Television,” The New Yorker, June 3, 1967. Reprinted in Kael, The Age of
Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, ed. Sanford Schwartz (New York: Library of America, 2011),
144. Subsequent citations refer to this edition and appear in text.

35. In 1968, for instance, Kael’s second book of collected film criticism, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, reprinted
the short notes she authored as the Berkeley Cinema Guild’s repertory programmer, and, several years
later, she released the first edition of 5001 Nights at the Movies, a massive omnibus of capsule reviews
she contributed to The New Yorker. Both could serve as tableside companions for an evening of watching
movies on TV.

36. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), x. It should be noted that Rosenbaum misremembers Bellour. In “The Unattainable Text,” Bellour
writes: “The text of the film is indeed an unattainable text. In saying this, despite the temptation of a play
on words, I do not mean to evoke the special difficulties which very often make it impossible to obtain the
film in the material sense” (Screen 3, no. 3 [1975]: 19).

37. Sanford Schwarz, introduction to The Age of Movies, xx.

38. Richard Combs, “Four Against the House,” in The Language and Style of Film Criticism, ed. Alex
Clayton and Andrew Klevan (New York: Routledge, 2011), 121-38.

39. For an excellent discussion of what Kael meant when she used such terms as “art” and “trash,” see
Craig Seligman, Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me (New York: Counterpoint, 2004), esp. 50-1.
 307

40. Conversations with Pauline Kael, ed. Will Brantley (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1996),
171.

41. Unlike Sarris, it must be noted, Kael would never use the word “cinephilia” to describe her affection
for cinema. Nor, for that matter, would she say or write the word “cinema,” if possible. “I avoid ‘cinema’
the way I avoid ‘one,’ because where I grew up only pretentious phonies said they were going to the
‘cinema’ or referred to themselves as ‘one,’ ” she stated, in 1994 (Conversations with Pauline Kael, 165).

42. Manny Farber, “Hard-Sell Cinema” (1957), reprinted in Negative Space: Manny Farber on the
Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 123.

43. On this trait of Kael’s personality, David Thomson has said: “So far as I know, she has never publicly
changed her mind on a film she’s written about. I do think, psychologically, that that [sic] point goes deep
into her. It is her incapacity to admit doubt or a change of mind that, well, it is the thing about her I find
most daunting” (quoted in Conversations with Pauline Kael, 123).

44. Pauline Kael, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” Harper’s, February 1969. Reprinted in The Age of Movies,
214.

45. Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies (1965; repr., London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1994), 20.

46. Ibid., 203.

47. Ibid., 276.

48. The Age of Movies, 214.

49. Quoted in Jerry Roberts, The Complete History of American Film Criticism, 199.

50. For a discussion of the process and politics of television’s recent cultural legitimation, see Michael Z.
Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York:
Routledge, 2011).

51. Conversations with Pauline Kael, 83.

52. Ibid., 70.

53. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991); and Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). For an
excellent discussion of Jameson and Baudrillard in relation to television’s plenitude and the condition of
postmodernity, see Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 167-88. As Sconce notes, Jameson drew a link between the
“fragmentation” of postmodernity and Jacques Lacan’s definition of schizophrenia: “Jameson specifically
invokes Lacan’s theories to help describe the intensity of an ‘undifferentiated vision of the world in the
present,’ a characteristic he sees as central to the postmodern experience and that others identify as the
very essence of the televisual” (188).

54. Andrew Sarris, Kael’s supposedly perennial sparring partner, penned an apt description of the Film
Generation’s signal structure of feeling when he wrote, “I stopped lowering my head at the epithet ‘cultist’
as soon as I realized that the quasi-religious connotation of the term was somewhat justified for those of
us who loved movies beyond all reason” (Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema, 1955/1969 [New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1970], 13).
 308

55. The Age of Movies, 44.

56. Greil Marcus, review of I Lost It at the Movies, Pauline Kael, Artforum 32, no. 1 (1993): 141.

57. Sconce, 174.

58. The Age of Movies, 331.

59. In fact, several versions of the article have been published in different venues. For a brief discussion of
these variations, see Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movies Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What
Movies We Can See (Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2000), 26-7.

60. Susan Sontag, “The Decay of Cinema,” New York Times Magazine, February 25, 1996. Subsequent
citations of this article would be identical and are therefore not included in the text or endnotes.

61. Jonathan Rosenbaum was one such cinephile. Among other places, he discusses Sontag’s impact on
him in “Goodbye, Susan, Goodbye: Sontag and Movies,” in Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film
Culture in Transition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 285-91.

62. For example, her 1965 essay “The Imagination of Disaster” was recently anthologized in American
Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now, ed. Phillip Lopate (New York: The Library of
America, 2008), 316-29.

63. Indeed, as Niels Niessen writes, “The main reason for the persistence within the field of cinema
studies of the theoretical quarrel surrounding the death of film/cinema—an idea that is almost impossible
to explain to people not familiar with the field—is that many contributors to it have avoided being
sufficiently clear about the philosophical implications of defining cinema in terms of indexicality” (“Lives
of cinema: against its ‘death,’ ” Screen 52, no. 3 [Autumn 2011]: 308).

64. The Age of Movies, 136.

65. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1888), 441-2.

66. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), reprinted in The Sociology of Georg Simmel,
trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: The Free Press, 1950), 413-4.

67. Stephen Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980-1989 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 90-141. Subsequent citations appear in text.

68. In the expurgated portion of this quote, Prince writes: “The home video experience meant movies on a
small television in a room undesigned [sic] for good image or sound. (In the latter 1990s ‘home theater’
systems revolutionized home viewing. Digital video, six-channel sound, and a large, widescreen projection
monitor restored ‘cinema’ back into video by producing a high-caliber viewing environment with sound
quality superior to that offered in many theaters)” (A New Pot of Gold, 124). This distinction between
VHS and digital home video technologies is common in general but curious in Prince’s account. Yes, the
higher resolution of laserdiscs, DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and HD screens more closely approximates the image
quality afforded by celluloid, but that has nothing to do with whether or not home video’s plenitude
violates the essence of cinephilia.

69. D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), vii.
Subsequent citations appear in text.
 309

70. Arlene Croce, “Pather Panchali and Aparjito,” (1959), reprinted in American Movie Critics, 271.

71. Ibid., 272.

72. Andrew Sarris, You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet: The American Talking Film (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 324. Emphasis mine.

73. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995), 153.

74. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film: The Front Line, 1983 (Denver, CO: Arden Press, Inc., 1983), 65.

75. Movie Wars, 32.

76. Emphasis mine.

77. Jeffrey Sconce, “Cult Cinema: A Critical Symposium,” Cineaste 34, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 48.
Subsequent citations appear in text.

78. Stanley Kauffmann, “Some Notes on a Year with Blow-Up,” in Film 67/68: An Anthology by the
National Society of Film Critics, ed. Richard Schickel and John Simon (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1968), 274. Subsequent citations appear in text.

79. Film: The Front Line, 1983, 31. Subsequent citations appear in text.

80. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2004), 141-2. Subsequent citations appear in text.

81. Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia, 277.

82. Roger Ebert, The Future of the Movies (Kansas City, MO: Andrews and McMeel, 1991), xi. Ellipsis in
original.

83. Girish Shambu, The New Cinephilia (Montreal: Caboose, forthcoming), 4. Subsequent citations
appear in text.

84. Girish Shambu’s Facebook page, accessed February 3, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/

girish.shambu?fref=ts.

85. Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia, 277.

Chapter 5
Hope and Disillusionment

1. David Thomson, “Introduction,” The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2002).

2. Robert E. Sherwood, “The First Person Singular” (1922), reprinted in American Film Criticism From
the Beginnings to Citizen Kane: Reviews of Significant Films at the Time They First Appeared, eds.
Stanley Kauffmann and Bruce Henstell (New York: Liveright, 1972), 139.

3. Gilbert Seldes, “The Movies Commit Suicide,” Harper’s, November 1928, 706.
 310

4. Welford Beaton, Know Your Movies: The Theory and Practice of Motion Picture Production
(Hollywood: Howard Hill, 1932), 190-1.

5. Manny Farber, “New York Film Festival—1968, Afterthoughts” (1968), reprinted in Negative Space:
Manny Farber on the Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 236.

6. Dwight Macdonald, Dwight Macdonald On Movies (New York: Berkeley Medallion Books, 1971), 196.

7. Ibid., 197.

8. Pauline Kael, “Movies on Television,” The New Yorker, June 3, 1967. Reprinted in Kael, The Age of
Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, ed. Sanford Schwartz (New York: Library of America, 2011),
135.

9. Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Cinema Via Videotape,” American Film, November 1979, 24.

10. Jeffrey Sconce, “Movies: A Century of Failure,” in Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste,
Style, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 287. Subsequent citations appear in text.

11. To be clear, Sconce does not use the term serious film culture, though I believe he is describing the
styles of thought and structures of feeling that I have named serious film culture.

12. Alexander Bakshy, “The Cinematograph as Art” (1916), reprinted as “The Kinematograph as Art” in
The Path of the Modern Russian Stage and Other Essays (London: Cecil Palmer & Hayward, 1918), 213-
4. Subsequent citations refer to this edition and appear in text.

13. These articles have since secured a modest reputation for Bakshy in the annals of American film
criticism. Lewis Jacobs included “The Cinematograph as Art” in the book Introduction to the Art of the
Movies: An Anthology of Ideas on the Nature of Movie Art (New York: Noonday Press, 1960), 57-70.
More recently, “The ‘Talkies’ ” has been included in two anthologies: American Movie Critics: An
Anthology From the Silents Until Now, rev. ed., ed. Phillip Lopate (New York: The Library of America,
2008), 45-7; and Cinema Nation: The Best Writing on Film from The Nation. 1913-2000, ed. Carl
Bromley (New York: Nation Books, 2000), 12-5. The inclusion of this article in the former puts Bakshy in
good company, but the latter anthology more accurately reflects his minor stature. During his tenure at
The Nation, Bakshy contributed almost 90 signed articles to the magazine, but he is represented only by
“The ‘Talkies’ ” in Cinema Nation. Conversely, James Agee, Manny Farber, Robert Hatch, Andrew
Kopkind, and Stewart Klawans are each represented by multiple articles.

14. Alexander Bakshy, “The ‘Talkies,’ ” The Nation, February 20, 1929, 236.

15. Ibid., 238.

16. For instance, in his 1973 book on America’s prewar film criticism, Myron Lounsbury said Bakshy had
“provided the most significant attempt in American criticism to suggest new possibilities of screen art”
(The Origins of American Film Criticism, 1909-1939 [New York: Arno Press, 1973], 218). More recently,
film historian Robert Spadoni has called Bakshy “one of the most perceptive critics writing about film”
during the sound transition (Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound and the Origins of the Horror Genre
[Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)], 8).

17. Sconce does not discuss how this trend relates to the rise of the Film Generation. Likewise, he does not
discuss how the contemporary trend toward cine-cynicism runs parallel with a renewed investment in
cinephilia, both among media scholars as a subject of analysis, and among film critics, cinephiles, and
 311

scholars as a structure of feeling. The strength of either discourse is likely fueled by its counterpart, but an
analysis of these tensions is also not within my purview.

18. Stanley Kauffmann, Before My Eyes: Film Criticism and Comment (New York: Da Capo Press, 1982),
321.

19. “The ‘Talkies,’ ” 236, 238.

20. Alexander Bakshy, “More Celluloid,” The Nation, January 18, 1933, 76.

21. Alexander Bakshy, “Character and Drama,” The Nation, April 18, 1928, 464.

22. Alexander Bakshy, “Inflated ‘Grandeur,’ ” The Nation, March 5, 1930, 280.

23. Alexander Bakshy, “Glories of the ‘Epic,’ ” The Nation, February 18, 1931, 200.

24. As early as 1919, Bakshy referred to cinema as a “prostituted medium,” suggesting a possible critique
of Hollywood in its formative years (“The Problem of the Artistic Kinema,” reprinted in The Theatre
Unbound [London: Cecil Palmer, 1923], 116).

25. Alexander Bakshy, “The Future of the Movies,” The Nation, October 28, 1928, 360.

26. “The Movies Commit Suicide,” 706.

27. “The Future of the Movies,” 360.

28. Alexander Bakshy, “Free Lances,” The Nation, March 13, 1929, 324.

29. Ibid., 326.

30. Ibid., 324.

31. Alexander Bakshy, “There Are Silent Pictures,” August 21, 1929, 203.

32. Alexander Bakshy, “Talkies and Dummies,” The Nation, November 13, 1929, 563.

33. “Free Lances,” 324; “There Are Silent Pictures,” 203.

34. “The ‘Talkies,’ ” 238.

35. “The Future of the Movies,” 360.

36. “The ‘Talkies,’ ” 238. Bakshy used the same phrase in “The Cinematograph as Art” to describe how the
silent film could establish its cultural legitimacy: “Art being the revelation of the human spirit in
everything capable of expressing it, the only condition with which it must of necessity comply, is the use of
the medium in accordance with its nature” (239).

37. “The ‘Talkies,’ ” 236.

38. Alexander Bakshy, “A Year of Talkies,” The Nation, June 26, 1929, 772.

39. Alexander Bakshy, “Color,” The Nation, March 19, 1930, 337. But Bakshy also proved that he would
never congratulate a movie just for using a technology or technique that he had sponsored in the abstract.
 312

For example, when Happy Days made uninspired use of “enlarged projection,” Bakshy eviscerated the
film: “You would think that with the increased screen space at their command the producers would have
tried to present their entertainers . . . in all the variety of simultaneous contrasts and juxtapositions made
possible by the enlarged projection. You would expect to see the screen surface used for weaving
decorative and rhythmic patterns built up of different groups of actors and dancers on the principle of
parallel action. But what do you find? A not particularly bright comedy introduction of stage life leading
up to a glorified but uncommonly dull minstrel show, both of which derive no greater benefit from the
larger screen than the ability to show an increased number of people at the same time or a full-sized figure
on a scale approximating the normal. Neither of these advantages is of much importance except for
reproducing the effect of the stage” (“Inflated ‘Grandeur,’ ” The Nation, March 5, 1930, 280). That said, he
could also be inconsistent on matters of “cinematic expression.” In “The Eye and the Heart,” published by
The Nation on December 11, 1929, Bakshy offered an equivocal stance on the relationship between cinema
and painting: “In my opinion, the art of the cinema has no business to imitate the art of painting either in
the matter of composition, of light effects, of surface texture, or of the treatment of human character.
Least of all can it afford to do it when it attempts to tell a story of dramatic significance. But I should not
like to say that films which lay particular stress on their pictorial appeal are not interesting. Some of them
will titillate your pictorial palate, if you happen to have one, with such choice relishes that you will forget
everything else” (728-9).

40. “The Movies Commit Suicide,” 708.

41. Gilbert Seldes, “The Mobile Camera,” The New Republic, October 30, 1929, 298.

42. Gilbert Seldes, Movies for the Millions: An Account of Motion Pictures, Principally in America
(London: B. T. Batsford, Ltd., 1937), 8-9. Emphasis in original.

43. Alexander Bakshy, “As You Were,” The Nation, January 22, 1930, 106, 108.

44. “Free Lances,” 324.

45. Alexander Bakshy, “Mädchen in Uniform,” The Nation, October 12, 1932, 338.

46. “The Future of the Movies,” 360.

47. Ibid., 362. In an article about the rise of news reels, Bakshy expounded on this theme, arguing that
“the chief fault to be found with the news reel is not so much that it is a tabloid, but rather that it is not
enough of a tabloid. Instead of giving us a mere reproduction of an event or a person, it should present a
selective picture that would bring out the most characteristic features of its subject; and to do this it must
use a more imaginative and more flexible technique” (“The News Reel,” The Nation, January 8, 1930, 54).

48. “The Future of the Movies,” 362.

49. Alexander Bakshy, “Fantasy All the Way,” The Nation, June 10, 1931, 646.

50. “The Future of the Movies,” 362. Along these lines, Bakshy told readers six months later that
Frederick Kiesler warranted “the gratitude of all believers in cinematic progress” for designing the Film
Guild Cinema as a “100 per cent cinema house,” and noted as well that he eagerly awaited its proposed
“side-walls for additional projection” (“Free Lances,” 326). Alas, the “side-walls” were never installed. For
more on the history of the theater and its architect, see Laura M. McGuire, “A Movie House in Space and
Time: Frederick Kiesler’s Film Arts Guild Cinema, New York, 1929,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 14, no.
2 (Spring-Summer 2007), 45-78.

51. “The Future of the Movies,” 362.

 313

52. “The Future of the Movies,” 362.

53. Ibid., 364.

54. Alexander Bakshy, “Journey’s End,” The Nation, August 30, 1930, 525.

55. Alexander Bakshy, “Where Broadway Scores,” The Nation, August 6, 1930, 160.

56. Alexander Bakshy, “The Talkies Advancing,” The Nation, October 30, 1929, 503. Bakshy also used the
principle of medium specificity to judge movies during the brief window of time when new silent films
could be compared to new talkies. Along these lines, he was probably at his most iconoclastic in his review
of The Passion of Joan of Arc. Initially, Bakshy calls the film a “picture of outstanding originality,”
highlighted by the close-ups and “static” camera that made it “decidedly fresh and unconventional.” But
then he qualifies his praise, saying that the film’s lack of camera movement could “hardly be described as
cinematically, as well as dramatically, successful.” “[I]nstead of finding an adequate cinematic form in
which to show the mental tortures of Joan and the reactions of her prosecutors,” Bakshy argued,
“[director Carl Theodor] Dreyer . . . reduced the drama of the situation to rather obvious facial mimics
illustrating the dialogue titles which are made to bear the whole burden of dramatic movement.” Finally,
in one of the most jaw-dropping sentences in the history of American film criticism, he concluded:
“Clearly, the picture should have been made as a talkie” (“There Are Silent Pictures,” 204).

57. “The ‘Talkies,’ ” 236.

58. Jean Epstein, “On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie” (1924), trans. Tom Milne, reprinted in
French Film Theory and Criticism: 1907-1929, vol. 1, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1993), 314.

59. “The ‘Talkies,’ ” 236.

60. Ibid.

61. Alexander Bakshy, “New Dimensions in the Talkies,” The Nation, December 24, 1930, 703.

62. “A Year of Talkies,” 773.

63. “Talkies and Dummies,” 563.

64. Alexander Bakshy, “Screen Musical Comedy,” The Nation, February 5, 1930, 160.

65. Alexander Bakshy, “Screen Musical Comedy,” The Nation, October 1, 1930, 356.

66. “New Dimensions in the Talkies,” 702.

67. Ibid., 703.

68. Alexander Bakshy, “The Shrinking of Personality,” The Nation, May 27, 1931, 590.

69. Spadoni, 32-3.

70. Alexander Bakshy, “Morals, Facts, and Fiction,” The Nation, July 6, 1932, 18.

71. Alexander Bakshy, “Concerning Dialogue,” The Nation, August 17, 1932, 152.
 314

72. Alexander Bakshy, “New Paths for the Musical Film,” New York Times, June 9, 1935.

73. “Populist at the Movies,” Time, March 3, 1970.

74. Roger Ebert, “ ‘You Give Out Too Many Stars,’ ” Roger Ebert’s Journal (blog), September 14, 2008,
http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/you-give-out-too-many-stars.

75. Roger Ebert, Life Itself: A Memoir (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2011), 219.

76. “Populist at the Movies.”

77. Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook 2003 (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Publishing,
2003), 770.

78. Roger Ebert, Questions for the Movie Answer Man (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Publishing,
1997), 1.

79. Roger Ebert, The Future of the Movies (Kansas City, MO: Andrews and McMeel, 1991), ix.

80. Roger Ebert, quoted in Life Itself, directed by Steve James (Chicago: Kartemquin Films, 2014).
Subsequent citations appear in text.

81. Roger Ebert, “Thoughts on the Centennial of Cinema” (1995), reprinted in Awake in the Dark: The
Best of Roger Ebert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 435.

82. Roger Ebert, “Not Being There,” The Atlantic Monthly, December 1980.

83. Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion (Kansas City, MO: Andrews, McMeel & Parker,
1985), 1.

84. Ibid., 2.

85. Ibid., 3.

86. Ibid., 4.

87. Siskel & Ebert & the Movies, “Buried Treasures, Part 1,” 1986,
http://siskelandebert.org/video/H7MB8B8Y8RUX/Buried-Treasures-Part-1-1986.

88. Siskel & Ebert & the Movies, “Holiday Video Gift Guide,” 1988,
http://siskelandebert.org/video/53AO473HYXN6/1988-Holiday-Gift-Guide.

89. Richard Corliss, “All Thumbs, or, Is There a Future for Film Criticism?” (1990), reprinted in Awake in
the Dark, 396.

90. Ibid., 401.

91. Ibid., 403.

92. Ibid., 408.

93. Josh Schollmeyer, “Enemies: A Love Story,” The Chicagoan 1, no. 1 (2011): 93n12.
 315

94. Awake in the Dark, 408.

95. Ibid., 403.

96. Ibid., 405.

97. Ibid., 415.

98. Roger Ebert, The Great Movies II (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), xiv.

99. Roger Ebert, The Great Movies (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), xviii.

100. Roger Ebert, “The Light in the Tunnel,” Roger Ebert’s Journal (blog), July 22, 2009,
http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/the-light-in-the-tunnel.

101. Roger Ebert, “See You At the Movies,” Roger Ebert’s Journal (blog), March 25, 2010,
http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/see-you-at-the-movies.

102. “The Light in the Tunnel.”

103. Awake in the Dark, 371.

104. Ibid., 376.

105. J. Hoberman, The Magic Hour: Film at Fin de Siècle (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007),
63.

106. Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook 2000 (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Publishing,
2000), ix.

107. The Great Movies II, xiv.

108. “The Light in the Tunnel.”

109. Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook 2010 (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Publishing,
2000), vii.

110. Life Itself, 266-7.

111. Roger Ebert, “Confessions of a Blogger,” Roger Ebert’s Journal (blog), August 21, 2008,
http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/confessions-of-a-blogger.

112. Roger Ebert, “It’s Going to be a Bumpy Night,” Roger Ebert’s Journal (blog), June 2, 2011,
http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/its-going-to-be-a-bumpy-night.

113. Roger Ebert, “Stream a Little Stream With Me,” Roger Ebert’s Journal (blog), March 9, 2011,
http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/stream-a-little-stream-with-me.

114. Roger Ebert, “Watching Movies on Cellphones,” Roger Ebert’s Journal (blog), July 9, 2012,
http://www.rogerebert.com/letters/watching-movies-on-cellphones.

115. Chris Jones, “Roger Ebert: The Essential Man,” Esquire, March 201o.
 316

116. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, “Dear Roger,” Notebook (blog), April 5, 2013,

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/dear-roger.

Conclusion

1. Stanley Kauffmann, “Why I’m Not Bored” (1974), reprinted in Before My Eyes: Film Criticism and
Comment (New York: Da Capo Press, 1980), 432. Subsequent citations appear in text.