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their lives in the Klondike Gold Rush as did

screenwriter and card shark Wilson Mizner,
An autobiographical note: I am a red diaper
baby, born into the shattered remains of the
Jean-Luc Godard:
alongside such luminaries as Sid Grauman, world Garnier has portrayed, and his book The Permanent Revolutionary
Alexander Pantages, Jack London, and Don- o&ered me a backstory. In 1935, my father, by Bert Rebhandl (translated by Edward
ald Trump’s grandpa Frederick. George H. Corey, had a play on Broadway, a Maltby). University of Wisconsin Press, 2023,
Most of these émigrés were ambitious, story published in Story Magazine, and a free 240 pp., illus. Hardcover: $29.95.
adrenaline-seeking men and women, many ticket to Hollywood. It was the depths of the
of whom had the moxie to game the system. Depression, and it seemed like a good idea at Midway through Stardust Memories
!ey mastered the cunning art of “spit- the time. Mostly a rewrite man at Columbia (1980), a group of aliens come to earth to
balling,” where a writer, as Garnier recounts, Pictures, and by his own description “undistin- tell Woody Allen’s angst-ridden moviemaker
would “waltz into the office of Zanuck or guished” as a screenwriter, he does not make protagonist Sandy Bates that they enjoy his
Goldwyn and start spinning a yarn, imper- an appearance in Scoundrels & Spitballers. But films—“particularly the early funny ones.”
sonating characters, telling the boss a smash- the world he inhabited is alive on every page, Jean-Luc Godard’s early movies weren’t
ing story—which they’d more often than not taking me to a time before I was born when he exactly funny, but they were fun. Band of
forget on their way to the track as the ink and his magic circle were still unbroken. By the Outsiders (1964) has a giddy fizz that sends
was drying on the check.” Writers escaped time I was five or six—old enough to notice you floating, elated, from the movie theater.
Warner’s strict work hours by sneaking out adult pain—there was plenty of it at my house. Alphaville (1965) is a dystopic sci-fi noir,
of windows, and hiding stepladders in the One night my dad came home from the stu- but it would be a sanctimonious churl who
bushes to climb back in. !ey played hooky dio carrying a box of stu& from his office and missed its gestures at slapstick. Pierrot le fou
and polo, shot craps, went to the dog track, told my mother that Harry Cohn had “canned” (1965) is ostensibly a violent thriller, but
and got drunk at lunch, sometimes all on the him because he had been targeted by HUAC. Godard forsakes the pulp roots of Lionel
same day. !ings changed rapidly. !ankfully, my mother White’s novel for an Andy Warhol
Scoundrels & Spitballers provides a vivid —a retail executive—kept us afloat. My dad and silkscreen color scheme that coaxes the film
map of their landscape. !ere was Darryl I still had a weekly “date”—dinner at Musso’s into Rom-Com territory.
Zanuck’s polo field on the Warners backlot, and a stroll down Hollywood Boulevard to Pick- Not that Godard would have thanked
Pickwick Books and Stanley Rose’s book- wick Books. And there were still gatherings at you for finding any of his movies amusing,
stores on Hollywood Boulevard, the original our house where curry was served, martinis were much less moving. After his conversion in
Brown Derby on Wilshire Blvd where Wilson drunk, and choreographers, writers, and cos- the late Sixties to what Bert Rebhandl calls
Mizner, ruled from table 50, and the famous tume designers who wore berets, drove foreign “strict Maoism,” the already professorial
backroom at the Musso & Frank Grill where cars, and smoked Gauloise cigarettes, shouted Godard became a thoroughgoing didact.
William Faulkner and “Buzz” Bezzerides over the Eartha Kitt and George Shearing forty- From thereon, he largely conceived of the
could rub elbows and bend them, too. fives that boomed from the stereo. Still, a shadow cinema as having just one purpose—the
Garnier’s portrayal of this world is in no of doubt had passed over them all. Most days my promulgation of insurrection. It would do
way Edenic. !ere was a dark side to this despondent father remained locked in his office, this not by telling stories of ideological der-
bumptious party and there were many casu- writing a novel that would never be published. ring-do but by formally embodying the
alties along the way. In 1941, when Larry My parents held whispered conversations that tumult that revolution required.
Edmunds, the successful young owner of an always seemed to end badly. !ere was crying. I Editing his first movie, Breathless, in
eponymous bookstore, popular with Holly- learned new words like suicide and Blacklist. 1960, Godard popularized the jump cut
wood notables, committed suicide, he left a Friends betrayed friends or disappeared to Mexi- when he resorted to it as a way of both satis-
note that read: “Too many little green men. co or drank themselves to death. !e party was fying and goading a producer who had
Couldn’t kill them all. Time to go.” !ere over, even for me: when the son of my parents’ demanded that the movie be shorter. If any-
were enough little demons, green or other- former friends invited me to his seventh birth- one “invented” the jump cut, it would have
wise, to go around in this hard-living tribe. day, promising clowns and donkeys, my folks been Georges Méliès, who accidentally did
!ere was many a fall from grace, sobriety, said I couldn’t go because his director father had so in 1896, and it would take filmmakers
the marriage bed, and mental health. Sure, “named names.” other than Godard to later employ the tech-
some studio bosses called writers “schmucks Scoundrels & Spitballers is not shapely. nique in a dramatic manner. Now, though,
with Underwoods,” screwed them financially, And that’s okay. But the book’s scattershot he claimed that by destabilizing the audi-
refused to let them park on the studio lot, ahistorical structure causes Garnier to miss an ence’s relationship to the otherwise
and excluded them from premieres of films opportunity. !e Hollywood Witch-Hunt ineluctably naturalistic moving image, the
the scenarists had written. But while this began as early as 1947 and some deeper con- technique was the visual equivalent of the
mistreatment took its toll, so did the forces sideration of it would have given this book a Marxist dialectic.
of self-destruction, the steep wages of self- natural narrative arc worthy of Aeschylus. And so, having delivered himself of the
loathing, and the historical moment. Once upon a time there was a freewheeling opinion that, “A camera filming itself in a
Garnier does not make this point, but I community of devil-may-care creative people mirror would be the ultimate film,” Godard
think these Hollywood sojourners are best who got paid to tell stories, while drinking, determined to further fool around with the
understood within the context of “!e Lost playing the ponies, getting laid, and shooting niceties of movie grammar, the better to
Generation”—the first group of American craps, whose idyll was ended by the cynical remind you that what you were watching was
artists and intellectuals who, while biblically shenanigans of a Senate subcommittee three not the real world. Say hello to motiveless
reared, chose to abandon the comforts and thousand miles away. Garnier does touch on camera movements, out-of-synch sounds
constraints of an all-seeing God. !is free- the Red Scare and its aftermath, wondering and images, screens filled with words, cuts
dom gave them some trouble. Garnier cap- why “there are so many unreliable narrators that come too late—or too early—in what
tures this in his portrait of Ohio-born among the victims” of the Blacklist. But that is one hesitates to call scenes, cinema that, as
writer/director and “general hellraiser” certainly not the only question to ask. Rebhandl puts it in his slim but nutritious
Rowland Brown, of whom he says, “In spite !is quibble may be just a biographical critical biography Jean-Luc Godard: !e Per-
of his Packard, his valets and his flashy suits, prejudice and doesn’t detract from the great manent Revolutionary, “increasingly takes on
[he] had remained stuck somewhere in pleasures of this wonderful book that Garnier the form of [the] essay.”
Ohio: fathers and sons, angels and demons, has dedicated “To the Living,” but within Truth be told, Godard had been a for-
good and evil, red or black, repair or impair, which the voices of the dead live on. malist from the get-go. When a hapless writer
passe or manque.” —Mary F. Corey from Cahiers du cinéma suggested that
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“!ere is a good deal of blood [in Pierrot le first of several relationships Godard was to
fou],” Godard snapped back: “Not blood, have with women he discovered as actresses”
red.” A decade earlier, as a young critic on —in a bathtub (she was appearing in a soap
the same magazine, Godard had been commercial), he offered her a part in
adamant that a movie’s subject matter was Breathless. !e part required her to appear
of no import. Quality and meaning inhered nude. Karina said no. But, as Rebhandl doc-
not in a film’s thematic content, he said, but uments, so many of the actresses Godard
in its shape and dynamic—its movement worked with down the years were willing to
from shot to shot, sound to sound, image to satisfy his need “to expose the breasts of
image. Reviewing Hitchcock’s remake of young women.” Indeed, on day one of the
!e Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), he Detective (1985) shoot, having ordered the
argued that the movie wasn’t so much a spy seventeen-year-old Emmanuelle Seigner to
thriller as a film about spy thrillers. “People remove her bra, Godard then told her to
say that Hitchcock lets the wires show,” he lose her panties, too.
wrote. “But because he shows them, they are At one point, Rebhandl talks of
no longer wires. !ey are the pillars of a Godard’s “elaborate arrangements of
marvelous architectural design.” Like any desire,” but an obsession with sodomy
vaguely sentient artist working post-Niet- aside, his fantasies were less elaborate than
zsche, post-Freud, post-Cézanne, Hitchcock garden variety. !e guy was a peeper. !e
serves up not an illusion but the workings of extended shot of Brigitte Bardot’s ass at the
an illusion. start of Contempt (1963) might well be
!ose are my cross references but, as intended as an ironic dissection of the male
Rebhandl points out, Godard was a past gaze. But show me a male who hasn’t gazed
master at the high culture name-drop. Writ- at it, and I’ll show you a blind man. For all I
ing about Anthony Mann’s Westerns, he know, Godard really believed he was fore-
roped in Virgil. Writing about Nicholas Ray, thetic political experimentation knows. grounding the intrinsic voyeurism of the
he summoned the spirit of Goethe. Not that Leninism, Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism: all of cinematic apparatus. !ere can be no
Rebhandl, who is a critic for Frankfurter All- them movie scripts purporting to be History, doubt, though, that he was having his buns
gemeine and tipBerlin, is overly impressed. all of them stories premised on a redemptive and eating them, too.
Since Joe Mankiewicz’s movies and Alberto third act that ushers in an eternally better Rebhandl has a good eye himself. !e
Moravia’s novels “have almost nothing in future, all of them ending in death and Permanent Revolutionary is worth reading
common,” he says, Godard’s comparison of destruction. just for his analysis of how the use of Cinema-
them is no more than the posturing of a Godard said that he didn’t want to make Scope in Contempt “transform[s] spaces of
“genial know-it-all.” political films. He wanted to make films togetherness…into an architecture of sepa-
But how much did Godard really know? politically. !ese are fine Brechtian words. ration.” But then, as Rebhandl reminds us,
Rebhandl, like earlier biographers, offers no But just as Brecht overrated the power of the even at their most rebarbatively theoretical,
evidence for Godard’s politics having been theater to affect real world change, so did Godard’s pictures had a beauty that both
thought out. Godard had seen every movie Godard grant the cinema a potency it never burnished and belied their ideological bald-
there was, but he had read precious little his- possessed. In the movies, politics is high ness. !e monochrome sequences of Paris
tory, let alone much socioeconomic theory. drama. In real life, politics is a dull slog, a in In Praise of Love (2001) give the Anto-
!e young Truffaut was famously blown repetitive exercise in solving problems that nioni of Eclipse (1962) a run for his money.
away by Godard’s speed-reading skills are invariably the byproduct of an earlier set !e tracking shots in Nouvelle vague (1990)
(“What struck me most…was the way he of solutions. To be fair to Godard, he did his stop being lyrical only in order to be balletic.
absorbed books. When we were at friends’ best to siphon anything like a story out of First Name: Carmen (1983) is ultimately a
houses in the evening, he would open up at his political films. But it is by now a safe bet mess, but there is no gainsaying the
least forty books and he always read the first that, dramatic or not, no movie is going to grandeur of its visual conceits.
and last pages”), but such skimming is the bring about international revolution. !at said, Godard’s best work is a frac-
mark of the journalist rather than the scholar. Rebhandl’s impressively crowded little tion of his vast output. For sixty years, from
Certainly, there is nothing in what one of book is very fair to Godard. He gets the 1960 until his death in 2020, he never
Rebhandl’s chapters calls Godard’s “Revolu- whole of Godard’s life and work into fewer stopped making movies. I haven’t counted
tionary Cinema” that suggests he got any than two hundred pages. If he misses them, but I can tell you that Rebhandl’s fil-
further with his study of politics than Mao’s Godard’s essential humourlessness, he misses mography runs to a dozen pages of closely
line about “political power grow[ing] out of little else. He makes it clear that while spaced text. !e only living artist of similar
the barrel of a gun.” Godard had a childhood that was in many longevity and fecundity is Bob Dylan (with
Godard came to politics in the same way respects as troubled as that of Truffaut (who whom Godard more than once compared
he came to everything else—through the so beautifully dramatized his own youth in himself, whose 1978 movie Renaldo and
movies. “I have always confused cinema !e 400 Blows), he was born far too well- Clara he found “sympathique,” and whom
with life,” he once said. “To me life is just heeled—and in wealthy, neutral Switzer- he fancied for the lead in his version of King
part of films.” So long as it goes no further land!—to have come to revolutionary poli- Lear in 1987).
than wanting to dress like Cary Grant or bed tics from any insight into the facts of life on But the living artist Godard most closely
Gina Lollobrigida, there is nothing wrong the ground. resembles is the painter and sculptor
with such Foucauldian flummery. But Most importantly, Rebhandl points up Michael Heizer. Just as Heizer’s earth-
Godard did go further. He loved the movies the sexist undertow in so much of Godard’s works—Double Negative in the Moapa Val-
so much he couldn’t forgive life for not work. Whatever you make of his movies, it ley, say, or Complex One in the Mojave
being similarly exciting. Alas, having con- is inarguable that his career-long insistence Desert—demand from their prospective
flated art with life, he then conflated art with that capitalism equals prostitution would viewers a commitment bordering on pil-
politics—a fatal move. For politics is not have come better from someone rather less grimage, so Godard went on insisting that
aesthetics—as anyone who’s read anything inclined to treat starlets as if they were the cinema be more than what Rebhandl
about the twentieth century’s litany of aes- hookers. Having spotted Anna Karina—“the calls “a spectacle to distract the masses.”
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Hence his desire not to supply content to an What Film Is Good For, Julian Hanich eleven pages, and are framed as responses to
industry but to possess the means of pro- and Martin P. Rossouw’s new anthology, is the question “what is film good for?” Hanich
duction and thus make movies that can be at once a compendium of short essays on and Rossouw divide these short essays into
exhibited without resource to mainstream cinematic ethics and a manifesto for value seven sections—Adaptive Goods, Empathic
channels. !anks to the Web, such dreams pluralism. !e organizing prompt for the Goods, Sensitive Goods, Reviving Goods,
of auteurist autonomy are today readily collection is a question: “What is film good Communal Goods, Medial Goods, and
imaginable. Not so when Godard was set- for?” !is framing invites the objection Unsettled Goods.
ting out. As a self-employed maverick film- (which they acknowledge on the very first Roughly, Adaptive Goods concerns the
maker, he set a moral example whose page of their introduction) that they are relationship between film and the impera-
impact no amount of mind-numbing agit- instrumentalizing the art form by focusing tive to adapt to mounting global challenges.
prop pictures should make us overlook. on its uses instead of its intrinsic value. Art Empathic Goods considers the value—as
!anks to Rebhandl we shall be less apt should be for art’s sake, or so the saying well as the danger—of the medium’s ability
to do so. !ough he occasionally drifts into goes. Using art for moral improvement, or to engender empathy. Sensitive Goods
Continental Philosophy impenetrability— to understand other minds, or to imagine addresses the way that film enables the culti-
his claim that when the elderly Godard other worlds, is using it for some purpose vation of various forms of sensitivity. Reviv-
finally stopped chasing young girls, he other than its own, which is to simply be art, ing Goods concerns the transformational
became “available for another love, for an sanctified and complete unto itself. capacity of cinema. Communal Goods
erotic, or mystical, or prophetically charged Taken as a whole, What Film Is Good For examines the role of films in forming and
relationship with history as such” is apple- reveals quite effectively that this model of sustaining communities. Medial Goods con-
sauce worthy of Althusser—he is a reliable aesthetic engagement is anemic at best. Our siders the nature of cinema as a mediator of
guide to all things Godard. engagement with a film doesn’t end when reality. Finally, Unsettled Goods turns to
!e Permanent Revolutionary is clumsily we leave the theater or turn off the TV. more vexed, unstable goods. All in all, it’s a
footnoted and its bibliography far too brief When we call a friend to compare impres- rainbow of value.
(it actually fails to mention some of the texts sions, we are engaging with the film. When I suspect the volume would have benefited
from which Rebhandl quotes). But in its we lay awake at night haunted by an uncanny from the addition of introductions for each
brevity and scope this is a magnificent image, we are engaging with the film. When of these sections along with a summary
beginner’s guide to Godard. As for seasoned we understand a real-life moral dilemma in reflection at the end of the book. Hanich
Godardians, it might even convince them to a different way because of a film’s continu- and Rossouw’s initial introduction lays out a
look further afield than those early funny ing resonance in our mind, we are engaging tantalizing agenda—charting the contempo-
ones.—Christopher Bray with the film. !ese aren’t separate activities rary landscape of cinematic ethics—but then
that bear a merely instrumental relationship leaves it to the reader to sort out what this

What Film
to aesthetic engagement; they are engage- landscape ends up looking like. I would
ment in action. have liked to see them follow through with a

Is Good For:
From my point of view as someone espe- more synthetic resolution.
cially friendly to value pluralism, the great- !e essays themselves are widely varied
On the Values of Spectatorship est merit of this collection is the breadth of in their approaches, though many synergies
Edited by Julian Hanich and Martin P. its outlook. I count thirty-five total contrib- between them emerge. In some cases,
Rossouw; with a Foreword by Mike Figgis utors (including co-authors) from a wide authors condense and apply some aspect of
and an Afterword by Radu Jude. Oakland, CA: variety of backgrounds. Film and media their larger research program, such as Geoff
University of California Press, 2023. 413 pp., studies are the most heavily represented King’s “Challenge and Discomfort: On Situ-
illus. Paperback: $29.95. fields, but there are also philosophers, film- ated Pleasures in Art and Indie Film,” which
makers, critics, social scientists, and more. develops ideas from his two most recent
Perhaps the most damaging misconcep- !eir contributions range from nine to books, Positioning Art Cinema and Cinema
tion that pervades aesthetic discourse is the of Discomfort (see review in Cineaste, Fall
notion that we must choose between rigid 2022), and Daniel Yacavone’s “Heterocos-
universalism and absolute relativism. !e mic Connections: On the Many Worlds and
austere universalist insists that a work is World Values of Cinema,” which draws
simply good or bad, and that this fact holds from his book Film Worlds: A Philosophical
true for everyone regardless of their personal Aesthetics of Cinema. Other authors offer ad
stance on the matter. !e freewheeling rela- hoc reflections that connect the volume’s
tivist counters that one’s personal stance is principal question to the contemporary
all there is to it. If you find value in a work, moment, such as Jennifer Fay’s “A Portal to
it’s valuable for you, and just to that extent. Another World: On Cinema, Climate
I can’t tell you how many exchanges I’ve Change, and a Good Apocalypse,” which
seen like the one I’ve just described. !ey relates the rupture of the pandemic to Tsai
are predicated on a false dilemma that Ming-liang’s !e Hole (1998) in considering
neglects a far more appealing alternative: the imaginative potency of the medium, and
pluralism. A work can be valuable in some Sarah Cooper’s “It’s Invaluable: On Film
ways, but not others, and from some per- Spectatorship in the Era of Covid-19,”
spectives, but not others. In the face of this which suggests that the pandemic’s disrup-
complexity, we should not resort to vacuous tion of film access should shift our concern
relativism, which throws up its hands at the toward global equity in distribution.
whole tangle, but instead should attend to !e subtitle of the book is On the Values
the intricate network of values and valuing of Spectatorship, which pointedly equivo-
practices that surround cinema. Recogniz- cates between the values that emerge from
ing the inadequacy of both universalism and spectatorship and the values that ought to
relativism should drastically enrich our guide it. Rossouw and Hanich conceive of
shared project of talking to each other about this as a volume on ethics, but they have a
movies. broad idea of what that means. !ey clarify
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Letters (continued)
At the other end, academic institutions,
which might once have harbored and nur-
The Pleasure of Print
I love getting the print version of Cineaste in
the mail—a real treat these days, just to hold a
Contributors
Mitchell Abidor is a writer and translator who is
tured passionate cinephile critics, have been magazine in my hands. And I love your many currently writing a biography of Victor Serge …
taken over by ideologues, immune to the aes- articulate articles about cinematic history: the Adam Bingham lives and works in the U.K. where
thetics of !lm, dedicated to the Marxist goal superb evaluations of Pasolini, Edward G. he teaches film studies … N. T. Binh (aka Yann
of unmasking the medium’s ulterior “hetero- Robinson, Jean Eustache, the title-writers of Tobin) is a member of the Positif editorial board …
Angela Bonavoglia, who covers women’s issues,
normative” and “late Capitalist” agenda, and silent movies. To be honest, I get much more is author of Good Catholic Girls and the oral history
who speak only to one another in a closed out of these forays into the past than I do the The Choices We Made; her Website is at
circle (self-perpetuating) of victimology. reviews of current !lms. Yes, the review of [Link] … Mary Bowen blogs
Cineaste and Criterion essays are the Oppenheimer was nicely balanced, and Mary F. about film at [Link] …
refuge of cinephiles seeking knowledgeable Corey’s takedown of Barbie was hilarious and Christopher Bray is a critic, cultural historian, and
in-depth reviews of the new and the old appropriately brutal. But I thought the ecstatic author of biographies of Michael Caine and Sean
(through revivals and !lm books), a refuge appraisal of the overrated, corny Past Lives suf- Connery … Jeremy Carr teaches film studies at
that is more precious than ever. For example, fered from the gushy tone that infects your pos- Arizona State University and is author of Kubrick
The Night of the 12th, the sharply observant itive reviews of new releases, especially those and Control and Repulsion … Robert Cashill is a
member of the Cineaste editorial board … Thomas
French procedural and one of my favorite that check off all the right socially progressive Doherty, professor of American Studies at
!lms of 2023, had gone pretty much unseen boxes. Okay, that said, I am a fan of many of Brandeis University, is author of numerous books
and unheralded. In his knowledgeable critique your regular writers: Jonathan Kirshner, David … Mary F. Corey teaches history at UCLA where
[Cineaste, Winter 2023], Darragh O’Dono- Sterritt, Leonard Quart. They pop up regularly she specializes in intellectual history and African
ghue provides not only superb in-depth and intelligently in your Home Video and Book American history … Thom Delapa is a writer,
analysis but also a broader frame of reference, Review columns. In short, your magazine excels educator, and film programmer currently residing in
encompassing English-language forerunners in its coverage of past cinema, and should be Ann Arbor, Michigan …. Will DiGravio, a Cineaste
of detective !ction along with a useful com- commended for its refusal to devote all its ener- Assistant Editor, is a Brooklyn-based critic and
pendium of French crime dramas. Previous gies to the hyped, latest flavor-of-the-month. researcher …James B. Evans is a film critic/
historian and university lecturer who has con-
Cineaste and Criterion editions have also
tributed to various periodicals and books …
included—at random—great interviews (Jean- Phillip Lopate Monica Filimon is associate professor of English
Claude Carrière on his partnership with Luis Brooklyn, NY at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY …
Buñuel); pieces on Hawks that try to nail Lopate’s new book is A Year and a Graham Fuller is a Cineaste Associate …
down the director’s greatness beyond the Day: An Experiment in Essays Philippe Garnier, a French cultural journalist
usual utilitarian adjectives; attention to strong based in Los Angeles, is now adapting/translating
women, both in the present and in prefemi- Praise for “Titular Bishops” his book Sterling Hayden: The Irregular for
nist Hollywood; Phillip Lopate on the early There are many reasons why Cineaste Blackpool Productions … Matthew Hays teaches
Antonioni !lm, Le Amiche, one of my own remains a favorite cinema publication, and it is film studies at Marianapolis College and Concordia
University and is co-editor (with Tom Waugh) of the
favorites as well; and the list goes on. articles such as Philippe Garnier’s “The Titular Queer Film Classics book series … Naveen Inim is
We seem increasingly governed by the Bishops of Hollywood Silent Pictures” [Cineaste, a recent MFA graduate from Boston University …
spurious idea that no one should evaluate or Winter 2023] that reinforces that belief. I’ve Valerie Kaufman is a freelance writer who also
sit in judgment on anyone else. Critics can been in situations, attempting to explain to the teaches film and writing … Jonathan Kirshner is a
not only challenge received opinions and uninitiated that intertitles were not always merely professor in Boston College’s political science
puncture hyperbole where overpraised popu- explanatory bits that came between passages of department and author of Hollywood’s Last Golden
lar !lms are concerned, but can also lead imagery, but had true artistry behind them, both Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in
viewers to more challenging material, urging from a graphics perspective as well as the specific America … Robert Koehler contributes writing and
patience, providing wisdom and the delight words chosen to make a point, add humor, or film criticism for Cinema Scope, Variety, DGA
Quarterly, and Sight and Sound … Gary M.
of fellowship in coming to appreciate less enhance the storyline. Kramer is a film critic for Salon, Gay City News,
obvious gems. In 2007, the Irish writer, Another important point made clear in the and the San Francisco Bay Times … Kevin Lally is
Rónán McDonald, came out with a book, The piece is the very short span of years that made up the former executive editor of Film Journal
Death of the Critic. People responded with a the golden age of the silent !lm. One learns this International and Boxoffice and author of Wilder
knee-jerk “Yea!” until they realized he was more when restoring a silent work, and seeing Times: The Life of Billy Wilder … Stuart Liebman
bemoaning rather than celebrating the death those titles hundreds of times, as James Mockos- is professor emeritus at Queens College and the
(and was even to !nd reasons for hope). One ki and I did for The Johnstown Flood [see review CUNY Graduate Center … Declan McGrath is
wonders if Beckett came to appreciate the on page 66]. After reading his piece, I’m wonder- author of two books on the craft of filmmaking and
irony that it was critics Kenneth Tynan and ing if Caldwell and Hilliker might have been director of the observational documentary Young
Plato … Ciara Moloney, a film and TV critic in
Harold Hobson who, in praising Waiting for involved. The titles are quite interesting as several Dublin, is a PhD candidate at Mary Immaculate
Godot as the most important play of the have a zoom effect as Janet Gaynor is screaming College, University of Limerick, and chief film critic
twentieth century, rescued it from its initial about the dam and flood waters. I received an for Current Affairs magazine … Charles Musser,
almost universally negative reception. email from a friend very well-educated in the who teaches film and media studies at Yale
silent era, wondering if we had added the zoom University, is currently writing a book entitled Labor
Molly Haskell effect. We had not. It was created at Fox in 1926. Films & Left-Wing Media: From Alfred Wagenknecht
New York, NY The article answered many questions, including to Carl Marzani and Union Films … Darragh
Feminist author and !lm critic some that I had no idea needed to be asked, but O’Donoghue is an archivist at Tate Britain in London
Haskell is currently writing a am pleased that they were. The subject would … Leonard Quart is author or co-author of numerous
books on film … Christopher Sharrett is a professor
memoir of her life in movies. make a wonderful coffee table book, as there is a emeritus at Seton Hall University … Ryan Silberstein
great deal of unknown history to be told. Thank is a Philadelphia-based film critic and Managing Editor
you for a terri!c article!
Letters to the Editors
of the MovieJawn Website … Imogen Sara Smith is
a freelance writer and teacher, author of In Lonely
Readers’ letters of comment should be emailed Robert Harris Places: FIlm Noir Beyond the City, and a regular
to cineaste@[Link]. Please try to keep Bedford, NY contributor to The Criterion Channel … David Sterritt,
your comments to 500 or fewer words. Harris has restored such !lms as a Cineaste Contributing Writer, is author of fifteen
Authors of letters chosen for publication will books on film …Matthew Strohl is author of Why It’s
receive a free one-year subscription or an
Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus,
and Vertigo, among others. Okay to Love Bad Movies and professor of philosophy
extension of their current subscription. at the University of Montana. n

CINEASTE 35