American Film Criticism / Theory

Before James Agee’s tenure as film critic for The Nation and Time from 1941–8, American film criticism was rarely taken seriously. Agee’s incisive reviews paved the way for the most significant journalistic critics of the postwar era—Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael.

While Agee’s literary sensibility enlivened his work, the more idiosyncratic Farber brought a painter’s eye and a superb command of the American vernacular to his quirky assessments of everything from neglected “B-movies” to the experimental films of Michael Snow. Active from the 1940s through the 1970s, Farber is probably best known for his distinction between “white elephant art”—prestigious, but empty and selfimportant films—and “termite art”—unpretentious movies redeemed by their low-key stylistic innovations.

Sarris and Kael were the dominant critical voices of the 1960s, and both writers attracted numerous disciples and imitators. Sarris’ The American Cinema proposed an American version of the highly polemical auteurism of Cahiers du Cinema. His elaborate rankings of American directors, which he only half-ironically labeled his pantheon, proved extremely controversial. Kael demolished Sarris’ auteurism in a characteristically acerbic article entitled “Circles and Squares.” Famously hostile to theoretical generalities (her critique of Sarris included the assertion that “film aesthetics as a distinct, specialized field is a bad joke”), Kael favored intuitive, visceral evaluations of movies and was praised for her slangy wise-cracking prose.

By the 1970s, academic theorists rejected the impressionistic, relatively apolitical criticism of Kael and Sarris. Cineaste and Jump Cut, leftist film journals radicalized by the antiwar movement and the Civil Rights movement, published translations of European theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer, while devoting considerable space to third-world films and radical documentaries ignored by mainstream critics. While Kael boasted that she never saw a film more than once, American academics, under the sway of semioticians like Christian Metz, favored meticulous textual analysis. The impact of the academic engagement with European theory was particularly profound in feminist circles, and a journal such as the Berkeley-based Camera Obscura synthesized post-structuralist analysis and second-wave feminism’s critique of male ideology.

Camera Obscura theorists deployed the work of Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser (especially as filtered through the work of French film-theorist Raymond Bellour) to claim that most Hollywood narratives were animated by an oedipal impetus that reinforced patriarchal attitudes. Subsequent feminist theorists paid more attention to the role of the female spectator; Mary Ann Doane and Tania Modleski, for example, challenged the view that women were incapable of deriving some form of pleasure from the maledominated commercial cinema.

The penchant for occasionally hermetic “grand theory” which reached its zenith during the 1970s, inspired an inevitable backlash. The 1980s marked a revival of historical criticism informed by empirical research—David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger’s delineation of what they termed the “classical Hollywood cinema” is a paradigmatic example. Their emphasis on normative elements in prototypical Hollywood films, particularly an ingrained tendency to foreground characters as “causal agents,” set the stage for publications advocating cognitive theory as an alternative to semiotics by Bordwell and his colleague Noel Carroll. Cognitivism aligned formalist analysis with an interest in the vicissitudes of human perception, but, as Robert Stam points out, the cognitivist agenda—despite its rhetoric—is not always antithetical to semiotics or psychoanalytic theory

By the 1990s, burgeoning interests in multi-culturalism, postcolonial theory and queer theory infused new life into film studies. These disparate, although undeniably related theoretical strands, derived sustenance from broader tendencies in cultural studies that emphasized popular art instead of high culture. Multiculturalists and queer theorists nevertheless retained much of the skepticism concerning the “dominant culture” which inspired the New Left.

Multicultural film theory moved quickly from an earlier generation’s preoccupation with “negative images” of African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans to a more nuanced critique of how Eurocentric assumptions permeate popular culture, as well as a parallel exploration of how alternative cinematic practices can offer an anti-dote. Postcolonial theory was more concerned with the intersection of race and film in the “Diaspora”—the terrain where exiled Africans, Asians and Latin Americans created what was termed a “hybridized” cinema in the West. Post-colonial theory was unquestionably indebted to the radical assault on Eurocentrism outlined by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978). Yet Ella Shohat argued that postcolonial theorists, in their zeal to transcend the Third Worldism of the Cold War, ignored the fact that the ravages of colonialism have not disappeared.

Queer theory mirrors many of the tensions and contradictions that inform multicultural and post-colonial theory Cinematic queer theorists, unlike an earlier generation of gays and lesbians, were equally disinclined to promote politically correct “positive images.” Prominent queer theorists such as Alexander Doty championed the decidedly “incorrect” images that fueled the “New Queer Cinema” and dissected “queerness” in heterosexual entertainers like Jack Benny.

Although the chasm between popular film criticism and academic theory often seems unbridgeable, a handful of film reviewers—Jonathan Rosenbaum, B.Ruby Rich and J.Hoberman—encouraged a dialogue between film journalism and academic film theory during the 1990s.