Two years ago, I cast my ballot for the 10 greatest films ever made in the last installment of the celebrated Sight and Sound magazine poll. To my credit, I did not vote for Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the tedious feminist tract that displaced both Citizen Kane and Vertigo. Yet I still received grief from friends and correspondents over what they took to be my willfully personal choices, which included a Hawaiian romp starring John Wayne (Donovan’s Reef), an unheralded Howard Hawks movie about race car drivers (Red Line 7000), and a widely disliked Hitchcock thriller about a kleptomaniac (Marnie).
For the noted essayist Phillip Lopate, whose new collection of essays and reviews My Affair with Art House Cinema was recently published by Columbia University Press, film criticism is a very private business, too. Although he has written on the movies for such august publications as the New York Times, Film Comment, and Cineaste, and as a booklet essayist for the Criterion Collection, Lopate insists in his latest collection that he is neither an “aesthetic philosopher” nor “a critical theorist.” He approaches movies, simply, as himself.
Lopate declines to explicitly spell out his critical principles, but he is happy to say what he values: “Anyone who reads the book can perceive what these mainly are: experiencing the integrity of each shot; relishing a flow of images that unfolds flexibly into its environmental space; endorsing a nuanced, humanistic psychology of character; and demonstrating some sort of wisdom.” Fortunately, Lopate’s preferences align with a great period in movie history — primarily the midcentury international New Waves — but the fact remains that his tastes are his own.
Lopate’s candor draws into sharp relief two competing methods of movie criticism: Should a critic account for consensus views, and either support or oppose them, or should he admit that what he esteems is unavoidably a matter of temperament, psychology, and experience? Lopate, who admits that his aesthetic priorities are informed by the quirks in his own background and epoch, is in the latter camp. Just as Pauline Kael once referred to her final volume of criticism as her ersatz memoirs, Lopate sees criticism as an extension of the personal essay.
The present volume consists in large part of pieces on individual directors, usually focused on specific films, but perhaps the most revealing chapters are a pair of introductory essays that explicate his perspective more directly.
In “On Changing One’s Mind About a Movie,” Lopate writes about the way that time, age, and experience can work to shift one’s attitude about a movie. He writes of having once rolled his eyes at Jacques Demy’s MGM-influenced musical The Young Girls of Rochefort, starring Catherine Deneuve and Gene Kelly, but, upon revisiting it in the company of his daughter, being startled by its resonance, especially in light of its director’s death from AIDS (and co-star Francoise Dorleac’s death in a car crash): “Artifice, serendipity, the fragile transience of happiness — I was seeing it the way Demy had intended, as a painful fairy tale about yearning and the impossible search for true love,” Lopate writes. He admits that the cheeky inventiveness of Jean-Luc Godard once held greater sway with him than the spiritual torment of Ingmar Bergman, but now says the opposite is true. “I am no longer as threatened by unresolvable anguish,” he writes. For Lopate, the personal comes before the polemical.
Then, in “How I Look at Movies,” Lopate discusses his own visual acuity. “Call me arrogant, but I am convinced that I have a trained eye and can judge the difference between good and bad film technique,” writes Lopate, who spends successive pages proving this assertion is no mere boast. He loves the deep focus aesthetic of D.W. Griffith, Orson Welles, and William Wyler, as well as the special magic conjured by black-and-white CinemaScope in films like Yojimbo or The Hustler: “My eye is better able to pick out expressive accents in a black-and-white widescreen than in a color image.” Even here, though, Lopate admits that his affinities do not amount to a set of standards as much as a set of likes. “I am unable to put forward a consistent theory of my predilections or even account completely for them,” he writes.
It isn’t that Lopate is wishy-washy in what he thinks as much as that he acknowledges that he is singing from his own hymnal. The pleasure of reading him is that his perceptions, while robustly argued, have the flavor of being freely arrived at: He is in thrall to no system, school, or mentor but to his own eyes and ears (though he writes appreciatively here of fellow film critics including Manny Farber, James Harvey, and Jonathan Rosenbaum).
In a series of tight, sharp chapters that reflect their origins as magazine or newspaper pieces, Lopate considers many of the leading figures of international cinema. He is most at home with those masters who peaked at midcentury, from Kenji Mizoguchi to Andrei Tarkovsky to Francois Truffaut. His fondness for this era is itself an openly acknowledged feature of his proudly high-flown tastes. “It used to be customary for populist writers to sneer at the use of the word ‘cinema’ or even ‘film’ as pretentious, but I had no trouble embracing these terms,” he writes.
Breaking down Robert Bresson’s masterpiece Mouchette, Lopate judges the teenage suicide at the heart of the film to be presented, by its filmmaker, as an unsolvable mystery rather than anything that can be rationally pondered: “It comes out of nowhere, a negative miracle, like the reverse of the resurrection scene in Dreyer’s Ordet,” Lopate writes, adding that Bresson toils as “a religious artist in a secular age.”
Lopate is particularly good with French cinema of this period. He aptly describes Godard’s groundbreaking Breathless as an amalgamation of “atmospheric pessimism of the French gangster film” and “the plot-driven fatalism of American film noir” — and, in this potent admixture, becomes a “charming ode to Franco-American relations” that stands in sharp contrast to Godard’s later pious, piteous anti-Americanism.
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By and large, Lopate writes about that which he loves. He agrees with Auden in judging it “pointless to waste time attacking mediocre work.” His passion leads him not to mindless effusiveness but profound comprehension. Lopate responds like a tuning fork when he is touched by something on-screen. He artfully evokes the impossibly delicate narrative of Yasujiro Ozu’s classic Late Spring, which centers on a young woman reluctant to forsake her devotion to her widower father even for her own future happiness and independence. “The conflict is not between old and new values but between two traditions: the duty of the parent to see the child safely married, the obligation of the child to care for an aging parent,” Lopate writes.
Lopate ranges far and wide in these pages: There are chapters on the “middle and late” period of Alain Resnais, the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, Mikio Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, and such relatively recent films as Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and works by the Dardenne brothers. He humbles himself to write about such all-American artists as John Ford and Harold Lloyd. He performs a public service in introducing general readers to such comparatively obscure or arcane filmmakers as Raul Ruiz, Maurice Pialat, or Jean-Marie Straub. But, above all, he gives us a gift in trusting his instincts about what he likes and why. We are glad to be along for the guided tour.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
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