A.O. Scott: Film Is Dead? What Else Is New?
A.O. Scott is a film critic for the NYT.
A few weeks ago I traveled to a college on Long Island to give a lecture — in other words, to stand up in front of a room full of people, ramble for a few minutes about movies and movie criticism, and then spend the rest of the hour answering questions. It was the middle of the day, and the audience was composed, in what looked like roughly equal numbers, of undergraduates and older students enrolled in continuing education courses. Half of the people were 25 and under, the other half 65 and over, leaving me smack in the generational middle and, as it happened, bouncing vertiginously, from one question to the next, between the future and the past....
Are movies essentially a thing of the past? Does whatever we have now, digital or analog, represent at best a pale shadow of bygone glory? Among the recent arrivals in bookstores — speaking of obsolescence! — are two collections of writing by prominent critics that say as much in their titles. The Library of America volume of Pauline Kael’s essays and reviews is called “The Age of Movies,” a period that evidently lasted from the mid-’50s until the early ’90s, when Kael departed her perch at The New Yorker. Meanwhile a book by Dave Kehr (who writes a home-video column for The New York Times), titled “When Movies Mattered,” gathers up his articles from the ’70s and ’80s, when he wrote mainly for The Chicago Reader....
Not that you should judge a book by its cover. The air of nostalgia in the packaging — i.e., the age of movies is obviously not now, when they no longer matter — is undermined by the prose, which is resolutely and often thrillingly situated in the present. That is, even though Kael and Mr. Kehr sometimes glance backward into film history, they share a concern (it is almost all they share) with what is happening around them, with the new work of actors and directors who feed and frustrate their faith in the medium. To read Kael on Robert Altman or Mr. Kehr on Blake Edwards is not merely to revisit bygone arguments but also to encounter and absorb the vigor of those arguments as if they were taking place today....