The moviegoers

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/03/28/lopate/
"American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now",Ed. by phillip Lopateの書評。

"American Movie Critics" is doomed to be a frustrating book if only because it offers us just a few samples of work -- presumably the crème de la crème -- from writers who showed their quality by never, or rarely, being boring. They do this (to invert Zelda Fitzgerald's formula) by never being bored, but the only way we can ever get to know this about a critic is by reading his or her work regularly, over time.

Although movies were only a couple of decades old when Otis Ferguson began writing about them for the New Republic, critics were already familiar enough with the formulaic quality of Hollywood movies to joke about it. Ferguson, the first of the "five greatest American film critics," according to Lopate (the others are James Agee, Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris)

Some critics, like the brilliant Robert Warshow, dealt with this quandary by writing about entire genres, regarding them as collaborative creations that operate much like the mythos of earlier societies. Creative people ranging from barely competent craftsmen to outright geniuses all play a part in shaping a genre, in a perpetual feedback loop with the audience, which flows toward the works that best embody our dreams and desires. I confess that as much as I might enjoy a genuinely original film like Robert Altman's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" and appreciate Pauline Kael's review of it, it's pieces like Warshow's famous essay "The Gangster as a Tragic Hero" (or, for that matter, Richard Slotkin's perceptive considerations of the western, not included in this book) that I find most fascinating as criticism.

The first great proponent of the '70s style of criticism was Manny Farber, a writer revered by most serious film reviewers but otherwise largely unknown. Two of Farber's best-known essays, "Underground Film" and "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," are included in "American Film Critics."

Farber was hell-bent on tearing down the prestige attached to big, expensive, earnest Hollywood movies promoted as serious, "quality" fare by studios and the lapdog middlebrow critics who did their bidding. These he describes scornfully as "masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago." Farber contrasted these films (he names a few, but they are, tellingly, virtually unseen today) to what he called "termite art," the unpretentiously inventive work that "goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity."