Origins of American Film Reviews

Primary Documents

 * Illustrated American -
 * New York Clipper -
 * New York Dramatic Mirror -
 * The Film Index -
 * Variety

American Movie Critics

 * "This book celebrates film criticism as a branch of American letters. Movies may be only a hundred years old, but already they have generated in this country a body of extraordinary critical writing that honors the best belletristic traditions of our nonfiction prose." (XIII)


 * "This anthology attempts to uncover the narrative trajectory by which the field groped its way from the province of hobbyists and amateurs to become a legitimate profession." (XIII)


 * "Early film reviewers (when not simply acting as plot-summary shills for the studios), embarassed to be seen wasting their energies on this upstart novelty, adopted a facetious, condescending tone, lest the writer be seen as taking such sentimental hogwash too seriously." (XIII)


 * Vachel Lindsay's "The Art of the Moving Picture" tried to defend the medium. Lindsay had a "Whitmanesque belief in movies as a democratic art" and he "envisioned Griffith's and Douglas Fairbank's films as having somewhat the same effect that "Emerson's 'Address on the American Scholar' was said to have on certain American people- a great turning point." (XIII)


 * The Photoplay was a name for the early cinema because of its perceived connection to theater.


 * Otis Ferguson as "first working film critic who put everything together" (XV)


 * James Agee succeeds Ferguson "as the most compulsively readable of the 1940's critics" --> "His rich, metaphorical prose nudged film reviewing in a more classical-essay direction. W.H. Auden... famously declared that though he did not care much for movies and rarely saw them, he read Agee religiously" (XV).


 * Further sketching of a film criticism trajectory includes Siegfried Karacaeur and Pauline Kael.


 * "I should like to inquire why we as the nation that produces the movies should have never developed any sound school of movie criticism" - Otis Ferguson "The Case of the Critics" (XIX)


 * "The best of that criticism belongs as much to the canon of American nonfiction prose as it does to the history of film reception." (XIX)

What is a Film Critic?

 * "First of all, the film critic is a critic" (XX).


 * "A premium is palced on the film critic's ability to translate visual representation into crisply vivid verbal descriptions" (XX).


 * "Assuming you've got a foot in the door, you must then earn respect as a writer and convert readers to the regular habit of perusing (if not agreeing with) you... It is a literary performace in the final analysis: What is involved is the operatio of one art form (literature) on another (the movies)." (XXIII).