Amid the hype surrounding the record-breaking yield of the “Pirates of the Caribbean sequel last year, American critics, who gave the film negative reviews, were deemed to be out of touch with the rest of the movie-going public yet again.
The majority of 2006’s serious, artistic crop was given the cold shoulder by Americans, who fancied bigger and louder flicks in the vein of “X-Men 3 and “The Da Vinci Code. The increasing number of films withheld from screening to the critics also reached an all-time high.
The situation was different in Egypt, which witnessed a line of smash-hits that were highly praised by the critics. There was one major difference: Nearly every film released over the past few years was seen as a potential blockbuster.
The extent of critics’ influence was tested with this year’s best reviewed picture, “Fi Sha’et Masr El Gedida (In the Heliopolis Flat), whose triumph at the box office can be partly attributed to positive reviews.
While there is currently no scale to measure critics’ impact on the success of movies, that was not always the case.
Film criticism emerged as early as film. The French, Germans, and Italians enjoyed a flourishing critical scene that reflected a balance between commercialism and art. American criticism, on the other hand, was striving to establish an identity for itself as film was widely considered to be nothing more than an industry.
Early American critics came from different fields (Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg were poets, H. L. Mencken was a reporter, Robert E. Sherwood was a Broadway playwright) and the majority did not fully grasp the merits of this new form of entertainment, choosing instead to blindly shower their praise on foreign art-house pictures.
The first genuine signs of a uniform, organized criticism movement appeared in 1934 with the writings of The New Republic’s Otis Ferguson who, throughout his short-lived career, highlighted the substantial value of even the trashiest of films. Ferguson was the first to establish film criticism as a distinctive form of writing that takes more than vocabulary and basic sentence structures to master.
Several international filmmakers started-off as critics in the 1940s including renowned Italian directors Fredrico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni along with a number of Polish and Scandinavian directors.
No other critical movement was more influential than the French Nouvelle Vague that burst by the end of the 1950s via the world’s greatest film journal Cahiers du cinema. The critiques of iconic filmmakers Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, and Chabrol were tremendously powerful, quickly becoming the barometer for the success or failure of any film released in Europe.
The 1950s also witnessed the professional birth of Pauline Kael, now regarded as possibly the greatest film critic in American history.
Kael’s writing style was infused by her own subjective emotions, composed in strongly colloquial English. By the mid-sixties, Kael’s popularity granted her a great deal of authority to prevent filmmakers from working or to advance the career of those she admired. Single-handedly, she was able to create a sensation of Antonioni in the early 1960s while prohibiting director David Lean (“Lawrence of Arabia ) from making films for 14 years.
Almost all revered critics that penetrated the scene afterwards – Armond White, A.O. Scott and the Pulitzer Prize winner Roger Ebert – considered themselves her protégés. By the mid-eighties, the dwindling state of movies reduced the influence of critics simply because most people stopped reading.
This also explains the diminishing role of critics in Egypt. The country’s most celebrated critics – Ahmed El-Hadari, Mary Ghadban, Ahmed Ra’fat Bahgat and Samir Farid – were preoccupied with European and classical American films. They saw the majority of Egyptian movies as replicas of foreign films with embedded western content. Egyptian intellectuals steered away from cinema, and so did these critics, especially with the end of Egypt’s neo-realism movement at the start of the 1990s.
The new breed of critics lacks the intelligence, knowledge and integrity of the old guard. Their cinematic expertise is confined to classical Egyptian flicks and some American ones. Their criticism feels hollow, lacking context or character.
Distended blockbusters will continue to dominate even without a thumbs-up from critics. The real challenge now is to motivate people to discover the hidden gems released every year and build up enough support for these filmmakers to continue producing.
My own passion for writing about films began years ago from Kael’s review of Vittorio De Sica’s “Shoeshine, arguably the most beautiful film critique ever written. Kael’s description of how she left the theatre in tears after watching the film and the alienation she felt from everyone who could not recognize the humanity of the great Italian maverick touched me in a way that transcended other reviews I’d read.
The same happened with Ferguson’s review of “Top Hat, Kael’s “L’Aventura as well as Ebert’s “Cries & Whispers and “The Passion of the Christ.
From their writings, I learned that if you succeed in inducing anyone to share your enthusiasm about filmmakers like Minnelli, Antonioni, Renoir or Chaplin, then maybe, being a critic is worthwhile after all.
