When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade
by Patrick Z. McGavin
In many ways the digital age is a gilded one for movie culture, binding social activity and intellectual inquiry in a way previously thought unimaginable. As a force of habit, I know the instant new reviews and essays are made available online at The New York Times, The New Yorker, Salon, and the other review sites and general interest publications I read most frequently.
Still, as much as I love that immediacy and ease of access, I still crave the solidity of the printed page. I trace a lot of that to my college experiences two and a half decades ago. During this time I became obsessed with tracking down The Village Voice, the moment it was available at the Chicago newsstands I haunted, all the better to take in the newest work of J. Hoberman, Andrew Sarris, David Edelstein, Georgia Brown, and Amy Taubin. After I secured my first subscription to the Voice, my supreme object of desire quickly became the LA Weekly, where I got my fix on what John Powers thought and scooped up Anne Thompson’s “Risky Business” column.
Criticism has always been akin to my own archaeological expeditions. Likewise, I knew the drop points, each Thursday afternoon, to grab The Chicago Reader. One of the many pleasures found in Dave Kehr’s superb collection, When Movies Mattered, is the almost Proustian way it conjures an irretrievable past, like the now-vanished New York of John Cassavetes’s Shadows. My situation was admittedly a little more extreme than most, given I grew up in the western suburbs of Chicago and eventually lived there during the time (1974–86) Kehr was the first staff critic of the Reader. In going back to these pieces, I have some fairly vivid memories of where I was when I first encountered them.
To be sure, memory is pretty much all that was available for requisitioning these pieces. Some were previously published, most prominently in the anthologies produced under the aegis of the National Society of Film Critics. Even in the age of the Internet, the Reader archives were for the longest time akin to the Politburo, buried behind a complicated paywall, and even once liberated, dating only to 1986. Having the reviews and essays available in a single volume is particularly welcome.
At the same time it is a natural response for those to express a certain resistance or confusion about why they should bother reading a collection devoted to reviews of films that are many things but not in the least “new” or “current.” Kehr’s essential blog is subtitled “Reports from the lost continent of cinephilia.” This collection pulses with a comparable energy, curiosity, and wonder about movies and moviemakers. Kehr argues that currency, like box-office grosses, is sometimes irrelevant. These are films that endure and mean just as much now as the moment they were made.
If one of the unfortunate consequences swirling about Pauline Kael was a blinding idolatry and the cult of personality, When Movies Mattered offers something quite different. It’s persuasive and compelling evidence of an exacting and bright critical voice who clearly took the job, though not himself, very seriously. One striking difference between Kehr and Jonathan Rosenbaum, the critic who succeeded him at the Reader, was how rare it was for Kehr to put himself into his pieces, to write about his background, his family, for instance, as a way to personalize himself, or to create a more direct connection with his audience.
John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands in Cassavetes's Love Streams
Born in 1953, Kehr wrote these pieces between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-three. The whole point of a film critic is that you have something to say, and you say it well. He found his voice early, and it is a remarkably consistent and rigorous one. “I hope,” Kehr writes near the end of his introduction, “this volume will offer a sense of what it was like to live and work through a period of tumult and possibility, when movies were central to the cultural discourse, and we had the time and inclination to take them seriously.”
The unquestioned subtext affirms the primacy of the director. In this regard, the collection is an exemplary and continuously engaging model of auteurist criticism. The book’s four-part structure has several key groupings floating through time and space, moving grandly from Orson Welles and Jean Renoir to Jonathan Demme and John Carpenter.
Kehr is a very good outside-in critic, meaning he likes to open with a point, a declaration, and then he burrows in on his theme with clarity and visual precision. One of the best examples is his piece on Cassavetes’s final masterpiece, Love Streams. He starts it the way Saul Bellow did The Adventures of Augie March, with a bold and telling self-assertion: “The history of film is in some ways also a history of the repression of emotion.” Writing further, Kehr says, “Cassavetes is compelled to expose, expand, to apotheosize emotion; it is no wonder then that he is consistently drawn to themes of breakdown and madness—the only way the contemporary cinema can assimilate emotions of Cassavetes’s size is to characterize them as insanity.”
The maverick, the outsider, the individualist—that is Kehr’s specialty and point of emphasis. Kehr has always been less aggressively polemical than Rosenbaum and Kael, although, by his choices, he is clearly privileging specific films and filmmakers over others. His taste is not always predictable. His critical hostility toward Robert Altman is widely known, but he writes ecstatically about Altman’s protégé, Alan Rudolph, and his dreamy, beautiful Trouble in Mind.
“[Rudolph] makes full use of the discoveries of the last 40 years—tonal mixes, narrative discontinuities, stylized colors, Dolby stereo—to create a film that belongs equally to now and then. In Trouble in Mind, he doesn’t revive a dead genre as much as he establishes an illusion of continuity.”
Keith Carradine in Alan Rudolph's Trouble in Mind
Even directors he has disparaged or been less than enthusiastic about in the past, like Billy Wilder and John Huston, receive a more open and warm consideration here. Kael had Altman and Brian De Palma, and Kehr has several of his own that he has always felt especially protective about, like Robert Zemeckis and especially Clint Eastwood. The thing is, he backs it up. His essay on Eastwood’s Sudden Impact is filled with context and sharp observation:
At this deeper level, Eastwood’s films are much more psychological than political; they approach something Jungian in their deployment of large, primal images. Eastwood’s work is probably open to routine charges of sexism...but on the other hand they can hardly be accused of pushing machismo. Eastwood’s movies don’t really work on a surface, social level at all; at their best, they operate in the realm of inner experience, emotional archetypes.
Another important point to make is that Kehr’s time at the Reader largely coincided with that of Richard Peña’s tenure as the director of programming at the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute. That connection provided Kehr the impetus and reason to write about directors like Manoel de Oliveira and Raúl Ruiz. By my count, twenty-six of the book’s essays are devoted to foreign directors. In the appendix that lists his top-ten lists for the years covered in the collection, more than half of those titles are foreign-language movies.
Strangely, there’s not a single piece devoted to a woman filmmaker, which is odd, because I remember his terrific and fascinating piece on Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky. Kehr also wrote early and admiringly about directors as varied as May, Agnieszka Holland, Kathryn Bigelow, Amy Davis, and Jane Campion, to name the names that come immediately to mind. (He compensates, in part, by including a couple of pieces on directors such as Renoir, Kenji Mizoguchi, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Mikio Naruse known for their trenchant and subtle treatment of women.)
Structurally, the collection would also benefit by other pieces Kehr wrote during this time, works that maybe did not resonate with him as strongly as they did others. If the writing in When Movies Mattered feels too effusive at times, he was more than capable of going for the jugular. For instance, my own introduction as a teenager to Kehr was not at the Reader, but at the glossy Chicago Magazine (my parents subscribed), where he also wrote a monthly column. This was Kehr on arguably the most talked about film of the decade, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, in the magazine’s October 1979 issue:
"Every shot is a record of obsession; every sequence visual evidence of the director’s indestructible ego and implacable will. Apocalypse Now is more than a movie: It’s a souvenir of a grueling sojourn into the jungle, a monument that one man has built to his heroic vision of himself, the concrete product of la folie des grandeurs played out to its limit. And when the film works at all, it works on that level—as an unformed, indirect expression of personal testing and triumph, staggering in its scale, appalling in its vanity, and finally beautiful, in some strange way, in its utter lack of necessity."
Sam Bottoms and Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now
When Kehr turned up at The Daily News in 1993, Hoberman paid him the highest compliment, calling him the most informed and gifted daily critic since Roger Greenspun at The New York Times. His DVD column in the Times is an enviable one. Yet, it is hard not to feel, after finishing this volume, a tinge of regret at what has gone missing from film culture since Kehr has involuntarily (I presume) stopped writing criticism of new theatrical releases. When Movies Mattered brings it all back home, and with a vengeance.
Patrick Z. McGavin is a Chicago writer and film critic whose writing appears in Time Out Chicago, The Boston Phoenix, and Stop Smiling
To purchase When Movies Mattered, click here.
Copyright © 2011 by Cineaste Publishers, Inc.
Cineaste,Vol.XXXVII No.1 2011
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