Bilge Ebiri

1. "Praising Arizona,” a review of Raising Arizona by Jack Barth, in Film Comment, March-April 1987.

This is a ground zero of sorts for me. I grew up in a family where art films and foreign films were watched fairly regularly, and I had seen my first Fellini, Bergman, and Truffaut films before the age of thirteen. But as much as I loved movies, the true obsession hadn’t gripped me yet. It was this article – which I haven’t revisited in ages – that did it, albeit in a somewhat indirect way. This was a cover story in Film Comment magazine, which my Dad had happened to have left lying around the house back in 1987. One day, after seeing (and loving) Raising Arizona at the theater, I came home, grabbed this issue and read the article. The article – and this is the only thing I remember from it – at one point compared the Coens’ highly stylized aesthetic to the expressive filmmaking in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist. It just so happened that Dad had also left a VHS copy of The Conformist lying around. I popped it in the VCR. I watched it. Not being able to make head nor tail of it, I rewound it and watched it again. A month later, I had watched the film ten times. The rest of Bertolucci’s oeuvre would follow – along with all the Italian and French cinema that influenced him. To this day, The Conformist is still one of my 3 or 4 favorite films. If it hadn’t been for this article, I may never have seen it.


2. Three books by Robert Philip Kolker: A Cinema of Loneliness, The Altering Eye, and Bernardo Bertolucci

I’m cheating here, not just by including three books as one item, but also because Kolker isn’t really a critic – he’s an academic and a theorist. But his writing to me is the model of how to truly write about film. Reading these books as a young teenager (soon after discovering The Conformist – see above), I found myself in awe of the way Kolker could write about a film by analyzing what was onscreen – shot selection, composition, editing, dialogue, music – instead of going off on his own metaphysical tangents.


3. Pauline Kael on The Leopard

Reviewing movies I love can be tough. How to make effusive enthusiasm interesting to a reader without sounding like a broken record? Even though she was notorious for all the films she panned, I can’t help but think of Pauline Kael’s impassioned review of Visconti’s The Leopard, which makes it look so easy. I wish I could include a quote, but all my books are in storage right now.


4. “How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Barry Lyndon,” a review by John Hofsess, in The New York Times, 1976.

This is a review I discovered relatively late, but I’ve always felt it crystallizes perfectly how I feel about some of the pitfalls of film criticism – the notion of articulating in words what, in some senses, is a fundamentally non-verbal experience. I wasn’t around for Barry Lyndon’s panning by critics at the time of its release, but it was exciting to discover that some cooler heads did exist back then. To wit:

“[T]here isn't much for a verbally-oriented person to chew on. There's no conceptual or discursive aspect, no kernel of pop sociology or philosophical nutmeat. It isn't at all like Nashville or Last Tango in Paris, where a knowing reviewer could write the kind of richly allusive in-depth analysis that critics have long done for novels. Instead, Barry Lyndon throws down the gauntlet to those film critics who are really literary or drama critics in disguise and tests their ability to appreciate qualities of form, composition, color, mood, music, editing rhythms-- among other cinematic qualities that generally do not greatly interest them. Words are a film critic's primary tools and when a movie doesn't lend itself to verbal translation-- discussions about character, ideas, values, plot development, and so on--many critics are inclined to dismiss it as unimportant or as a failure.”


5. Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, by Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol

Two of the greatest filmmakers of all time writing about another great filmmaker. Rohmer and Chabrol’s book has almost none of the discipline of Kolker (see above) and little of the filmmaking insights of Hitchock-Truffaut. But it’s an amazing book nonetheless: A chance to witness two of the greatest cinematic minds of the 20th Century fully engage themselves in tackling – on all levels -- one of the most astonishing directorial outputs ever. I like to reread this every couple of years.
_________________________________
New York-based critic Bilge Ebiri is the editor of Screengrab.