The Books of My Life: Its Only a Movie

Raymond Haberski's doctoral dissertation cum book, Its Only a Movie: Films and Critics in American Culture (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), is a rather odd if far too frequent kind of hybrid one finds in the world of academe these days. Haberski’s book is, as befits a work of history, generally descriptive. It explores how film, which was initially seen as a dangerous dumbing down form of capitalism by Progressives and Mass Culture analysts, came to be seen as an art form, movies, in the 1950s and afterwords thanks to the Cahiers crowd, Andrew Sarris, and academic film studies.

Then, unfortunately, the reader of Its Only a Movie arrives at chapter seven, the chapter on the film and movie culture war between "pragmatist" Pauline Kael and auteurist Sarris in the 1960s. In chapter seven, It’s Only a Movie suddenly morphs into something far more polemical and apologetic than descriptive, far more ideological than historical. 

Haberski’s apologetics and polemics seem to revolve heavily around the orbit of Pauline Kael. Kael, with her intellectual anti-intellectualism, her anti-elitist elitism, her messianism, her theoretical anti-theoreticism, her anti-historical historicism, her fetishisation and romanticisation of her own emotional responses to films, her narcissistic belief that she could make a movie better than many of those she reviewed, a trait she shared with a number of rock critics of the era, and "borrower of research without citation, is a rather strange saint to hang one’s icon on since the auteur policy of Cahiers and Sarris has won the day in contemporary film studies and film criticism to such an extent that even the anti-auteurist crowd write books about directors like David Lynch. Haberski, the historian-critic-polemicist-king, seems, on the basis of evidence in Its Only a Movie, to want to be a little bit Pauline Kael, a little bit Andrew Sarris, and a little bit Arthur Schlesinger, Junior, for the 2000s. As a result, Haberski champions a revival of a middle way or vital centre form of criticism that seeks to preserve and conserve a criticism that has set modernist standards in a postmodernist world lost in a hallucinatory and foggy maze of demagoguery and simulation.

There are a number of problems with Haberski’s history of American film criticism. First, as Its Only a Movie implies on several occasions, film criticism has been an international practise and particularly an Atlantic world practise as Iris Barry and the influence of Cahiers du Cinema on film criticism in the Anglo-American world in the 1960s and 1970s points up and to which Haberski makes mention. Haberski doesn't explore the influence of another film journal, the British film journal Movie, and Robin Wood, who was associated with Movie, on American film criticism. Movie, in fact, had a major influence on film criticism and film studies in the UK, the US, and Australia. Haberski is far too selective in his exploration of American film criticism. Critics like John Simon and Stanley Kaufmann, at best, reside in the very dark shadows cast by Kael and Sarris in the book. Haberski takes a far too functionalist approach to criticism largely ignoring the process by which critical standards and critical canons are established by elites and elite institutions. A conflict approach to criticism would seem to promise a more fruitful way to approach the manufacture of cultural standards and values. Finally, Haberski's book is full of mistakes. Peter Biskind becomes Bisking in the index. The title of Roland Marchand's essay is missing in action from the bibliography. These, by the way, are only the tip of the mistake iceberg in the book.

There were some things I liked about Haberski’s history of American film criticism. I agree, as Haberski implies, that much contemporary film studies is problematised by its crystal ball textualism, its belief that everything you need to know about a movie or film can be found in its final textual form, and its increasingly esoteric if not occult reliance on psychoanalysis as a tool in deciphering the finished film text, something that, in the process, has, as Biblical Studies did before it, detached the academic study from the broader audience and isolated academia from the general public in the process. I agree with Haberski that economic factors--the decline of the studio system and the rise of television--demographic factors--the coming of age of the baby boom generation--and cultural factors--the advent of the director star--created a space that gave rise, if briefly, to the new American cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. That creative space disappeared very quickly, however, as Hollywood found the answer to its economic woes in the blockbuster and its multiple ancillary economic products.

So, to sum up, Its Only a Movie is an interesting book marred, in my opinion, by a shift from descriptive analysis into polemics and apologetics overdrive in chapter seven. The book on the history of film criticism in the US remains, in my opinion, to be written.