Critic Rivalries

Worth looking out for is a piece in the New Yorker looking at the history of the Village Voice. Surprisingly it only has a couple of lines on the critic Andrew Sarris, who was one of the mainstays during the 1960s and 70s. It's an interesting omission given that Sarris had probably the most famous of all film critic rivalries with the New Yorker's own Pauline Kael. He's generally considered to be the man who brought to the US and developed the French theory of authorship; the idea that the director was the main creative impulse in cinema, the 'auteur'. When it came to films, Sarris was a classicist: he loved the old masters - Ford, Hawks, Welles. Kael also believed in the supremacy of the director, but she was a more instinctive critic (famously she declared that she never watched a film more than once - with an odd exception like Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller) and mocked theorists like Sarris. Their rows were played out in print and often very personal. His take on their relationship after she died is fascinating.

There probably isn't a feud amongst today's major critics which is quite the same, although Jonathan Rosenbaum seems determined to have one with David Thomson. Of these two heavyweights, Thomson is a stylist and purely in terms of writing the finest critic around at this moment in time. His view of cinema is a melancholic one; having loved the films of the Hollywood golden age and from the 1970s, Thomson has become disillusioned with the modern era and speculated often about whether the medium is in its death throes. Rosenbaum, on the other hand, may be the most knowledgeable man about films in the world; he absolutely refutes the idea that it is on its last legs, pointing to the variety and breadth of work coming out of places like Iran and China. There's no doubt that he despises what he sees as Thomson's narrow view of films and he also believes him to be a lazy researcher, particularly in the biography of Orson Welles, Rosebud.

What prevents this from being a proper feud is that while Rosenbaum's attacks have been many and widespread, Thomson has never really acknowledged his fellow critic's views. In fact in the comments to a Chicago Reader blog post from a year or so back, one person asks Rosenbaum if Thomson has ever responded to the criticism and it is admitted he never has. The only reference that I can find that Thomson has made about his 'rival' is in The New Biographical Dictionary of Cinema (the last edition published by Little, Brown in 2002 is pretty much an essential text on a film buff's shelf) in an entry on Raúl Ruiz: 'I was criticised a few years ago, very reasonably, by Jonathan Rosenbaum for important maverick and foreign figures left out of this book. But I refuse to include them all, and I am always happiest to find a new way of sizing up a person.'

It may be tit for tat stuff, but for The Knowledge the relationship between those who comment on films is as gripping as anything.