Doctor Zhivago (David Lean 1965)
It is probably still the case that Lean is my favourite filmmaker, but Fellini has grown on me, even though there are not many of his films I consider great. This however is not the point, but the point is that it is so easy to be influenced by the views of others. Thinking now about my struggles concerning Lean vs. Fellini, I feel almost ashamed and sympathise with my brother's dismissal of my concerns. And yet, I cannot completely shake free of such thoughts. Not about Lean and Fellini but in other circumstances. I did not like either Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino 2019) or Little Women (Greta Gerwig 2019) all that much, and this puzzled me because they had got such overwhelmingly great reviews by many critics I like and trust. Maybe I had not really understood their greatness? I watched Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood again, a few weeks later, but felt the same thing. There are many things I dislike, especially how many scenes are too emphatic and on the nose, and how it is structured, and how it is weird that Tarantino seems to dismiss and make fun of the films Rick Dalton makes, even though Tarantino loves such films, including 1970s Italian genre cinema. With Little Women it was mainly the awful, unbearable music score by Alexandre Desplat that ruined the film for me. I was also put off by the acting style, which felt incoherent and, as with Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, too emphatic. Both films felt over-directed. But I have not read any thoughtful negative criticism of either film, and this makes me feel, still, that I am missing something. (I added the word "thoughtful" because I have of course read negative criticism of them both, but written from a position of either wilful ignorance or arrogance.)
I do not think I will be persuaded; my feelings are what they are and I trust my judgement, but I still want to know more about reasons of others. I always do. It might be that they for example agree with me on some of my criticism, but either do not mind or thinks it is part of the strength of the film. It can sometimes be that two people agree about a certain aspect of a film, like the acting being over the top, but for one it is part of what is good about the film whereas the other cannot stand it.
***
To get back to being swayed, or deeply influenced by others. Something I find annoying, or sometimes disturbing, is when people seemingly base their own judgement of films or filmmakers on what their favourite critics think. I have for example experienced this many times with fervent readers of Andrew Sarris. When I have mentioned a certain film or filmmaker, they have responded by saying variations of "Well, Andrew Sarris did not like him." as if this meant that the case was closed and I had been proven wrong. They did not speak out of personal experience of said filmmaker, they based their beliefs on Sarris. This often happens with film scholars too. I say something or ask someone what they believe, and they reply by quoting maybe Bazin or Deleuze or Mulvey or Gunning or Bordwell, or, heaven forbid, Althusser, as if this was the final word or the truth of the matter. "We now know, thanks to Barthes and Foucault..." No, we do not know, other than what they believed, and I did not ask what they thought, I asked what you thought.
There is a certain kind of filmmaker, the likes of Fred Zinnemann, Carol Reed, William Wyler and George Stevens, whom a lot of people diminish and dismiss. They are said to be among the makers of "white elephant art", as Manny Farber phrased it; boring, self-righteous and unimaginative. They are among those of whom people might say "Well, Sarris did not like him." Neither did David Thomson. Those today who do not like them will often also invoke that alleged purveyor of middle-brow taste, Bosley Crowther at The New York Times, because if he liked their films, this, in a case of reverse engineering, proves that they are not any good. My point here is not to do with the merits of these filmmakers, although I happen to love three of those four mentioned here (the one I do not love is Stevens, although I am not denying his intelligence, imagination and personal style). My point is that it is from a personal investigation into the work itself that you should base your preferences and form your opinions, not based on what others think. You may like or dislike Zinnemann or Buñuel, or Lean or Fellini, as much as you wish, but if it is not coming from arguments from the films, but from what others have said about them, you are doing them a disfavour.
Besides, critics change their minds, and they often have more complex views to begin with than they are given credit for. The most embarrassing people are those who have neither engaged with the films in question nor with the critic they are using as alleged proof of their own sound opinions. I often wonder how they deal with filmmakers who are not in Sarris's book The American Cinema, like Edward Dmytryk. How will they know if he is good or not when Sarris has not written about him?
Tom misunderstanding Trilling on Austen when talking to Audrey
Metropolitan (Whit Stillman 1990)
---------------------------------------George Stevens, while he is today often bunched together with Wyler and Zinnemann, was not included in the categories "Less than meets the eye" or "Strained seriousness" in Sarris's book. Stevens was instead in "The far side of paradise", the prestigious category where you also find Samuel Fuller, Raoul Walsh, Nicholas Ray, Vincente Minnelli and King Vidor, and others. That might surprise some, considering Stevens's reputation today.
Among the films Farber calls "white termite art" in his essay "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" is Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960). This makes no sense to me, not even on the terms he provides.
